Trump Saved St. Pete"s Because He Wants A Piece Of The Syrian Pie

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

Trump saved St. Petersburg after the CIA tipped off the FSB about an impending terrorist attack there.

Russia immediately acted on the information and arrested several terrorist suspects who were said to be plotting an attack on the famous Kazan Cathedral, and President Putin was so grateful for the many lives that were saved as a result of this joint cooperation between the two Great Powers that he even called Trump and extended his personal thanks to the CIA and its Director.

This was a model-breaking moment for some because it shattered their worldview of the US, Trump, and especially the CIA as inherently evil forces obsessed with plotting against Russia.

That’s not to say that these three are angels, but just that the pursuit of their interests can sometimes take surprising forms such as the recent example of high-profile anti-terrorist cooperation with Russia that was so useful to Moscow that President Putin felt obliged to thank the CIA, something which would have otherwise been unthinkable for the former head of the FSB to do in the presently tense atmosphere of the New Cold War.

This just goes to show that Russia genuinely appreciates what the US did and is willing to work with it on all areas of shared interests across the world, which brings the analysis around to discussing why Washington would uncharacteristically engage in an act of goodwill such as this one towards its rival.

There’s of course a catch, and it’s that the US did the right thing for self-interested reasons that aren’t visibly or immediately apparent but have to do with its envisioned role in determining the outcome of the Russian-led “political solution” to the War on Syria.

The US has thus far been largely sidelined from this process, but has informally found a way to nevertheless make itself indispensable to it through the 2000 troops that it’s deployed in northeastern Syria and the 10 bases that it built there in support of the Kurdish-led “Syrian Democratic Forces” that now occupy this oil-rich and agriculturally wealthy one-third of the country.

In exchange for saving the lives of an untold number of people in President Putin’s hometown, the US expects Russia to respect its post-war interests in northeastern Syria by encouraging Damascus to agree to the northeastern region’s Kurdish-led “decentralization”, a goal which also overlaps with Moscow’s own for vastly different reasons.

Russia therefore isn’t opposed in principle to this implicit quid-pro-quo because it stands to benefit from expanding its “balancing” strategy in Syria to include the US, as this opens up the potential for furthering the long-desired objective of a so-called “New Détente” with Washington. That’s not to say that Russia will succeed in this scenario or that it’s even moving in that direction per se, but just that the US hopes that it will, otherwise the CIA might neglect to inform the FSB the next time they discover another imminent terrorist plot.

New Russian Hacker Claims Putin Ordered Theft Of Clinton"s Email, After First One Refused FBI Bribe To Lie

A Russian hacker has reportedly confessed that he hacked the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton"s emails under the direction of Russia"s Federal Security Service (FSB), claims Russian news outlet The Bell. Konstantin Kozlovsky - a Russian citizen with a hacker group called Lurk, confessed to the theft during a hearing about his arrest in August, along with a handwritten letter in which he admits to acting on the orders of an FSB agent he referred to as "Ilya." 

Sound familiar?

In May, another Russian hacker claimed US officials offered him cash, citizenship and an apartment if he would accept responsibility for hacking the DNC and stealing Clinton"s emails - which he refused, and was then arrested by the FBI under the lead of former Director James Comey.

“[They told me:] you will have to confess to breaking into Clinton’s inbox for [President Trump] on behalf of [Russian President Vladimir Putin],” Mr. Nikulin wrote, as translated by The Moscow Times.

 

"Later I received an offer from an agent: "You will have to declare that you broke Hillary Clinton mailbox for J. Trump on Putin"s orders, you must agree to the extradition to the US, then we will remove all charges give you apartment and money, US citizenship "- I gave up shortly" questioning "was over, the agent said that they had come"

 

According to Nikulin, the proposal was made during conversations 14-15 November. The following conversation then took place on February 7 (translation via Currenttime.tv)

 

"You have to say that it is you broke-mail Clinton, that you prepared and entered into a democratic network and polling stations on Putin"s orders, you call the names of accomplices, agree to extradition, and in America we will resolve all the issues will be living in an apartment and we will provide you all."

 

“He was offered to falsely testify that he was cooperating in the attack on the Democratic Party,” defense attorney Martin Sadilek said Thursday, the Associated Press reported.

A tale of two headlines:

Considering what we have learned about James Comey"s FBI in recent weeks and months, something doesn"t seem quite right with this story. After serious doubt was cast on Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC to inspect their servers - and recent forensic analysis which revealed at least the Guccifer 2.0 portion of the leaked emails could have only been accessed locally - the Russian hacking narrative has been on incredibly thin ice. 

In March, Journalist Lee Stranahan more or less destroyed the CrowdStrike narrative in an article summarized below: 

• The DNC Russian hacking claims rely entirely on a report by a private company the DNC hired called "CrowdStrike"

(not mentioned in Stranahan"s article: The Irvine, CA company was partially funded by Google, which led a $100M "Series C" investment round)

• CrowdStrike"s report ("Fancy Bear") is highly speculative, inconclusive by most standards, and does not contain "hard evidence" per CrowdStrike Co-Founder Dmitri Alperovitch:

The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with “spearphishing” emails. These are communications that appear legitimate — often made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted — but that contain links or attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access to a computer. “But we don’t have hard evidence,” Alperovitch said.

• The MSM ran with the "Fancy Bear" report in an attempt to delegitimize Trump:

 Starting in June of 2016 and continuing to this day, the DNC, Washington Post, New York Times, and other MSM outlets have been using the CrowdStrike report to stage a smear campaign against Donald Trump in an attempt to delegitimize the President while providing an excuse for Hillary Clinton"s loss.

• Cybersecurity experts and respected journalists have cast serious doubt on it"s the report"s validity.

How To Get To “Reasonable Certainty” on a Russia Finding - Jeffrey Carr, Medium (12.13.2016)

HERE’S THE PUBLIC EVIDENCE RUSSIA HACKED THE DNC — IT’S NOT ENOUGH - Sam Biddle, The Intercept (12.14.2016)

• In December, CrowdStrike published another report concluding that Russia hacked Ukranian a artillery-targeting app using the SAME "Fancy Bear" malware.


• Once again, Several new articles casting doubt on CrowdStrike"s claims cropped up.

The GRU-Ukraine Artillery Hack That May Never Have Happened - Jeffrey Carr, Medium (1.3.2017)

Why I Still Don"t Buy the Russian Hacking Story - Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg (12.22.2016)

Skeptics Doubt Ukraine Hack, Its Link to DNC Cyberattack - Oleksiy Kuzmenko, VOA (12.23.2016)

He told VOA that contacts in the Ukrainian military units that used the app reported no losses of D-30 howitzers, which contradicts large battlefield losses referenced in the CrowdStrike report.

“I personally know hundreds of gunmen in the war zone. None of them told me of D-30 losses caused by hacking or any other reason,” Narozhnyy stressed to the VOA

• The Government of Ukraine issued a statement calling the CrowdStrike report Fake News:

In connection with the emergence in some media reports which stated that the alleged “80% howitzer D-30 Armed Forces of Ukraine removed through scrapping Russian Ukrainian hackers software gunners,” Land Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine informs that the said information is incorrect.

Ministry of Defence of Ukraine asks journalists to publish only verified information received from the competent official sources. Spreading false information leads to increased social tension in society and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. -mil.gov.ua (translated) (1.6.2017)

• CrowdStrike relied on a misinterpretation of evidence for the Ukraine story

The information CrowdStrike relied on came from a Russian propaganda blog, not the IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies) as CrowdStrike claimed.

An article by VOA News details this fact and puts this whole thing into context: Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data - Oleksiy Kuzmenko, VOA (3.21.17)

The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists.

But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.

And now - despite the "Russian Hacking" meme having been more or less gutted, a new Russian Hacker emerges - claiming Putin ordered him to steal Hillary Clinton"s emails.

But did Putin also rig Hillary"s campaign so she"d completely abandon Michigan, Wisonsin and Pennsylvania, inquiring minds want to know? Oh, and let"s not forget about the time Julian Assange all but used sign language to let the world know that Seth Rich was the source.

Russia Accuses US Of "State Hooliganism"

Against the constant tirade of US politicians calling Putin and his pals "thugs," a Russian official on Monday called the United States’ shuttering of Russian facilities "state hooliganism."

Reuters reports thAT Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov exclaimed,

"I am inclined to call what is happening state hooliganism."

This follows shocking revelations from Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova that the FBI agents were searching the Russian diplomatic and consular compounds for explosive devices, something more common in the hideout of terrorist groups than in the embassies and consular properties of large states.

As TheDuran notes, during an interview on Rossiya One television, Zakharova described the incident in the following way,

“By the way, do you know, what they were looking for – as we were told before the searches? You would not believe it – they were looking for explosives”.

She added,

“Just try to imagine that you are being brainwashed for a year that an enemy is living overseas and this enemy is impacting your life and everything bad that might happen – the election of a president you don’t like – has been done by the Russians.

On September 2, black cars with FBI and State Department officers rolled up to our consulate general in San Francisco and they came into the building.

A day before, the directorate chief said that if the doors of our diplomatic compound, which is our property, were closed they would be broken. More to it, a car of a private company specialising in forcing open doors, locks and safes drove to our trade mission in Washington. We have posted this video in the internet.

I don’t know how our diplomats could find nerve enough to open the doors and be polite”.

With all this in mind, Irish Journalist Bryan McDonald asks American readers to put the shoe on the other foot for a moment...

Imagine an alternative universe where US officials reacted with outrage on Saturday after the Russian Foreign Ministry announced it was closing the US Consulate in Vladivostok and giving staff only 48 hours’ notice to evacuate.

To compound matters, on Monday, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) indicated its intention to carry out searches at the building on Tuesday afternoon. The raids would extend to trade missions in the capital, Moscow.

In Vladivostok, the operations won’t be restricted to US consular offices in the Far Eastern city, but will also take place at the apartments of staff who live in the building and who have diplomatic immunity. To perform those searches, Russian authorities have ordered those staff members and their families, including children and babies, to leave their homes for up to 12 hours.

"We are talking about an invasion in the consulate office and homes of diplomatic staff, who themselves are being ousted not to disturb FSB agents,” US State Department spokesperson Heather Ann Nauert complained. She pointed out that Washington was given just two days to close a consulate which serves the needs of “an area bigger than all of Europe.”

The Kremlin’s actions seriously violate international norms, including Moscow’s obligations in the Vienna declarations on diplomatic and consulate relations, Nauert said. These are “unprecedented measures on restricting the work” of the US diplomatic mission in Russia, she contested, “It is obvious that Russia is not interested in the development of relations between people.”

To make matters worse, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman confirmed his boss had personally ordered the measure. “This was a decision made by the president himself,” press secretary Dmitry Peskov told supporters. The US media was especially angered by Putin’s involvement, after he spent the past year promising to repair relations with Washington, repeatedly saying how “it’d be great to get along with America” and “we are going to have excellent relations.”

Mikhail Belov, a US expert, who has never been to America and can"t speak English, on news channel Rossiya 24 said: “We were all worried that Putin was going soft on the Americans when he started talking about making friends with them. The military industry will be relieved now he"s changing tack,” he said.

Real world woes

Obviously, the above is a joke. But the fact the US gave Russia two days last weekend to shut its San Francisco Consulate is no laughing matter. Nor were Saturday’s FBI raids on the building or the virtual mainstream media blackout of any dissenting views on the move. This would stand in stark contrast to the predictable reaction if Russia had even considered pulling a similar stunt.

Right now, the only conclusion to be drawn from Donald Trump’s choice is that Washington is actively looking for an escalation in its standoff with Moscow. Hoping Putin will take the bait and raise the stakes even further. Because how else can you interpret a move which would surely be hyped as an “act of war” if carried out by the Russian side?

For her part, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova insists America is seriously violating international regulations. She also says the latest US decision “even exceeds” Barack Obama’s move to expel Russian envoys and confiscate Russian consular property in the dying days of his presidency.

Zakharova may well be correct, because the searches of two compounds in Washington on Saturday certainly seemed like an illegal takeover, particularly in light of how the US authorities lifted diplomatic immunity from the trade mission compound at short notice – something considered extremely abnormal in diplomatic circles, especially between major powers.

So what happens next?

The main questions now are how will Moscow respond, and what do the US authorities hope to gain from their actions? Firstly, the Kremlin might not want to descend to the same level as their adversaries and may try to retake the moral high ground, as Putin did in response to Obama’s December orders. On the other hand, the Russians may feel enough is enough and prepare a similar clampdown on the Americans, perhaps by removing leisure facilities or conducting raids. Some well-placed sources have suggested a nuclear option where Moscow reduces its embassy personnel in the US to the bare minimum and forces their counterparts to do the same in Russia. A state-of-affairs which would see both sides restricted to their capital city properties only.

When it comes to working out what the Americans are really up to, the answer seems clear now. The White House wants to antagonize the Kremlin to such an extent that something like the extreme notion of a large-scale shutdown of bilateral interaction is implemented. In this event, the State Department may feel it gains by making Russia look like the petulant partner. The problem with this plan lies in how uncharacteristic it would be for Putin, and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to take the bait.

The other confusing issue is Donald Trump’s behavior. He came to office promising a vast improvement in US-Russian relations. Thus, either he’s changed his mind, or he’s lost control of his own apparatchiks, and has been forced to surrender to their demands. Either way, America is now a dangerous rival, because there seems to be no longer any consistency in its conduct. And, barring impeachment or resignation, there’s still almost three and a half years of the Trump Presidency ahead. So, brace yourself, because things could get a lot worse.

Putin Tells Oliver Stone About His Days As A KGB Spy

Russia"s President Putin talked to Oliver Stone not only about politics and international affairs, but also about his family, childhood, and hobbies, as well as the time when he served as an under-cover KGB agent in Dresden in 1980s. These recollections are part of a book of full transcripts that includes material left out of the documentary series The Putin Interviews (which was panned last week by Rolling Stone in its "10 Most WTF Things We Learned From Oliver Stone"s Putin Interviews").

Vladimir Putin said he joined the KGB, the Soviet Committee for State Security, in 1975, because he had “always wanted to."

“I entered law school because I wanted to work for the KGB. And still when I was a pupil at school, I went to the KGB office in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) by myself. And I asked them what I had to do in order to work for the KGB. And the workers told me that I had to have a higher education and a better legal education.”

Putin said he did not have “any contact with the KGB” following the visit, so it was “quite unexpected that the KGB found me and offered a job” after he graduated from law school.

When asked by Stone, Putin acknowledged he watched many films about the agency and their intelligence work and was particularly inspired by a Soviet-era espionage thriller called Seventeen Moments of Spring, in which the main character played by famous actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov is a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany. The president admitted to romanticizing about getting a job at the KGB.

Putin served as an under-cover spy in Dresden from 1985 through 1990 and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel when the USSR collapsed. In the late 1990s, he briefly served as the head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor.

* * *

While Putin"s walk down memory lane with Stone was rather limited, the BBC recently conducted an extensive look on Putin"s days in Dresden. Some excerpts below:

Putin had arrived in Dresden in the mid-1980s for his first foreign posting as a KGB agent. The German Democratic Republic or GDR - a communist state created out of the Soviet-occupied zone of post-Nazi Germany - was a highly significant outpost of Moscow"s power, up close to Western Europe, full of Soviet military and spies. Putin had wanted to join the KGB since he was a teenager, inspired by popular Soviet stories of secret service bravado in which, he recalled later, "One man"s effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people."

Initially, though, much of his work in Dresden was humdrum. Among documents in the Stasi archives in Dresden is a letter from Putin asking for help from the Stasi boss with the installation of an informer"s phone.

And there are details too of Soviet-East German social gatherings Putin attended, to celebrate ties between the two countries. But if the spy work wasn"t that exciting, Putin and his young family could at least enjoy the East German good life. Putin"s then wife, Ludmila, later recalled that life in the GDR was very different from life in the USSR. "The streets were clean. They would wash their windows once a week," she said in an interview published in 2000, as part of First Person, a book of interviews with Russia"s new and then little-known acting president.

The Putins lived in a special block of flats with KGB and Stasi families for neighbours, though Ludmila envied the fact that: "The GDR state security people got higher salaries than our guys, judging from how our German neighbours lived. Of course we tried to economise and save up enough to buy a car."

A former KGB colleague, Vladimir Usoltsev, describes Putin spending hours leafing through Western mail-order catalogues, to keep up with fashions and trends. He also enjoyed the beer - securing a special weekly supply of the local brew, Radeberger - which left him looking rather less trim than he does in the bare-chested sporty images issued by Russian presidential PR today.

East Germany differed from the USSR in another way too - it had a number of separate political parties, even though it was still firmly under communist rule, or appeared to be.

"He enjoyed very much this little paradise for him," says Boris Reitschuster. East Germany, he says, "is his model of politics especially. He rebuilt some kind of East Germany in Russia now."

The block of flats nearby, where the Putins lived

But in autumn 1989 this paradise became a kind of KGB hell. On the streets of Dresden, Putin observed people power emerging in extraordinary ways. In early October hundreds of East Germans who had claimed political asylum at the West German embassy in Prague were allowed to travel to the West in sealed trains. As they passed through Dresden, huge crowds tried to break through a security cordon to try to board the trains, and make their own escape.

Wolfgang Berghofer, Dresden"s communist mayor at the time, says there was chaos as security forces began taking on almost the entire local population. Many assumed violence was inevitable.

"A Soviet tank army was stationed in our city," he says. "And its generals said to me clearly: "If we get the order from Moscow, the tanks will roll.""

After the Berlin Wall opened, on 9 November, the crowds became bolder everywhere - approaching the citadels of Stasi and KGB power in Dresden.

The former KGB headquarters in Dresden

Putin and his KGB colleagues frantically burned evidence of their intelligence work. "I personally burned a huge amount of material," Putin recalled in First Person. "We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst."

Two weeks later there was more trauma for Putin as West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived in the city. He made a speech that left German reunification looking inevitable, and East Germany doomed. Kohl praised Gorbachev, the man in Moscow who"d refused to send in the tanks, and he used patriotic language - words like Vaterland, or fatherland - that had been largely taboo in Germany since the war.  Now they prompted an ecstatic response.

It"s not known whether Putin was in that crowd - but as a KGB agent in Dresden he"d certainly have known all about it. The implosion of East Germany in the following months marked a huge rupture in his and his family"s life.

"We had the horrible feeling that the country that had almost become our home would no longer exist," said his wife Ludmila. "My neighbour, who was my friend, cried for a week. It was the collapse of everything - their lives, their careers."

One of Putin"s key Stasi contacts, Maj Gen Horst Boehm - the man who had helped him install that precious telephone line for an informer - was humiliated by the demonstrating crowds, and committed suicide early in 1990. This warning about what can happen when people power becomes dominant was one Putin could now ponder on the long journey home.

"Their German friends give them a 20-year-old washing machine and with this they drive back to Leningrad," says Putin biographer and critic Masha Gessen. "There"s a strong sense that he was serving his country and had nothing to show for it."

He arrived back to a country that had been transformed under Mikhail Gorbachev and was itself on the verge of collapse.

"He found himself in a country that had changed in ways that he didn"t understand and didn"t want to accept," as Gessen puts it.

His home city, Leningrad, was now becoming St Petersburg again. What would Putin do there? There was talk, briefly, of taxi-driving. But soon Putin realised he had acquired a much more valuable asset than a second-hand washing machine.

In Dresden he"d been part of a network of individuals who might have lost their Soviet roles, but were well placed to prosper personally and politically in the new Russia. In the Stasi archives in Dresden a picture survives of Putin during his Dresden years. He"s in a group of senior Soviet and East German military and security figures - a relatively junior figure, off to one side, but already networking among the elite.

Vladimir Putin is standing second from the left in the front row

Prof Karen Dawisha of Miami University, author of Putin"s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, says there are people he met in Dresden "who have then gone on… to be part of his inner core".

They include Sergey Chemezov, who for years headed Russia"s arms export agency and now runs a state programme supporting technology, and Nikolai Tokarev head of the state pipeline company, Transneft.
And it"s not only former Russian colleagues who"ve stayed close to Putin.

* * *

While Showtime has limited the distribution of "The Putin Interviews", in the interview below Stone speaks to the FT"s Matthew Garrahan and explains why western world has Vladimir Putin all wrong.

Matt Taibbi: Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives

Authored by Matt Taibbi Of Rolling Stone

Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives

So Michael Flynn, who was Donald Trump"s national security adviser before he got busted talking out of school to Russia"s ambassador, has reportedly offered to testify in exchange for immunity.

For seemingly the 100th time, social media is exploding. This is it! The big reveal!

Perhaps it will come off just the way people are expecting. Perhaps Flynn will get a deal, walk into the House or the Senate surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers, and unspool the whole sordid conspiracy.

He will explain that Donald Trump, compromised by ancient deals with Russian mobsters, and perhaps even blackmailed by an unspeakable KGB sex tape, made a secret deal. He"ll say Trump agreed to downplay the obvious benefits of an armed proxy war in Ukraine with nuclear-armed Russia in exchange for Vladimir Putin"s help in stealing the emails of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and John Podesta.

I personally would be surprised if this turned out to be the narrative, mainly because we haven"t seen any real evidence of it. But episodes like the Flynn story have even the most careful reporters paralyzed. What if, tomorrow, it all turns out to be true?

What if reality does turn out to be a massive connect-the-dots image of St. Basil"s Cathedral sitting atop the White House? (This was suddenly legitimate British conspiracist Louise Mensch"s construction in The New York Times last week.) What if all the Glenn Beck-style far-out charts with the circles and arrows somehow all make sense?

This is one of the tricks that keeps every good conspiracy theory going. Nobody wants to be the one claiming the emperor has no clothes the day His Highness walks out naked. And this Russia thing has spun out of control into just such an exercise of conspiratorial mass hysteria.

Even I think there should be a legitimate independent investigation – one that, given Trump"s history, might uncover all sorts of things. But almost irrespective of what ends up being uncovered on the Trump side, the public prosecution of this affair has taken on a malevolent life of its own.

One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn"t believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.

The aforementioned Mensch, a noted loon who thinks Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart but has somehow been put front and center by The Times and HBO"s Real Time, has denounced an extraordinary list of Kremlin plants.

She"s tabbed everyone from Jeff Sessions ("a Russian partisan") to Rudy Giuliani and former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom ("agents of influence") to Glenn Greenwald ("Russian shill") to ProPublica and Democracy Now! (also "Russian shills"), to the 15-year-old girl with whom Anthony Weiner sexted (really, she says, a Russian hacker group called "Crackas With Attitudes") to an unnamed number of FBI agents in the New York field office ("moles"). And that"s just for starters.

Others are doing the same. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, upon seeing the strange behavior of Republican Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, asked "what kind of dossier" the Kremlin has on Nunes.

Dem-friendly pollster Matt McDermott wondered why reporters Michael Tracey and Zaid Jilani aren"t on board with the conspiracy stories (they might be "unwitting" agents!) and noted, without irony, that Russian bots mysteriously appear every time he tweets negatively about them.

Think about that last one. Does McDermott think Tracey and Jilani call their handlers at the sight of a scary Matt McDermott tweet and have the FSB send waves of Russian bots at him on command? Or does he think it"s an automated process? What goes through the heads of such people?

I"ve written a few articles on the Russia subject that have been very tame, basically arguing that it might be a good idea to wait for evidence of collusion before those of us in the media jump in the story with both feet. But even I"ve gotten the treatment.

I"ve been "outed" as a possible paid Putin plant by the infamous "PropOrNot" group, which is supposedly dedicated to rooting out Russian "agents of influence." You might remember PropOrNot as the illustrious research team the Washington Post once relied on for a report that accused 200 alternative websites of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season."

Politicians are getting into the act, too. It was one thing when Rand Paul balked at OKing the expansion of NATO to Montenegro, and John McCain didn"t hesitate to say that "the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin."

Even Bernie Sanders has himself been accused of being a Putin plant by Mensch. But even he"s gotten on board of late, asking, "What do the Russians have on Mr. Trump?"

So even people who themselves have been accused of being Russian plants are now accusing people of being Russian plants. As the Russians would say, it"s enough to make your bashka hurt.

Sanders should know better. Last week, during hearings in the Senate, multiple witnesses essentially pegged his electoral following as unwitting fellow travelers for Putin.

Former NSA chief Keith Alexander spoke openly of how Russia used the Sanders campaign to "drive a wedge within the Democratic Party," while Dr. Thomas Rid of Kings College in London spoke of Russia"s use of "unwitting agents" and "overeager journalists" to drive narratives that destabilized American politics.

This testimony was brought out by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. Warner has been in full-blown "precious bodily fluids" mode throughout this scandal. During an interview with The Times on the Russia subject a month back, there was a thud outside the window. "That may just be the FSB," he said. The paper was unsure if he was kidding.

Warner furthermore told The Times that in order to get prepared for his role as an exposer of 21st-century Russian perfidy, he was "losing himself in a book about the Romanovs," and had been quizzing staffers about "Tolstoy and Nabokov."

This is how nuts things are now: a senator brushes up on Nabokov and Tolstoy (Tolstoy!) to get pumped to expose Vladimir Putin.

Even the bizarre admission by FBI director (and sudden darling of the same Democrats who hated him months ago) James Comey that he didn"t know anything about Russia"s biggest company didn"t seem to trouble Americans very much. Here"s the key exchange, from a House hearing in which Jackie Speier quizzed Comey:

SPEIER: Now, do we know who Gazprom-Media is? Do you know anything about Gazprom, director?
COMEY: I don"t.
SPEIER: Well, it"s a – it"s an oil company.

(Incidentally, Gazprom – primarily a natural-gas giant – is not really an oil company. So both Comey and Speier got it wrong.)

As Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg noted, this exchange was terrifying to Russians. The leader of an investigation into Russian espionage not knowing what Gazprom is would be like an FSB chief not having heard of Exxon-Mobil. It"s bizarre, to say the least.

Testimony of the sort that came from Warner"s committee last week is being buttressed by news stories in liberal outlets like Salon insisting that "Bernie Bros" were influenced by those same ubiquitous McDermott-chasing Russian "bots."

These stories insist that, among other things, these evil bots pushed on the unwitting "bros" juicy "fake news" stories about Hillary being "involved with various murders and money laundering schemes."

Some 13.2 million people voted for Sanders during the primary season last year. What percentage does any rational person really believe voted that way because of "fake news"?

I would guess the number is infinitesimal at best. The Sanders campaign was driven by a lot of factors, but mainly by long-developing discontent within the Democratic Party and enthusiasm for Sanders himself.

To describe Sanders followers as unwitting dupes who departed the true DNC faith because of evil Russian propaganda is both insulting and ridiculous. It"s also a testimony to the remarkable capacity for self-deception within the leadership of the Democratic Party.

If the party"s leaders really believe that Russian intervention is anywhere in the top 100 list of reasons why some 155 million eligible voters (out of 231 million) chose not to pull a lever for Hillary Clinton last year, they"re farther along down the Purity of Essence nut-hole than Mark Warner.

Moreover, even those who detest Trump with every fiber of their being must see the dangerous endgame implicit in this entire line of thinking. If the Democrats succeed in spreading the idea that straying from the DNC-approved candidate – in either the past or the future – is/was an act of "unwitting" cooperation with the evil Putin regime, then the entire idea of legitimate dissent is going to be in trouble.

Imagine it"s four years from now (if indeed that"s when we have our next election). A Democratic candidate stands before the stump, and announces that a consortium of intelligence experts has concluded that Putin is backing the hippie/anti-war/anti-corporate opposition candidate.

Or, even better: that same candidate reminds us "what happened last time" when people decided to vote their consciences during primary season. It will be argued, in seriousness, that true Americans will owe their votes to the non-Putin candidate. It would be a shock if some version of this didn"t become an effective political trope going forward.

But if you"re not worried about accusing non-believers of being spies, or pegging legitimate dissent as treason, there"s a third problem that should scare everyone.

Last week saw Donna Brazile and Dick Cheney both declare Russia"s apparent hack of DNC emails an "act of war." This coupling seemed at first like political end times: as Bill Murray would say, "dogs and cats, living together."

But there"s been remarkable unanimity among would-be enemies in the Republican and Democrat camps on this question. Suddenly everyone from Speier to McCain to Kamala Harris to Ben Cardin have decried Russia"s alleged behavior during the election as real or metaphorical acts of war: a "political Pearl Harbor," as Cardin put it.

That no one seems to be concerned about igniting a hot war with nuclear-powered Russia at a time when both countries have troops within "hand-grenade range" of each in Syria other is bizarre, to say the least. People are in such a fever to drag Trump to impeachment that these other considerations seem not to matter. This is what happens when people lose their heads.

There are a lot of people who will say that these issues are of secondary importance to the more important question of whether or not we have a compromised Russian agent in the White House.

But when it comes to Trump-Putin collusion, we"re still waiting for the confirmation. As Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters put it, the proof is increasingly understood to be the thing we find later, as in, "If we do the investigations, we will find the connections."

But on the mass hysteria front, we already have evidence enough to fill a dozen books. And if it doesn"t freak you out, it probably should.

US Eases Sanctions Against Russian Federal Security Service

Just moments ago, when reporting on the latest Putin comment involving the recent flaring up of violence in Eastern Ukraine, we said that "the biggest question remains unanswered: what side of the Ukraine-Russian conflict will the new US State Department under Rex Tillerson side with, and will Trump slam the alleged Russian violence as his predecessor was so quick to do on virtually every single occasion."

We may have just gotten the answer, because moments ago the Treasury Department"s Office of Foreign Assets Control, under Rex Tillerson, posted a Russia-related general license notice on its website, according to which US authorities eased sanctions against Russia’s Federal Security Service - the successor agency to the USSR"s KGB - pertaining to licenses and permits for information technology products in Russia.

According to the license, "all transactions and activities" with participation of the Russian Federal Security Service, prohibited earlier by executive orders of the US President, are authorized with certain exceptions. Also related to “transactions necessary and ordinarily incident to comply with rules and regulations administered by, and certain actions or investigations involving, the FSB,” according to Treasury website.

Cited by Tass, Russian Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has declined to make a statement on the United States’ decision.

"First we need to understand what it is all about," Peskov said. "If we turn to the rocket engines matter, we will see that our US counterparts never impose sanctions that could damage their own interests."

While this initial de-escalation of sanctions against Russia may or may not give John McCain an aneurysm, it will certainly lead to a vocal outcries by Democrats and the media against Rex Tillerson - whose proximity to Putin is well-known - and of course, president Trump, accusing them of immediately going soft on Russia, and leading to even further sanctions elimination between the US and Russia, thus alienating Europe, whose relations with Moscow remain as icy as anything observed under the Obama administration.

The full Treasury general license notice is below (link).

Head Of Investigations At Russia's Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Arrested For Treason

In what may be the latest fallout from the cold cyberwar taking place between the US and Russia, the head of the investigation unit, and one of the most important cybercrime experts at Kaspersky Lab, Russia"s biggest cybersecurity firm, was been arrested on charges of treason. Stoyanov was involved in every big anti-cybercrime operation in Russia in past years, including the one against the components of the Lurk cybercrime gang.

Kaspersky Lab confirmed to AP reports in Russia"s Kommersant newspaper that Ruslan Stoyanov, head of its computer incidents investigations unit, was arrested in December.

Ruslan Stoyanov

According to the “Kommersant” the arrest may be linked to the investigation on into Sergei Mikhailov, deputy head of the information security department of the FSB, Russia national security service. Stoyanov and Mikhailov were both arrested in December, according to the Kommersant the investigation was exploring the receipt of money from foreign companies by Stoyanov and his links to Mikhailov. Mikhailov is also facing treason charges alongside Stoyanov.

Kaspersky spokeswoman Maria Shirokova, said in a statement that Stoyanov"s arrest "has nothing to do with Kaspersky Lab and its operations."

She said the company has no details of the charges Stoyanov faces, but added that the investigation dates back to the time before Stoyanov was hired by Kaspersky.

According to Forbes, the arrest may be a matter of national security:  "A Russia-based information security source told FORBES the details of the case were likely to remain private. The case has been filed under article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, the source said, meaning it should result in a secret military tribunal. Article 275 allows the government to prosecute when an individual provides assistance to a foreign state or organization regarding “hostile activities to the detriment of the external security of the Russian Federation” (translation from source). According to the source, this can be applied broadly. For instance, furnishing the FBI with information on a botnet may amount to treason."

Before Stoyanov joined Kaspersky in 2012, he served six years as a major in the Ministry of Interior’s cybercrime unit between 2000 and 2006, then he moved into the private sector. While Ruslan Stoyanov was working for the Russian government, he was the lead investigator into a hacker crew that extorted $4 million to U.K. betting shops under the DDoS threat.

U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Russia of meddling in the U.S. presidential election through hacking, to help Donald Trump win the vote, claims that Russia has rejected. U.S. and EU officials also have accused Russia of hacking other Western institutions and voiced concern that Russia may try to influence this year"s elections in Germany, France and the Netherlands. It wasn"t immediately clear if the arrests are somehow linked to these allegations.

The FSB"s press office did not comment on the arrest.

Meanwhile Andrei Soldatov, who has studied the internet and Russian security services for more than a decade, called the arrest of the Kaspersky manager "unprecedented."

"It destroys a system that has been 20 years in the making, the system of relations between intelligence agencies and companies like Kaspersky," he told The Associated Press. "Intelligence agencies used to ask for Kaspersky"s advice, and this is how informal ties were built. This romance is clearly over."

While Kaspersky has published research damaging to Russian hacking operations, Eugene Kaspersky is known to have held a friendly relationship with the Russian government.  The company has a strong international presence, including antivirus research facilities inside the United States.

It remains unclear if today"s arrest has any connection to the "Russian election hacking" scandal that brought US-Russian relations to a halt in the last days of the Obama administration.