Tag: russian president vladimir putin
Nikki Haley

On Campaign Trail, Haley Targets Trump's 'Mental Fitness' And Putin 'Bromance'

While on the campaign stump in New Hampshire, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley suggested that former President Donald Trump was so friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin that she felt it necessary to take the matter directly to her former boss.

Mike Warren of The Dispatch tweeted about Haley's remarks on Trump's "bromance" with Putin while covering her campaign stop in Keene, New Hampshire on Saturday. The former South Carolina governor also addressed Trump's widely ridiculed remarks during a Friday night rally, in which he mistakenly referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as "Nikki Haley," saying his rival's name four times.

"[W]hen you're dealing with the pressures of the presidency, we can't have someone else that we question whether they're mentally fit to do this," Haley said.

During her time at the United Nations, Haley was a frequent and outspoken critic of Putin. In 2018, shortly before resigning from her post, Haley criticized Putin's attack on Ukrainian ships, saying his "outlaw actions" should be condemned by the international community.

"What we witnessed this weekend is yet another reckless Russian escalation," Haley said at the time. "The United States continues to stand with the people of Ukraine against this Russian aggression."

Just a few months prior, then-President Trump famously defended Putin during a press conference in Helsinki, Finland, following the US intelligence community's conclusion that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump get elected. Even Republicans panned Trump's defense of Putin, with then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) saying there was "no question" the Putin administration interfered in the election. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) called Trump's remarks "disgraceful," adding "no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant."

Haley is attempting to shore up support among New Hampshirites ahead of the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary on Tuesday. Polls show her trailing Trump by roughly 13 percentage points.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Do The CIA Revelations Mean Trump Will Be Putin’s Puppet?

Do The CIA Revelations Mean Trump Will Be Putin’s Puppet?

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet. 

In 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson, a man named John A. Stormer self-published a book called None Dare Call It Treason. It accused America’s left-leaning elites of paving the way for a Soviet victory in the Cold War. The book sold seven million copies, but Johnson crushed Goldwater in the election.

Now that the CIA has determined that the Russians intervened in the presidential election to help Trump win, the Cold War politics of left and right have been flipped. If Stormer rewrote his book for 2016, its thesis might go like this:

Beware of Donald Trump. Witlessly or willfully, he’s doing the Kremlin’s bidding. Anyone who enables him—on his payroll or in the press, by sucking up or by silence, out of good will or cowardice—is Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. This is a national emergency, and treating it like normal is criminally negligent of our duty to American democracy.

Trump as traitor: I can just imagine the reaction from the Tower penthouse. Lying media. Paranoid hyperbole. Partisan libel. Sour grapes. A pathetic bid for clicks. A desperate assault on the will of the people. Sad! (Note to Tweeter-in-Chief: You’re welcome.)

As a kid in a New Jersey household where Adlai Stevenson was worshipped, I thought Stormer was a nut job, so I won’t pretend that accepting the modern inverse of his case is a no-brainer. I’m also not trying to recast my political differences with the president-elect as a national security crisis. Trump won. Elections have consequences. I get that.

I may not like it, but I’m not surprised that Trump tapped Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a crusading climate change denier and an advocate of dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, to run the EPA, presumably into the ground. Anyone who interpreted Al Gore’s meeting with Trump as a sign of his open-mindedness on climate change got played, just like Gore got played.

Similarly, I’m cynical, but not shocked that Trump’s picks for treasury secretary, National Economic Council and chief adviser—Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn and Steve Bannon—are alumni of Goldman Sachs. A billionaire managed to hijack Bernie Sanders’ indictment of Wall Street and brand Hillary Clinton as the stooge of Goldman Sachs. The success of that impersonation isn’t on Trump, it’s on us.

I’m infuriated, but not startled that Trump refuses to disclose his tax returns, divest his assets, create a credible blind trust, obey the constitutional prohibition of foreign emoluments or eliminate the conflict between fattening his family fortune and advancing American interests. That’s not draining the swamp, it’s drinking it.

It’s abysmal that Democrats didn’t have a good enough jobs message to convince enough Rust Belt voters to choose their economic alternative to Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. It’s disgraceful that the media normalized Trump, propagated his lies, monetized his notoriety and lapped up his tweet porn. It’s maddening that the Electoral College apportions ballot power inequitably. But as enervating as any of that is, none of it is as dangerous to democracy as the CIA’s finding that Putin hacked the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. Without firing a single shot, the Kremlin is weeks away from installing its puppet in the White House.

Within days, Trump is expected to name Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil’s CEO, as his secretary of state. Putin bestowed the Order of Friendship, one of Russia’s highest civilian honors, on Tillerson, after Exxon signed a deal with Rosneft, the Russian government-owned oil company, to jointly explore the Black Sea and Arctic. The plan died when the U.S. and EU sanctioned Russia for annexing Crimea; Tillerson, whose Exxon shares’ value will skyrocket if sanctions are lifted, favors lifting them.

The Tillerson appointment is the latest dot in the pattern of Trump’s Putinophilia. When 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred that Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic emails, Trump—who’s refused most of his security briefings—rejected their conclusion, claiming at one point that it “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” at another that “it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” I knew that Trump is a serial fat-shamer, but I didn’t know until now that being a Newarker puts me in his crosshairs, too.

It’s entirely conceivable that Russia has something on Trump. They may hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Trump debt. They may have spousally unsettling video of him—a KGB specialty, and a plausible Trump susceptibility. Surely the Kremlin has mapped his character disorder. In the third debate, when Trump said Putin had no respect for Clinton, and she shot back, “Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president,” Trump’s interruption—“No puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet, no, you’re the puppet”—sounded like a third-grader. Actually, it was a confession, what clinicians call projective identification. Putin’s psy ops must know every such string on him to play.

Before the election, when both parties’ congressional leaders were secretly informed that Russia had its thumb on the scale for Trump, Republican leader Mitch McConnell torpedoed a bipartisan plan to decry their intervention. Now that the news is out, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunday that the intel “should alarm every American,” and they called for a bipartisan investigation to stop “the grave threats that cyberattacks… pose to our national security.”

Trump’s response? “I think it is ridiculous. It’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it. Every week it’s another excuse. We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College.”

As we don’t know. Trump’s Electoral College margin will rank 44th among the 54 presidential elections that have been held since the 12th Amendment was ratified. Nate Silver called Trump’s “landslide” claim “Orwellian.” The Washington Postgave it Four Pinocchios. Why not just call it a lie?

Trump blew off the Kremlin’s intervention in our election the way Putin denied Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Do we call that a lie, too?

Maybe there’s a better word we should dare to use.

IMAGE: Russian President Vladimir Putin (C), Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (L) and Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Alexander Bortnikov watch events to mark Victory Day in Sevastopol May 9, 2014. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo 

Obama Orders Review Of Election-Related Hacking

Obama Orders Review Of Election-Related Hacking

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama ordered intelligence agencies to review cyber attacks and foreign intervention into the 2016 election and deliver a report before he leaves office on Jan. 20, homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco said on Friday.

Monaco told reporters the results of the report would be shared with lawmakers and others.

“The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process … and to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders, to include the Congress,” Monaco said during an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Monaco said cyber attacks were not new but might have crossed a “new threshold” this year.

When she was working as a senior FBI official in 2008, she said, the agency alerted the presidential campaigns of then-Senator Obama and Republican Senator John McCain that China had infiltrated their respective systems.

“We’ve seen in 2008 and in this last election system malicious cyber activity,” Monaco said.

In October, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Obama has said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks.

Asked if Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team was not concerned enough about Russia’s influence on the election or about other threats to the United States such as infectious disease outbreaks, Monaco said it was too soon to say.

As a presidential candidate, Trump praised Putin and called on Russia to dig up missing emails from his opponent, Hillary Clinton, from her time as secretary of state under fellow Democrat Obama.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

IMAGE: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about the worst mass shooting in U.S. history that took place in Orlando, Florida, at the White House in Washington, U.S., June 12, 2016.  REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Russian Opposition Leader Nemtsov Shot Dead: Official

Russian Opposition Leader Nemtsov Shot Dead: Official

Moscow (AFP) – Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead in central Moscow overnight Friday, an interior ministry spokesman told AFP.

“In central Moscow, a man with documents in the name of Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov was killed,” an interior ministry spokesman told AFP, declining to give further details.

Moscow police confirmed the killing.

This story will be updated.

Photo: Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, pictured in Moscow on December 5, 2012, was shot dead in central Moscow overnight, an interior ministry spokesman said (AFP/Natalia Kolesnikova)