“If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange and Trump associates the person who comes up with the most hits is Nigel Farage.
.. The source mentioned Farage’s links with Roger Stone, Trump’s long-time political adviser who has admitted being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker whom US intelligence agencies believe to be a Kremlin agent.
.. The spokesman also declined to comment on whether Farage had received compensation from the Russian state-backed media group RT for his media appearances. RT, which has featured Farage about three times over the last 18 months, also declined to comment, citing confidentiality.
.. Farage has said he only met Assange once has but declined to say how long the two have known each other.
Ten days later, Mr. Nevins received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee documents, some of which he posted on a blog called HelloFLA.com that he ran using a pseudonym.
Soon after, the hacker sent a link to the blog article to Roger Stone, a longtime informal adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump, along with Mr. Nevins’ analysis of the hacked data.
.. Later, going through what the hacker sent as someone who “actually knows what some of these documents mean,” the GOP consultant said he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.”The episode shows how the hacker’s activities extended to exposing Democrats’ get-out-the vote strategies in swing states and informing a Trump ally of hacked data during the national campaign.
.. He said he didn’t use any in his consulting business, which includes running grass-roots-style campaigns for corporations and wealthy landowners seeking to influence local politics.
.. More impressed after studying the voter-turnout models, Mr. Nevins told the hacker, “Basically if this was a war, this is the map to where all the troops are deployed.”At another point, he told the hacker, “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”
.. Democrats, Mr. Nevins wrote, “spent millions probably to figure out who these people are that are conducive to their message and now it’s exposed for the other side.”
..He isn’t convinced the Russians were behind it, Mr. Nevins said, but even if they were, it doesn’t matter to him because the agenda of the hackers seemed to match his own.“If your interests align,” he said, “never shut any doors in politics.”
Michael Caputo, who served as a communications adviser to the Trump campaign, has been asked by the House committee investigating Russian election meddling to submit to a voluntary interview
.. Mr. Caputo, who lives near Buffalo and spent six months on the Trump team, worked in Russia during the 1990s and came to know Kremlin officials. He also did work in the early 2000s for Gazprom Media, a Russian conglomerate that supported President Vladimir V. Putin.
.. he met his second wife, who is Ukrainian, while working in 2007 on a parliamentary election in Kiev.
.. He is a protégé of Roger J. Stone Jr.
.. “The only time the president and I talked about Russia was in 2013, when he simply asked me in passing what it was like to live there in the context of a dinner conversation,” he wrote.
Yet, the manner of the firing was ham-handed: The president’s bodyguard was dispatched to deliver the termination documents to what turned out to be an empty office, the White House having failed to check on the director’s whereabouts (he was on FBI business in California). And, as has become ever clearer over the last few days, the justifications for the action from the White House have been deceptive.
.. In a nutshell, Trump wanted to be rid of Comey but deflect responsibility for removing an FBI director less than four years into a ten-year term. So he directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein to prepare a memo explaining the grounds of termination. Then, his team spun the firing as if it were the Justice Department’s idea, occurring now only because Rosenstein just started on the job. (Sessions has recused himself from aspects of the Russia inquiry, though the scope of the recusal is uncertain.) The White House tried to make it appear as if the president were merely concurring in the decision. Only when Rosenstein reportedly protested did Trump own up.
.. He also, disturbingly, said that he was thinking of Russia when he made the decision, contradicting everyone in the White House who said that had nothing to do with it.
.. It is understandable that Democrats are screaming bloody murder about events of the last few days — certainly Republicans would be doing the same if a Democrat were in the White House and axed an FBI director the way Trump has. But the analogies to Watergate — ubiquitous in the media — are overwrought
.. The objective of a foreign counterintelligence investigation is not to gather evidence of a specific violation of law in order to build a prosecutable criminal case against a suspect. It is to determine the actions and intentions of foreign powers to the extent they bear on American interests.
.. There have been reports that the FBI has been scrutinizing business dealings former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had with Kremlin-connected Ukrainian politicians between 2005 and 2014, and business conducted in Russia by Carter Page, whose connection to the Trump campaign — which listed him as an adviser — appears remote. Trump’s shady longtime crony Roger Stone has boasted of a relationship with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, and there are suspicions he may have had prior knowledge that WikiLeaks would publish e-mails hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta
.. In short, it may be that this investigation really does have nothing to do with Donald Trump directly. That makes his petulant and self-destructive response to it all the more mystifying — except against the backdrop of his entire adult life, which has involved bullying and blustering his way to fame and fortune.
.. The more he complains and lashes out, the more the opposition turns up the heat. The race to the bottom may have just begun.