When the onslaught of news is overwhelming and oppressively Right Now, I like to escape by:
This is the dominant Manichaean struggle of our age, and perhaps every age before it: shall we structure our society with a strict hierarchical system of highs and lows, with power concentrated at the top? Or shall we have an egalitarian society where truth, justice, and fairness rule the day?
There are a lot of stories, myths, and narratives centered on this question: hierarchy or fairness? Cultural wars and actual wars have been waged — numerous times throughout history.
We are fighting a new incarnation of that war now in our nation, as civil unrest spreads following yet another extrajudicial murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — who knelt on the neck of George Floyd for a jaw-dropping 8 minutes and 46 seconds: 2 minutes and 53 seconds beyond the point where Floyd lost consciousness and 1 minute and 54 seconds past the point fellow officers checked to confirm he had no pulse.
That is a staggeringly long time.
There is simply no credibility to the typical excuse that Chauvin somehow feared for his life — from an unarmed, handcuffed, prone, unconscious, and then lifeless George Floyd. Arrested over an allegedly counterfit $20 bill. Meanwhile Congress appropriates hundreds of billions and even trillions for big business and last I heard, no arrests had been made. Curious.
Psychologists like Alice Miller and Darcia Narvaez attribute this troubling mentality — this mentality that exhibits complete disregard for human life — as originating in our child-raising “techniques.” At one time corporal punishment for youth was the rule and not the exception; not uncoincidentally, the Hitler Youth of Germany had been largely raised under the “advice” of Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Shreber who advocated beating babies from a young age so the importance of obedience would be drilled into them early on.
It wasn’t until much later we learned that traumatized and neglected children display severe lesions affecting up to the 30 percent of the areas of the brain responsible for controlling emotions. In other words, “traditional” child-rearing in the fundamentalist religion style of “spare the rod, spoil the child” produces emotionally crippled adults — who tend to enact the revenge fantasies of their internal repressed rage as adults later in life. They simply need be provided with an “authorized” scapegoat.
Miller goes on to suggest the psychological survival mechanism of denial employed by abused children to survive their situation leads them to develop the kind of emotional blindness in adulthood that will turn the other way when witnessing violations of another person’s humanity — or may even be induced to carry them out. We’re all familiar with the Adolf Eichmann “defense” of why he should be exonerated for behaving like a robotic killer: “I was just following orders.”
Teaching children to be obedient or be emotionally abandoned — whether through physical abuse or emotional abuse or both — is the key to unlocking this mystery of the appeal of hierarchy and authoritarianism which is seeing a resurgence not just in the United States but around the world — especially in Europe as well. Miller calls it “poisonous pedagogy” — not just parents but many other forms of authority indoctrinate youth in this vicious cycle and benefit from the creation of obedient individuals by amassing and maintaining power.
The kicker is we are not supposed to recognize this process — and if we do, we most certainly are not supposed to speak up about it. We are supposed to remain unaware that our deference to authority is merely a construct; a thin veneer over the insecurity of power that hopes desperately to continue wielding absurd moral authority over the masses. This collective and complicitous denial keeps us all locked in the dance of abuser and abused — essentially pretending it isn’t happening all around us including in our own homes.
For all the right wing enjoys brandishing the Constitution as fundamental law, they tend to often miss the forest for the trees — that the founding fathers wrote extensively on their views and consideration in constructing a new nation towards the end of the 18th century, and that those views were decidedly against the arbitrary rule of kings and the strict striations of class as seen in the empires of Europe. They sought to get away from the cult of personality paradigm of the divine right of kings, believing that the rule of law should hold sway and that men ought to govern themselves through a political process with enough checks and balances to ensure no single branch or individual could wield too much power over others.
James Madison especially was a big believer in the “wisdom of crowds” to arrive at a better, more morally appropriate solution to legislation and problem solving. Moreover they were extremely uncomfortable with the role of slavery at the founding of the nation, despite being simultaneously apiece with the times and not entirely living up to those professed ideals.
Nevertheless, the role of ideals is to move us forward towards better times; to continually improve our individual and collective characters to get closer to living them out. Taking the ideals of fairness and equality as the guiding north star of a new nation and falling short is, in my humble opinion, still leagues farther along than giving in to the indulgent impulse towards supremacy and hierarchy and calling it a day. It’s the essence of progressivism as a vehicle for a narrative of self-growth — as opposed to the narrative hierarchy offers, which is static; dead; inert. There can be no change, no dynamism to a system which defines a priori everyone’s place in society.
Hierarchy is the politics of death.
This past week we had a serious, unironic “debate” about whether or not senicide is a reasonable “plan” for handling the coronavirus crisis. This under the pretense that the other course of action — following the advice of medical professionals and epidemiologists to stay home and socially distance ourselves to curb the spread of covid-19 — is tantamount to shutting down the economy, which is tantamount to killing more people than the virus will.
Meanwhile, Congress passed a $2 trillion relief package, one quarter of which will go to the billionaire class with precious little oversight as to how it can be spent — and still apparently no one seems to have the slightest bit of confidence that the world’s richest economy can possibly weather the storms of depressed consumer demand for even several weeks much less the potentially many months this pandemic will rage across the planet. Perhaps this reveals that The Economy simply isn’t as robust as we tell ourselves it is during better times.
The proposed Sophie’s Choice between weeks or months of physical separation and allowing many people to die all around us is a false frame.
Millions of people dying is bad for The Economy in a very similar way to how having ICE eject millions of people from the economy is bad for The Economy. Insofar as economies require a labor force, and insofar as governments require revenue from taxation to pay for the infrastructure upon which The Economy rests, having millions of people depart from them is not a pathway to improving the economy — it is the opposite.
However, perhaps The Economy itself has become a contested concept. There may be a class-based and/or ideologically-based difference of opinion on what this concept means. Perhaps there is now:
On paper, “Starving the Beast” is passed off as deeply held ideological libertarianism regarding the fundamental goodness of small government. In practice, starving beasts tend to die of preventable causes — and if governments are to retain the kind of power needed to be a check and balance on a growing hypercapitalist economy, they must indeed grow as well.
But beyond the general case, our specific circumstances of global pandemic lead us to a reasonable question: if laissez-faire capitalism and the free hand of the market is supposedly both sufficient to solve all human problems and vastly superior than the socialist hand of government at doing these things, then why are we in such a pickle? Why hasn’t the Invisible Hand managed to come up with its own solution to the mass death we are currently experiencing?
Or is the answer we might hear one that is too grim to bear — having been provided a clue this week in the grumbling of sacrificing the old to save the young — that a certain part of the political spectrum believe this is the market working as intended. That mass death is an acceptable “negative externality” of laissez-faire capitalism and that we bleeding-heart liberals ought to suck it up and grow thicker skin, rather than demand that governments step in to prevent preventable human atrocity.
Not only am I afraid of the answer — I’m afraid we’ll never get a straight answer in the world of political ketman we seem to have blundered into. In this world, right-wing elites including numerous elected officials continue to give lip service to a democracy that has been systematically hollowed out since the redoubling of the conservative movement in the 1970s to present, to currently resemble a geopolitical reality closer to that of modern Russia than to anything James Madison or Alexander Hamilton would have recognized.
It is technically possible that psychologically speaking, they themselves are actually unaware of this seismic shift in ideological views from that of democratic power and Constitutional authority to one of authoritarian rule and total technocratic control — but I think it’s more likely they’re simply not saying it out loud.
| metaphor | meaning | notes |
| pick your brain | I need to gather information that you have | |
| mental space | a way to describe how much of your thoughts are occupied by a specific topic, event, person, etc. | |
| in the back of my mind | stored for usage later | |
| out of my mind | temporarily unable to think clearly; often, drunk, stoned, high, etc. | 𤪠|
| lose my mind | go crazy; generally in a more permanent sense than “out of my mind” | |
| mind meld | to be completely in sync with someone else on an idea, plan, concept, etc. without having to communicate very extensively or at all | |
| brainless | of low intelligence; stupid; without thought | |
| on my mind | I’m thinking about you |
see also: Shoshanna Zuboff (who wrote the seminal work on surveillance capitalism), Don Norman
Some takeaways:
Example:
The machine learning algorithms can classify people into two buckets, “likely to buy tickets to Vegas” and “unlikely to” based on exposure to lots and lots of data patterns. Problem being, it’s a black box and no one — not even the computer scientists — know how it works or what it’s doing exactly.
So the AI may have discovered that bipolar individuals just about to go into mania are more susceptible to buying tickets to Vegas — and that is the segment of the population they are targeting: a vulnerable set of people prone to overspending and gambling addictions. The ethical implications of unleashing this on the world — and routinely using and optimizing it relentlessly — are staggering.
“You’re never hardcore enough for YouTube” — YouTube gives you content recommendations that are increasingly polarized and polarizing, because it turns out that preying on your reptilian brain makes you keep clicking around in the YouTube hamster wheel.
The amorality of AI — “algorithms don’t care if they’re selling shoes, or politics.” Our social, political, and cultural flows are being organized by these persuasion architectures — organized for profit; not for the collective good, not for public interests, not subject to our political will anymore. These powerful surveillance capitalism tools are running mostly unchecked, with little oversight and with few people minding the ethics of the stores of essentially a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires.
Intent doesn’t matter — good intentions aren’t enough; it’s the structure and business models that matter. Facebook isn’t a half trillion dollar con: its value is in its highly effective persuasion power, which is highly troubling and concerning in a supposedly democratic society. Mark Zuckerberg may even ultimately mean well (…debatable), but it doesn’t excuse the railroading over numerous obviously negative externalities resulting from the unchecked power of Facebook in not only the U.S., but in countries around the world including highly volatile domains.
Extremism benefits demagogues — Oppressive regimes both come to power by and benefit from political extremism; from whipping up citizens into a frenzy, often against each other as much as against perceived external or internal enemies. Our data and attention are now for sale to the highest bidding authoritarians and demagogues around the world — enabling them to use AI against us in election after election and PR campaign after PR campaign. We gave foreign dictators even greater powers to influence and persuade us in ways that benefit them at the expense of our own self-interest.
When usability pioneers have All the Feels about the nature of our creeping technological dystopia, how we got here, and what we might need to do to right the ship, it’s wise to pay attention. Don Norman’s preaching resonated with my choir, and they’ve asked me to sing a summary song of our people in bulleted list format:
Is it all bleak, Don?! His answer is clear: “yes, maybe, no.” He demurs on positing a definitive answer to all of these issues, but he doesn’t really mince words about a “hunch” that it may in fact involve burning it all down and starting over again.
Pointing to evolution, Norman notes that we cannot eke radical innovation out of incremental changes — and that when radical change does happen it is often imposed unexpectedly from the outside in the form of catastrophic events. Perhaps if we can’t manage to Marie Kondo our way to a more joyful internet, we’ll have to pray for Armageddon soon…?! đą
This list casts a wide net in enumerating the various principals of interest to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Plus, don’t miss the RussiaGate Lexicon — and please note these are both works in progress and being updated frequently as new details emerge about Putin’s revanchist influence in American politics.
| Huma Abedin | Top aide to Hillary Clinton |
| — | — |
| ABLV | One of the largest private banks in Latvia |
| — | — |
| Roman Abramovich | Russian steel magnate whose Evraz company was given the green light to supply steel to DAPL by the Trump administration |
| — | — |
| ACU Strategic Partners | A company seeking to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East in partnership with a sanctioned Russia company; Mike Flynn was working for them without having disclosed it to the US government as required. |
| — | — |
| Aeroflot | |
| — | — |
| Aras Agalarov | Emin’s father; a wealthy Russian-Azerbaijani oligarch who has received lucrative construction contracts from the Kremlin. Known as “Putin’s Builder” |
| — | — |
| Emin Agalarov | Popular Russian-Azerbaijani singer and businessperson who may have facilitated a handoff of hacked information to Donald Trump Jr via surrogates |
| — | — |
| Rinat Akhmetov | Ukranian steel magnate who brokered the relationship between Paul Manafort and defeated presidential candidate Victor Yanukovich |
| — | — |
| Rinat Akhmetshin | Former Soviety spy who attending the June 9 meeting in Trump Tower between Don Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya |
| — | — |
| Vagit Alekperov | CEO of Lukoil, Russia’s second largest oil and gas company, that sought the services offered by Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica |
| Vagit Alekperov | CEO of Lukoil, Russia’s second largest oil and gas company, that sought the services offered by Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica |
| — | — |
| Alfa Bank / Alfa Group | Largest private commercial bank in Russia, that reportedly had a mysterious secret server connection to the Trump Organization during the campaign. The head of Alfa Group is the father-in-law of Dutch lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, currently serving 30 days in federal prison after being indicted by the FBI in the Mueller investigation. |
| — | — |
| Leyla Aliyeva | Wife of Emin Agalarov and daughter of the president of Ajerbaijan. |
| — | — |
| Dmitri Alperovich | Head of Crowdstrike, the US security firm that first broke the results of the DNC hack investigation, concluding the Russian military intelligence agency was behind it. |
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| @America_1st_ | IRA-controlled Twitter account, an anti-immigration persona with 24,000 followers |
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| American Media | Helped bury stories portraying Trump in a bad light before the election, via catch and kill methodology among others |
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| Anbang Insurance | |
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| Michael Anton | Flight 93 |
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| Apple | The House might come after messaging records for principals. |
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| Tevfik Arif | co-founder of Bayrock and Kazakh-born Soviet official turned real estate tycoon |
| — | — |
| Andrey Artemenko | Member of the Ukranian parliament who says Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen and business crony Felix Sater confirmed the White House received his âpeace proposalâ (suggesting Russia âleaseâ the country for 100 years) |
| — | — |
| Julian Assange | Editor-in-chief of Wikileaks and former hacker from Australia, currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on the lam from rape charges in Sweden; he is suspected of coordinating with the Russian government on the cyber attack on the American election in 2016. |
| — | — |
| Artem Avetisyan | Russian banker and consultant who bought Bank of Cyprus’s Russian-based businesseses; a transaction overseen by Wilbur Ross |
| — | — |
| Mykola Azarov | Former Prime Minister of Ukraine who was ousted in the Maidan revolution along with President Viktor Yanukovych. |
| — | — |
| Bank of Cyprus | |
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| Steve Bannon | |
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| Andrey Baranov | Head of investor relations for Rosneft who met with Carter Page in Moscow after his 2016 speech. |
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| Tom Barrack | |
| — | — |
| Alan Baskaev | Worked at the Internet Research Agency |
| — | — |
| Fabien Baussart | Cooperated with Russia in the Syrian civil war and nominated Putin for a Nobel Peace Prize; Donald Trump, Jr. spoke at an event held by Baussart’s French think tank. |
| — | — |
| Bayrock Group | Employed Felix Sater for a number of shady real estate dealings involving Mr Trump. Founded by Tevfik Arif, a Russian oligarch. |
| — | — |
| Being Patriotic | An IRA-controlled Facebook group that bought ads in support of the Trump campaign, and had over 200,000 followers by the time it was finally deactivated in mid-2017 |
| — | — |
| Brian Benczkowski | Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ’s criminal division; once represented a Putin-tied Russian bank |
| — | — |
| Berserk Bear | Hacker group |
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| Jeffrey Berman | |
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| Leonid Bershidsky | Well-known journalist who was the founding editor of Russiaâs top business daily, Vedomosti, as well as the first publisher of the Russian edition of Forbes; left the country during the Brain Drain. âThe Kremlin doesnât care because it doesnât consider the likes of me Russiaâs best and brightest,â he told me by email after his departure to Germany in the summer of 2014. âTo them, weâre the traitors, the fifth column.â |
| — | — |
| Vitaly Bespalov | 26-year-old former worker at the Internet Research Agency in Russia who has spoken to the US media about his experiences in the “factory of lies” |
| — | — |
| Preet Bharara | U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting the Prevezon Holdings case when he was fired by Trump, shortly after which the huge case about to go to trial abruptly settled. |
| — | — |
| Black Fist | IRA-controlled persona claiming to want to teach African-Americans self-defense to protect themselves when contacted by police, that hired an actual self-defense instructor in NY to offer classes sponsored by Black Fist |
| — | — |
| Black Matters US | IRA-controlled account posing as grassroots activists |
| — | — |
| Black Sea Cable | |
| — | — |
| Darren Blanton | his company Colt Ventures provided data management services to the Trump campaign |
| — | — |
| Tony Blinken | John Kerry’s deputy secretary of state under Obama |
| — | — |
| Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva | Worked for the Internet Research Agency from at least April 2014 to at least July 2014; she served on the translator project and oversaw the group’s data analysis operations. She is one of the operatives who traveled to the United States to gather intel. |
| — | — |
| Mikhail Bogdanov | Russian deputy foreign minister |
| — | — |
| Gen. Alexander Bortnikov | Director of FSB circa 2015 |
| — | — |
| Maria Anatolyevna Bovda | Worked for the Internet Research Agency from at least November 2013 to at least October 2014. She was at one time head of the translator project, along with other positions. |
| — | — |
| Donna Brazile | |
| — | — |
| John Brennan | Acting CIA director under Obama; one of the 3 who brief Trump and Obama about the Russian attack on Election 2016 |
| — | — |
| Bridges LLC | LLC begun by Maria Butina and Paul Erickson in South Dakota |
| — | — |
| Elliot Broidy | Major Trump campaign donor and Deputy Finance Chair of the RNC, who suspiciously took hundreds of millions of dollars from the UAE and was working on a business deal with the corrupt Prime Minister of Malaysia implicated in a heist of $4.5 billion dollars. Had himself been charged with felony bribery, ended up turning state’s witness, plea-bargained his case down to a misdimeanor while those he bribed went to prison. Also, he was reportedly negotiating a deal wherein he stood to benefit to the tune of $75 million, to drop the Feds’ case into the Malaysian theft. |
| — | — |
| William Browder | Founder of Hermitage Capital, who worked with Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to uncover a $230 million money laundering scheme from Prevezon Holdings into NYC real estate. He has sought justice for the murder of Magnitsky in 2009. |
| — | — |
| Mikhail Leonidivich Burchik | One of the 13 Russian nationals indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018, in connection with the Internet Research Agency’s attack on the U.S. 2016 election. Burchik was Executive Director, the #2 in the organization, from at least March 2014. |
| — | — |
| Christopher Bancroft Burnham | |
| — | — |
| Sen. Richard Burr | (R-NC) and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the committees in Congress conducting Russia investigations |
| — | — |
| Richard Burt | Helped Trump write his first foreign policy speech |
| — | — |
| Evgeny Buryakov | |
| — | — |
| Maria Butina | “Personal assistant” to Alexander Torshin, she claims to have started several gun rights organizations in Russia |
| — | — |
| Buzzfeed | Originally broke the story of the Steele dossier and published what of it they had. |
| — | — |
| Mikhail Bystrov | One of the 13 Russians indicted by Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel in February 2018, Bystrov was General Director — the organization’s highest-ranking position — by April 2014. |
| — | — |
| Matthew Calamari | |
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| Cambridge Analytica | Data analytics company that worked for the Trump campaign and has been indicted in the UK for data theft. |
| — | — |
| Michael Caputo | Member of Trump’s campaign team, in charge of communications for New York. Left the campaign after voicing approval of the installation of Paul Manafort, replacing Corey Lewandowski as Trump’s campaign manager. |
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| Cendyn | Cloud computing company that hosted the Trump Organization and may have information on the Alfa Bank link during the campaign |
| — | — |
| Center for Political and Foreign Affairs | French right-wing group that hosted a Trump trip to Paris during the home stretch of the campaign |
| — | — |
| Mike Cernovich | Alt-Right personality in the U.S. who lives in Orange County, CA |
| — | — |
| Jason Chaffetz | Bowing out of politics after announcing a move to Fox and whining about the cost of living as a Senator |
| — | — |
| Yuri Chaika | Russian prosecutor general |
| — | — |
| James Clapper | Director of National Intelligence under Obama; one of the 3 who brief Trump and Obama about the Russian attack on Election 2016 |
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| Bill Clinton | |
| — | — |
| Hillary Clinton | |
| — | — |
| Dan Coates | Director of National Intelligence who testified that there is no doubt Russia sees its 2016 efforts as having been successful. |
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| Michael Cohen | Trump’s personal lawyer. Convicted of various federal crimes including campaign finance violations; sentenced to 3 years in prison. |
| — | — |
| Roy Cohn | Trump’s mentor and ruthless, vicious lawyer |
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| Susan Collins (R-ME) | Senator from Maine who has been a voice of moderation within the Republican-controlled Senate, siding several times with the Democrats and voting against her own party. |
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| James Comey | Being fired by Donald Trump as the FBI Director |
| — | — |
| Mike Conaway | new leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe after the recusal of Devin Nunes |
| — | — |
| Concord Catering | Company owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, known to be nicknamed “Putin’s Chef” and inside the Russian president’s inner circle. |
| — | — |
| Sam Clovis | |
| — | — |
| Colt Ventures | provided data management services to the Trump campaign, and an investor in VizSense — a social media company who worked reportedly for the campaign and for Michael Flynn |
| — | — |
| Columbus Nova | |
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| Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) | Leader of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the Congressional committees investigating the Russia scandal |
| — | — |
| Concord Management and Consulting | |
| — | — |
| George Conway | Husband of Kellyanne Conway, a lawyer who has represented a corporation accused of bribing Russian officials |
| — | — |
| Kellyanne Conway | |
| — | — |
| Rep. John Conyers | Criticized the firing of Sally Yates: “If dedicated government officials deem [Trump’s] directives to be unlawful and unconstitutional, he will simply fire them as if government is a reality show.” |
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| Alex Copson | Managing director of ACU Strategic Partners, a firm Mike Flynn was consulting for regarding building nuclear power plants in the Middle East. |
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| Mark Corallo | |
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| Jerome Corsi | Intermediary between Roger Stone and Wikileaks, an arm of the Russian intelligence apparatus |
| — | — |
| Ed Cox | New York Republican Party Chairman and son-in-law of Richard Nixon who recommends Carter Page to the Trump campaign |
| — | — |
| Randolph “Randy” Credico | Roger Stone’s publicly identified intermediary between himself and Julian Assange of Wikileaks. When subpoena’d by Congress, he pled the Fifth. |
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| Crocus Group | Real estate developmenr firm owned by the Agalarovs, that secured the Moscow location for Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant |
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| Crowdstrike | One of the US private security contractors who implicated the Russians in the hack of the DNC servers. |
| — | — |
| Olivia Culpo | The reigning Miss Universe at the time of the 2013 Moscow pageant (and former Miss USA, and noted Trump favorite) |
| — | — |
| Rep. Elijah Cummings | ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, one of the first to request an investigation into Michael Flynn |
| — | — |
| Michael Daniel | White House director of cybersecurity |
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| Stormy Daniels | |
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| Keith Davidson | |
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| Davis Manifort Partners, Inc. (DMP) | Political consulting company created by Paul Manafort in 2005. |
| — | — |
| DCLeaks | A cutout of the GRU, this account directly released and coordinated with Wikileaks to release more widely the stolen emails from Clinton, the DNC, and the DCCC |
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| Rick Dearborn | |
| — | — |
| Definers Public Affairs | GOP strategy firm hired by Facebook to besmirch its rivals and tar them with accusations of being tied to George Soros |
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| Wendi Deng | Ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, friend of Ivanka Trump, and friend of Russian oligarhcs + Putin (rumored to be Putins’ girlfriend) |
| — | — |
| Diana Denman | |
| — | — |
| Department of Justice | |
| — | — |
| Oleg Deripaska | Russian billionaire and Kremlin insider barred from the US due to organized crime links [contact w/Paul Manafort] |
| — | — |
| Deutsche Bank | Both the Risk Division’s Goup Risk Office and Credit Risk Management teams are under scrutiny from House Democrats at the HPSCI for due diligence on Trump transactions that have anything to do with the bank’s own confirmed history of laundering Russian money. |
| — | — |
| Sheri Dillon | |
| — | — |
| Igor Diveykin | |
| — | — |
| Kirill Dmitriev | Chief executive of the state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund, their sovereign wealth fund, who met with Erik Prince at a bar in the Seychelles, with George Nader present. |
| — | — |
| — | — |
| DMP International, LLC (DMI) | Company started by Paul Manafort in 2011 to consult, lobby, and do PR for Ukranian dictator Victor Yanukovich, whom Manafort helped get elected in 2010 until fleeing the country in 2014. |
| — | — |
| Dmitry Dokuchaev | FSB handler of Russian DNC hacker |
| — | — |
| Annie Donaldson | |
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| Donbas region | Area of Ukraine where a counter-revolution emerged after students ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and overthrew the government. |
| — | — |
| Don’t Shoot Us | An IRA-controlled Facebook group with more than 250,000 followers by the time it was deactivated in mid-2017 |
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| Jack Dorsey | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter and Square |
| — | — |
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| Alexander Downer | Top Australian diplomat in Britain, who had drinks with George Papadopolous in London the night he blabbed about the Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton. |
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| DragonFly | Hacker group |
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| Alexander Dugin | Russia’s most well-known neo-fascist ideologue, & Kremlin confidant |
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| Pavel Durov | Founder of the successful VKontakte social network website, often described as Russiaâs Facebook. Durov said he had been forced out of the company over his refusal to co-operate with the security services, and that his company was now under the âfull controlâ of Kremlin-friendly figures |
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| Arkady Dvorkovich | |
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| Josh Earnest | Obama White House press secretary in 2016 |
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| Fedor Emelianenko | MMA star, former Trump business partner, and friend of Putin |
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| En+ Group Plc | One of Oleg Deripaska’s companies whose sanctions were lifted by the Trump administration. |
| — | — |
| Energetic Bear | Hacker group connected to the Kremlin |
| — | — |
| Boris Epshteyn | |
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| Paul Erickson | Attempted to set up a backchannel between the NRA and the Russian government during the Trump campaign. |
| — | — |
| Oleg Erovinkin | ex-KGB chief linked to helping the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump, reportedly found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day |
| — | — |
| European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (the Centre) | NGO entity created by Manafort and Gates in Belgium in 2012 to serve as an “arm’s length” front for their work with Yanukovich. |
| — | — |
| EuroSibEnergo JSC | One of Oleg Deripaska’s companies whose sanctions were lifted by the Trump administration. |
| — | — |
| — | — |
| FAN (Federal Agency of News) | Fictional corporate twin entity to the IRA (indicted by Mueller) that is suing Facebook on First Amendment grounds… surely to go up to a COTUS tipped by Kavangaugh, as all such hyper-controversial cases are liable to be?!?! |
| — | — |
| Fancy Bear | Hacked Democratic Party emails during the 2016 US presidential election; also hacked MAcros campaign emails in France. |
| — | — |
| Nigel Farage | Former UKIP leader now under investigation for ties to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange |
| — | — |
| FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) | Investigation of domestic terror units and criminal cells, as well as foreign criminal groups within the U.S. |
| — | — |
| Federal Assembly | Russian Parliament |
| — | — |
| Federal Election Commission (FEC) | Overseeing the process generally of national and state elections |
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| Diane Feinstein | US Senator from California who published Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS’s transcript of testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. |
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| FireEye | Security firm |
| — | — |
| Dmitry Firtash | Ukranian oligarch and nagural gas magnate who got sweetheart deals within Putin’s inner circle |
| — | — |
| — | — |
| Marc Elias | |
| — | — |
| Jon Finer | John Kerry’s chief of staff |
| — | — |
| — | — |
| FL Group | Icelandic hedge fund with ties to Putin, that invested in Trump Soho via FBI informant and convicted felon Sal Lauria |
| — | — |
| Michael Flynn | As the new NSA director he advocated military intervention in the Middle East and an alliance with Russia; later it turned out he’d accepted undisclosed payments from the Rurkish government and lied about undisclosed meetings with the Russian Ambassador, î¤Sergey Kislyak |
| — | — |
| Flynn Intel Group | |
| — | — |
| Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts | Hosted the meeting in the Seychelles between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund |
| — | — |
| Fox News | |
| — | — |
| Free Beacon | see: Washington Free Beacon |
| — | — |
| Mikhail Maratovich Fridman | invested $200m in Uber (?) |
| — | — |
| Peter Fritsch | |
| — | — |
| Frontier Services Group | Erik Prince’s company, who has ignored document requests from Congress relating to the meeting in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev |
| — | — |
| FSB | the Russian Federal Security Service |
| — | — |
| Fusion GPS | Political research firm hired first by conservative billionaire, later by the Clinton campaign, that ultimately led to the Steele dossier. |
| — | — |
| Dmitry Fyodorov | Worked at the Internet Research Agency before being employed at Facebook |
| — | — |
| Michael Gaeta | |
| — | — |
| Gang of Eight | |
| — | — |
| Alan Garten | |
| — | — |
| Rick Gates | Paul Manafort’s right hand man, indicted along with the former Trump campaign manager for a number of federal crimes from money laundering to illegal foreign lobbying and tax evasion. |
| — | — |
| Gazeta.ru | |
| — | — |
| Gazprom | Russia’s energy monopolgy and largest gas company |
| — | — |
| General Services Administration | |
| — | — |
| Georgia | Former Soviet state |
| — | — |
| Gerasimov | Russian General who wrote seminal asymmetric warfare doc |
| — | — |
| Masha Gessen | Journalist and author who has lived extensively in Russia and studied the rise of Putin |
| — | — |
| Igor Girkin | Leader of the Ukranian pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, he is alleged to have been connected to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 |
| — | — |
| Rudy Giuliani | Publicly “predicted” the Comey “re-opening” of Clinton’s emails when the Anthony Weiner laptop was found |
| — | — |
| Glavplakat | |
| — | — |
| Nikolai Glushkov | Former Boris Berezovsky associate turned up murdered in the UK, 8 days after the poisoning and attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in London. |
| — | — |
| Richard Goettlich | |
| — | — |
| Rob Goldstone | Publicist of Russian-Azerbaijani singer Emin Agalarov who set up the June 9 meeting between Don Jr, Kushner, Manafort, and the Russians |
| — | — |
| Online search company whose system was gamed, hacked, or perhaps simply used intentionally to sow disinformation to some of the most vulnerable citizen targets, as identified by stolen and purchased predictive user data. | |
| — | — |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | Glasnost |
| — | — |
| Sergei Gordeev | |
| — | — |
| J.D. Gordon | |
| — | — |
| Sebastian Gorka | Former counterterrorism analyst for Fox News who joined the administration as an adviser; his ties to the Hungarian right had come increasingly under scrutiny before his departure from the White House. Prior to immigrating to the United States, Gorka had mounted an unsuccessful political career in Hungary and, in doing so, once expressed support for a far-right militia in the country. |
| — | — |
| Sergey Gorkov | |
| — | — |
| Nikolai Gorokhov | |
| — | — |
| Government Accountability Office | A watchdog organization for financial and other high-profile crimes within the U.S. |
| — | — |
| Trey Gowdy | (R-SC) Chair of the House Oversight Committee |
| — | — |
| Rhona Graff | |
| — | — |
| Sen. Chuck Grassley | (R-IA) |
| — | — |
| GRU | Soviety military intelligence services |
| — | — |
| GSA | Has been asserted by TFA that documents were “unlawfully” given to the Special Counsel’s Office by this agency, including parts susceptible to privilege. |
| — | — |
| Guccifer 2.0 | A cutout of the GRU, this account directly released and coordinated with Wikileaks to release more widely the stolen emails from Clinton, the DNC, and the DCCC |
| — | — |
| Shane Hable | Hillary for America IT chief |
| — | — |
| Alex Halderman | Testified before the House Intelligence Committee on the probable ability of the Russians to hack an election |
| — | — |
| Sean Hannity | Made claims on his show that the Steele dossier launched the Russia probe, which isn’t accurate. |
| — | — |
| Hapsburg group | Informal name given to the set of former European politicians whom Paul Manafort and Rick Gates paid to espouse pro-Yanukovich talking points. |
| — | — |
| Charles Harder | Representing Trump in the Stormy Daniels case; also represented Terry Bolea in the Gawker trial |
| — | — |
| Rep. Denny Heck (D-WA) | Member of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the Congressional committees investigating the Russia scandal |
| — | — |
| Hermitage Capital Management | The investment fund client of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a $230 million money laundering scheme through New York real estate via Prevezon, a Russian holding company. |
| — | — |
| Hope Hicks | Yet another former White House Communications Director, she resigned the day after giving 9 hours of testimony on the Hill to the House Intelligence Committee. Til then she had been the longest-running current member of the Trump campaign. |
| — | — |
| Rick Hohlt | |
| — | — |
| Dylan Howard | |
| — | — |
| Jon Huntsman | US Ambassador to Russia |
| — | — |
| William Hurd | Paul Erickson’s lawyer |
| — | — |
| Jon Iadonisi | Tied to VizSense Inc. and White Canvas Group, 2 firms that did business with Michael Flynn |
| — | — |
| Ivan Ilyin | Christian fascist philosopher who inspired much of Vladimir Putin’s political philosophy |
| — | — |
| Imgur | Platform used by the Russian disinformation campaign that House Democrats want to subpoena |
| — | — |
| Platform used by the Russian disinformation campaign that House Democrats want to subpoena the transition team for records of | |
| — | — |
| Andrew Intrater | |
| — | — |
| IRA (Internet Research Agency) | Well-known troll farm with ties to the Kremlin, funded and run by Russian oligarch and “Putin’s Chef” Yevgeniy Prigozhin (who also oversees private mercenary military forces in Syria and Ukraine. |
| — | — |
| Iron Liberty | |
| — | — |
| Iskra | The main Bolshevik newspaper in the early 20th century |
| — | — |
| Darrell Issa | |
| — | — |
| Viktor Ivanov | One of Putin’s closest allies, he’s the head of anti-narcotics in Russia; has spoken out against marijuana legalization in the US (!) |
| — | — |
| @jenn_abrams | IRA-controlled Twitter account claiming to be a Virginian Trump supporter with 70,000 followers |
| — | — |
| Ramzan Kadyrov | Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed leader, who is thought to be behind the murder of Putin critic and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Kadyrov received a medal from Putin the month after Nemtsov’s murder. |
| — | — |
| Brittany Kaiser | |
| — | — |
| Oleg Kalugin | Former KGB agent who became a U.S. citizen and grew critical of Putin’s regime. |
| — | — |
| Denis Katsyv | Sole shareholder of Prevezon, implicated in the $230m theft of Russian taxpayer dollars |
| — | — |
| Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze | 8th person at Don Jr’s June 9 meeting; VP at Crocus Group, owned by Aras Agalarov â a lawyer for the Russian real estate firm, he has been identified by the Government Accountability Office as part of a large ring of Russian money-laundering operations. |
| — | — |
| Robert Kelner | Mike Flynn’s lawyer |
| — | — |
| Brian Kemp | Georgia secretary of state who bristled at the idea of DHS’s warning about the election integrity and attempts to hack voter registration |
| — | — |
| John Kerry | Secretary of State under Obama from 2013 to 2018 |
| — | — |
| Ketchum | Western PR firm that helps place pro-Russian op-eds in Western media (like Putin’s in NYTimes on 9/11/13) |
| — | — |
| KGB | The Soviet secret service, renowned for ruthlessness and duplicity |
| — | — |
| Eva Khan | Daughter of a Russian oligarch, married to Alex van der Zwaan — the first to go to prison in the Mueller investigation. |
| — | — |
| German Khan | Russian oligarch billionaire, principal of Alfa Bank (Russia’s largest privste bank) and the father-in-law of Alex van der Zwaan who has pleaded guilty to MUeller’s team. |
| — | — |
| Mikhail Khodorkovsky | Ex-oil tycoon unexpectedly freed by Putin ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics |
| — | — |
| Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova | FAN’s chief accountant and an indictee under Mueller’s Russian investigation |
| — | — |
| Konstantin Kilimnik | Paul Manafort’s business associate in the Ukraine |
| — | — |
| Sergey Kislyak | Russian Ambassador who spoke with î¤Mike Flynn [tracker] about lifting sanctions in undisclosed series of meetings |
| — | — |
| KLS Research LLC | Company formed by Peter Smith to facilitate and manage his question to find Hillary’s missing emails. |
| — | — |
| Artem Klyushin | Young Russian billionaire who claims to have been instrumental in getting Trump elected. |
| — | — |
| Koala | |
| — | — |
| Aleksandr Kogan | Cambridge Analytica researcher who oversaw the harvesting of 50 million Facebook user accounts’ info who also moonlighted as a lecturer at St. Petersburg University |
| — | — |
| Kommersant | Long-respected business newspaper purchased by pro-Kremlin oligarch Alisher Usmanov |
| — | — |
| Komsomol | Leninist Youth League organization for Communists aged 14 to 28 in the late 80s & early 90s |
| — | — |
| Konstantin Kosachev | |
| — | — |
| Andrei Kostin | CEO of VTB, one of the largest Russian banks (and under US sanctions) |
| — | — |
| BĂŠla Kovacs (KGBĂŠla) | One of the leaders of Jobbik, Hungary’s pro-Putin rightist party, who is accused of being a Russian spy. |
| — | — |
| Dmitry Kovtun | One of the two main suspects in the UK’s murder investigation case of former FSB/KGB spy turned informant and expat dissident, Alexander Litvinenko — killed by polonium-210 poisoning after having tea with the two then-current KGB officers in November, 2006. |
| — | — |
| Vladimir Kozhin | Senior Putin aide who attended the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in lieu of Putin. |
| — | — |
| Kozy Bear | The Dutch intelligence community alerted the DNC way back in 2015 that they had been hacked back in 2014. |
| — | — |
| The Kremlin | |
| — | — |
| Jody Kriss | Former Bayrock partner who filed a lawsuit in January, 2017 alleging tax evasion of as much as $250 million in income + Russian money laundering |
| — | — |
| Aleksandra Krylova | Served as Director and 3rd highest employee within the Internet Research Agency, from at least September 2013. She was one of two employees of the IRA who obtained visas and entered the United States on June 4, 2014. |
| — | — |
| Mikhail Kulagin | Russian diplomat recalled to Russia, fearing his cover would be blown re: heavy involvement in the 2016 election, including the veterans’ pensions ruse |
| — | — |
| Charles Kushner | Father of Jared, the elder Kushner committed campaign fraud, blackmailed his own sister, and spent time in federal prison before re-emerging to help run the family business and, of course, suck at the teat of the Presidency |
| — | — |
| Jared Kushner | The evil son-in-law so evil he owned a billion dollar building at 666 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan |
| — | — |
| Kushner Companies | |
| — | — |
| David Laufman | Former chief of the DOJ’s Counterintelligence & Export Control Section |
| — | — |
| Sal Lauria | FBI informant and convicted felon who brokered a $150 million deal for Sater with FL Group, an Icelandic hedge fund tied to Putin that also invested in the Trump Soho project |
| — | — |
| Sergei Lavrov | Russian Foreign Minister |
| — | — |
| Platon Lebedev | |
| — | — |
| Marie Le Pen | head of the French far-Right party |
| — | — |
| Pyotr Levashov | Russian hacker who ran the sprawling Kelihos botnet, a massive spam and scam network; indicted by a US grand jury on 4/21/17 |
| — | — |
| Lenta.ru | |
| — | — |
| Lev Leviev | Russian “king of diamonds” who was a partner in Prevezon (involved in the Magnistsky-exposed money laundering of $230m in Russian tax dollars) and sold several floors of the NYTimes building in Manhattan to Jared Kushner |
| — | — |
| Ruslan Leviyev | Former police investigator from the Siberian city of Surgut, who left the force after becoming disgusted by the âculture of corruptionâ he had witnessed, and moved to Moscow in 2009. Inspired, like so many others, by the anti-Putin protests of 2011â12, Leviyev, a tattooed 29-year-old, is now one of the countryâs top âsocial media dissidentsâ. |
| — | — |
| Val Levitan | Russian Canadian CEO of developer Talon (Trump Toronto); had no previous experience in real estate or construction |
| — | — |
| Corey Lewandowski | Donald Trump’s first campaign manager; succeeded by Paul Manafort. |
| — | — |
| Robert LiButti | Alleged mobster and associate of John Gotti, who is on video with Trump in the 80s at a WrestleMania event |
| — | — |
| Ronald Lieberman | |
| — | — |
| Vladimir Lisin | Russian steel mogul who made $830m in 3 days after the election |
| — | — |
| Aleksandr Litvinenko | former Russian FSB agent who informed on Putin’s connections to the Russian mafia and was assassinated by polonium-210 poisoning in 2006 |
| — | — |
| Marina Litvinenko | |
| — | — |
| Oleg Lobov | Ties to the Romneys?! |
| — | — |
| Andrey Lugovoy | One of the two main suspects in the UK’s murder investigation case of former FSB/KGB spy turned informant and expat dissident, Alexander Litvinenko — killed by polonium-210 poisoning after having tea with the two then-current KGB officers in November, 2006. Lugovoy is currently a sitting member of the Russian parliament: deputy of the State Duma. |
| — | — |
| Lukoil | Russia’s second largest oil company after Rosneft, they contracted with Trump data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica |
| — | — |
| Loretta Lynch | US Attorney General under Barack Obama |
| — | — |
| Lyovochin | |
| — | — |
| Rachel Maddow | Host of the most popular nighttime news show on MSNBC; she’s been following the Russia story aggressively for over a year in meticulously detailed fashion. |
| — | — |
| Sergei Magnitsky | lawyer who tried to expose the theft of $230 million of Russian taxpayers’ money by Prevezon Holdings (laundered into NYC real estate) before being arrested and allegedly tortured prior to his death in a Moscow prison in 2009; the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act is a landmark human rights act named after him. |
| — | — |
| Main Intelligence Directorate | Division of the GRU that carried out the second half of the Russian attack on our democracy — cyber intrusions and hacking of stolen materials from the Clinton campaign, disseminated by WikiLeaks |
| — | — |
| Ted Malloch | |
| — | — |
| Jason Maloni | |
| — | — |
| Paul Manafort | |
| — | — |
| Jeanette Manfra | Head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security who confirmed to NBC News that the Russians successfully infiltrated “an exceptionally small number” of voter regidstration rolls in 21 states. |
| — | — |
| @march_for_trump | IRA-controlled accouunt created in May 2016 to promote IRA-organized rallies in support of the Trump Campaign |
| — | — |
| John Mashburn | |
| — | — |
| John McCain | |
| — | — |
| KT McFarland | Deputy Nartional Security Advisor under Mike Flynn. Asked to step down by HR McMaster. |
| — | — |
| Don McGahn | White House counsel from XXXX-XXXX |
| — | — |
| Evan McMullen | |
| — | — |
| Medium | Social media and blogging community frequented by the Russians during their efforts at sowing propaganda and discord during the American 2016 Presidential election. |
| — | — |
| Dmitry Medvedev | Russian Prime Minister |
| — | — |
| Menatep | |
| — | — |
| Rebecca Mercer | |
| — | — |
| Robert Mercer | Shadowy billionaire Trump backer and donor who also backs Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and John Bolton. |
| — | — |
| Met Life Insurance | Holds Trump debt |
| — | — |
| MI6 | British intelligence agency; the rough equivalent of the American CIA. |
| — | — |
| Joseph Mifsud | Director of the London Academy of Diplomacy who meets with George Papadopoulos in Italy. |
| — | — |
| Leonid Mikhelson | part owner of Novatek who made $1.9b from the stock pop post-Trump |
| — | — |
| Military Unit 26165 | GRU cyberunit dedicated to targeting military, politival, governmental, and non-governmental organizations outside of Russia, including the U.S. Separate from this investigation, Unit 26165 was charged by a grad jury for hacking the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the World Doping Agency, and other international sport associations. |
| — | — |
| Military Unit 74455 | A GRU unit engaged in cyber operations, including assisting in the release of the documents stolen by Unit 26165, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU. This unit also hacked computers belonging to the stater boards of elections, secretaries of state, and U.S. companies supplying software and other technology related to elections. |
| — | — |
| Stephen Miller | Aggressively anti-immigrant advisor to Trump, co-writing many of his most vitriolic speeches |
| — | — |
| Sergei Millian | Trump associate, head of the Russian-American chamber of commerce, and one of the sources of the Steele dossier |
| — | — |
| Marat Mindiyarov | Former worker at the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, who told the Western press what it was like inside the farm. |
| — | — |
| Semion Mogilevich | Notorious mobster |
| — | — |
| Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan | The crown prince of Abu Dhabi. |
| — | — |
| Mossack Fonseca | World’s fourth largest offshore law firm, whose files were published as the Panama Papers in a German newspaper |
| — | — |
| Robert Mueller | Special Counsel at the DOJ, investigating RussiaGate |
| — | — |
| MVD | Ministry of Internal Affairs; supervises all police, prisons, and “public order militias” |
| — | — |
| George Nader | Lebanese-American businessman who lobbies for the UAE, and was at the meeting in the Seychelles with Erik Prince and the Russians |
| — | — |
| Alexsei Navalny | Putin critic and activist blogger; has been arrested, charged, & sentenced several times (but recognized as a political prisoner by NGOs) |
| — | — |
| Boris Nemtsov | Putin critic and opposition politician who was shot dead in Moscow in 2015 by a member of the Chechen security forces |
| — | — |
| New Island | Restaurant of Yevgeny Prigozhin that became a favorite of Putin’s, netting Mr Prigozhin lucrative contracts for shady operations as “Putin’s Chef” |
| — | — |
| Newsru.com | |
| — | — |
| Alexander Nix | CEO of Trump data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica |
| — | — |
| NKVD | a forerunner to the KGB under Stalin |
| — | — |
| NRA | Hosted a number of conduits between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals, particularly Russian billionaires and oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin. |
| — | — |
| NSA (National Security Agency) | |
| — | — |
| Sam Nunberg | Former Trump aide who made a series of bizarre statements on cable TV before testifying to Robert Mueller’s team |
| — | — |
| Devin Nunes | |
| — | — |
| NY Observer | Website owned by Jarek Kushner as part of Observer Media |
| — | — |
| Observer Media | Media company owned by Jared Kushner. |
| — | — |
| Keith Olbermann | American TV host |
| — | — |
| Opposition Bloc | Successor ruling party in Ukraine after Victor Yanukovich fled to Moscow and his Party of Regions toppled. |
| — | — |
| Viktor Orban | President of Hungary, noted for his pro-Putin and anti-refugee beliefs |
| — | — |
| Orbis | Steele’s research firm |
| — | — |
| Alex Oronov | dead â Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law (brother of Trump’s personal lawyer |
| — | — |
| Ostankino | Russia’s TV network |
| — | — |
| Ozero Cooperative | |
| — | — |
| Pacific Life Insurance | Holds Trump debt |
| — | — |
| Carter Page | |
| — | — |
| @Pamela_Moore13 | IRA-controlled Twitter account claiming to be a Texan Trump supporter with 70,000 followers |
| — | — |
| George Papadopoulos | Member of the Trump campaign who has pled guilty in the Robert Mueller investigation and flipped to become a cooperating witness. Will serve jail time. |
| — | — |
| Brad Parscale | Head of the Trump campaign’s digital operation |
| — | — |
| Party of Regions | Ukranian political party run by Victor Yanukovych, the pro-Putin dictator ushered into power by Paul Manafort. |
| — | — |
| Stefan Passantino | |
| — | — |
| Sam Patten | |
| — | — |
| PBK | |
| — | — |
| David Pecker | Helped American Media bury stories unfavorable to Trump leading up to the election — a campaign contribution violation, not to mention a moral violation |
| — | — |
| Mike Pence | Vice President of the United States |
| — | — |
| Pericles Emerging Markets | |
| — | — |
| Perkins Coie | |
| — | — |
| Dmitry Peskov | Putin’s press secretary. Michael Cohen was in touch with him as late at June 2016, during the presidential campaign, in talks over the Trump Tower Moscow deal. |
| — | — |
| Walid Phares | Fox News counterterrorism analyst & one of Trump’s 5 initial national security advisors |
| — | — |
| John Podesta | His stolen emails were one of several tronches of stolen documents released by Wikileaks at strategic moments during the 2016 presidential election campaign. |
| — | — |
| Victor Podobnyy | Russian agent who received intelligence information from American energy consultant Carter Page beginning in January 2013 |
| — | — |
| Sergey Polozov | Worked for the Internet Research Agency as its head of IT from April 2014 to at least July 2014; he oversaw the buildout of the U.S. infrastructure for the Russian operations. |
| — | — |
| — | — |
| Mike Pompeo | CIA Director who went from praising to condemning Wikileaks |
| — | — |
| Petro Poroshenko | Ukranian president |
| — | — |
| Prevezon Holdings | a Cyprus company that has invested in Manhattan real estate and which prosecutors allege was the receptacle for some of the $230 million stolen from Russian taxpayers in 2007; part of Hermitage Capital, the investment fund Magnitsky was investigating until his murder in a Moscow prison in 2009. |
| — | — |
| Reince Priebus | |
| — | — |
| Yevgeniy Prigozhin | “Putin’s Chef” — a former caterer and restauranteur who now runs Vladimir Putin’s internet propaganda operations via the Internet Research Agency as well as overseeing mercenary forces operating in Syria and Ukraine. |
| — | — |
| Erik Prince | Sec. of Education Betsy DuVoss’s brother, who met a Russian oligarch in the Seychelles during the campaign to talk about lifting sanctions. Founded and runs Blackwater, a formidable private security firm often accompanying US military operations as the theater of war becomes increasingly privatized and mercenaries find themselves duking it out in the desert armed with the plausible deniability of being at arm’s length from their country’s official foreign policy. |
| — | — |
| Project Veritas | |
| — | — |
| Pussy Riot | |
| — | — |
| Vladimir Putin | |
| — | — |
| Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) | Member of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the Congressional committees investigating the Russia scandal |
| — | — |
| Was asked by House Democrats on March 7, 2018 to provide intel on the scope and scale of the Russian disinformation effort on their platforms during the 2016 election | |
| — | — |
| Relcom | One of the first private companies or “collectives” formed under Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms, it brokered the first proto-Internet within the Soviet Union and first connection to the outside world â playing a key role in thwarting the attempted coup against Gorbachev by the KGB in August, 1991 |
| — | — |
| Right to Bear Arms | Moscow-based entity begun by Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin — odd, in a country with no gun rights at all. |
| — | — |
| Ritz Carlton | Hosted Donald Trump during his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant |
| — | — |
| Rodina | extreme nationalist party in Russia c. 2003 that hinted at ethnic cleansing; The Guardian reported it had actually been set up as a prop by Putin & cronies, to draw votes away from the other far-right Communist Party |
| — | — |
| Ed Rogers | Hired by Alfa Bank: a former REagan administration official |
| — | — |
| Mike Rogers | Admiral and Director of the National Security Agency under Obama; one of the 3 who briefed Trump and Obama about the Russian attack on Election 2016 |
| — | — |
| Dana Rohrabacher | Representative (R-CA 48th District) since 2013; dubbed “Putin’s favorite Congressman” |
| — | — |
| Sergei Roldugin | Putin ally implicated in the Panama Papers |
| — | — |
| Rosneft | Russia’s state oil company |
| — | — |
| Rossiiskaia Gazeta | Russia’s official government newspaper |
| — | — |
| Wilbur Ross | US Secretary of Commerce and single largest shareholder of the Bank of Cyprus, the famous haven for Russian oligarchs to stash their billions |
| — | — |
| Rossotrudnichestvo | |
| — | — |
| Steve Roth | CEO of Vornado, a $20 billion real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns 49.5% of Jared Kushner’s building at 666 Fifth Avenue; he’s also on Trump’s economic advisory team |
| — | — |
| Andrei Rozov | |
| — | — |
| RT.com | Russian state-owned news service |
| — | — |
| RUPTLY | The Kremlin’s new video news agency |
| — | — |
| Rusal | One of Oleg Deripaska’s companies whose sanctions have been lifted by Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. |
| — | — |
| Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA | |
| — | — |
| Russian Direct Investment Fund | Russia’s sovereign wealth fund |
| — | — |
| Russian Imperial Movement | part of the far-right coalition within Russia seeking to build an international consensus, this group advocates “Christian Orthodox imperial nationalism” |
| — | — |
| Sergei Ryabkov | Russian Deputy Foreign Minister |
| — | — |
| Paul Ryan | Speaker of the House (R-WI) and a Trump defender and denialist |
| — | — |
| Dmitry Rybolovlev | the âFertilizer Kingâ â fertilizer billionaire who purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for $95 million, but never moved in |
| — | — |
| Konstantin Rykov | |
| — | — |
| Anatoli Samochornov | |
| — | — |
| Sheryl Sandberg | |
| — | — |
| Sarah Huckabee Sanders | |
| — | — |
| Felix Sater | Russian mobster and FBI informant who runs Bayrock, a money-laundering firm designed to hide dirty Russian money in Trump’s taxes |
| — | — |
| Saudi Arabia | |
| — | — |
| Sberbank | Russia’s largest bank |
| — | — |
| Anthony Scaramucci | Trump press secretary for all of 10 days |
| — | — |
| Dan Scavino | Managed the Trump campaign’s social media |
| — | — |
| Rep. Adam Schiff | Top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee overseeing that chamber’s Russia investigation |
| — | — |
| Keith Schiller | Trump’s longtime security chief and confidant |
| — | — |
| Eric Schneiderman | New York State Attorney General who has a long history of legal cases with Trump |
| — | — |
| Chuck Schumer | (D-NY) and Sen. Minority Leader |
| — | — |
| SCL Group Limited | |
| — | — |
| Igor Sechin | President of Rosneft at the time Exxon violated Russian sanctions to help protect his property interest |
| — | — |
| Secured Borders | An IRA-controlled Facebook group that bought ads in support of the Trump Campaign, and had over 130,000 followers at the time it was deactivated in mid-2017 |
| — | — |
| Jay Sekulow | Trump’s personal lawyer |
| — | — |
| Jeff Sessions | Trump’s first US Attorney General, before Bill Barr. He has recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his curious, multi-part memory loss of meetings with Russian agents. |
| — | — |
| Alex Shnaider | Ukrainian steel magnate & partner at Talon International who is managing Trump Toronto hotel as it goes into default |
| — | — |
| Paula Shugart | President of the Miss Universe Organization, who reported directly to Trump at the time of the 2013 Moscow pageant |
| — | — |
| Konstantin Sidorkov | Director of PArtnership Marketing for vKontakte, a Russian social media site, that had communications with the Trump campaign about setting up a profile. |
| — | — |
| Siemens AG | |
| — | — |
| Sinclair Media | Conservative broadcasting conglomerate gobbling up local TV stations and forcing them to air canned right-wing footage with each segment. |
| — | — |
| Glenn Simpson | Head of research firm Fusion FPS who commissioned the Christopher Steele dossier. |
| — | — |
| Paul Singer | Billionaire financier who originally commissioned research firm Fusion GPS to start compiling opposition research on Donald Trump. He abandoned the project after Trump secured the nomination. |
| — | — |
| Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom | Law firm retained by Paul Manafort and Rick Gates to “whitewash” Victor Yanukovich’s imprisonment of his political rival, Yulia Tymochenko, in Ukraine. |
| — | — |
| Matt Skiber | An IRA-controlled Facebook account that organized a pro-Trump rally near Trump Tower in mid-2016 |
| — | — |
| Sergei Skripal | Former Russian official turned British spy who was attacked with his daughter Yulia with nerve gas in southern England, reputedly by agents of the Kremlin. |
| — | — |
| Yulia Skripal | Sergei’s daughter |
| — | — |
| Dan Smith | Head of the State Dept’s intelligence bureau under Obama |
| — | — |
| Peter Smith | Alleged to have solicited help on the dark web in finding Hillary’s “missing” emails from the Russians |
| — | — |
| Snapchat | One of the social networks the Democratic oversight committees want to send document requests to, to request more intel on the scope and scale of the Russian campaign on their platforms |
| — | — |
| Edward Snowden | Controversial former employee for private firms working within the US government who absconded with millions of top secret NSA and other departmental intelligence documents, fled to Hong Kong where he alerted the press, and flew on to Moscow where he lives under the protection of the Kremlin. |
| — | — |
| Solidarity | Polish workers’ party confronting Communism in the late ’80s |
| — | — |
| Oleg Solodukhin | |
| — | — |
| Reuben Sorensen | Nuclear non-proliferation expert who briefed Mike Flynn on the ACU’s nuclear program and rejoiced that he would be named head of the NSA. |
| — | — |
| Sean Spicer | Trump’s press secretary |
| — | — |
| Sputnik | Russian news wire proffering fake news |
| — | — |
| Joseph Stalin | |
| — | — |
| Alex Stamos | Ex-Facebook security chief |
| — | — |
| Stasi | Nickname for the Ministry of State Security in East Germany during the Cold War |
| — | — |
| Christopher Steele | Former British MI6 intelligence agent who put together the Steele Dossier on Donald Trump’s dealings with Russia |
| — | — |
| Beny Steinmetz | |
| — | — |
| Daniel Steinmetz | |
| — | — |
| Raz Steinmetz | |
| — | — |
| Roger Stone | Long-time political advisor best known for being part of Richard Nixon’s “Dirty Tricks” crew who perpetuated Watergate among much else; he “predicted” the release of Clinton’s hacked emails |
| — | — |
| Stop All Immigrants | An IRA-controlled Facebook group |
| — | — |
| Stop All Invaders | An IRA-controlled Facebook group that bought Facebook ads in support of Donald Trump |
| — | — |
| Lee Stranahan | Works for Sputnik in Russia. Never responded to an official Congressional inquiry. |
| — | — |
| Strana.ru | |
| — | — |
| SUP Media | Russia’s largest blogging service via acquisition of LiveJournal from Six Apart |
| — | — |
| Vladislav Surkov | Putin’s disinformation machine |
| — | — |
| SVR | Russian foreign intelligence service |
| — | — |
| Eric Swalwell | Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee |
| — | — |
| John Szobocsan | |
| — | — |
| Matt Tait | |
| — | — |
| Talon International | |
| — | — |
| Tambov-Malyshev group | organized crime ring based in St. Petersburg w/ties to Putin; led by Gennadiy Petrov and Aleksandr Malyshev |
| — | — |
| Targeted Victory | GOP strategy firm hired by Facebook |
| — | — |
| @TEN_GOP | An IRA-controlled Twitter account posing as the Tennessee GOP Party. |
| — | — |
| TFA | Trump for America, Inc., the business entity formed to handle the Trump transition |
| — | — |
| Rex Tillerson | U.S. Secretary of State and former CEO of Exxon |
| — | — |
| Gennady Timchenko | 23% owner of natural gas company Novatek, who made $1.8b from surges in pro-Russian market following Trump’s election |
| — | — |
| Ivan Timofeev | Program director at the Russian International Affairs Council, a government-funded think tank, who met with George Papadopolous to try to establish a meeting between Trump and Putin. |
| — | — |
| Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov | Nicknamed “The Little Taiwanese,” he’s one of Russia’s most notorious mobsters. At the time of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, he had been indicted in the U.S. for protecting a high-stakes illegal gambling operation run out of Trump Tower. |
| — | — |
| Alexander Torshin | Russian central banker, Putin confidant, NRA whisperer, handler of Maria Butina |
| — | — |
| Vadim Trincher | Ran a Russian-American gambling crime ring out of Trump Tower. Serving 5 years for racketeering. |
| — | — |
| The Translator Department | Department within the IRA dedicated to U.S. operations |
| — | — |
| Donald J. Trump | |
| — | — |
| Donald J. Trump Jr | |
| — | — |
| Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust | |
| — | — |
| Eric Trump | |
| — | — |
| Fred Trump | Donald Trump’s father, who built the family real estate fortune and handed it off to his son to ruin it |
| — | — |
| Ivanka Trump | Daddy’s little girl |
| — | — |
| Trump Foundation | |
| — | — |
| Trump Organization | |
| — | — |
| Trump Transition | |
| — | — |
| Tsargrad | |
| — | — |
| Tumblr | Was asked by House Democrats on March 7, 2018 to provide intel on the scope and scale of the Russian disinformation effort on their platforms during the 2016 election |
| — | — |
| Turboatom | Ukranian state-owned company who was the target of a bribery offer from ACU Strategic Partners — who Mike Flynn was working with — to accept a $45 billion contract to build reactors in Saudi Arabia in exchange for supporting the lifting of sanctions levied against Russia by the US and EU. |
| — | — |
| Turkey | |
| — | — |
| TV Rain | Independent Russian broadcaster |
| — | — |
| — | — |
| Yulia Tymoshenko | Ran against Victor Yanukovich in the 2010 Presidentials elections, and was jailed by him under spurious charges following his Paul Manafort-aided win. |
| — | — |
| UAE | |
| — | — |
| UBS Real Estate | Holds Trump debt |
| — | — |
| United Muslims of America | An IRA-controlled Facebook account that had over 300,000 followers at the time it was finally deactivated in mid-2017 |
| — | — |
| United Russia | Political Party of Russian PResident Vladimir Putin |
| — | — |
| Viktor Vekselberg | Putin-connected oligarch with connections to secretary of commerce î¤Wilbur Ross [tracker] |
| — | — |
| Natalia Veselnitskaya | Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who met with Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, and Kared Kushner at Trump Tower in June 2016 about the dirt Russia had on Hillary Clinton. At the time she was representing Prevezon Holdings in the case the U.S. Justice Department had brought against them for a $230 million money laundering scheme that lawyer Sergei Magnitsky had uncovered. |
| — | — |
| VizSense Inc. | Provided social media services to the Trump campaign and Michael Flynn |
| — | — |
| vKontakte | Russian social network; equivalent analog to Facebook |
| — | — |
| Vnesheconombank | Russian state-owned development bank, under investigation for Russian election interference |
| — | — |
| Vornado | $20 billion REIT that’s an ~equal partner with Jared Kushner in the 666 Fifth Ave. building in Manhattan; Steve Roth, CEO, is an advisor to Trump |
| — | — |
| Rosemary Vrablic | Executive at Deutsche Bank’s private wealth unit who helped finance many of Trump’s real estate projects after other banks (and the “regular” side of Deutsche Bank) wouldn’t deal with him any more, following massive losses |
| — | — |
| VTB Bank | Russia’s largest commercial bank; under US and EU sanctions for money laundering |
| — | — |
| Sen. Mark Warner | (D-VA) â top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee |
| — | — |
| Washington Free Beacon | |
| — | — |
| The Washington Post | venerable local paper purchased by Jeff Bezos in 2013 |
| — | — |
| Debbie Wasserman Schultz | |
| — | — |
| Jeff Weaver | |
| — | — |
| Anthony Weiner | |
| — | — |
| Allen Weisselberg | |
| — | — |
| The House HPSCI committee wants to subpoena them for communication records relating to principals in the Trump campaign | |
| — | — |
| Julian David Wheatland | |
| — | — |
| Acting AG Matt Whitaker | |
| — | — |
| White Canvas Group | Undertook Turkey-related work for Michael Flynn |
| — | — |
| The White House | Supposed to be a civil servant but often a lobbyist, The White House includes the President and high-level senior staff |
| — | — |
| Wikileaks | |
| — | — |
| World National-Conservatism Movement (WNCM) | umbrella term for Russia’s movement to unite an international extreme far-right coalition |
| — | — |
| Christopher Wray | candidate for the next FBI Director, to replace James Comey |
| — | — |
| Christopher Wylie | Whistleblower from Trump data team Cambridge Analytica who revealed the existence of a formerly secret client: Lukoil, Russia’s #2 oil and gas company |
| — | — |
| Viktor Yanukovych | Ukraine’s former pro-Moscow president; he paid $12.7 million to help influence the Ukranian election his way before being ousted from power in 2013. Paul Manafort made many of the millions he later laundered with Rick Gates via undisclosed lobbying for Mr Yanukovych. |
| — | — |
| Sally Yates | Deputy Attorney General under Barack Obama and Acting Attorney General following the inauguration of Donald Trump. She was dismissed by him after 10 days when she instructed the Justice Department not to allow Trump’s Muslim ban to be enforced because it violated the law and the Constitution. |
| — | — |
| Steve Yates | |
| — | — |
| Boris Yeltsin | First President of the Russian Federation, after he orchestrated Russia’s exit from the USSR (and thus, its downfall, as all the Soviet satellite republics followed suit). He ruled from 1991 to 1999, never quite managing to usher in a true democracy before settling on a successor, an obscure and unknown former KGB officer stationed in East Berlin during the Second World War: Vladimir Putin. |
| — | — |
| Youtube | Favored propaganda platform for Russian agents used in the cyberattacks against the 2016 election |
| — | — |
| Yukos | |
| — | — |
| Yunarmia | “Young Army” â created in 2015 by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to “encourage patriotism among schoolchildren” |
| — | — |
| Mark Zuckerberg | CEO of Facebook, whose platform was used by the Russians in their influence campaign against the 2016 U.S. elections |
| — | — |
| Alex van der Zwaan | Dutch lawyer caught lying to the FBI about his law firm Skadden’s report on Ukranian dictator Victor Yanukovich’s imprisonment of his presidential rival Yulia Tymochenko in Ukraine. Has plead guilty to Robert Mueller’s team. |
| — | — |
The internet is a rage machine.
It’s designed to whip you up into a frenzy in order to foment cheap pageviews. Its interest is in you becoming a histrionic attention whore, such that you suck in as much clandestinely stolen user data to your platform of choice as possible.
Anger is also notably the “loophole” emotion — it’s the invisible one men get to have, while claiming for generations upon generations that “women are too emotional to be entrusted” with leadership or anything meaningful, really. Meanwhile male anger and aggression have killed hundreds of millions and wreaked destruction upon the earth many times over, as fragile masculinity is repeatably and predictably triggered over any little old thing.
A neat trick.
A story.
A lie.
âThe most dangerous ‘enemy of the people’ is presidential lying–always. Attacks on press by @realDonaldTrump more treacherous than Nixonâsâ
— Carl Bernstein, journalist who broke the Watergate scandal
“These systematic attacks on the media accomplish two things. First, they fire up the base, which believe that traditional media do not represent their interests or concerns. Second, they provoke the media itself, which feeling threatened, adopts a more oppositional posture. This in turn further fuels the polarization on which the leaders depend and paves the way for the government to introduce legal restrictions.
The most dramatic example was in Venezuela, where elements in the media embarked on a campaign of open warfare, engaging in overtly partisan coverage intended to undermine ChĂĄvezâs rule. Some media owners were alleged to have conspired in a 2002 coup that briefly ousted the president. Once Chavez returned to power, he rallied his supporters behind a new law imposing broad restrictions on what the media could and could not cover under the guise of âensuring the right to truthful information.â Across the hemisphere, other restrictive legal measures were adopted, including Ecuadorâs notorious 2013 Communications Law, which criminalizes the failure to cover events of public interest, as defined by the government. In the first year, approximately 100 lawsuits were filed under the law, stifling critical reporting.”
— Columbia Journalism Review
“Brian Stelter, in his Reliable Sources newsletter, rounds up elite-media Twitter reaction:
At the same time, understand that this is partly a game to Trump. His confidants tell us he intentionally exploits the media’s inclination to take the bait and chase our tails.”
— Axios
John McCain:
“… slammed President Donald Trumpâs attacks on the media this week by noting dictators âget started by suppressing free press.â
It was a startling observation from a sitting member of Congress against the President of the United States, especially considering McCain is a member of Trumpâs party.
âI hate the press,â the Arizona Republican sarcastically told NBC Newsâ Chuck Todd on âMeet the Press.â âI hate you especially. But the fact is we need you. We need a free press. We must have it. Itâs vital.â
But he continued, âIf you want to preserve â Iâm very serious now â if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,â McCain said in the interview. âAnd without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. Thatâs how dictators get started.â
Evan McMullin:
“Authoritarians routinely attack checks on their power and sources… Donald Trump does exactly that.”
http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2017/02/05/are-trumps-attacks-on-media-authoritarian.cnn
It’s heartening to see many new faces and hear many new voices who may in the past have not explicitly considered themselves “activists,” or who have felt a greater call to stand up against a political administration whose ideologies show every indication of running counter to a constitutional democratic framework.Â
If that describes you: THANK YOU! You are awesome. And if you’re an Old Hat at this sort of thing, this post is for you too — by way of initiating a civil dialogue with some of the fresh faces you see in your timeline or in your local community who may be exhibiting the following behavior:
Making claims that issue X, Y, or Z is “not important” or “not as important” as issue A, B, or C — which is what we should really be discussing right now.
Here’s why this behavior tends to do more harm than good:
But we will grow from it, and they will not — over the long run, at least.
Things we need to improve upon and/or rebuild:
are not merely empowered to separate us from discerning fact and fiction.
They separate us from debate; civic discourse; meaningful conflict;
From coalition-building; compromise; concession.
They separate us from each other.
Communities seem quaint
Common ground, a shifting place
Quicksand beneath one’s feet
We are all swamp things now
The eyes ogle, waiting for us to falter — for sport
Our shelf lives grow ever shorter
While billionaires transfuse the blood of the young
The youth don’t want my mid-life crisis
It bores them so
My tone grates on America’s next greats
Ideologies wage the fifth world war out on the vast placeless social media savannah
Faux fantastical beasts feast upon felled paper tigers
One can only hope the most outsized egos
Are the biggest dinosaurs
When the meteor comes
The creator of the also excellent Century of the Self film series released his latest film in October, 2016. Dubbed HyperNormalisation, it offers both a history lesson of the complicated relationship between the West, the Middle East, and Russia, as well as an unflinching look at the roles played by technology, surveillance, and the media on our modern condition of general confusion, destabilization, and surrealism.