Intro
The Ukrainian presidential elections in 2004 where mired in corruption and violence, the country was on fire. The pro European opposition candidate narrowly lost to the pro Russia oligarch Victor Yanukovych whose overthrow in 2015 led to the bloody conflict in Ukraine and and a new cold war between Russia and the West.
What's been overlooked is how there are some familiar some of these faces are in the Republican campaigns of 2004,2008 and 2016.
Helping Yanukovych's Presidential campaign where some major GOP linked groups, these included:
3eDC: a lobbying firm run Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. The pair have engaged in number of shady ventures over the years involving lobbying and political consulting. Stone was a key figure in the Watergate scandal.
New Media Communications:: run by CEO Mike Connell, who was accused of rigging GOP elections
Integrated Web Strategy:: another Connell affiliated company that works with Chamber of Commerce Institute of Legal Reform, which has been found by courts to have engaged in illegal election manipulations
Campaign Solutions:: run by Mike Connell's wife, Becki Donatelli
Airnet Group:, parent company of Smartech Corporation, owned by Jeff Averbeck, which was employed by Mike Connell in the controversial diversion of the state of Ohio's official vote prior to certification of a contested majority favoring George Bush over Democratic opponent John Kerry.
Dynology Corp:, which has a heavily military client list: "a majority of our staff hold security clearances that allow access to Secret and Top Secret classified government information."
U.S 2004 Presidential election
In December 2008 IT expert Mike Connell was killed in a plane Crash in Akron Ohio days before he was due to testify in lawsuit into vote rigging.
His notes,phone and laptop have never been recovered.
The nature of the assistance given to GOP's operative during the time is also suspicious the Bush white house used a private email server (sound familiar?) and private email addresses for the president and other senior Republicans millions of these emails where lost before
More recently allegations have surfaced about the way the voting machines Ohio where set up and their apparently lax security which could have led to vote counts being altered.
New Media communications also IT support for the Bush and McCain campaigns.
Connell's wife owns Donatelli group which also was also linked to voting controversies in Florida 2004 election to do with election machine software effecting the vote counts. Florida was/is a key swing state, which Bush won by a very small margin that year despite exit polls showing wins for Kerry.
Roger Stone helped spread a false rumour that elections officials in Florida where interfering with the vote recount prompting protesters to storm the offices where the recount was taking place. Stone had been sent to Florida on the express orders of senior Republicans.
CBS (200
:
Beginning as a political campaign worker and congressional staffer, Connell became a key Republican media consultant who developed Internet strategies for the 2000 and 2004 Bush-Cheney campaigns. He was founder and CEO of Cleveland-based New Media Communications, which built Web sites for President Bush and former presidential nominee John McCain, according to the company's Web site. He was also chief IT consultant for Karl Rove.
Connell's ties to the Bush family extend back to working on campaigns for George H.W. Bush and former Fla. Governor Jeb Bush, for whom he built the campaign site jeb.org. In 1999 he told the Cleveland magazine Inside Business, "I'm loyal to my network, I'm loyal to my friends, and I'm loyal to the Bush family."
He was also quoted as saying, when asked to predict the Internet's role in the upcoming presidential race, "There are things we will be doing on Election Day that haven't even been dreamt of yet."
The rise of the Republican Party in Washington in the '90s, and especially after the 2000 election, meant that Connell's network of connections was expanding as well. Having worked with Ohio Congressman Bob Ney and Governor Bob Taft, Connell's IT skills were sought after for the campaigns and Congressional sites for dozens of GOP candidates and officeholders. The New Media Communications Web site (now turned off, with a memorial to Connell in its place) boasted, "New Media's client list reads like a 'Who's Who' of Republican politics."
In 2000, Connell co-founded with his wife Heather GovTech Solutions to pursue government contracts.
GovTech's clients for databases, content management systems and other services included the White House, the Energy Department, several Republican-led Congressional committees and a few dozen congressional members' Web sites.
The Center for Public Integrity reported that in 2002 and 2004, the General Services Administration allowed federal agencies to purchase services directly from GovTech without a full bidding process.
In 2004 Connell helped form an online advertising firm called Connell Donatelli, which administered the Web site for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a 527 developed to attack Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.
Connell's central role in building the IT infrastructure of the White House and his association with Karl Rove has brought him into the controversy surrounding missing White House e-mails relating to the firing of U.S. Attorneys and other topics, and the fate of e-mail communications sent by Rove and other administration staffers which were sent via a Republican Party Web site, gwb43.com, rather than through a whitehouse.gov address.
Connell built the gwb43.com site, which shares mail servers with GovTech.
Connell's Internet expertise also led him to be subpoenaed earlier this year to testify in an Ohio federal court regarding alleged voter fraud in the 2004 election. Despite exit polls showing a lead by Democratic nominee John Kerry of more than 4 percent, Mr. Bush won the state's vote by 2.5 percent, along with its crucial electoral votes.
Much has been written about problems at the polls in Ohio that year, where voters in many (predominantly Democratic) precincts were forced to wait hours because of a shortage of working voting machines. A lawsuit being pursued by attorney Clifford Arneback seeks to answer questions about this and other ballot problems. [For example, in Franklin County Mr. Bush received 4,258 votes in a precinct where only 638 voters cast ballots.]
Questions have also been raised about how votes from Ohio counties were tabulated. Computer expert Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican who works in detecting fraud in network architecture and protecting computer infrastructures, has testified that the
Ohio election returns he saw were indicative of a "KingPin Attack," in which a computer is inserted into the communications flow of an IT system, with the intent to change data as it passes to its destination.
It was later learned that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's office had routed Internet traffic from county election offices through out-of-state servers based at SMARTech in Chattanooga, Tenn. SMARTech hosts dozens of GOP Web domains.
Last month, U.S. Judge Soloman Oliver refused Connell's request to quash a subpoena connected to the lawsuit, King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, and demanded his testimony relating to his IT work.
In [a previous] his deposition given in November, Connell denied any knowledge of vote rigging.
The Ukraine connection
Sydney Morning Herald (2004):
Pens filled with disappearing ink. Hospital patients forced to vote in exchange for treatment. Students instructed to show their ballots to professors.
These are just some of the tricks used to skew Ukraine's disputed presidential election, observers say.
As the Supreme Court grappled for a third day today with the country's spiralling election crisis, legal experts, election monitors, and politicians said it could take weeks to unravel the knot of irregularities.
The Central Election Commission declared Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich the winner of the November 21 runoff for the presidency with a margin of 3 per cent - or some 880,000 votes - ahead of the top opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.
International observers noted numerous election flaws and described them as blatantly counter to Ukrainian laws and international standards. Those allegations are the basis of the case the opposition has presented to the Supreme Court asking it to name Yushchenko the winner.
The examples filed to the Supreme Court focus on eight eastern and southern regions with more than 15 million votes, almost half of the total cast in the runoff.
Yushchenko's lawyers and observers pointed to turnout figures that exceeded 127 per cent in some precincts. Observers mainly attributed this to pro-Yanukovich activists who travelled across the country and voted many times as absentees.
"You can achieve 127 per cent ... if you have several well-organised groups to travel around," said Peter Novotny, the head of the 1,000-strong observer mission of the European Network of Election Monitors, who described the vote as "an outright fraud."
Prison officials were reported to have forced inmates to vote for the government candidate. One Western observer who spoke on condition of anonymity said some hospital patients were told to vote for a specific candidate if they wanted treatment.
Students said they were stripped of their right to a secret ballot, or face the loss of privileges.
"We had to, or we could have lost our rooms on campus" said Serhiy, a student from Yanukovich's eastern stronghold of Donetsk, who only gave his first name for fear of reprisals.
Ukraine's opposition has produced transcripts of telephone conversations between pro-Yanukovich officials, allegedly taped by Ukraine's Security Service, that purportedly document vote-rigging. One exchange, published on the Ukrayinska Pravda Web site, went like this:
Official 1: "Why is the voting rate in the Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk regions so low?"
Official 2: "We're increasing it now."
Official 1: "Don't drag things out."
In the Ukrainian election similar allegations where made with regards to vote rigging where made when tapes where released of Yanjkoich discussing tampering with ballots
The opposition leader at the time called the election 'rigged'.
Suspicions where aroused when exit polls and final vote tallies turned widely different the same issue that alarmed voters in the U.S the same year.
Bloomberg (2017):
Jim Slattery arrived at the Stalin-era presidential headquarters in Kiev, Ukraine, with an unusual gift for the nation’s strongman leader: a bust of Abraham Lincoln.
What Slattery didn’t know was that another American operative was helping the president defend the imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko, an act widely condemned in the Western world.
His name: Paul Manafort, future presidential campaign manager for Donald Trump. Today, Manafort sits at the center of the concentric circles of worry and suspicion over what President Trump has called “this Russia thing.” What began with questions about Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election has Democrats, and even some Republicans, now warning of Trump’s Watergate.
Until recently, Manafort had receded into the background as the uproar over Trump’s firing of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and then the FBI director, James Comey, began to shake the White House.
But the Manafort story—a tale of pro-Russia players, political tradecraft and cunning financial maneuvers—has never gone away. The reason, in a word, is money. Manafort, who less than a year ago was playing a central role in the Trump campaign, made millions of dollars over a decade promoting Kremlin-friendly interests in Ukraine and beyond. No other Trump associate has profited as handsomely from ties to Russia-linked businessmen and politicians.
In the decade before he worked for Trump, Manafort’s efforts did for Moscow what its finest political minds had failed to do: help get a pro-Russian candidate installed in Kiev. It culminated in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the revival of Cold War tensions, Western sanctions on Russia’s energy and banking sectors and Russia’s campaign to get those sanctions removed.
Manafort, 68, had claimed Yanukovych was the one Ukrainian who could lead his country closer to the West at a pace Putin could stand, according to Dan Fried, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for the region which includes Ukraine. But that proved false.
Manafort, who denies any contact with Russian government officials, never registered as a lobbyist for a foreign government for his Ukrainian work. His spokesman said Manafort had “received formal guidance recently from the authorities” on registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for some of his work, none of which, he contended, was for the Russian government.
Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating what they call a “criminal organization” set up by Yanukovych via bribes and theft of state assets before he fled to Moscow after the killing of more than 100 protesters in 2014, and they are looking at what role Manafort may have played in the suspected scheme. They’ve repeatedly asked the FBI for help to question Manafort as part of their inquiry into a New York law firm in connection to a report that largely defended the Tymoshenko prosecution.
“We’re waiting for a response,” says Serhiy Gorbatyuk, Ukraine’s head of special prosecutions, his desk piled high with papers.
For Manafort—who resigned from the Trump campaign after six months amid reports of his work in Ukraine—ties to pro-Russian politicians go back to 2005. He played a key role in transforming Yanukovych, who was convicted in his youth of robbery and assault, into a popular candidate who clinched the presidency in 2010.
“Manafort raised very sensitive issues to spin Yanukovych more effectively,” says Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament. “He used damaging techniques to divide Ukrainian society and help Putin to achieve a simple goal.”
Manafort, who speaks neither Russian nor Ukrainian, developed a close working relationship with Yanukovych, discussing—through an interpreter—politics and strategy during sauna sessions and tennis matches at the opulent Mezhyhirya palace, according to a person who worked on Yanukovych’s election campaigns.
In the five-year period from 2007 to 2012, Manafort was paid at least $12.7 million, according to a handwritten Party of Regions ledger found later in its head office. Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau and the FBI are investigating whether the ledger reflected any illegal payments to Manafort and to others. Manafort’s spokesman says that after being paid he had many expenses and so the payment figure does not represent profit. One payment to Manafort on the ledger matches an invoice he signed in 2009 to sell $750,000 of computers to a Belize-registered company called Neocom Systems Ltd., according to documents obtained by Leshchenko from Manafort’s Kiev office.
Belize is investigating. Doug Singh, who runs International Corporate Services (ICS), which registered Neocom in 2007, says he’s received multiple requests for records from Belize’s Financial Intelligence Unit, which investigates money laundering. Belize authorities declined further comment. Evgeniy Kaseev, listed as a director of Neocom, couldn’t be reached for comment. Manafort’s spokesman disputed the authenticity of the invoice and said Manafort is unfamiliar with it.
Manafort’s contacts with pro-Russian politicians go beyond Yanukovych and the Party of Regions. Viktor Medvedchuk said he met Manafort in 2014. Medvedchuk is so close to the Kremlin that Putin is godfather to his daughter and he is under U.S. sanctions because of his role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. In a written response to questions, he said of Manafort that he was “the best, both among foreign and domestic political consultants. The events of the past year in the United States have only strengthened my opinion.” He said he had not had contact with Manafort since then. Manafort’s spokesman confirmed the 2014 meeting but said he didn’t recall interacting with Medvedchuk directly.
Even after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and Yanukovych fled to Russia, Manafort returned to Ukraine 17 times, earning at least $1 million to help reelect pro-Russia politicians, according to a party official who worked with him. Manafort’s spokesman declined to comment on that payment.
The idea of working in Ukraine first came to Manafort in 2004 from Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire who controls aluminum producer Rusal, according to a person familiar with the situation. Ukraine was in the throes of the Orange Revolution—protests over allegations of electoral fraud in Yanukovych’s November 2004 victory. The Supreme Court ordered a new election. Manafort’s then-partner, Rick Davis, went to Kiev and concluded it was too late to help. Yanukovych’s pro-Western rival Viktor Yushchenko won.
Manafort Timeline:
March 2006 - Helps Party of Regions win parliamentary elections, paving the way for Viktor Yanukovych to become prime minister.
January 2010 - Helps Yanukovych win the presidency.
October 2011 - Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is jailed.
November 2013 - Yanukovych terminates negotiations with the EU over Ukraine’s association agreement, sparking widespread protests.
February 2014 - More than 100 protesters are shot in Kiev’s Independence Square. Soon after, Yanukovych flees to Moscow.
March 2014 - Putin annexes Crimea. The EU and U.S. impose travel bans and asset freezes on Russian and Ukrainian officials.
October 2014 - Advises the Opposition Bloc in snap parliamentary elections, and it wins 10 percent of the vote.
April 2016 - Joins Trump’s presidential campaign. Resigns six months later.
April/May 2017 - U.S. investigators demand Manafort’s bank records. The Senate requests details of his contact with Russian officials. Manhattan prosecutors probe his real estate transactions.
Manafort arrived in 2005 to advise Ukraine’s richest man, billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, who was worried his business interests might be seized by President Yushchenko. That same year, Davis Manafort Partners Inc. registered a company in Moscow at an address used by more than 80 other firms. It’s unclear whether the company actually functioned, and Manafort’s spokesman said no such office was opened. While working in Ukraine, Manafort earned millions from a side private equity fund with Deripaska, according to a lawsuit by Deripaska, who is suing Manafort in the Cayman Islands over the soured business partnership. Deripaska declined to comment.
Akhmetov, then a major financial backer of the Party of Regions, asked Manafort to help Yanukovych’s 2006 parliamentary election campaign. Manafort hired as many as 40 top-flight U.S. campaign workers, some of whom later worked on the Trump campaign, including Tim Unes, who organized Trump’s rallies, and Rick Gates.
Crucial to the strategy—and new to Ukraine—was research from focus groups and better polling to drive messaging. Among the issues: the rights of Russian-speakers and opposition to Ukraine’s joining NATO.
“He was going for visceral issues and an emotional reaction,” says Kateryna Yushchenko, the American-born wife of former President Viktor Yushchenko and a onetime State Department and White House official. “When I confronted his people about it, they said, ‘That’s politics.’ I said this isn’t like gun rights or abortion. Here it could lead to war.”
Even though he hired Manafort, Yanukovych retained Russian advisers from Moscow, including Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of Putin’s United Russia faction, and Sergei Glazyev, Putin’s current adviser on Ukraine, according to Taras Chornovil, a top Party of Regions official until 2008. A spokesman for Glazyev confirmed he advised Yanukovych from 2004 to 2009 but didn’t consult with Manafort.
The Party of Regions emerged from the 2006 election with the largest number of seats in parliament; Yanukovych became prime minister. His victory was short-lived, however. His political struggle with President Yushchenko resulted in elections a year later. This time Manafort ran a cookie-cutter campaign. In one ad, a Party of Regions poster showed what was purportedly a smiling blonde Ukrainian girl holding a bright yellow umbrella under the slogan “Stability and Prosperity.” In reality, Manafort’s advisers had plucked a stock photograph of an American girl.
His party did well but Yanukovych was pushed into opposition after Tymoshenko cobbled together a ruling coalition. In 2008, then-President Yushchenko announced a campaign for eventual Ukrainian membership in NATO. To exploit widespread opposition to NATO, Manafort’s team brought a truck to the parliament filled with anti-NATO balloons and instructed parliamentarians to each take one into the chamber.
Ukraine’s hope of joining NATO ended with its 2010 presidential election. With Manafort guiding him, Yanukovych won narrowly. Manafort prepared Yanukovych’s first visit as head of state to Washington that April. He advised Yanukovych to give up Ukraine’s remaining stock of highly enriched uranium, according to a person close to the situation. Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons in 1994 and there was little sacrifice involved in yielding the uranium. But it helped Yanukovych clinch a major prize: a photo of him beaming alongside President Barack Obama.
Manafort was closely involved in recruiting the firm of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLC on behalf of the Ukrainian Justice Ministry to write a lengthy report on Tymoshenko’s prosecution. He met with Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavrynovych to go over the contract with Skadden and emailed with Skadden partner Greg Craig, according to documents uncovered by Ukrainian prosecutors. The ministry agreed to pay Skadden a mere $12,000, just below the threshold requiring it to go to a public tender. But much more money was to come to Skadden.
Manafort was prepping the Party of Regions for another parliamentary election in October 2012, bringing in Tony Fabrizio, who would later become the Trump campaign’s chief pollster. International monitors said the elections were marked by the abuse of state resources and lack of transparency in party financing.
Manafort advised Yanukovych to push ahead with an association agreement with the EU. But the EU insisted he release Tymoshenko, while Putin pressured him to abandon the deal. In November 2013, Yanukovych terminated negotiations with the EU. The move triggered widespread protests.
Months after Russia annexed Crimea, Manafort returned to Ukraine to advise the pro-Russian anti-NATO party, now known as the Opposition Bloc, for the 2014 parliamentary elections, again bringing Fabrizio on board. Nestor Shufrych, one of the party leaders, says Manafort pushed for them to be the voice of Russians in the east. Shufrych thought they had no chance but they got nearly 10 percent, with 29 seats. Manafort personally approved the list of candidates, according to another party official.
Shufrych says the party paid Manafort roughly $1 million. The two celebrated over a bottle of cognac at Manafort’s Kiev office.
The new disclosures are required under a law that was passed to combat Nazi propaganda during World War II, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The disclosure requirements are more stringent than domestic lobbying forms and include more information, including details like itemized meetings and phone calls.
Also in the filing is a flyer that the firm distributed, touting reforms to the voting process in Ukraine to make it more "free, fair and transparent." For example, one new rule increased the vote threshold a party is required to have before they could be admitted to parliament from 3 percent to 5 percent. Another nixed the option to "vote against all" on the ballot.
During the contract with Mercury, Manafort also attended meetings with Paula Dobriansky, a former State Department official during the Bush administration, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Nadia Diuk, a vice president at the National Endowment for Democracy.
The disclosures also detail all the other contacts Mercury made on behalf of the Centre, including reaching out to dozens of news outlets and meeting with government officials, staffers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, think tanks and nonprofit organizations.
The documents also bring to light details first uncovered by The Associated Press last August about what Manafort did to influence U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia.
His relationships with pro-Russia figures and work in the Trump campaign have been central to the controversy swirling around accusations that Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election in Trump’s favor.
Similar filings by Manafort could be forthcoming, his spokesman told The Hill earlier this month.
Even before the 2016 elections, Manafort “has been in discussions with federal authorities about the advisability of registering under FARA for some of his past political work,” said spokesman Jason Maloni.
“Mr. Manafort received formal guidance recently from the authorities and he is taking appropriate steps in response to the guidance.”
Violating FARA is considered a felony, though only a handful of prosecutions have been pursued since the law's formation. It is considered a compliance-based statute, so even filling out registration paperwork late can get firms and individuals out of trouble with the Justice Department. FARA is more broad than the LDA, and covers consulting and public relations efforts, in addition to traditional lobbying.
Mercury and the Podesta Group had been registered for the Centre under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which dictates domestic lobbying disclosure. The two firms made a total of $2.2 million during the two years of work.
Both firms had signed statements from the Centre, saying that it received no funds or support from a foreign government or party — something lawyers advised the firms would preclude them from registering under FARA.
However, following a series of AP reports that included details about how Manafort and his associate Rick Gates directed strategy while operating as advisers for the Party of Regions, the firms have decided to register with the Justice Department retroactively.
U.S 2016 Presidential election
Trumps Key campaign staff Cater Page ,Paul Manafort and Roger Stone had an huge impact on Trump's political campaign in both it's message,strategy and day to day operating it's very likely these three had a key impact in shifting the GOP's position on Russian sanctions and the Ukraine crisis.
The Washington Post (2017):
A 2004 article at Slate details the allegations against Yanukovych, including stuffing ballot boxes and use of police to intimidate Yushchenko supporters. The rampant fraud led to a series of protests dubbed the Orange Revolution -- and a second ballot, which Yushchenko won.
At some point over the next two years, Yanukovych hired an American consultant to help the Party of Regions in the parliamentary elections. A cable released by
Wikileaks noted the addition to Yanukovych's team.
Enjoying a lead in the polls since the fall 2005 Orange team split, ex-PM Yanukovych's Party of Regions is working to change its image from that of a haven for mobsters into that of a legitimate political party. Tapping the deep pockets of Donetsk clan godfather Rinat Akhmetov, Regions has hired veteran K street political help for its "extreme makeover" effort. According to the Internet news site Glavred.info, Davis, Manafort & Freedman is among the political consultants that have been hired to do the nipping and tucking.
Davis, Manafort & Freedman was, as you'd expect, Paul Manafort's firm.
Business Insider (2017):
Before the GOP's national security committee meeting last July, Trump had said multiple times that he thought the West should respond more forcefully to Russian aggression.
He gave a speech in Ukraine in September 2015, at the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting, where he said "our president is not strong and he is not doing what he should be doing for the Ukraine." He mentioned that he thought Europe should be "leading some of the charge" against Russia's aggression, too.
But his tone on Ukraine and Crimea appeared to shift after he hired Manafort to manage his campaign in April 2016, as Politico's Michael Crowley has reported.
At the end of July, for instance, Trump told ABC that "the people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also." Days earlier, he had told reporters that he "would be looking at" the possibility of lifting sanctions against Russia for its annexation of Crimea.
Manafort served as a top adviser to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine from 2004 to 2012, and he helped the Russia-friendly strongman Viktor Yanukovych win the Ukrainian presidency in 2010.
Yanukovych was ousted on corruption charges in 2014 and fled to Russia under the protection of the Kremlin.
Secret ledgers uncovered by an anti-corruption centre in Kiev and obtained by The New York Times revealed that Yanukovych's political party, the pro-Russia Party of Regions, earmarked $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort for his work from 2007 to 2012.
Manafort has denied ever having collected the earmarked payments. But the unverified dossier on which top US leaders have been briefed alleges that Yanukovych "confided directly to Putin that he authorized kickback payments to Manafort," who "had been commercially active in Ukraine right up to the time (in March 2016) when he joined campaign team."
Quartz (2016):
In early May 2016, the Missouri state legislature submitted a bill to the governor requiring that citizens must show photo ID in order to vote. Democrats staged an all-night filibuster opposing the measure, noting that it could potentially disenfranchise over 220,000 voters who who lack proper ID. Missouri attorney Steve Harman noted the bill would most likely affect black Missourians—11% of the population—and that it echoed the political aims of Jim Crow. As is true in most states, there has never been a case of voter fraud in Missouri history, leading many legislators to question the true intent of the law.
Missouri is known as “the bellwether state,” having voted for the winning candidate in all but one presidential election between 1904 and 2008. Obama lost the state in both elections, but in 2008, he lost by a mere 3903 votes. Imagine what that result would have looked like had 220,000 voters—among them his black Democratic base—been unable to cast their ballots.
In swing states like Missouri, voter ID laws that disenfranchise non-white voters could potentially influence the outcome of national elections. In this case, purple states like Missouri may in the future turn blazing red.
Missouri’s law will not be passed in time to impact the 2016 race.
But it is part of a growing trend of states that have passed or moved toward restrictive voter ID laws as America’s population grows increasingly diverse. In 2016, 17 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Of these states, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin have been identified as swing states. Others are newly ambiguous: Texas, a state that has voted Republican since 1980, is now less of a sure bet. After GOP frontrunner Donald Trump proclaimed Mexicans “rapists” in the summer of 2015, applications for citizenship and voter registration among Texan Latino immigrants soared, and polls have shown a tight race. But will the new voters be able to cast their ballots? Under current regulations, an estimated 771,300 Texan Latinos, many of them recent immigrants, lack the required ID.
Buzzfeed (2017):
The dead man was Scot Young. The one-time multimillionaire and fixer to the world’s super-rich had been telling friends, family, and the police for years that he was being targeted by a team of Russian hitmen – ever since his fortune vanished overnight in a mysterious Moscow property deal. He was the ninth in a circle of friends and business associates to die in suspicious circumstances. But when the police entered his penthouse that night, they didn’t even dust for fingerprints. They declared his death a suicide on the spot and closed the case.
A two-year investigation by BuzzFeed News has now uncovered explosive evidence pointing to Russia that the police overlooked. A massive trove of documents, phone records, and secret recordings shows Young was part of a circle of nine men, including the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who all died suspiciously on British soil after making powerful enemies in Russia. The files reveal that Young lived in the shadow of the Russian security services and mafia groups after fronting for Berezovsky.
Scott Young is one of 14 people suspected of being assassinated on the orders of the Russian state on U.K soil.
CNN (2017):
The brazen daytime slaying of a Russian politician outside a Ukrainian hotel this week brings to eight the number of high-profile Russians who have died over the past five months since the US presidential election on November 8.
Steele dossier allegations:
The Steel dossier shed new light on the Trump-Russia controversy much of this
has been corroborated.
Page 4:
Dossier claims Paul Manafort & Carter Page were colluding w/Russians.
Dossier claims Wikileaks is a front for the Kremlin.
Dossier claims Russia had moles within the Dem Party.
Page 9:
Dossier claims that Russia has krompat on Trump in addition to material on Clinton.
Dossier claims Cater Page held secret meetings on sanctions.
independent.ie (2017):
An ex-KGB chief suspected of helping the former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to compile his dossier on Donald Trump may have been murdered by the Kremlin and his death covered up, it's been claimed. Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor the FSB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on December 26 in mysterious circumstances. Mr Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, who is repeatedly named in the dossier.
He has been described as a key liaison between Mr Sechin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr Steele wrote in an intelligence report dated July 19, 2016, he had a source close to Mr Sechin, who had disclosed alleged links between Mr Trump's supporters and Moscow. The death of Mr Erovinkin has prompted speculation it is linked to Mr Steele's explosive dossier, which was made public earlier this month.
Talking Points Memo (2017)
Congress is investigating whether any private voter information allegedly stolen by Russian hackers was passed to or used by the Trump campaign, Time reported Thursday.
Ken Menzel, general counsel of the Illinois State Board of Elections, told Time that 90,000 state voter records were obtained through cyberattacks on their system, 90 percent of which contained drivers license numbers and a quarter of which contained the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers. Two anonymous sources close to congressional investigations into Russia’s election interference say lawmakers want to know if any of this stolen data eventually ended up in the hands of Trump’s team.
Time did not specify which of the five congressional committees looking into Russian interference in the election is investigating this specific thread.
This report is the latest indication that Russia’s cyberattacks on the United States’ electoral infrastructure, which include efforts to delete or alter voter data in Illinois and targeted attacks on election systems in 21 states, are becoming a focus of congressional and federal probes into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/congress-investigating-trump-team-used-voter-information-stolen-russians
Conclusions:
The issues that come up again and again are:
- Suspicious campaign financing (dark money,shell companies,bribes)
- Vote hacking/fraud (leaked NSA report, voter disenfranchisement,obstructing democratic processes)
- Fake news (Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, Twitter bots, Alt Right sites)
- Suspicious deaths (Connell,Scott Young,Russian officials)
The real question is how far does the Russia-Trump web spread? And has this plan been a long time in the making?
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