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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 22:46:00 GMT
A bombshell new report on alleged leaked Kremlin documents references "apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat" on former President Donald Trump — but experts warn it should be read with a skeptical eye.
On Thursday, The Guardian reported on "what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents" allegedly showing that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized an operation to support Trump's election during a January 2016 meeting because it would bring "social turmoil" to the United States. The documents reportedly include an assessment of Trump as "mentally unstable and unbalanced," and the report also says they contain "apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat," potentially compromising material, on Trump.
It was a massive revelation if true, but Johns Hopkins professor of strategic studies Thomas Rid warned readers should "remain somewhat cautious" about the story, pointing to language in it that "makes me wonder how much the Guardian even knows about the source," as well as the report's frequent hedging among other concerns. According to the report, the section of the document about the alleged "kompromat" says details about it can be found in an appendix, but it's "unclear what the appendix contains."
Chris Krebs, former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director, agreed with Rid's skepticism, writing, "This is far too convenient & reeks of #disinfo operation. It could all be individually or collectively true and at the same time planted & fake." Krebs added that "in the meantime, I'm taking this approach," attaching a meme of Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road warning, "That's bait."
At The Washington Post, journalist Philip Bump also expressed skepticism, writing, "It is odd that this document, so closely related to the national discourse over the past five years, only emerged now. It was purportedly leaked from within the Kremlin, but that happened only now? Or it only trickled down to the media now, when so many other things emerged more quickly? It's curious."
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 23:24:54 GMT
For years, there have been whispers that the Russian government holds compromising materials on Donald Trump. Now, The Guardian claims to have its hands on an alleged leak from the heart of the Kremlin that shows them boasting about “kompromat.” The supposed leak obtained by The Guardian reportedly claims that President Vladimir Putin personally approved a nefarious plan to throw Russia’s support behind Trump’s 2016 campaign. The document states that Putin, his spy chiefs, and top ministers agreed that a victory for a “mentally unstable” Trump would permanently weaken the United States. The document also reportedly states that the Kremlin has so-called kompromat—or damaging intelligence—on Trump. It cryptically refers to “certain events” that happened during “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.” The purported leak doesn’t explain what those events involved—only referring to an appendix that wasn’t attached to the obtained document. The Daily Beast has not reviewed the supposed Kremlin leak, and The Guardian has not definitively proven it to be authentic. Questions about its veracity were raised almost immediately after its release, with some Russian Twitter users highlighting linguistic errors in the document, and words not used by native Russian speakers. The Washington Post’s national correspondent Philip Bump wrote that it’s “hard not to be skeptical of the document.” For example, some of the phrases used, like describing Trump as “mentally unstable,” seem a little too titillating, and some of the predictions of a Trump victory leading to destabilization seem a little too prescient for a 2016 memo. The document is suspiciously light on actual evidence of kompromat, and it includes a discussion of potential social media influence campaigns that were already well underway, he wrote. Bump also points out that the lead Guardian reporter on Thursday’s story had a 2018 scoop about Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, going to London to meet with Julian Assange shortly before WikiLeaks released Democratic emails hacked by Russia—but Robert Mueller’s report never corroborated it, nor did other reporters. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov called the supposed leaked papers “a great pulp fiction” and Trump called the story “disgusting” and “fake news” in a statement to the Daily Mail. Other media allegations based on intelligence reports have also ultimately proven to be wrong but, in its Thursday report, The Guardian has quoted experts on Russian spy agencies and Kremlin diplomacy who say they have no reason to doubt that the document is genuine. Trump is known to have visited Moscow on multiple occasions in the decades before he was elected in 2016. One memorable section of the Steele dossier threw up some extraordinary but unsubstantiated claims about the former president and some Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room when he jetted to Russia for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. The document reportedly offers more detail on what Kremlin leaders allegedly thought of Trump before he became president and why they wanted him to win. It reportedly describes the future president as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex,” and, therefore, the “most promising candidate.” The Guardian reports that the document states that a Kremlin plan to back Trump was agreed upon at a meeting of the national security council on Jan. 22, 2016. The document reportedly recommends that the Kremlin and its spy agencies use “all possible force” to push Trump to victory in the election and help him sow “social turmoil” in the United States. The document reportedly predicts that a Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilization of the U.S.’s sociopolitical system,” and a “social explosion.” The papers threaten to insert “media viruses” into American systems to help exacerbate the chaos of a Trump presidency. Trump has historically denied that Russia helped elect him as president and that the Kremlin has any kompromat on him. Months after the January 2016 meeting, Russian hackers broke into the servers of the Democratic National Committee and released thousands of private emails in an attempt to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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Post by Admin on Jul 16, 2021 2:48:13 GMT
Trump in a statement posted on Twitter by his spokesperson, Liz Harrington, rejected the report as "disgusting" and "fake news."
"It's just the Radical Left crazies doing whatever they can to demean everybody on the right," said Trump.
"It's fiction, and nobody was tougher on Russia than me, including on the pipeline, and sanctions. At the same time we got along with Russia. Russia respected us, China respected us, Iran respected us, North Korea respected us."
Claims that Russia had obtained lurid private information about Trump that it could use as leverage were aired in a dossier compiled by a former UK intelligence officer and published in 2016 after Trump won the presidency.
The dossier's standout claim — never proved, and furiously denied by Trump — was that there existed a video of prostitutes urinating for Trump's enjoyment on a hotel bed chosen because it had been used by Barack Obama.
Russia dismissed The Guardian's report, describing it as "pulp fiction," the newspaper said.
The documents are said to be from a Russian national security council meeting on January 22, 2016, attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and top intelligence and military officials.
The Guardian said it took steps to verify the documents through expert analysis. It said they also included verifiable circumstantial details.
The newspaper said Western intelligence agencies were also aware of the documents.
The documents suggested the main subject of the closed meeting was a plan to deploy Russian intelligence in an audacious bid to help Trump win the election against Hillary Clinton, The Guardian said.
The documents, according to The Guardian, said Russian officials believed that a Trump victory would aid Russia by badly destabilizing the US.
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Post by Admin on Jul 16, 2021 6:21:57 GMT
The Guardian cited independent experts who said the Kremlin documents appear to be genuine. However, former senior intelligence officials from the CIA, the White House National Security Council and the KGB, including some who specialized in Russia for years, told SpyTalk they had serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and the timing of their release.
“While I’m certain that Putin played Trump like a fiddle and directed a multifaceted campaign to influence U.S. opinion, sow chaos and support his candidacy, I find the timing and extraordinary level of detail in these ostensibly highly classified reports curious,” said Douglas London, a retired senior CIA operations officer who is now an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies.
“The value and reliability of intelligence is based on its source and our ability to validate his or her access and motivations,” added London, author of a forthcoming memoir about his three decades in the CIA, The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.
“Coincidence and convenience are red flags in espionage,” he told SpyTalk. “So why now? And how would any beyond Putin’s most inner circle have access? Why would they wait until now to share these documents? And why wouldn’t they have cut a lucrative deal by defecting and/or cooperating in place with a Western Intelligence service—or defect and go public with a huge expose and book deal?”
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services, told the Guardian that the leaked documents “reflect the reality” of top Kremlin decision-making, and noted Putin "micro-manages" most special operations. Sir Andrew Wood, former British ambassador in Moscow, called them “spell-binding.”
But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, said the documents did not clearly seem to be aligned with Russia’s operational practices.
“The Russian security council is a formal body, and the notion that it is operational does not ring true,” Medish said. “That is not what Putin uses the security council for. The Russians definitely do active measures, but that’s all in a black box. The idea that it’s discussed in a meeting with 13 people—I don’t believe that happens.”
Medish noted he had not seen the underlying documents, and hoped that they would shed more light on their provenance. “We must ask who wants us to see this now and why?” he added.
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Post by Admin on Jul 16, 2021 18:55:07 GMT
Vetting Challenge
Similarly, John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer who served in Moscow and ran Russian operations for the agency’s clandestine service, urged caution. “Without the resources of a professional intelligence organization, nobody can say for certain” how real they are.
But offhand, he commented, the documents not only appear “too neat and tied in a bow” to be taken at face value, they invite scrutiny of their provenance.
Other former intelligence officers had similar reactions.
“I’m surprised that such a document would leak, but not in the least surprised by what it says,” said Glenn Carle, a former national intelligence officer at the CIA. “It is exactly what my assessment was [in 2015] and it seems to confirm exactly what I’ve said.” Carle first raised questions about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia long before he won the Republican nomination.
“These documents would have been incredibly tightly held, and the risks of leaking are mortal,” Carle added. “These are ruthless people.”
The Guardian also claimed that, “Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them”—which would seem to imply the agencies have granted them some credibility. Yet none of the agencies have stepped forward to say so, even after previously declaring without reservation that Putin favored Trump in the 2016 election and took steps to help him.
Trump did not initially respond to the allegations, the Guardian reported, but his spokeswoman Liz Harrington later relayed his statement dismissing the story.
"This is disgusting,” it said. “It’s fake news, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA was fake news. It’s just the Radical Left crazies doing whatever they can to demean everybody on the right."
As usual, Trump’s sentiments were perfectly aligned with the Kremlin, where Putin spokesman Dmitri Peskov described the Guardian piece as “a great pulp fiction.”
Former KGB officer Yuri Shvets also voiced serious questions about the provenance of the “leak.” Like Carle, Shvets said any of the Russians in the chain of custody would be risking their freedom, if not their life, in leaking them.
“The Kremlin is not the White House,” said Shvets, who has lived in the United States since the 1990s. “They are not known for leaking this kind of document.
“Second, these documents have top security clearance,” Shvets added. “Access is limited to a handful of people, and the movement of the file between them is registered. If someone wants to see them, the guy who is the keeper of the file makes an entry in a journal, so to find who leaked it would take just 15 minutes. And the leaker would get 15 years in jail.”
As a result, Shvets thinks it highly unlikely that these documents would be the product of an unauthorized leak.
“These people working in the Kremlin are fine and dandy,” he told me. “They’re all millionaires. Why would they risk their lives to leak a document to Luke Harding? It doesn’t make any sense.”
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump also noted a number of oddities in the January 2016 document and called attention to the fact that it included a discussion of “how Russia might insert ‘media viruses’ into American public life,” when, in fact, such efforts had been underway since the first half of 2014.
None of which means that The Guardian got it wrong. It may simply mean that the contents of the document were accurate and it was created by the Kremlin—but not in 2016, and for its own, yet-to-be-deciphered purposes. That’s sloppy. It may well have been a provocation that was designed to discredit the Guardian and other media who have reported aggressively on Trump’s ties to Russia. Or to distract attention from some of the lingering, unanswered questions about Russian involvement in Trump’s financial affairs.
The new papers, it needs noting, contain nothing about how Trump laundered money for the Russian Mafia or how his bankrupt real estate empire was bailed out by the Bayrock Group, which was run by people with ties to Russian intelligence.
"This is potentially an extremely important revelation,” said Medish, “but I don’t want us to get caught out in another Hitler’s diary hoax.”
Medish was referring to the 1983 discovery of diaries purportedly written by Adolf Hitler that turned out to be fraudulent, much to the embarrassment of historians and news organizations who thought they were authentic. “If the Russians wanted to discredit the journalists behind this, that’s one way to do it," Medish said.
“My opinion is this came from the Kremlin, but that the documents were not created in 2016,” said Olga Lautman, a specialist in Russian and Ukrainian affairs and host of a soon-to-be launched podcast called Kremlin File. “That might explain why the documents focused narrowly on Trump versus a bigger picture of how they compromised the entire Republican Party.”
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