Cockburn

The President’s father, Fred Trump, had a rule: for some business, you only ever want to meet one person at a time. Then it’s their word against yours. If you have a meeting of three people, then you have two people to give evidence against you. This is the story, anyway, from people who know the Trump family and the Trump family legend. Fred Trump supposedly had links with both the Democratic Party machine and the mob in the New York borough of Queens. If the story about his rule is true, it would have served him well as he built up his property empire – allegedly with methods that might not have borne scrutiny. Someone deep inside Trumpworld tells Cockburn Donald Trump adopted his father’s rule as his own. ‘He never writes anything down.

Like a reckless gambler whose roulette system has worked in the past, Vladimir Putin can’t resist trying to hack US elections. He’s at it once again, in the midterms, one source close to the intelligence community tells Cockburn. ‘The GRU [Russian military intelligence] is up to its usual tricks in the midterms but the NSA [the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic spying] knows and is mitigating.’ Our source says it’s the ‘usual Russian Intelligence playbook’ familiar from the presidential election: propaganda on social media with ‘some GRU active SIGINT [signals intelligence] collection, also known as hacking, in the mix’.

Glasses are clinking in the London offices of Orbis Business Intelligence, home to the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. Steele has learned that a court in Washington DC has dismissed a libel action brought by three Russian oligarchs over what he wrote about them and their company, Alfa Bank, in his dossier on Donald Trump, Russia, and the US presidential election. Steele is celebrating this as a major victory for the First Amendment and against what he views as an effort – backed by the Kremlin – to use the courts to muzzle him. The dossier did not actually say much about Alfa’s owners, Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan.

From the Telluride Daily Planet, founded 1898, published Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays in Telluride, Colorado, comes a local news item that may have wider significance. Last week, before a roomful of a hundred people at the Wilkinson Public Library, carried by Telluride TV and sponsored by the Telluride Ski & Golf Company, a former CIA officer called Bob Baer shared what he knew about Donald Trump and Russia. The newspaper reports that: Baer began digging after becoming privy to the Trump-Russia ties during the 2016 election cycle, when he received a tip from a current Democratic operative who asked him to reach out to an ex-KGB officer.‘I knew from the phone number from the FBI that it was a legit KGB guy,’ he said.

Sheriff David Clarke was paid $6,000 by jailed Russian activist Maria Butina. An organisation founded by Butina, an alleged Russian agent currently being held without bond, covered Clarke’s expenses as part of his trip to Russia with the NRA in 2015, Fox 6 in Milwaukee reported on Tuesday. (Cockburn has contacted Sheriff Clarke’s office for a comment – but not received one yet.) On Wednesday, Butina was deemed a flight risk and sent to jail until her trial. Today Clarke is slated to emcee an event with Vice President Mike Pence in Tennessee and another one Tuesday in Montana. Earlier this month, Pence and Clarke appeared together in Kansas City.