Yes, I think that's the point.Melania Trump regularly used a private Trump Organization email account, an email from a MelaniaTrump.com domain, iMessage and the encrypted messaging app Signal while in the White House, according to her former senior adviser and close friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who says she corresponded multiple times a day with the first lady. [...] [I]n an interview with The Washington Post, upon the publication of her tell-all memoir, “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.”
The Post has viewed messages dated after the inauguration that appear to be from private email and messaging accounts used by Melania Trump. The messages contained discussions of government hires and contracts (including Winston Wolkoff’s), detailed schedules for the president and first lady during the Israeli and Japanese state visits, strategic partnerships for the first lady’s Be Best initiative, the logistics of the Easter egg roll, and finances for the presidential inauguration, key parts of which Winston Wolkoff, an experienced New York City events producer, planned.
Members of the Trump administration have already faced scrutiny for using private email. The House Oversight Committee last year began looking into the use of private accounts for government business by Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also has used private email to conduct government business. Donald Trump spent much of the 2016 election cycle drawing attention to the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state, calling it “worse than Watergate.”
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A first lady is not a government employee, said Richard Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, but “if she is doing United States government business, she should be using the White House email.” Use of personal accounts is allowed under the Presidential Records Act, but it’s risky: If those records are not carefully maintained, the White House might not be able to produce them in response to a subpoena.
WaPo
"Losing" records.Bush’s White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove got in trouble for losing records with personal emails in 2006.
You say she had a 15-year friendship with Melania Trump and yet still thought Melania would come to her defense? We've seen Melania for four years and not even closely, yet we could have told her that was a pipe dream.Winston Wolkoff's book is unique in the landscape of books about the Trumps, as the first insider's look at the first lady's private world. The two women had a 15-year friendship, says Winston Wolkoff, beginning in New York City and continuing through Trump's first year in the White House, where Winston Wolkoff was her unpaid senior adviser.
Winston Wolkoff’s time at the White House ended badly. She was ousted from her role and subsequently cooperated with multiple investigations into spending on President Trump’s inauguration.
She felt “betrayed” by the first lady, she says, because she didn’t publicly come to her defense when an inauguration committee tax return, and news reports, named an event planning firm she and business partners had created for producing the inauguration as the recipient of a $26 million payment.
That much is obvious.Winston Wolkoff told The Post she began recording her phone conversations with the first lady in February 2018 and until they stopped talking or texting on Jan. 1, 2019. She decided to do so, she says, the day after the White House terminated her contract, out of fear of becoming a “fall guy” as scrutiny of inaugural spending intensified. And, she says, because the first lady had made it clear she would not support her publicly or clear up matters in the press that Winston Wolkoff says were untrue.
[...]
This was at the height of the Mueller investigation, Winston Wolkoff says, when protecting herself from the Trump family and the machinery of White House palace intrigue had suddenly started to seem very important. “I didn’t record a friend. I would never record a friend,” Winston Wolkoff told The Post. “But — this is very important — she was no longer my friend when I pressed record.”
[...]
In the book, she chronicles what she saw as extensive mismanagement and opaque accounting she witnessed while working on the inauguration. She writes that the first lady’s needs seemed not only to be an afterthought, but on many occasions appeared to be actively thwarted. And she portrays a tense relationship between Melania and Ivanka Trump.
That has become obvious, too.In one telling anecdote, Winston Wolkoff recalls conspiring with Trump to keep the first daughter out of certain photos during the presidential swearing-in, a plan she says they playfully referred to as “Operation Block Ivanka.”
[...]
“Ivanka would not stop trying to put herself in front of Melania” — figuratively and literally. Throughout planning for the inauguration, Winston Wolkoff told The Post, Ivanka Trump kept sending her text messages about exactly where she wanted to be standing in the swearing-in photo, “and ‘it’s so important for me to be with my father’.
[...]
“You know how they are snakes,” read an August 2017 text that appears to be from Melania to Winston Wolkoff, in reference to a conflict with Ivanka and Jared Kushner over staffing.
[...]
Winston Wolkoff told The Post that she was operating to protect the interests of her friend Melania, but also because she felt that “people were overstepping their boundaries” and there was something wrong with the first daughter being so disrespectful to the first lady of the United States.
[...]
Melania Trump was not informed that she could bring guests to the president’s first address to Congress, and by the time she found out, the first lady’s box had been filled with guests of Ivanka Trump’s and Cabinet members. When Melania Trump tried to start hiring top staffers very early in the administration, Winston Wolkoff says, they were told there was almost no budget left for the first lady’s office and they lost qualified candidates.
[...]
“Melania’s not lonely; she’s self-contained,” Winston Wolkoff told The Post. “People think she’s, like, sad and trapped, and she’s not.”
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The picture she paints of Melania’s relationship with Donald is sunny.
“They totally get along. It’s crazy,” she says. “I mean, they laugh together. She knows who she married. He knows who he married. They are one and the same.”
Live with pigs...Winston Wolkoff says that “everything in the book is 100 percent verifiable and factual” and showed The Post what appeared to be extensive digital and physical archives of emails and emoji-laden texts from the first lady that she is prepared to use to back up her claims — and played some audio recordings.
[...]
[Winston Wolkoff] told The Post she has cooperated with prosecutors on three different investigations into inauguration spending (the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the House Intelligence Committee and D.C.’s attorney general) and has gone “more than a million dollars into the hole” in lawyers’ fees since working for the Trumps.
Obsessed.In a confusing ramble [according to the released transcript], Trump told Zelenksy he’d like him to look into “the server,” and namedropped CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that investigated the hack on the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
[...]
For what it's worth, people at CrowdStrike are as confused as we all are.
“I got nothing,” Adam Meyers, the vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike, told me in an online chat, when asked why Trump may have referred to the company in the call.
A company spokesperson said that they were working on an official response.
“My media monitoring tool has been blowing up!” the spokesperson said in an email.
In a statement sent to reporters, CrowdStrike said that "with regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI. As we've stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community."
How Trump managed to remember the name "CrowdStrike," which is mentioned only four times in the Mueller report, each in footnotes, is anyone's guess. And honestly, who knows what the fuck Trump is actually trying to say here. It’s unclear why he believes Ukraine has “the server,” and what server he is even talking about. Presumably, Trump is referring to the DNC server that’s at the center of a conspiracy theory completely made up by Trump’s imagination, though perhaps he's thinking of Hillary Clinton's private email server.
[...]
According to this conspiracy, the FBI and CrowdStrike failed to seize a DNC server that supposedly holds important information related to the hack. In reality, there’s no missing server, and both CrowdStrike and the US government concluded that Russian government hackers broke into the DNC.
In a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, Trump said CrowdStrike is “Ukraine-based” (fact check: it’s based in Sunnyvale, California, and has a big office in Arlington, Virginia).
“That’s what I heard. I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard,” Trump said.
[...]
For the record, CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that makes an antivirus-like product called Falcon. This is a cloud-based software that monitors computers and protects them from malware. The company also investigates data breaches when customers hire its researchers to respond to an incident.
[...]
Trump is saying that CrowdStrike, an American company, is actually Ukrainian. That’s why he’s asking the new President of Ukraine, a former comedian by the way, to help him find a missing server that actually does not exist.
Vice
That'll do for a start.Authorities in the United States have arrested Roger Stone, an associate of President Donald Trump for alleged witness tampering and other crimes.
The Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office on Friday said Stone was arrested in Florida by the FBI following a grand jury indictment.
alJazeera
This is no surprise to Stone. It'll be interesting to see what he pleads.The Associated Press news agency reported that the indictment lays out Stone's conversations about stolen emails from the Democratic Party posted by WikiLeaks ahead of the election.
[...]
Stone has been charged on seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements and one count of witness tampering.
Stone is scheduled to make a court appearance later on Friday.
Like Cohen, because he knew that's what Trump wanted. I doubt if he'll give up Trump by saying he was being directed by him. He'll be looking for a pardon. But, who knows? Trump is an unreliable friend.“Robert Mueller is coming for me,” Stone wrote to supporters in August last year, before asserting that his name was next on what he called Mueller’s “hit list” of targets. Stone denied wrongdoing and said he faced legal peril simply because he had advised Trump for several decades.
[...]
Mueller’s indictment alleges that during the summer of 2016 Stone spoke to senior Trump campaign officials about WikiLeaks “and information it might have had that would be damaging to the [Hillary] Clinton campaign. Stone was contacted by senior Trump campaign officials to inquire about future releases by” WikiLeaks, which the document refers to as “Organization 1”.
“On multiple occasions, Stone told senior Trump campaign officials about materials possessed by Organization 1 and the timing of future releases,” the document states.
It also alleges that Stone – a longtime political adviser to Trump – made “multiple false statements” about his interactions regarding WikiLeaks, and “falsely denied possessing records that contained evidence of these interactions”, and “attempted to persuade a witness to provide false testimony to and withhold pertinent information from the investigations”.
[...]
“Shortly after [WikiLeaks’] release, an associate of [a] high-ranking Trump campaign official sent a text message to Stone that read ‘well done’.
[...]
Asked if he had no emails or other communications relating to Wikileaks and the hacked Democratic documents, Stone allegedly said: “That is correct. Not to my knowledge.”
The indictment states: “In truth and in fact, Stone had sent and received numerous emails and text messages during the 2016 campaign in which he discussed Organization 1, its head, and its possession of hacked emails.”
The Guardian
A busy day in the Mueller investigation courts today.It was Stone who first recommended that Trump’s team hire as its campaign manager Paul Manafort, who has been found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes and is said to have breached a plea agreement with the special counsel.
Manafort will make his first court appearance in months on Friday as prosecutors and defence lawyers argue over whether he intentionally lied to investigators.
UPDATE:According to several published reports, the "senior Trump campaign official" mentioned here was Steve Bannon, which makes the phrase "was directed to contact Stone" even more intriguing. At that point in the campaign, the universe of people who could "direct" Bannon to do anything was a tiny one, and several of them had the same last name.
Charles P Pierce
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Republicans have quietly and unceremoniously ended their congressional investigation of whether the FBI and Justice Department were biased in their handling of inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s emails and Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
House judiciary chairman Robert Goodlatte and oversight chairman Trey Gowdy, who are retiring next week, sent a letter rather than a full report to the Justice Department and the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. It wraps up an inquiry that was conducted mostly behind closed doors.
[...]
Goodlatte and Gowdy say in their letter that they reviewed thousands of documents and conducted interviews that “revealed troubling facts which exacerbated our initial questions and concerns”. They call on the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate further. A separate report issued this year by the Justice Department’s own internal watchdog found there was no evidence that the then FBI chief James Comey or the department were motivated by political bias toward either candidate.
Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, and Elijah Cummings, top Democrat on the oversight panel, are expected to formally end the investigation when they take power in January. Nadler has called it “nonsense”.
Guardian
"I don't remember the conversation clearly. I suspect that is because it seemed like a passing comment and the notion that Anthony Weiner's computer might connect to Midyear and Hillary Clinton made no sense to me."I suppose he could have simply gone on to other things at the time, thinking the issue was closed and he was well rid of the nightmare. But he also says that after not getting any word from him on what to do about it, the team asked for a meeting. Why did they wait two or three weeks?
Soooooo...you were just bluffing?Six days before WikiLeaks began releasing Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, Roger Stone had a text message conversation with a friend about WikiLeaks, according to copies of phone records obtained exclusively by NBC News.
“Big news Wednesday,” the Stone pal, radio host Randy Credico, wrote on Oct. 1, 2016, according to the text messages provided by Stone. “Now pretend u don’t know me.”
“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replied.
“Great,” Credico wrote back. “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.”
[...]
[T]wo days later, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released its first dump of emails stolen from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the 2016 presidential election.
[...]
[T]ext messages provided by Stone to NBC News show that Credico appeared to be providing regular updates to Stone on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans in the days before the hacked emails were released. In the texts, Credico told Stone he had insights into Assange's plans through a longtime friend, who was also Assange’s lawyer, according to the text messages.
Reached Wednesday, Credico downplayed the text exchanges. “There's absolutely nothing there that I had any knowledge of anything that Assange was going to do because I didn't,” he told NBC News.
"Where's the smoking gun?" he added.
NBC
Indictments, please. And let's do Junior while you're at it.Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating whether Stone had any advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' plans to publish Podesta's emails, according to people familiar with the investigation. Nearly a dozen Stone associates have been summoned by Mueller to appear before his Washington grand jury, the sources said.
[...]
The text messages obtained by NBC News appear to show that Stone and Credico exchanged messages about Assange having damaging information about Clinton at least as early as Aug. 27, 2016. The texts show that at 6:07 p.m. that day, Credico wrote to Stone, “Julian Assange has kryptonite on Hillary.”
Stone did not appear to reply to that particular message but the conversations ramped up over the following weeks.
“I think it’s on for tomorrow,” Credico texted Stone on Oct. 3, 2016, according to the messages obtained by NBC News.
CREW sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI [in April] calling for the release of all records pertaining to an investigation of the source that leaked information to Rudy Giuliani in October 2016, days before FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that the FBI was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Comey announced the investigation on October 28, 2016 in a letter to Congress on the basis that new information had been found but not yet examined by the FBI.
Two days before Comey’s letter announcing the reopening of the investigation, Giuliani appeared on Fox News and gave a statement indicating he was given information that had not been yet made public regarding the Clinton probe.
“I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton finally are beginning to have an impact,” he said on the October 26 program. “He’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway."Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," then-candidate Donald Trump said at a July 27, 2016 press conference in Florida, urging Russian hackers to work to find emails belonging to his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
"I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens."
[...]
He also posted on Twitter, urging Russia "or any other country or person" to release Clinton emails.
[...]
Although he later said he was speaking in jest, the comment was made the same day that Russian state hackers are now alleged to have made fresh attempts to hack Clinton campaign emails.
According to an indictment handed up on Friday against 12 Russian military officers by special counsel Robert Mueller, the hackers on July 27, 2016 "attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton's personal office." [emphasis added]
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Spearphishing refers to the practice of attempting to steal a person's password or gain access to their computer.
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"At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign," Mueller wrote.
Buzzfeed
As Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, delivered his opening remarks, aides displayed poster boards to highlight the guilty pleas Mueller has obtained in his ongoing probe.Republicans briefly objected to the visual aids. “Cite the rule,” Democrats said, and Cummings was ultimately allowed to proceed.
And, of course, there was a huge scandal, and the 2016 election went tits up. I, along with other smarter folk, were not convinced by the reports at the time, because there was so much ambiguous information coming out in panicked tones. None of them indicated that the Dutch had been surveilling these Russian groups for two years already. One of the problems with having any trust in our intelligence and government pronouncements is the secrecy that they are either prevented from revealing because of actual national security (ours or allies) and their propensity to be secretive for the sake of being secretive.In the summer of 2014, the Joint Sigint Cyber Unit (JSCU) was launched, a joint unit of AIVD and MIVD, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service. Based in the Dutch city of Zoetermeer, it focuses on, among other things, obtaining intelligence through cyber operations. That same summer, the unit received a tip about a group of Russian hackers based at a university complex in Moscow. An AIVD hacking team, operating under the JSCU flag, subsequently succeeded in penetrating the internal Russian computer network. Not only did the AIVD gain access the computer network, it also hacked the security camera in the corridor.
[...]
This allowed them to see exactly who entered the hacking room. Information about these individuals was shared with the US intelligence services. Dutch intelligence services consider Cozy Bear an extension of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, which is firmly controlled by President Putin.
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After a few months, in November 2014, the Dutch watched as the Russian hackers penetrated the computer network of the State Department. After being alerted to this by the Dutch intelligence chiefs, it took the Americans over 24 hours to avert the Russian attack, after a digital clash.
[...]
In the autumn of 2014, the Russians also gained access to the non-classified computer network of the White House. This allowed them to see confidential memos and non-public information about the itinerary of President Obama, and to at least part of President Obama's email correspondence. These hacks, too, were exposed by the Dutch intelligence services, which subsequently notified the Americans.
[...]
In April 2016, Fancy Bear accessed the Washington servers of the Democrats; Cozy Bear had done so as early as the summer of 2015. Once more, the group was caught red-handed by the Dutch, who again alerted their U.S. counterparts.
It is not clear why the hacks at the DNC could continue for so long despite the Dutch warnings.Last year, The New York Times reported that for months, the DNC had not taken the FBI warnings seriously. Eventually, cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, which was investigating the matter on behalf of the Democratic Party, also concluded that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were jointly responsible for the hacks.
NOS
Nice going, guys.Last Sunday on Dutch television programme College Tour, Rob Bertholee, head of AIVD, said that he had no doubt that the Kremlin was directly responsible for the Russian cyber campaign against U.S. government agencies. Bertholee as well as Pieter Bindt, who was heading MIVD at the time, personally discussed the DNC matter with James Clapper.
[...]
As of now, the AIVD hackers do not seem to have access to Cozy Bear any longer. Sources suggest that the openness of US intelligence sources, who in 2017 praised the help of a Western ally in news stories, may have ruined their operation.
Understandable. He offered the Russian ambassador and the Foreign Minister top secret information that an intel ally had US counterparts about an IS threat, and told him where, in effect revealing which ally it was. And he leaked info about where we had submarines to Duterte. Clueless fool. We haven't heard any stories of this kind of blunder for months. They may have quit giving him intel reports. If they're smart, they did.In the television programme College Tour, this month, AIVD director Bertholee stated that he is extra careful when it comes to sharing intelligence with the U.S., now that Donald Trump is President.
And there you have it.One text that Page sent Strzok early on the morning of Nov. 9, 2016, has dominated the conservative media world this week, serving as a springboard for a Republican conspiracy theory suggesting that the nation’s premier law enforcement organization was plotting a coup against Trump within hours of his stunning victory.
“Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing,” Page, a FBI lawyer, wrote in the text to Strzok from her FBI-issued phone. “Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society.”
Republican lawmakers seized upon the “secret society” reference this week, claiming to see sinister motives, and it started popping up all over cable news chyrons. But, in fact, it was almost certainly a joke, a bit of gallows humor after an election that featured Russian interference.
So what was that “calendars” reference all about? Out of context, it’s a bit confusing. But the backstory is actually kind of funny. The New York Times first reported that the “calendars,” which the Times said had a “Russia theme,” were a gag gift for those working on the early Russia probe.
[...]
It turns out that, as a joke, Strzok had purchased calendars featuring “beefcake” photos of Vladimir Putin doing manly, tough-guy things like riding a horse.
HuffPo
It's a testament to the GOP-Trump cabal desperation and fear that they are going back through everything they can to find something - anything - they can publicize to deflect attention and try to smear the Mueller investigation.What’s remarkable about the “secret society” text message is that it has been available to reporters for more than a month, as it was included in a first set of texts that the Justice Department sent to Capitol Hill (and allowed reporters to view) in December. But it wasn’t picked up, even by Fox News (which had access to the texts), because it seemed like such an obvious joke.
[...]
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a prominent promoter of the “secret society” text, admitted Thursday there’s a “real possibility” that it was just a joke.
