Reince Priebus Sweating Secret Comey Memos, White House Sources Say

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is nervous about what could be in store for him if the former FBI director reveals more details of his secret memos.

Betsy Woodruff
Lachlan Markay
Asawin Suebsaeng

President Donald Trump isn’t the only one in the White House who could be caught in a compromising position by James Comey’s secret memos. The president’s chief of staff is worried he could be soon in the crosshairs, as well.

Comey, the former FBI director who was fired earlier this month by Trump, took detailed notes of his interactions with the president and senior Trump administration officials in order to properly document conversations that were on the verge of improper.

Three White House officials told The Daily Beast that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has privately expressed worry about a possible Comey memo specifically involving one of their reported chats, and how it might play in the press and to investigators.

“Nervous laughter,” one official succinctly characterized Priebus’ demeanor in the midst of recent revelations.

More: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/24/reince-priebus-sweating-secret-comey-memos-white-house-sources-say

How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative

Political consultant Aaron Nevins received documents from hacker ‘Guccifer 2.0’ and posted some on his blog; Guccifer called the blog to the attention of Trump adviser Roger Stone


By Alexandra Berzon and
Rob Barry
May 25, 2017 11:06 a.m. ET


The hacking spree that upended the presidential election wasn’t limited to Democratic National Committee memos and Clinton-aide emails posted on websites. The hacker also privately sent Democratic voter-turnout analyses to a Republican political operative in Florida named Aaron Nevins.

Learning that hacker “Guccifer 2.0” had tapped into a Democratic committee that helps House candidates, Mr. Nevins wrote to the hacker to say: “Feel free to send any Florida based information.”

Ten days later, Mr. Nevins received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee documents, some of which he posted on a blog called HelloFLA.com that he ran using a pseudonym.

... snip to the end

He isn’t convinced the Russians were behind it, Mr. Nevins said, but even if they were, it doesn’t matter to him because the agenda of the hackers seemed to match his own.

“If your interests align,” he said, “never shut any doors in politics.”

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-alleged-russian-hacker-teamed-up-with-florida-gop-operative-1495724787

Did Russians Target Democratic Voters, With Kushner’s Help?

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Last week, new reporting shined a light on one focus of the congressional investigation: determining how the Russians knew which voters to target with their disinformation campaign. A report from TIME’s Massimo Calabresi on Thursday provided new details:

As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia’s role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica … and Breitbart News.

Cambridge Analytica is the data mining firm hired by the Trump campaign to help it collect and use social media information to identify and persuade voters to vote (or not vote), through an activity known as political microtargeting.

The company is principally owned by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who supported Trump and was a leading investor in Breitbart.

Stephen Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman (after Manafort) and now chief strategist at the White House, was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board as well as the executive chairman of Breitbart before joining Trump’s team in August.

More: http://www.newsweek.com/did-russians-target-dem-voters-kushners-help-613612

That Time the Soviets Bugged Congress, and Other Spy Tales

Allowing a photographer from the Russian state media into the Oval Office was an act of breathtaking recklessness.

By Calder Walton
May 22, 2017

During a private meeting in the Oval Office earlier this month, President Donald Trump is understood to have disclosed highly classified intelligence to two senior Russian diplomats. U.S. reporters and photographers were excluded the White House meeting, but bizarrely, a photographer from the Russian state-run media agency, TASS, was admitted. Soon, commentators were asking an obvious question: whether it was smart to allow a Russian government photographer, with his electronic equipment, into the Oval Office. Responding to that point, a former deputy director of the CIA, David Cohen, replied: “No, it was not.”

In the days that followed, Vladimir Putin helpfully offered to provide a “recording” of the Russian meeting in the Oval Office, leading to howls of laughter on Twitter at the Kremlin leader’s puckishness. It turns out this was a mistranslation from Russian: He meant a written “record.” However, though it may seem like a story line from The Americans, fears that the TASS photographer may have planted an electronic monitoring device in the Oval Office are not as far-fetched as they first seem. In fact, the Kremlin is a past master of planting hidden listening devices in America’s most sensitive government buildings. During the Cold War, Soviet intelligence used TASS as cover for espionage, and in one operation, used it to plant a bug at the center of Capitol Hill.

Despite struggling to compete with Western technology throughout the Cold War, the Soviets were masters at electronic bugging. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow was one of the KGB’s most remarkable targets; it was riddled with Soviet microphones. It was penetrated virtually continuously from the beginning of Soviet–American diplomatic relations in 1933 until at least the mid-1960s. Inexplicably, however, almost all historical studies of American relations with the Soviet Union, even those recently published, overlook the hemorrhage of diplomatic secrets from the U.S. Moscow embassy for more than 30 years.

At the end of the Second World War, an electronic sweep of the Embassy revealed a staggering 120 hidden microphones. According to a member of its staff, they “kept turning up, in the legs of any new tables and chairs that were delivered, in the plaster of the walls, any and everywhere.”
More: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/22/donald-trump-russia-soviet-union-spying-congress-bug-215174

White House looking at ethics rule to weaken special investigation: sources

The Trump administration is exploring whether it can use an obscure ethics rule to undermine the special counsel investigation into ties between President Donald Trump's campaign team and Russia, two people familiar with White House thinking said on Friday.

Trump has said that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's hiring of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the investigation "hurts our country terribly."

Within hours of Mueller's appointment on Wednesday, the White House began reviewing the Code of Federal Regulations, which restricts newly hired government lawyers from investigating their prior law firm’s clients for one year after their hiring, the sources said.

An executive order signed by Trump in January extended that period to two years.

Mueller's former law firm, WilmerHale, represents Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who met with a Russian bank executive in December, and the president's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is a subject of a federal investigation.

More: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-mueller-idUSKCN18F2KK