PAY ATTENTION FOLKS! RSN: Jonathan Chait | Now We Have a Road Map to the Trump Campaign's Collusion With Russia

02 July 17

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FOCUS: Jonathan Chait | Now We Have a Road Map to the Trump Campaign's Collusion With Russia 

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
Chait writes: "Most of the commentary surrounding the Russia scandal has treated the possibility that Donald Trump's campaign deliberately colluded with Moscow as remote, unfounded speculation. The new reporting that has broken this weekend suggests instead that this collusion likely did take place."
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ost of the commentary surrounding the Russia scandal has treated the possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign deliberately colluded with Moscow as remote, unfounded speculation. The new reporting that has broken this weekend suggests instead that this collusion likely did take place. It provides a road map to the, or perhaps a, likely avenue through which this occurred.

The figure carrying out the operation in question was Peter W. Smith, who died at the age of 81 earlier this year. Smith is hardly a lone kook. He’s an established Republican donor with a demonstrated history in financing ethically murky investigations, such as paying Arkansas state troopers for stories of Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances.

Smith surfaced earlier in the week in an explosive Wall Street Journal report by Shane Harris, which Harris followed up on Friday night. What really underscores the significance of Harris’s reporting, though, is adetailed account, also published Friday night, by Matt Tait, a British cybersecurity expert who dealt extensively with Smith. Tait’s report makes it clear that Smith had access to Michael Flynn, at the very least, and was working not only to obtain stolen Clinton emails but also to hide the Trump campaign’s involvement.

Tait had established some expertise analyzing Clinton’s emails; Smith, who said he had been contacted by someone who possessed a cache of emails from Clinton’s private server, wanted help validating them. As Tait explains, he warned Smith that Russia had been conducting an attack on the U.S. elections, but Smith appeared completely unconcerned about it. Smith tried to hire Tait for his project and showed him a document creating an independent-looking organization to try to acquire the stolen emails. The document, Tait reports, “detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: ‘KLS Research’, set up as a Delaware LLC ‘to avoid campaign reporting,’ and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.” This certainly appears like an attempt to mask the Trump campaign’s involvement in the plot.

The document listed a series of high-level Trump campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn, and Lisa Nelson. Bannon and Conway, contacted by the Journal, deny any involvement with Smith. But Smith’s comments to Tait indicate a fairly close understanding of Trump campaign internal dynamics. It is possible he was bluffing, but Smith seemed to be displaying authentic insider credentials.

The key to understanding the significance of this report is to put it together with a sentence from Harris’s first story on this in the Journal, which reports that U.S. investigators “have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.”

So, according to Harris’s reporting, Russians were trying to transmit emails from Clinton’s server. Tait is describing in detail a Republican operative trying to obtain stolen emails from Russia. So we have evidence both of the campaign’s request and Russian efforts to fulfill the request.

Smith is deceased (at an old age, there is no grounds for suspicion about the cause of his death), but Michael Flynn, a figure he reportedly worked for, is very much with us and facing significant legal jeopardy. Flynn’s lawyer has said he has “a story to tell.” This might be part of the story.

RSN: Security Expert: GOP Attempt to Find Russian Hacked Clinton Emails Had Trump Campaign Ties

01 July 17 PM

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Security Expert: GOP Attempt to Find Russian Hacked Clinton Emails Had Trump Campaign Ties 
Alicia Cohn, The Hill 
Cohn writes: "When a GOP operative with alleged ties to the Trump campaign sought last year to obtain emails missing from Hillary Clinton's private email server, he turned to an independent security expert to help validate them." 
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Donald Trump and Steve Bannon in the Oval Office. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

hen a GOP operative with alleged ties to the Trump campaign sought last year to obtain emails missing from Hillary Clinton's private email server, he turned to an independent security expert to help validate them.

That's according to Matt Tait, the CEO and founder of UK-based security consultant firm Capital Alpha Security, who on Friday opened up about the GOP operative's attempts to recruit him last spring.

According to Tait, writing his account for Lawfare, he strongly believed that not only was the operative, Peter Smith, communicating with Russian hackers, but his operation was formed with the "blessing" of at least some members of now-President Trump's campaign.

Prior to last year's presidential election, Smith put together a team of lawyers, tech experts and Russian-speaking investigators in an attempt to obtain 33,000 private emails that had been deleted from Clinton's private server.

Smith has since told The Wall Street Journal that he believed Clinton's private email server had been hacked by Russians. The operation allegedly formed under the assumption Clinton was attempting to hide information in the emails and that they could uncover it by obtaining the hacked copies.

Tait wrote that he believed the team "was formed with the blessing of the Trump campaign."

Smith cited several Trump campaign officials during his recruitment attempt, Tait alleges, including Trump’s former national security adviser and then-adviser Michael Flynn, now-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, now-counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and now-Agriculture Department policy adviser Sam Clovis.

Several of those names appeared on a document specifying the mission and scope of Smith's operation dated Sept. 7, 2016 that was obtained by the Journal.

"Smith and his associates’ knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign were insightful beyond what could be obtained by merely attending Republican events or watching large amounts of news coverage," Tait wrote.

Smith allegedly described infighting and tension within Trump's campaign to Tait, and also told him that “Trump often just repeats whatever he’s heard from the last person who spoke to him."

Smith, the White House and a Trump campaign official have all denied that the operative or his team worked for them. The operative, Smith, has since died.

Smith's team "appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out," Tait wrote in his account.

"Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election," he continued.

Tait never saw any of the alleged emails. Smith told the Journal he did obtain some emails but was unable to verify them. He also said that his investigation found five hacking groups that claimed to have Clinton’s private emails, and that he determined that at least two of those groups were Russian.

Former FBI Director James Comey said last year in his recommendation against prosecuting Clinton that the private server did not appear to have been hacked.

Since the timing of the events Tait alleges, Flynn was forced to resign as Trump’s national security adviser in February amid revelations that he misled Vice President Pence and other White House officials about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.

An ongoing FBI probe into whether Russia attempted to hack the 2016 presidential election exists, as well as investigations into whether members of Trump's campaign colluded with the Kremlin.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/44444-security-expert-gop-attempt-to-find-russian-hacked-clinton-emails-had-trump-campaign-ties

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