WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, personally “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” and turned from seeking to “denigrate” Hillary Clinton to developing “a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

The conclusions were part of a declassified intelligence report, ordered by President Obama, that was released on Friday. Its main determinations were described to Mr. Trump by the nation’s top intelligence officials earlier in the day, and he responded by acknowledging, for the first time, that Russia had sought to hack into the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems. But he insisted that the effort had no effect on the election, and he said nothing about the conclusion that Mr. Putin, at some point last year, decided to aid his candidacy.

[font size="+1"]The report, a damning and surprisingly detailed account of Russia’s efforts to undermine the American electoral system and Mrs. Clinton in particular, went on to assess that Mr. Putin had “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”[/font]

The report described a broad campaign that included covert operations, including cyberactivities and “trolling” on the internet of people who were viewed as opponents of Russia’s effort. While it accused Russian intelligence agencies of obtaining and maintaining “access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards,” it concluded — as officials have publicly — that there was no evidence of tampering with the tallying of the vote on Nov. 8.

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[font size="+1"]The intelligence agencies also concluded “with high confidence” that Russia’s main military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., created a “persona” called Guccifer 2.0 and a website, DCLeaks.com, to release the emails of the Democratic National Committee and of the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John D. Podesta.[/font]
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Fox News was the main source for 40% of Trump voters

By Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel and Amy Mitchell


In the coming days, Americans will follow a single event across a variety of media channels: the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. If the public’s media habits during the campaign are any indicator, it is likely that Trump and Hillary Clinton voters will be learning about the inauguration from very different media outlets. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, Americans who say they voted for Trump in the general election relied heavily on Fox News as their main source of election news leading up to the 2016 election, whereas Clinton voters named an array of different sources, with no one source named by more than one-in-five of her supporters. The survey was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 2016, among 4,183 adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.



When voters were asked to write in their “main source” for election news, four-in-ten Trump voters named Fox News.1 The next most-common main source among Trump voters, CNN, was named by only 8% of his voters.

Clinton voters, however, did not coalesce around any one source. CNN was named more than any other, but at 18% had nowhere near the dominance that Fox News had among Trump voters. Instead, the choices of Clinton voters were more spread out. MSNBC, Facebook, local television news, NPR, ABC, The New York Times and CBS were all named by between 5% and 9% of her voters.

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The Donald Trump administration is setting up the United States for a major shift in foreign policy — one that stands to make us considerably less safe and secure than we have been under President Barack Obama’s leadership.

His admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised alarms; his antagonism of China and Mexico could trigger major diplomatic breakdowns leading to trade wars; foreign intelligence communities have reason to be increasingly wary of sharing information with us; and Trump’s recent comments in a joint interview with the Times of London and Germany’s Bild newspaper threaten to destroy important relationships that protect us from harm.

In his interview with the Times and Bild, Trump criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying he was not sure if he could trust her or Putin more. He suggested imposing new tariffs on German car companies that do not build factories in the United States as Japanese manufacturers have done. He also openly declared that NATO is “obsolete.”

video url: http://shareblue.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Trump-TOL-excerpts.mp4?_=1

TRUMP: I thought the U.K. was so smart in getting out. And, you were there, and you guys wrote it and put it on the front page

REPORTER: Yes.

TRUMP: “Trump said that Brexit was going to happen.”

REPORTER: Yes.

TRUMP: Right? And it happened.

REPORTER: Yes.

TRUMP: That was when I was going to lose easily, you know, everybody thought I was crazy. Obama said, “they’ll go to the back of the line.” Meaning, if it does happen. And then he had to retract. That was a bad statement.

REPORTER: And now we’re at the front of the queue.

TRUMP: I think you’re doing great. I think it’s going great.

REPORTER: Who do you trust more, if you talk to them: Angela Merkel or Vladimir Putin?

TRUMP: Well, I start off trusting both, but let’s see how long that lasts. It may not last long at all. And I said a long time ago that NATO had problems. Number one, it was obsolete, because it was, you know, designed many, many years ago. Number 2, the countries weren’t paying what they’re supposed to pay.

So what's new on the Trump-Russia front? First up, the Independent tells us that the former MI6 agent behind the now-famous dossier alleging close ties between Russia and the Trump team was dismayed that his findings didn't generate more action during the presidential campaign:

Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

....By late July and early August MI6 was also receiving information about Mr Trump. By September, information to the FBI began to grow in volume: Mr Steele compiled a set of his memos into one document and passed it to his contacts at the FBI. But there seemed to be little progress in a proper inquiry into Mr Trump. The Bureau, instead, seemed to be devoting their resources in the pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions.

The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city.

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The more I read about this stuff, the harder I find it to believe. It just seems wildly ridiculous, the kind of thing that would barely pass muster on a TV potboiler, let alone in real life. The truth is that I'd probably dismiss it entirely if it weren't for the vast amount of very public and very strange evidence that Team Trump and Team Putin are very close.

I don't know. This is all completely outlandish, and I can hardly bring myself to credit it. And yet, there's an awful lot of evidence that points in the direction of it being true—or at least partly true, anyway. Strange days.

On Friday, a prominent Democrat on Capitol Hill finally said it.

“I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” said Representative John Lewis, D-Ga., in an exclusive interview with NBC News. “I think the Russians participated in helping [Trump] get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”

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The Jokes On Us

Instead, Putin’s approval ratings have gone UP among Republicans. Blinded by party loyalty and trained to make every political conflict a ‘Democrats versus Republicans’ issue, conservatives would rather side with Putin than acknowledge the legitimacy of a Hillary Clinton presidency. The result? A troubling trend towards normalizing Trump’s ‘unpresidented’ behavior.

That Trump’s diversions mimic an effective Russian government propaganda tactic known as the 4D Approach (dismiss, distort, distract, dismay) is particularly unsurprising in light of reports of an explosive dossier released this week that alleges that the Russian government has been cultivating Donald Trump for years and has compromising personal, sexual, and financial information on him.

Suddenly, reports that Trump’s campaign made contact with Russian officials in November, and Mr. Trump’s reticence to disclose his foreign assets, paint a troubling picture of a president-elect groomed, owned by, and acting in concert with a hostile foreign power.
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The Senate early has passed a measure to take the first step forward on dismantling President Barack Obama’s health care law, responding to pressure to move quickly even as Republicans and President-elect Trump grapple with what to replace it with.

The nearly party-line 51-48 vote early Thursday came on a nonbinding Republican-backed budget measure that eases the way for action on subsequent repeal legislation as soon as next month.

“We must act quickly to bring relief to the American people,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

The House is slated to vote on the measure on Friday, though some Republicans there have misgivings about setting the repeal effort in motion without a better idea of the replacement plan.

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Government ethics and legal experts say President-elect Donald Trump's plan to transfer oversight of his company to his sons does not go far enough to avoid serious conflicts of interest as president, and they urged journalists not to let him off the hook.

Trump announced today at a press conference that he would transfer control of The Trump Organization to a trust controlled by his eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, but would still retain an ownership interest in the business and receive reports on the business' finances.

His attorney, Sheri Dillon of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, told reporters the company would also appoint an in-house ethics consultant to review future actions and cancel pending foreign deals. Still, ethics experts say the plan falls short of a clear separation from the business side.

“It doesn’t do what everybody wanted it to do,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project On Government Oversight. “In essence, keeping an ownership interest in the business is a wrong decision. He can’t just set up firewalls between himself and his sons who are running the business and think there isn’t a conflict of interest.”

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President-elect Donald Trump’s showy press conference on Wednesday did not put concerns about his conflicts of ethics and potential violations of the emoluments clause to rest. Far from it. Informed observers could quickly ascertain that this was a hoax, not a good-faith attempt to resolve serious ethical problems.

On Wednesday afternoon, Walter M. Shaub Jr., director of the Office of Government Ethics, made clear that Trump had failed to even come close to removing ethical violations that will go to the heart of his ability to govern. Shaub has taken heat for tweets trying to cajole Trump into taking appropriate steps to rectify his ethical problems. But Shaub’s tweets and his willingness to step forward to deliver a tutorial on ethics for the benefit of Trump and the country were gutsy acts of a public servant who sees a gross departure from bipartisan precedent on ethics; perhaps he will goad members of Congress into performing their constitutional obligations.

Shaub cited Trump’s own secretary of state nominee, Rex W. Tillerson, to highlight Trump’s ethical shortcomings. “Mr. Tillerson is making a clean break from Exxon. He’s also forfeiting bonus payments worth millions,” Shaub said. “As a result of OGE’s work, he’s now free of financial conflicts of interest. His ethics agreement serves as a sterling model for what we’d like to see with other nominees. He clearly recognizes that public service sometimes comes at a cost. The greater the authority entrusted in a government official, the greater the potential for conflicts of interest. That’s why the cost is often greater the higher up you go.”

Trump, however, has done nothing approaching this, Shaub pointed out. He dismantled the facade of a “blind trust”:

Stepping back from running his business is meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective. The Presidency is a full-time job and he would’ve had to step back anyway. The idea of setting up a trust to hold his operating businesses adds nothing to the equation. This is not a blind trust — it’s not even close. I think Politico called this a “half-blind” trust, but it’s not even halfway blind. The only thing this has in common with a blind trust is the label “trust.” His sons are still running the businesses, and, of course, he knows what he owns. His own attorney said today that he can’t “un-know” that he owns Trump Tower. The same is true of his other holdings. The idea of limiting direct communication about the business is wholly inadequate. That’s not how a blind trust works. There’s not supposed to be any information at all.

Shaub rapped Trump’s paid lawyer. “The president-elect’s attorney justified the decision not to use a blind trust by saying that you can’t put operating businesses in a blind trust. She’s right about that. That’s why the decision to set up this strange new kind of trust is so perplexing,” he said. “The attorney also said she feared the public might question the legitimacy of the sale price if he divested his assets. I wish she had spoken with those of us in the government who do this for a living. We would have reassured her that presidential nominees in every administration agree to sell illiquid assets all the time.”

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Republicans in Congress are taking the first of three steps necessary to repeal the Affordable Care Act: The Senate passed the budget resolution to start that process at 1 am on Thursday, and the House is expected to do the same on Friday.

And as they work to repeal the ACA, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan promised last week that Republicans in Congress also plan to defund Planned Parenthood.

The GOP has been trying for years to do both of these things, and now they have the chance to make both happen in one fell swoop — through a process that Democrats will be powerless to stop on their own.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is working out the details of the Planned Parenthood defunding bill, Ryan’s office told Vox, and the committee hasn’t released those details yet. One possible model could be a bill that passed the House last year, which prohibits Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds for one year, unless its affiliates and clinics stop performing abortions.
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The Justice Department inspector general will review broad allegations of misconduct involving FBI Director James B. Comey and how he handled the probe of Hillary Clinton’s email practices, the inspector general announced Thursday.

The investigation will be wide ranging — encompassing Comey’s various letters and public statements on the matter and whether FBI or other Justice Department employees leaked nonpublic information, according to Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

The inspector general’s announcement drew praise from those on both sides of the political aisle, for different reasons, and once again put Comey on the hot-seat. Democrats and Clinton herself have blamed Comey for the Democratic candidate’s loss, arguing that the renewed inquiry and the FBI director’s public missives on the eve of the election blunted her momentum. Comey also has been criticized for months by former Justice officials for violating the department’s policy of avoiding any action that could affect a candidate close to an election. President-elect Donald Trump has notably declined to commit to keeping the FBI Director.

Brian Fallon, a former Clinton campaign spokesman, praised the investigation Thursday.

“This is highly encouraging and to be expected given Director Comey’s drastic deviation from Justice Department protocol,” Fallon said. “A probe of this sort, however long it takes to conduct, is utterly necessary in order to take the first step to restore the FBI’s reputation as a non-partisan institution.”

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