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| Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein declares 29-page indictment of Russian meddling |
VietPress USA (July 13, 2018): On July 10, 2018, AP reported that "With Europe's wary eyes upon him, President Donald Trump launched a weeklong trip there on Tuesday with harsh criticism for NATO allies and predicted the "easiest" leg of his journey would be his scheduled sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As he departed the White House for a four-nation European tour, Trump did little to reassure allies fretting over the risk of damage he could do to the 69-year-old trans-Atlantic mutual defense pact and his potential embrace of Putin during a summit in Helsinki.
Trump said Tuesday he "can't say right now" if Putin is a friend or foe, but called him a "competitor." The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to boost Trump's candidacy, and warns of further attempts at interference both in the 2018 midterms and in European elections."
Trump always denied that he, his association, his people or his campaign had any collusion with Russia in meddling the 2016 Election to help Trump's victory.
But today, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a press conference had declared 29 pages of Russian indictment for meddling the U.S. Election 2016 to ruin Hillary Clinton and to support Trump.
With this indictment, how President Trump can praise Vladimir Putin is better than NATO allies.
Read this special report from Yahoo News at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/justice-department-lays-case-12-russian-officers-accused-hacking-democrats-2016-192737647.html
VietPress USA News
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Justice Department lays out its case against 12 Russian officers accused of hacking Democrats in 2016
WASHINGTON — Starting in March 2016, Russian military intelligence hackers covertly targeted over 300 people affiliated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and two other Democratic political organizations as part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to steal documents and emails and then release the material through cutouts in order to disrupt the American presidential election, according to a major new indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller that was released Friday.
The long-awaited, 29-page indictment revealed startling new details about Russia’s 2016 election efforts — including the leasing of U.S. based servers paid for with bitcoin — and fills out key gaps in the story of how top officials of one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s premier intelligence services, known as the GRU, plotted to meddle in both U.S. congressional races and the presidential race.
The charges, unveiled at a press conference by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, comes at a diplomatically awkward time: on the eve of President Trump’s Monday summit with Putin in Helsinki. The indictment charges 12 GRU officers in the cyberattacks, including the chief of a hacking unit known as “Unit 26165” as well as “others known and unknown to the grand jury.”
But it conspicuously makes no mention of Putin, who U.S. intelligence officials in a January 2017 report concluded had “ordered” the Russian influence campaign that included the hacks on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
“There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin is the intellectual author of this,” said Steve Hall, a CIA former station chief in Moscow who later oversaw the agency’s Russian operations during President Barack Obama’s second term. “So remind me again who President Trump is sitting down with on Monday?”
Rosenstein said at the press conference that he had briefed Trump on the indictment before the president left for Europe earlier this week. But Hall said the detailed new criminal charges will increase the pressure on Trump to confront Putin over the issue in Helsinki. “What any good American president would do is go in there and say to Putin, ‘OK, you are harboring 12 criminals. You can give them to me now — so I can fly them back on Air Force One — or do you want me to send a plane for them tomorrow.’” (The United States has no extradition treaty with Russia.)
Trump and his allies, however, can take solace in the fact that no members of the president’s campaign are accused of knowingly participating in the Russian hacking campaign. “There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime,” Rosenstein said at the press conference, although he quickly added that Mueller’s investigation “is ongoing.”
But the indictment documents show how a phony Russian online persona, Guccifer 2.0 — set up by the GRU to publicly dump stolen Democratic Party documents — communicated with a “person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.” This is an apparent reference to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone.
Stone is not identified by name in the indictment but has acknowledged “innocuous” communications with Guccifer 2.0 that match the exact wording of the messages in the indictment: “thank u for writing back…did u find anyt[h] interesting in the docs I posted,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote the Trump adviser on Aug. 15, 2016. Three weeks later, on Sept. 9, 2016, Guccifer referred to a stolen Democratic Party document posted online and asked Stone, “‘what do u think of the info on the turnout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign.” He responded, “pretty standard.”
Perhaps the most significant new information in the indictment reveals how WikiLeaks, the so-called transparency website founded by Julian Assange, actively solicited the emails stolen from the DNC that were published on the eve of the Democratic Party convention in July 2016, causing major disruptions that led to the resignation of the party’s chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Despite Assange’s repeated denials, the emails came directly from the GRU through Guccifer 2.0, the indictment alleges, although it was unclear from the charges whether Assange was aware of Guccifer’s Russian military ties.
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