Tag: moscow
Tulsi Gabbard

'Putin Is Giddy': National Security Agency Knew Russians Could Hack Signal

The National Security Agency was reportedly aware of vulnerabilities in the messaging app Signal weeks before 18 top Trump administration national security and defense officials used the app in a group chat to plan the recent bombing of Yemen. Those vulnerabilities, an NSA memo warned, were being exploited by Russian hackers. Details have also emerged that at least two top administration officials who were in the chat were overseas, including one in Moscow — where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The use of the Signal app by the upper echelon of Donald Trump’s national security and defense team has rocked the nation, fueling concerns over the mishandling of sensitive—and potentially classified—information in ways that may be unlawful. These fears are seemingly compounded by Trump’s alleged mishandling of hundreds of classified documents, which led to criminal charges that were ultimately dropped after the U.S. Supreme Court granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts.

CBS News reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), an arm of the Pentagon, had “sent out an operational security special bulletin to its employees in February 2025 warning them of vulnerabilities in using the encrypted messaging application Signal.”

The NSA operates under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

The Pentagon also sent out a memo warning of Signal’s vulnerabilities and use by Russian hackers, just days after that group chat.

“Several days after top national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing the Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information,” NPR reported Tuesday.

“Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations,” the Pentagon’s memo warned.

It also notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups who are “targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest.”

The Pentagon memo reminded users that “third-party messaging apps (e.g. Signal) are permitted by policy for unclassified accountability/recall exercises but are not approved to process or store non-public unclassified information.”

NPR’s Quil Lawrence noted that “NPR has seen DoD memo as far back as 2023 prohibiting mobile apps for discussing even much less sensitive info like ‘controlled unclassified information.'”

Last month, a Google Threat Intelligence memo warned of the use of apps like Signal by “military personnel, politicians, journalists, activists, and other at-risk communities.”

Critics argue that the use of Signal for “war plans” was against policy. During Tuesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing CIA Director John Ratcliffe had insisted Signal was approved for use.

National security experts, including at least one former Trump administration official, have been highly critical of the use of the app by the 18-members in a chat.

President Trump’s Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff “was in Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he was included in a group chat with more than a dozen other top administration officials — and inadvertently, one journalist — on the messaging app Signal,” CBS News reported on Tuesday. “Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, a popular commercial messaging platform that many were shocked to learn senior Trump administration officials had used to discuss sensitive military planning.”

Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, acknowledged on Tuesday during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that she was overseas during the Signal chat. The Associated Press reported the DNI “wouldn’t say whether she was using her personal or government-issued phone because the matter is under review by the White House National Security Council.”

The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov appears to be one of the first to note that Witkoff had been in Moscow during the time the chat had been organized. He notes: “The Signal app itself has high encryption. But if your phone is inside Russia, and especially if your WiFi and Bluetooth are not disabled, Russia can see what is inside your phone pretty easily.”

On Tuesday morning, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) noted: “Not a single person out of 18 of the very most senior officials in this Admin — including the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director — voiced any concern with highly classified military plans circulated on Signal. You also can be sure this is not the only time.”

The Atlantic’s Dr. Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and scholar, responded to Rep. Goldman, writing: “Putin is giddy. He has compromised the phones of every top national security official in the Trump administration. No doubt has enough juicy information from what is likely to be multiple Signal chats to deeply damage American security. And possibly to blackmail some of them.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Kinzinger: Moscow Is Celebrating Nomination Of Its Stooge Vance

Kinzinger: Moscow Is Celebrating Nomination Of Its Stooge Vance

One former Republican member of the House of Representatives is warning that Russia is rooting for Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who is former President Donald Trump's 2024 running mate, to become vice president.

The Hill reported that during a Monday night interview with The Late Show's Stephen Colbert, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) cautioned viewers that it isn't just Americans who are paying attention to Vance's pending nomination as the GOP's pick for vice president. He suggested Vance's ascension to become Trump's right hand was welcome news to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"They are celebrating that choice, both in Milwaukee tonight and in Moscow," Kinzinger said.

“JD Vance is the one that has … very loudly talked about how he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine. He has opposed aid to Ukraine,” he continued. “At a time where, since World War II, the biggest defense of a country, of freedom, that is happening right now.”

Kinzinger, who served in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Vance's past opposition to supporting Ukraine in its ongoing war to defend its territory from occupying Russian forces could mean that the U.S. abandons the eastern European democracy should Trump win a second term. He accused the Ohio Republican of "aggressively parrot[ing] actual Russian talking points" in railing against funds for Ukraine.

"I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other," Vance told former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — who is now serving a federal prison sentence — in a 2022 episode of his podcast.

Vance has already taken the position that disputed territories like Donbas in the east along with Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014 and resulted in Russia getting kicked out of the G8 (now G7), should be officially ceded to Putin to end the war.

"[The Russia-Ukraine war] ends the way nearly every single war has ever ended: when people negotiate and each side gives up something that it doesn’t want to give up,” Vance said in December. “No one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to the 1991 boundaries.”

A foreign policy expert told the Ohio Capital Journal last month that making territorial concessions to Putin would likely embolden him and that Russia is on the verge of relenting due to staggering losses.

“We need to flip the script,” said Charles A. Kupchan, who is an international affairs professor at Georgetown University . “We need to make it clear to the Russian leadership and the Russian people that we have more staying power than they do. Ultimately, the Russians are going to tire of this. They’ve lost somewhere around 350,000 people dead and wounded. This is a war that is imposing very considerable costs on Russia. The key here is to make sure that we convince Putin that we’re going to stay the course. It’s only then that I think you’ll see him cease and desist.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Tara Reade

Tara Reade's Long Journey To Moscow Was All Too Predictable

On April 3, 2019, Tara Reade, a former staff assistant who worked briefly in Joe Biden's Senate office in the early 1990s, told a reporter from The Union newspaper in California that Biden had touched her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, by putting his hand on her shoulder and neck. Just under a year later, on March 25, 2020, Reade gave a very different account of events. Appearing on a podcast with Katie Halper, Reade claimed that Biden slammed her against a wall, put his hand under her skirt, forced her legs apart, and penetrated her with his fingers.

The account immediately garnered national attention, with headlines in major newspapers and frequent coverage on news networks. In particular, Reade’s story was heavily supported by The Intercept reporter Ryan Grim and by that organization’s cofounder, Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald’s support for Reade included multiple appearances on Fox News and an article for Fox in which he argued that Reade “was not going away.”

Except she did. On Tuesday, Reade appeared on Russian state media to announce that she was defecting to Russia. In a statement delivered while sitting next to convicted Russian spy Marina Butina, Reade claimed that she no longer felt safe in America, but “luckily the Kremlin is accommodating.” Which is understandable, considering that Reade began supporting Putin well before she made her claims about Biden.

When they first appeared in the media, Reade’s accusations were shocking. Soon after appearing on Halper’s program, Reade filed a police report stating that she had been sexually assaulted in 1993. As with all such claims, the first response was, and should be, to take them seriously and start from an assumption that the victim is just that: someone who was on the receiving end of an assault for which they shared no blame.

Reade’s statements were taken seriously in the national media. Other women who had been subject to sexual assault and harassment spoke up in her support. That she had waited 27 years to file a report created some doubt, but since Reade had been a young woman dealing with a man in a powerful position, many expressed understanding at her delay. In Reade’s case, she is also a single parent and documented victim of domestic violence, which could certainly reinforce both fear and reticence.

Attention to Reade’s statements increased following a report in The New York Times where Reade provided an even more detailed account of Biden’s reported assault. That article also included a single sentence saying that “A friend said that Ms. Reade told her about the alleged assault at the time, in 1993.” Such contemporaneous accounts are vital to proving many cases of sexual assault and are often considered the best form of evidence. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called concerns about the assault described by Reade “significant and relevant.”

However, soon after Reade spoke out, there were a growing number of reasons to doubt her statements. Many of those who worked on Capitol Hill noted that the area where Reade claimed the assault took place was public and highly trafficked by both members of Congress and their staff. Reade was insistent that the area was “semi-private,” but couldn’t provide a clear location or a time—something that would have allowed her account to be checked against Biden’s calendar.

Reade claimed that she had reported the assault to three members of Biden’s staff. All three of those former staffers denied any such conversation. Those staff members didn’t just deny it in an “I don’t recall” manner; they denied it in a way that left little doubt that, in their opinion at least, Reade was not being truthful. Broader interviews of other staff members at the time, including interns who had worked with Reade, found no one who supported her claims.

Eventually NPR interviewed 74 former staffers for Biden, 62 of whom were women. Their statements were consistent when it came to Biden's actions while in the Senate.

None of the people interviewed said that they had experienced sexual harassment, assault or misconduct by Biden. All said they never heard any rumors or allegations of Biden engaging in sexual misconduct, until the recent assault allegation made by Tara Reade.

As with all such reports, it’s critical to neither blame the victim or engage in an effort to drag up events from their past as a means of diminishing their testimony. However, writing in USA Today, columnist Michael Stern looked through Reade’s claims and found several other reasons for doubt. That included a claim by Reade that she had filed a complaint with the Senate personnel office. No one at that office could find a complaint and Reade could not produce a copy of the complaint.

When it came to how she left Biden’s office, Reade told a shifting series of stories, including claiming she left voluntarily after Biden demeaned her by asking her to serve drinks at a campaign event. On other occasions, Reade claimed she had been fired in retaliation after filing the official complaint. In NPR’s extensive interviews, other staffers reported that she had been fired for poor job performance, and specifically for failing to properly handle constituent mail.

WhenPolitico interviewed a number of people who knew Reade, either as acquaintances or former coworkers, their report was even less flattering. They described a pattern of behavior in which Reade “ingratiated herself” to people, then borrowed money, skipped out on payments, or walked away from bills. One description was of a “‘manipulative, deceitful, user.”

When it was all assembled, none of the people in Biden’s office supported Reade’s claims, and there was no record of her Senate complaint. Her past acquaintances reported multiple instances of deception. Not a great start. And when Reade provided The New York Times an extended list of people she claimed had been told about the assault shortly after it occurred, not one of them recalled any such conversation.

All of this only made Reade a better subject for those like Grim and Greenwald, who pitched the whole thing as a massive conspiracy of silence around Biden. Efforts to do so included pushing a clip from a woman phoning The Larry King Show in 1993 who claimed her daughter had “a problem with a prominent senator,” but chose not to go to the press “out of respect for him.” This anonymous call was paraded out as Reade’s mother, with Greenwald promoting this as a “bombshell” against Biden.

But every look into Reade consistently showed one thing: Until 2017, she regularly praised Biden, supported him on social media, and promoted his ongoing work to combat sexual assault.

Those statements alone are, of course, not any sort of condemnation of Reade or her story. It’s common that women who have been assaulted by men in prominent positions may feel compelled to continue supporting that man in public out of fear for how it may affect their lives or careers in the future. Speaking out against that kind of pressure was the very essence of the #MeToo movement.

What’s different in Reade’s case is that, somewhere in the 2017-2018 period, it appeared her views on a number of subjects did a 180-degree flip—in particular, her views on Russia and on the United States. Over that period, she went from writing and “liking” statements that spoke out against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his actions in the 2016 election to dismissing those actions entirely and turning her fire on the “imperialism” of the United States.

In November 2018, Reade authored an article for Medium titled “Why a liberal Democrat supports Vladimir Putin.” In it, she declared that America is “not a democracy at all but a corporate autocracy.” She praised Putin for bringing order to Russia, for his “political genius,” and for how he looked “with or without a shirt”

President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. … President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women.

By the time she made her accusations against Biden, Reade had deleted the Medium article (the link above is through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). When confronted with these quotes, she claimed that they had been “taken out of context from a novel she was writing.” Which was, simply enough, a lie.

At this point in her domestic politics, Reade had turned away from Biden, bounced off at least two other campaigns, and was all in for Bernie Sanders. Members of Sanders’ team helped to push Reade’s claims, and the broad coalition who saw this as an opportunity to weaken Biden in the primaries pressed the idea that anyone who had ever expressed faith in claims by another woman, but cast doubt on Reade, was a hypocrite.

However, by May, Reade’s own attorney dropped her after it emerged that she had also lied about many aspects of her background, including her fictional college degrees and claims that she had been a faculty member at Antioch College. The Intercept slogged on, with Grim trying to extract some aspect of the story that could be used to defend their earlier promotion. But most publications simply allowed the Reade story to fade away, the lengthening number of false claims and the lack of evidence ultimately weakening her accusations against Biden.

Reade continued to be a frequent guest on right-wing media over the past three years, including an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program in 2022. Carlson was, of course, highly supportive. Following her appearance on Sputnik, during which she made a litany of complaints about America (including that American roads are too bumpy) and “humbly” asked for Putin to “to fast track her citizenship request,” some media outlets continued to support Reade.

No one should expect Greenwald, The Intercept, or anyone else on the right to apologize for spending years pushing an ugly story for no other purpose than to harm Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Russian state media is already using Reade as a source in attacking U.S. policies and the U.S. military. She’s working for them now—just like she was in 2020.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

U.S. Formally Accuses Russian Hackers Of Launching Political Cyber Attacks

U.S. Formally Accuses Russian Hackers Of Launching Political Cyber Attacks

By Jonathan Landay and Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government on Friday formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations during the campaign for the Nov. 8 presidential election.

U.S. officials have said in the past few months that they believe cyber attacks were orchestrated by hackers backed by the Russian government, possibly to disrupt the election in which Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton faces Republican Party candidate Donald Trump. Russia has dismissed allegations it was involved in cyber attacks on the organizations.

“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” a U.S. government statement said on Friday about hacking of political groups.

The statement by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not blame the Russian government for hacking attempts against state election systems, but said “scanning and probing” of those systems originated in most cases from servers operated by a Russian company.

“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process,” the statement said. “However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government.”

The condemnation coincides with increasing tensions between Washington and Moscow on a range of international issues, from the Middle East to Ukraine and cyberspace.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Jonathan Landay, writing by Dustin Volz and Julia Edwards; Editing by Grant McCool)

IMAGE: The headquarters of the Democratic National Committee is seen in Washington, U.S. June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

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