Daily News Dump – July 15

Assange Turned Embassy into Command Post for Election Meddling

“New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy.

The surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command center and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States.” via CNN

This is some really explosive reporting by CNN. In hindsight, it makes the denials of both Wikileaks and the Russians even more laughable.

This reporting was possible thanks to a series of leaks of reports and documents that were compiled for the Ecuadorian government by a private Spanish security entity called UC Global. Ecuadorian Intelligence Officers have verified their authenticity.

Some of the major points from the article:

• Assange also issued a special list of people who were able to enter the embassy without showing identification or being searched by security. He was even granted the power to delete names from the visitor logs. To avoid surveillance cameras, Assange occasionally met guests inside the women’s bathroom, according to the security reports.
• The task of controlling Assange proved difficult. Fistfights broke out between Assange and the guards. He smeared feces on the walls out of anger.
• Assange also maintained direct contact with senior officials in Ecuador, including former Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño, and regularly used those connections to threaten embassy staff, according to the surveillance documents and two Ecuadorian government sources who spoke to CNN. He claimed he could get people fired, even the sitting ambassador. Assange’s authority appeared at times to rival that of the ambassador. In December 2013, Ambassador Juan Falconí wrote a letter to Assange and said that “you cannot give instructions contrary to mine.”

I’m going to pause there to point out the obvious. This is absolutely BONKERS. There’s no reason ANY embassy guest should be given such latitude – especially an openly-combative one.

• The campaign took a historic turn on June 14, when the Democratic National Committee announced that it had been hacked and blamed Russia — which Trump dismissed as a farce. Assange was busy back at the embassy. That month, members of the security team worked overtime to handle at least 75 visits to Assange, nearly double the monthly average of visits logged by the security company that year. He met Russian citizens and a hacker later flagged in the Mueller report as a potential courier for emails stolen from the Democrats.
• Also in June, WikiLeaks secretly communicated with Russian hackers and Assange publicly announced plans to release new material about Clinton.
• The Mueller report says the Russian hackers obscured their identities by using online personas for all their communications with WikiLeaks, which included emails and direct messages to WikiLeaks’ account on Twitter.
• Assange took at least seven meetings that month with Russians and others with Kremlin ties, according to the visitor logs.
• Two encounters were with a Russian national named Yana Maximova, who could not be reached for comment. Almost nothing is known about Maximova, making it difficult to discern why she visited the embassy at key moments in June 2016. During her two visits that month, she met with Assange in the middle of the day in the embassy’s conference room.
• Assange also had five meetings that month with senior staffers from RT, the Kremlin-controlled news organization.
• In June 2016, RT’s London bureau chief, Nikolay Bogachikhin, visited Assange twice, and gave him a USB drive on one occasion, according to the surveillance reports. That five-minute visit was hastily arranged and required last-minute approval from the Ecuadorian ambassador.

So, we have lots of super-secret meetings with Russians, last minute meetups and USB swaps with an RT bureau chief, and meeting with a hacker who Mueller flagged as a courier? All while denying that Russia was involved in any way? Yep. Nothing to see here. Besides treason. Lots. Of. Treason.

That CNN article has waaaay more information – including photographic evidence of these exchanges taking place – but there’s lots more news to cover today. You should read it in its entirety in your free time, though.

Trump Finally Crossed a Line?

We’ve all seen the racist comments by now. This is – yet another – scandal that would have absolutely rocked any other administration, but thanks to the mostly spineless members of the GOP caucus, it’s just another day at the office for Trump.

While not *really* doing anything substantive to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, several GOP Congresscritters did speak out publicly against Trump’s hateful rhetoric.

By my count, so far we’ve heard from: John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, Roy Blunt, Tim Scott, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Will Hurd, Pete Olson, Fred Upton, Pat Toomey, Paul Mitchell, Susan Brooks, Pete King, John Katko, Mike Turner, Elise Stefanik, and Tom Cole.

Nowhere near as many people as we *should* have heard from, and many – some unsurprisingly – went as far as to defend the language POTUS used, but it’s a start, at least.

One Senator that *did* surprise me was Lindsey Graham. I know he’s Trump’s new biggest fan, but I expected some of his morals to remain. Instead, he:

“Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of President Donald Trump’s strongest allies on Capitol Hill, declined on Monday to condemn the President over his racist tweets against several minority members of Congress, instead calling them a “bunch of communists.”

Graham’s comments, which were later tweeted out by Trump, are the latest example of congressional Republican alignment with Trump in the face of fierce controversy.”Well, we all know that (New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and this crowd are a bunch of communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country,” Graham said during an appearance on “Fox and Friends.” “They’re calling the guards along our border, the border patrol agents, ‘concentration camp guards.’ They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins. They’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America.” via CNN

The best he could muster was to advise Trump to “aim higher,” meaning to attack their policies and not them individually. Trump, being Trump, took this advice literally and said he wasn’t going to wait until they were “Senators or something” to attack them.

Seriously.

Kellyanne is Going to get a Subpoena

“White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway on Monday defied a congressional subpoena, refusing to show up for testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee about her violations of the Hatch Act and prompting House Democrats to threaten to hold her in contempt of Congress.

In a letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the chairman of the panel, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone asserted the Trump administration’s long-standing view that current and former presidential advisers are “absolutely immune” from congressional testimony, writing: “Ms. Conway cannot be compelled to testify before Congress with respect to matters related to her service as a senior adviser to the president.”

“Because of this constitutional immunity, and in order to protect the prerogatives of the Office of the President, the president has directed Ms. Conway not to appear at the committee’s scheduled hearing,” Cipollone continued.

Cummings threatened to hold Conway in contempt of Congress if she does not honor the subpoena before July 25.” via Politico

Again, absolute immunity isn’t a thing. It’s never been a thing, and hopefully it won’t ever be a thing. Congress isn’t even asking Kellyanne to testify about any of her conversations with POTUS – they’re wanting to talk about the multiple times she violated federal law, leading the OSC to recommend that she be removed from federal service.

But her Emails?

DeVos just became the newest member of the Cabinet to lie to Congress.

“House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings said Monday that he is expanding an investigation into the use of personal email by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Cummings told DeVos in a letter that his move came after “disturbing new revelations” released by the Education Department’s inspector general in May about how DeVos had used personal email while on the job.

“New information has now come to light indicating that you and other Department officials violated the Department’s prohibition on using personal email accounts to conduct official business, violated the requirement in the Federal Records Act to forward these emails to your official account within 20 days, and violated the requirement in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to produce relevant records in response to public requests,” wrote Cummings (D-Md.).” via Politico

But wait, isn’t that what they excoriated Hillar – oh, never mind.

Trump “Trumps” up ICE Raids

“President Donald Trump on Monday asserted that the mass-deportation raids he confirmed and publicized last week took place, despite few signs of removals being carried out at the scale he promised.

“The ICE raids were very successful — people came into our country illegally, illegally,” Trump told reporters during an event at the White House showcasing American-made products. “Many, many were taken out on Sunday, you just didn’t know about it.”

Trump last week said that the raids, which had already been delayed once amid internal resistance and word of their timing having leaked, would begin Sunday in nearly a dozen cities across the country. Last month, he pledged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials would soon begin work on deporting “millions of illegal aliens,” a lofty figure that Trump later revised down.

“We’re taking them out by the thousands,” he told reporters on Friday, pledging that the weekend’s operations would prioritize removing criminals.” via Politico

Spoiler alert: ICE didn’t execute any missions outside of their normal purview – or their normal plans – on Sunday. I know, I know; Trump lying is completely shocking, but here we are.

Department of Interior Staff Being Relocated

“The Trump administration plans to relocate most of the Bureau of Land Management’s D.C. workforce to west of the Rockies, part of its broader push to shift power away from Washington and shrink the size of the federal government.

The proposal to move roughly 300 employees from a key Interior Department agency — among them the majority of top managers — comes as Trump officials are forcibly reassigning career officials and upending operations across the federal government. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue finalized plans this summer to move about 550 jobs at two of his department’s scientific agencies from the nation’s capital to greater Kansas City. The White House is trying to abolish the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency, and has threatened to furlough as many as 150 employees if Congress blocks it.

“The problem with Washington is too many policy makers are far removed from the people they are there to serve,” Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) said in a statement supporting the land agency’s move. “Ninety-nine percent of the land the BLM manages is West of the Mississippi River, and so should be the BLM headquarters.” via Washington Post

Despite what Senator Gardner says, this isn’t a push to get the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) closer to its work – it’s a deliberate plan to dismantle this agency.