Cockburn

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.

From Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, comes a warning to his old boss. “My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will,” Cohen told the ABC anchor, George Stephanopoulos, off-camera, “I put family and country first.” He was answering a question about whether he would cooperate with the Feds and flip on the president if that were the price of his freedom. Such a deal may be a real possibility now, following an FBI raid on his offices, home and hotel room. Cohen said, menacingly, that the president’s lawyers had better think very carefully about their next steps: “I will not be a punching bag as part of anyone's defence strategy. I am not a villain of this story, and I will not allow others to try to depict me that way.

Vladimir Putin — about to embark on a state visit to Austria, his first foreign trip since being re-elected president of Russia — sits for an interview with Austrian television…and is repeatedly questioned about a man popularly known as ‘Putin’s chef’. This is because the ‘chef’, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is not really a chef, but an oligarch said to be trusted with some of the Russian state’s most important tasks, including  — allegedly — interfering in the US presidential election, though Putin denied this in his interview.Prigozhin earned his mocking nickname after opening a luxury restaurant in St Petersburg that became one of Putin’s favourites.

Everyone wants to know what caused President Trump to dump national security adviser H.R. McMaster.Today’s papers are saying it was because McMaster, addressing the Munich Security Conference in February, said he had ‘incontrovertible’ evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump was quick to signal his disapproval.‘General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians,’ Trump tweeted, ‘and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems.’A Washington source tells Cockburn that McMaster’s gaffe in Munich wasn’t the reason for his retirement. In this telling, McMaster had to go because of a security breach.