Trump Adviser Had Twitter Contact With Figure Tied to Russians

Roger J. Stone Jr., an off-and-on adviser to President Trump for decades, has acknowledged that he had contact on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the mysterious online figure that is believed to be a front for Russian intelligence officials.

.. But Mr. Stone insisted in an interview that the contact had been brief and involved nothing more than the exchange of a few direct messages, well after the party committee had been hacked. “Even if he is a Russian agent, my cursory exchange with him happens after he releases the D.N.C. stuff,” Mr. Stone said on Saturday. “There’s only one exchange with him. I had no further exchanges.”

.. He denied any knowledge of what the hackers were up to before their attacks. “This is a witch hunt,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s the worst form of McCarthyism. Seems as if you’re not for nuclear war with the Russians over Syria, then you must be a traitor.”

.. During the campaign, Guccifer 2.0 used social media to invite individual reporters and Republican operatives to request specific caches of documents.

Why Would Jeff Sessions Hide His Talks With Sergey Kislyak?

Obama had inherited a plan for an aggressive missile-defense system for Eastern Europe that was a major irritant to Moscow. Kislyak, who studied physics, was an expert on arms control, and explained that the system was not solely defensive, as the Bush Administration had insisted. A radar system to be deployed in the Czech Republic was of particular concern to Kislyak.

“I was the new guy, so I was willing to listen,” McFaul, who later became Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, said. “He was lecturing me about the dual capabilities of that radar and that it had capabilities against Russia. And I said, ‘That’s news to me.’ And he said, ‘Well, you need to learn.’ ”
.. “He could have been rough and abrasive and a Putin-style Russian Cold Warrior, which he was not. He played it very softly. Because he was not what people expected him to be, he ingratiated himself with the audience. ”
.. He’s very good on the geopolitical stuff and the domestic political stuff. Not shy, very understated.”
.. Despite the high regard in which he was held, Kislyak increasingly found that he had almost no audience in Washington.
.. Sessions insisted that he met with Kislyak only in his capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee. McFaul scoffed at that idea. “He’s meeting with Senator Sessions because of his relationship to Trump, not because of what he does on the Senate Armed Services Committee,” he said. “We now know he’s the Attorney General, but back then he was talked about for all kinds of jobs, including Secretary of Defense.”
.. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, had several conversations with Kislyak during the transition. In December, he met with Kislyak at Trump Tower, along with Jared Kushner, to “establish a more open line of communication in the future,” according to the White House.
.. To some extent, they all share Kislyak’s view that America, through nato and its eastern expansion, has been needlessly hostile to Russia, that Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty is a nuisance issue, and that the U.S. and Russia could be united by the common threat from isis.
.. The suggestions that there’s something wrong with speaking to Kislyak is “really sensitive to me because, when I was the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, that’s what the Russian government did to me,” McFaul added. “They really discouraged people to meet with me that were not part of the government, and if there was ever a meeting with someone defined as the opposition it became crazy, awful, page-one news that I was meddling in their internal affairs. We don’t want to become that.”

The Tragedy of Newcomb Mott, Who Thought He Could Walk Into Soviet Russia

Young and naive, he just wanted his passport stamped.

He had a confidence characteristic of young, educated, American white men in the 1960s—a feeling that everything would probably work out, because, the great majority of the time, everything did.

.. The first Soviet authorities to question Mott asked him repeatedly: Do you belong to the CIA? Do you know anyone who does? But they seem to have given up the idea rather quickly that he might be a spy.

.. Instead, they were interested in trading him for one.

.. From the government’s perspective, trading Ivanov for Mott would give the Soviet government an opening: every time they wanted one of their imprisoned spies shipped back to the USSR, they would only have to arrest an American on some pretense and threaten to punish them harshly.

.. The punishment for illegal border crossing was one to three years in prison; Mott was sentenced to 18 months in a corrective labor camp.

.. But two autopsies, one after his parents were able to recover his body, showed more than 60 wounds on his body. He’d been stabbed to death.

What to Make of Donald Trump’s Early-Morning Tweets

One of the articles is based on Senator Orrin Hatch’s remark about the wiretaps that led to the downfall of Michael Flynn as the national-security adviser. Another is based on Mark Levin, a conservative radio host, who recently accused Obama of “police state” tactics to carry out a “silent coup” against Trump.

.. One of President Trump’s most consistent rhetorical maneuvers is a fairly basic but often highly effective one—the diversionary reverse accusation. When he is accused of benefitting from “fake news,” he flips the neologism on its head; suddenly CNN, the Times, and the rest are “fake news.” When Democratic politicians such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi call for investigations of his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials, Trump posts pictures of those critics meeting publicly with Vladimir Putin and calls for an investigation.

.. Ironically, the Obama Administration, after being informed that the Russian government was likely behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee and that the effort was intended to undermine Hillary Clinton, did not act more forcefully for fear of appearing to favor its own political party.

.. The book describes Putin’s system as a “protection racket” in which he views himself as the “CEO of Russia, Inc.,” and is served by “crony oligarchs.” “In reality,” Hill and Gaddy write, “his leadership style is more like that of a mafia family Don.”

.. the methods used in the Russian secret services to discredit opponents. “Core individuals collect and amass detailed compromising material (kompromat in Russian) that can be used as leverage on every key figure inside and outside of government,”

.. They wanted to amplify someone like Trump because what he says is music to their ears.”

.. Also, this is not just two-way superpower. There is China, the rising powers. I almost see it as like the great power competition from the time before the Second World War.”

.. the Russians, partly because they “have” Edward Snowden, in Moscow, possess “a good idea of what the U.S. is capable of knowing. They got all of his information. You can be damn well sure that [Snowden’s] information is theirs.”