Let's put this fire out w/gasoline

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https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/23/politics/trump-pardons-stone-manafort-kushner/index.html
Trump issues 26 new pardons, including for Stone, Manafort and Charles Kushner

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening announced 26 new pardons, including for longtime ally Roger Stone, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's father, Charles.

The pardons extend Trump's streak of wielding his clemency powers for criminals who are loyalists, well-connected or adjacent to his family. While all presidents issue controversial pardons at the end of their terms, Trump appears to be moving at a faster pace than his predecessors, demonstrating little inhibition at rewarding his friends and allies using one of the most unrestricted powers of his office.



TRUMP WHITE HOUSE


The pardons of Manafort and Stone reward two of the most high-profile and widely condemned former advisers of the President, both of whom were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller, went to trial and were convicted by juries of multiple crimes.


Manafort, who is serving home confinement, admitted his crimes and initially agreed to cooperate with Mueller then lied to prosecutors, while Stone never cooperated after lying to Congress to protect the President. Manafort spent close to two years in prison for bank and tax fraud, illegal foreign lobbying and witness tampering conspiracies before being released because of the Covid-19 pandemic, while Stone's sentence for obstruction of Congress and threatening a witness was commuted by Trump earlier this year days before he was set to surrender.


Charles Kushner, meanwhile, had been prosecuted by then-US Attorney for New Jersey Chris Christie in the early 2000s for tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions.


He eventually pleaded guilty to 16 counts of tax evasion, one count of retaliating against a federal witness -- his brother-in-law -- and another count of lying to the Federal Election Commission.


Christie in early 2019 went on to say that Charles Kushner committed "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he had prosecuted, referring to an elaborate revenge plot that the older Kushner hatched in 2003 in order to target his brother-in-law, William Schulder, a former employee turned witness for federal prosecutors in their case against Kushner.


As a part of the plot, Kushner hired a prostitute to lure Schulder into having sex in a Bridgewater, New Jersey, motel room as a hidden camera rolled.


A tape of the encounter was then sent to Kushner's sister and Schulder's wife, Esther. Ultimately, the intimidation stunt failed. The Schulders brought the video to prosecutors, who tracked down the woman and threatened her with arrest. She promptly turned on Kushner.


Also included in Trump's pardon list Wednesday evening is former California GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter's wife, Margaret, just one day after Trump granted Duncan Hunter a full pardon. Margaret Hunter had pleaded guilty last year to conspiring "knowingly and willingly" to convert campaign funds for personal use.


Beyond the high-profile pardons, Trump also pardoned more than 20 other individuals, including those who had pleaded guilty to various cyber crimes, firearm possession and mail fraud. He also commuted the sentences of three others.


The wave of pardons Wednesday evening comes after Trump used his expansive pardon powers Tuesday for a list that included former campaign aide George Papadopoulos, former US congressman Chris Collins, and the four Blackwater guards involved in the Iraq massacre.


Also in that batch were Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer who was sentenced to 30 days in jail after pleading guilty to lying to Mueller investigators; two Border Patrol agents convicted in 2006 of shooting and wounding an unarmed undocumented immigrant and then covering it up; and several people convicted of non-violent drug crimes serving lengthy sentences.


The crush of pardons, poised to be a defining facet of Trump's final weeks in office, follows a flood of calls and emails into the West Wing from people looking to benefit from the President's broad clemency powers.


Throughout his term, the President has largely ignored the established government process to review and recommend clemency requests, instead relying on the word of friends, donors and Fox News hosts.


Of the 20 clemencies Trump issued Tuesday night, only three had existing petitions with the Justice Department's Office of Pardon Attorney, the department said.


The department previously told CNN in November that it played a role in only eight of the 27 pardons and commutations Trump had granted at the time.


More Mueller investigation pardons


The pardons Trump has given this week for Mueller investigation defendants follow a years-long pattern of Trump encouraging and rewarding his associates to refuse to help federal investigators on matters of national security, if they relate back to him.


Mueller, in his final report, documented extensively how Trump had signaled to Manafort and to Stone about the possibility they could receive pardons during their criminal proceedings if they stuck with him. Trump had even commended Stone for having the "guts" not to testify against him, and Mueller wasn't able to conclude whether Trump and Stone both lied about their conversations in 2016.


The Manafort and Stone pardons also play into Trump's crusade to undermine the findings of the Mueller investigation. Both men had been prime targets whom investigators believed could have shared the truth about still unresolved questions around the President's campaign and Russian election interference if they had been willing.



Here are the high-profile pardons and commutations Trump has granted during his presidency


Prosecutors were never able to determine if Trump had learned in advance from Stone about planned releases from WikiLeaks of Democratic emails stolen by the Russians, and couldn't determine why Manafort shared internal campaign polls or discussed American policy in Ukraine with a Russian associate during Trump's run for office.


Commenting on Stone's crimes at his sentencing, federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson described how Congress, the Justice Department, the judiciary and the American public should care to see just punishment for people like Stone who did not tell the truth.


"Everyone depends on our elected representatives to protect our elections from foreign interference based on the facts. No one knows where the threat is going to come from next time or whose side they're going to be on, and for that reason the dismay and disgust at the defendant's belligerence should transcend party," Jackson said.


Manafort's long-time deputy, Rick Gates, who served in top jobs on the 2016 Trump campaign and inauguration and became one of Mueller's most significant cooperators, has not received clemency from the President
"Politics don't corrupt people. People corrupt politics," Jackson also said, of Manafort and Gates' schemes, when she separately oversaw their case.


As for Stone, the President had commuted Stone's sentence in July just days before Stone had been set to report to a federal prison in Georgia to serve a 40-month sentence.


Stone was convicted in November 2019 of seven charges -- including lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing a congressional committee proceeding during the Russia investigation. Among the things Stone misled Congress about were his communications with Trump campaign officials -- communications that prosecutors said he had hidden out of his desire to protect Trump.


He was indicted in January 2019 after armed FBI agents arrested him at his Florida home. Trump's possible knowledge of Stone's efforts to get leaked Democratic documents during the 2016 presidential campaign was a major question in the Mueller investigation, one that Democrats on Capitol Hill still want to investigate. In more recently released findings from Mueller, the special counsel documented how he looked at whether Trump had lied in written answers about his conversations with Stone. As President, Trump could not be charged with a crime because of departmental policy, Mueller said, and the special counsel's office never pressed him for testimony.


Manafort, meanwhile, was convicted by a jury of tax and banking crimes in August 2018, then pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US and conspiracy to obstruct justice.


As part of a plea deal cut in September 2018, Manafort admitted to money laundering, tax fraud and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years of lucrative work as a political consultant for Ukrainian politicians, including a former Ukrainian president who sought refuge in Russia, as well as defrauding banks to supplement his income with cash through mortgages.


He also agreed to cooperate with the prosecutors from Mueller's office -- before lying during those interview sessions. A federal judge ruled his intentional lies voided his earlier plea deal.


Manafort was first sent to prison in June 2018 when prosecutors discovered he was conspiring with a Russian-intelligence-connected colleague in Moscow, Konstantin Kilimnik, in an attempt to coax witnesses who might testify against him. Kilimnik was also charged by Mueller. He has not received a pardon.


Manafort was eventually sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison, but he moved to home confinement in May when the Justice Department released several nonviolent inmates because of the coronavirus pandemic.


Andrew Weissmann, the ex-prosecutor who oversaw Manafort's prosecution in the Mueller investigation, has alleged that the former Trump aide received special treatment from the Justice Department following his imprisonment.


"The pardons from this President are what you would expect to get if you gave the pardon power to a mob boss," Weissmann wrote on Twitter Wednesday night.


Pardons receive swift backlash from Democrats


Shortly after Trump announced the pardons Wednesday evening, Manafort addressed the President in a tweet, writing: "I humbly thank you for the Presidential Pardon you bestowed on me."


"Words cannot fully convey how grateful we are," he said.


That message was echoed by Stone, who said in a statement, "I wish to praise God and give my deepest thanks to President Donald J. Trump for his extraordinary act of justice in issuing me a presidential pardon."


But beyond the White House and those receiving pardons, news of the move drew swift backlash, particularly from Democrats in Congress.


"Once one party allows the pardon power to become a tool of criminal enterprise, its danger to democracy outweighs its utility as an instrument of justice," Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted.


"It's time to remove the pardon power from the Constitution."
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon called the pardons, "just the tip of the iceberg of the damage Donald Trump will do to our democracy in his remaining days as president."
"Every Senate Republican who has enabled his escalating abuse of power for the last 4 years is responsible for this," he tweeted.


And while large parts of the GOP were silent in the immediate aftermath of the pardons, the criticism didn't just fall on party lines. GOP Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said in a statement the move from Trump was "rotten to the core."


Notably, Michael Cohen -- Trump's former lawyer and "fixer" who has been serving a three-year prison sentence for crimes including, tax evasion and lying to Congress -- tweeted, "What happened tonight shows how broken the whole criminal justice sustem (sic) is."


"Despite me and family being threatened by @POTUS @realDonaldTrump, I still cooperated with a dozen federal/state agencies, Mueller, Congress...and all these criminals receive #pardons. This is wrong!"
 
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Russian state media are calling for Trump — or 'Trumpusha' — to get asylum in their country when he leaves the White House so he can save himself from prosecution
 
Here4money said:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/us/politics/russia-hack-nsa-homeland-security-pentagon.html

Scope of Russian Hack Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit
The Pentagon, intelligence agencies, nuclear labs and Fortune 500 companies use software that was found to have been compromised by Russian hackers. The sweep of stolen data is still being assessed.

WASHINGTON — The scope of a hack engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday, when some Trump administration officials acknowledged that other federal agencies — the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon — had been compromised. Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.

United States officials did not detect the attack until recent weeks, and then only when a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, alerted American intelligence that the hackers had evaded layers of defenses.

It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies.

About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update — a Trojan horse of sorts — that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised.

Among those who use SolarWinds software are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, the Justice Department, parts of the Pentagon and a number of utility companies. While the presence of the software is not by itself evidence that each network was compromised and information was stolen, investigators spent Monday trying to understand the extent of the damage in what could be a significant loss of American data to a foreign attacker.

The National Security Agency — the premier U.S. intelligence organization that both hacks into foreign networks and defends national security agencies from attacks — apparently did not know of the breach in the network-monitoring software made by SolarWinds until it was notified last week by FireEye. The N.S.A. itself uses SolarWinds software.

Two of the most embarrassing breaches came at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, whose Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency oversaw the successful defense of the American election system last month.

A government official, who requested anonymity to speak about the investigation, made clear that the Homeland Security Department, which is charged with securing civilian government agencies and the private sector, was itself a victim of the complex attack. But the department, which often urges companies to come clean to their customers when their systems are victims of successful attacks, issued an obfuscating official statement that said only: “The Department of Homeland Security is aware of reports of a breach. We are currently investigating the matter.”

Parts of the Pentagon were also affected by the attack, said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, who added that they were not yet sure to what extent.

“The D.O.D. is aware of the reports and is currently assessing the impact,” said Russell Goemaere, a Pentagon spokesman.

This was the second time in recent years that Russian intelligence agencies had pierced the State Department’s email systems. Six years ago, officials struggled to get Russian hackers out of their unclassified email systems, at times shutting down State’s communications with its own staff in an effort to purge the system.

Then, as now, State Department officials refused to acknowledge that Russia had been responsible. In an interview with Breitbart Radio News, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo deflected the question with generalities, saying that there had “been a consistent effort of the Russians to try and get into American servers, not only those of government agencies, but of businesses. We see this even more strongly from the Chinese Communist Party, from the North Koreans, as well.”

In fact, it is the Russians who have been consistently most effective, though in this case it was not clear which State Department systems they had extracted data from or how much. A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Investigators were also focused on why the Russians targeted the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which helps determine policy for internet-related issues, including setting standards and blocking imports and exports of technology that is considered a national security risk. But analysts noted that the agency deals with some of the most cutting-edge commercial technologies, determining what will be sold and denied to adversarial countries.

Nearly all Fortune 500 companies, including The New York Times, use SolarWinds products to monitor their networks. So does Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed, and major defense contractors like Boeing, which declined on Monday to discuss the attack.

The early assessments of the intrusions — believed to be the work of Russia’s S.V.R., a successor to the K.G.B. — suggest that the hackers were highly selective about which victims they exploited for further access and data theft.

The hackers embedded their malicious code in the Orion software made by SolarWinds, which is based in Austin, Texas. The company said that 33,000 of its 300,000 customers use Orion, and only half of those downloaded the malign Russian update. FireEye said that despite their widespread access, Russian hackers exploited only what was considered the most valuable targets.

“We think the number who were actually compromised were in the dozens,” said Charles Carmakal, a senior vice president at FireEye. “But they were all the highest-value targets.”

The picture emerging from interviews with corporate and government officials on Monday as they tried to assess the scope of the damage was of a complex, sophisticated attack on the software used in the systems that monitor activity at companies and government agencies.

After a quarter-century of hacks on the defense industrial establishment — many involving brute-force efforts to crack passwords or “spearphishing” messages to trick unwitting email recipients to give up their credentials — the Russian operation was a different breed. The attack was “the day you prepare against,” said Sarah Bloom Raskin, the deputy Treasury secretary during the Obama administration.

Investigators say they believe that Russian hackers used multiple entry points in addition to the compromised Orion software update, and that this may be only the beginning of what they find.

SolarWinds’s Orion software updates are not automatic, officials noted, and are often reviewed to ensure that they do not destabilize existing computer systems.

SolarWinds customers on Monday were still trying to assess the effects of the Russian attack.

A spokesman at the Justice Department, which uses SolarWinds software, declined to comment.

Ari Isaacman Bevacqua, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said that “our security team is aware of recent developments and taking appropriate measures as warranted.”

Military and intelligence officials declined to say how widespread the use of Orion was in their organizations, or whether those systems had been updated with the infected code that gave the hackers broad access.

But unless the government was aware of the vulnerability in SolarWinds and kept it secret — which it sometimes does to develop offensive cyberweapons — there would have been little reason not to install the most up-to-date versions of the software. There is no evidence that government officials were withholding any knowledge of the flaw in the SolarWinds software.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Sunday issued a rare emergency directive warning federal agencies to “power down” the SolarWinds software. But that only prevents new intrusions; it does not eradicate Russian hackers who, FireEye said, planted their own “back doors,” imitated legitimate email users and fooled the electronic systems that are supposed to assure the identities of users with the right passwords and additional authentication.

“A supply chain attack like this is an incredibly expensive operation — the more you make use of it, the higher the likelihood you get caught or burned,” said John Hultquist, a threat director at FireEye. “They had the opportunity to hit a massive quantity of targets, but they also knew that if they reached too far, they would lose their incredible access.”

The chief executive officers of the largest American utility companies held an urgent call on Monday to discuss the possible threat of the SolarWinds compromise to the power grid.

For the N.S.A. and its director, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command, the attack ranks among the biggest crises of his time in office. He was brought in nearly three years ago as one of the nation’s most experienced and trusted cyberwarriors, promising Congress that he would make sure that those who attacked the United States paid a price.

He famously declared in his confirmation hearing that the nation’s cyberadversaries “do not fear us” and moved quickly to raise the cost for them, delving deep into foreign computer networks, mounting attacks on Russia’s Internet Research Agency and sending warning shots across the bow of known Russian hackers.

General Nakasone was intensely focused on protecting the country’s election infrastructure, with considerable success in the 2020 vote. But it now appears that both civilian and national security agencies were the target of this carefully designed hack, and he will have to answer why private industry — rather than the multibillion-dollar enterprises he runs from a war room in Fort Meade, Md. — was the first to raise the alarm.

Analysts said it was hard to know which was worse: that the federal government was blindsided again by Russian intelligence agencies, or that when it was evident what was happening, White House officials said nothing.

But this much is clear: While President Trump was complaining about the hack that wasn’t — the supposed manipulation of votes in an election he had clearly and fairly lost — he was silent on the fact that Russians were hacking the building next door to him: the United States Treasury.

In the near term, government agencies are now struggling to get to the bottom of a problem with limited visibility. By shutting down SolarWinds — a step they had to take to halt future intrusions — many agencies are losing visibility into their own networks.

“They’re flying blind,” said Ben Johnson, a former N.S.A. hacker who is now the chief technology officer of Obsidian, a security firm.
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https://www.marketwatch.com/story/r...rosoft-exec-11614116490?mod=mw_more_headlines
Russia assigned more than 1,000 expert engineers to execute SolarWinds hack, says Microsoft exec
Published: Feb. 23, 2021 at 4:41 p.m. ET

The attack was part of a ‘multi-decade’ campaign, Microsoft’s Brad Smith tells senators

A cyberespionage campaign waged by Russian foreign intelligence on U.S. companies and government institutions was of a scale and sophistication never before seen, technology executives told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday.

“A thousand very skilled, capable engineers worked on this,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.88%. “We haven’t seen this level of sophistication matched with this kind of scale.”

The attack was part of a “multi-decade campaign” on the part of the Russian government to infiltrate American corporations and government agencies, said Kevin Mandia, CEO of cybersecurity firm FireEye FEYE, -0.26%, that began to spread widely after hackers surreptitiously installed malicious code into an update of SolarWinds Corp. SWI, -0.45% software used by thousands of companies and government agencies to administer information technology infrastructure.

Mandia said that the hackers did a “dry run” in October 2019, using innocuous code, to test whether malicious code would spread as widely as it did. The malicious code was launched in March 2020 and not discovered until December, when FireEye detected a breach of its own network and reported it publicly.

There has been some debate over the degree of confidence to which authorities can blame Russia for the attack, after former President Donald Trump said last year that China could be behind the attack, but the witnesses at the hearing said the campaign was likely waged by Russia. “We’ve seen substantial evidence that points to Russian foreign intelligence and we have no evidence that leads us anywhere else,” Smith said.

Ann Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said last week that 18,000 different entities downloaded the malicious software update and that the hackers then chose nine federal agencies and roughly 100 private-sector companies to compromise. Reports indicate that the U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury and Defense were all breached.

The Biden administration is preparing sanctions and other measures to punish the Russian government for the SolarWinds attack and other transgressions, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, but senators were also eager to learn which new policies could be put in place to help defend against future attacks.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the intelligence committee, suggested the implementation of a “mandatory reporting system” that would require companies to disclose breaches of their system to the government so that the public and private sector can more quickly respond in concert to threats.

Warner also suggested that broad international cooperation is needed to mitigate the threat of such attacks on countries around the world. “Do we need norms in cyberspace — that are enforceable — like we have in other forms of conflict?” he asked. “We don’t bomb ambulances in war,” he added, suggesting that international norms against subverting software update processes should be fought for.

Witnesses agreed that without effective diplomacy, it will be nearly impossible for U.S. companies to protect themselves from sophisticated foreign actors.
 
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