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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2017 18:29:18 GMT
Correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin take us inside Vladimir Putin's Russia, with an in-depth look at the resurgent national identity, the government's propaganda machine, the risk of being a Kremlin critic and much more.
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Post by Admin on Jul 25, 2017 18:42:10 GMT
Congressional Republicans and Democrats announced Saturday they had reached an agreement on a sweeping Russia sanctions package to punish Moscow for meddling in the presidential election and its military aggression in Ukraine and Syria. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat, said lawmakers had settled lingering issues with the bill, which also includes stiff economic penalties against Iran and North Korea. The sanctions targeting Russia, however, have drawn the most attention due to President Donald Trump’s persistent push for warmer relations with President Vladimir Putin and ongoing investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.
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Post by Admin on Aug 3, 2017 18:38:18 GMT
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that the U.S. diplomatic missions in Moscow and elsewhere in the country will have to reduce their staffs by 755 people, signaling a significant escalation in the Russian response to American sanctions over the Kremlin’s intervention in the 2016 presidential election. The United States and Russia have expelled dozens of each other’s diplomats before — but Sunday’s statement, made by Putin in an interview with the Rossiya-1 television channel, indicated the single largest forced reduction in embassy staff, comparable only to the closing of the American diplomatic presence in the months following the Communist revolution in 1917.
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Post by Admin on Aug 7, 2017 18:19:38 GMT
After news broke that Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia probe, has impanelled a grand jury as part of his investigation, President Trump declared at a rally in West Virginia that “the Russia story is a total fabrication. It’s just an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics.” Trump’s comments, which were meant to denigrate and perhaps thwart the Mueller probe, were undermined by the fact that the grand jury has been at work for several weeks in the District of Columbia. Grand juries don’t investigate hoaxes, and there are rules against using them for anything resembling a political hunt. As several former federal prosecutors told me, the grand jury is significant because it means that Mueller is in the midst of a “predicated” criminal investigation. That is, he has reached the point where he has evidence of criminal conduct. “It can’t be used for a fishing expedition,” Matt Olsen, a former federal prosecutor, said. “He’s got a very powerful tool to pursue specific federal crimes.” At the same time, the fact that Mueller is using a grand jury does not mean indictments are imminent or even a certainty. In the Clinton e-mail case, a grand jury was impanelled to issue some subpoenas—a fact that was only recently discovered—but it was never used to issue any indictments.
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Post by Admin on Oct 25, 2017 18:29:45 GMT
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund political research into President Donald Trump that ultimately produced a dossier of allegations about his ties to Russia, a person familiar with the matter said Tuesday night. The revelation is likely to fuel complaints by Trump that the dossier, which the president has derided as "phony stuff," is a politically motivated collection of salacious claims. Yet the FBI has worked to corroborate the document, and in a sign of its ongoing relevance to investigators, special counsel Robert Mueller's team — which is probing potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign — weeks ago questioned the former British spy, Christopher Steele, who helped compile the claims in the dossier. The dossier, which circulated in Washington last year and was turned over to the FBI for its review, contends that Russia was engaged in a longstanding effort to aid Trump and had amassed compromising information about him. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the document as false and in recent days has questioned on Twitter whether Democrats or the FBI had helped fund it. Trump has also attacked the findings of the FBI, NSA and CIA that Russia waged a large-scale influence campaign to interfere in the election. The FBI and the CIA have said with high confidence that the effort was aimed at hurting Clinton's candidacy and helping Trump. The NSA found the same with "moderate" confidence.
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