Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged kompromat

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

Ex-KGB Agent Says Trump Was a Russian Asset. Does it Matter? - 0 views

  • If something like the most sinister plausible story turned out to be true, how much would it matter? Probably not that much
  • I have merely come to think that even if we could have confirmed the worst, to the point that even Trump’s supporters could no longer deny it, it wouldn’t have changed very much. Trump wouldn’t have been forced to resign, and his Republican supporters would not have had to repudiate him. The controversy would have simply receded into the vast landscape of partisan talking points — one more thing liberals mock Trump over, and conservatives complain about the media for covering instead of Nancy Pelosi’s freezer or antifa or the latest campus outrage.
  • One reason I think that is because a great deal of incriminating information was confirmed and very little in fact changed as a result. In 2018, Buzzfeed reported, and the next year Robert Mueller confirmed, explosive details of a Russian kompromat operation. During the campaign, Russia had been dangling a Moscow building deal that stood to give hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to Trump, at no risk. Not only did he stand to gain this windfall, but he was lying in public at the time about his dealings with Russia, which gave Vladimir Putin additional leverage over him. (Russia could expose Trump’s lies at any time if he did something to displease Moscow.)
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.
  • Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.
  • Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.
  • Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”
  • To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump
  • This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.
  • A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
  • If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.
  • He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.
  • there was a reasonable chance — I loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.
  • Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”
  • During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)
  • In 2018, I became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump
  • Here is what I wrote in that controversial section:
Javier E

Digital kompromat is changing our behaviour | Comment | The Times - 0 views

  • Eyes and ears everywhere, the sort of stuff that makes civil libertarians recite prophetic lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “You had to live . . . in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinised.”
  • Many studies have proved the rather obvious idea that we act differently when we know we are being watched. This instinct to alter our behaviour under watchful eyes is so strong that the mere presence of a picture of eyes can encourage pro-social behaviour and discourage the antisocial sort.
  • Researchers found that putting a picture of human eyes on a charity donation bucket increased donations by 48 per cent. In another experiment, pictures of a stern male gaze were placed in spots around a university campus where bike theft was rife. The robberies then plummeted by 65 per cent.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • For centuries humans felt they were watched and judged by an all-seeing God who could condemn them to hell if they sinned heavily. The fear of divine punishment shaped private behaviour, applying a brake on some of our worst impulses.
  • it also seems sensible to assume that in the absence of an all-seeing deity threatening fire and brimstone, the brakes on devious or selfish behaviour in private will be eased, resulting in more “what’s the harm?” behaviour, more dabbling in the grey area between right and wrong, more secretive cruelty or casual selfishness.
  • Gradually, the fear of being watched by God and going to hell is being replaced by a fear of being recorded by technology and suffering the hell of public shame.
  • scandals might also act as a warning that in the age of the smartphone, the space for “getting away with it” has shrunk considerably.
daltonramsey12

Russia says it doesn't gather dirt on others, but history of 'kompromat' says otherwise - 0 views

  •  
    The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed as "a total fake" allegations that Russian intelligence agencies collected compromising information about President-elect Donald Trump - a denial that was echoed by much of Russia's establishment. But when President Vladi­mir Putin's spokesman went further - saying the Kremlin "does not engage in compromising material" - it was widely greeted by the rolling of Russian eyes.
Javier E

U.S. Reacting at Analog Pace to a Rising Digital Risk, Hacking Report Shows - The New Y... - 0 views

  • the United States government is still responding at an analog pace to a low-grade, though escalating, digital conflict.
  • to anyone who reads between the lines and knows a bit of the back story not included in the report, the long lag times between detection and reaction are stunning.
  • The delays reveal fundamental problems with American cyberdefenses and deterrence that President-elect Donald J. Trump will begin to confront in two weeks
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • a failure of imagination about the motives and plans of a longtime adversary meant that government officials were not fully alert to the possibility that Mr. Putin might try tactics here that have worked so well for him in Ukraine, the Baltics and other parts of Europe.
  • while American intelligence officials — who were focused primarily on the Islamic State and other urgent threats like China’s action in the South China Sea and North Korea’s nuclear and missile threat — saw what was happening, they came late to its broader implications
  • It was telling that within an hour of the release of the report on Friday, the secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, declared for the first time that America’s election system — the underpinning of its democracy — would be added to the list of “critical infrastructure.” This after years of cyberattacks on campaigns and government agencies.
  • “in July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee networks” and stayed there for 11 months, roaming freely and copying the contents of emails that it ultimately released in the midst of the election. Classified briefings circulating in Washington indicate that British intelligence had alerted the United States to the intrusion by fall 2015.
  • Almost immediately, a low-level special agent with the F.B.I. alerted the Democratic National Committee’s information technology contractor, which doubted the call and did nothing for months. The F.B.I. failed to escalate the issue, even though it was clear from the start that the attackers were almost certainly the same Russians who had mounted similar campaigns against the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
  • It was not until Oct. 7, 2016, 15 months after the initial hacking attack, that the intelligence agencies first publicly blamed Russia. Even then, Mr. Obama made it clear that he did not want to escalate the situation before the election, for fear of getting into a tit-for-tat cyberwar in which Russia might try to alter the actual vote tallying. (It did not.)
  • “The biggest frustration to me is speed, speed, speed,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, in response to a question from Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the panel, about the obstacles to seeing a threat from abroad and acting on it here in the United States.
  • It is clear that Mr. Putin saw a huge vulnerability in the American system that was ripe to be exploited.
  • The country’s highly partisan politics, with cable channels and websites devoted to pressing an agenda for the fully convinced and the half-convinced, made it more vulnerable to any disclosures that could capture a news cycle
  • Add to that the uniquely Russian combination of covert espionage and the disclosure of the emails it harvested, as well as the release of “kompromat” — compromising information about politicians and policy makers — and “fake news,” a tactic not above American officials at times.
Javier E

Trump Helsinki Summit: His Servility to Vladimir Putin Is Unbecoming of a President - 0 views

  • In a sign of the poverty of our historical imagination, Trump’s performance is frequently compared to Neville Chamberlain. But this is unfair to Chamberlain, who, although deeply wrongheaded, was in fact a serious and patriotic man. Trump’s performance in Helsinki was something else altogether, a performance so servile that we struggle to place it in context, because there are no parallels in the history of the American presidency.
  • So what are we to make of our president, who relishes insulting and humiliating the leaders of western democracies, but truckles to dictators? We simply do not know (and it remains dangerous to speculate) whether the Russians have “kompromat” on Trump. Perhaps the reality is worse; maybe Trump really believes all of this and genuinely admires what Putin represents.
  • Monday in Helsinki reminded us that as valuable as the court may be, it’s not worth it; not worth the mendacity, the pusillanimous appeasement, the debasement of the presidency, the castration of the Congress, the mockery of decency, the assault on truth, the air of thuggery and corruption in Trumpian politics, and the diminishment of our role in the world.
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20 items per page