1. Attorney General Jeff Session just fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, one of the three senior FBI officials who can corroborate Jim Comey’s allegation that Trump asked him to kill the investigation into Michael Flynn. [The other two men, Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff, and James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, had already been forced from their positions after having been attacked and maligned by members of the Trump administration.] This, of course, sets the stage for the end game to play out, as Trump, whith nowhere left to turn, attempts to end the Mueller investigation – something that he called for today, through his attorney, John Dowd.
2. Facebook has confirmed that, in 2014, Cambridge Analytica, the conservative data analytics firm owned by far-right hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and run at the time by Steve Bannon, illegally harvested the Facebook profiles of approximately 50 million American voters in an enormous data breach. This data, according to Christopher Wylie, who assisted Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan in obtaining the data, told the UK Observer, “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” And they apparently did this through an app built by Global Science Research (GSR), a firm owned by Kogan. The app, called thisisyourdigitallife, paid Facebook users to take personality tests, telling them that the collected data would be used for academic use. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users took the test. What they didn’t know, however, is that, in violation of Facebook policy, GSR was also harvesting information on the friends in their networks, allowing Cambridge Analytica the ability to target U.S. voters at the individual level with false advertising intended to manipulate those inner demons. The only thing we don’t yet know for certain was the extent to which Cambridge Analytica shared this targeting data with the Russians, who were also engaged in an advanced disinformation campaign on the part of candidate Trump.
3. We discovered yesterday that the President of United States has filed a $20 million suit against porn actress Stormy Daniels for violating the terms of the agreement under which he attempted to buy her silence concerning an affair. And, what’s more, we also learned from Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, that, according to his client, she only signed the agreement to keep quiet because she’d been threatened with physical harm. Avenatti has refused thus far to say who threatened his client. When asked yesterday if it was Donald Trump himself who made these threats, Avenatti said, “I will neither confirm nor deny.” And, of course, unless Trump’s team finds a way to stop it (like with this threat of a $20 million judgement), Ms. Daniels is going to be on 60 Minutes the evening of March 25, talking about the affair, the threats, and the hush money she accepted from Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
4. It was reported yesterday that the Russians have penetrated our electrical grid, giving them the ability to essentially shut down significant portions of our country, should they wish to do so. The following is from the New York Times.
The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems, and could have sabotaged or shut power plants off at will.
United States officials and private security firms saw the attacks as a signal by Moscow that it could disrupt the West’s critical facilities in the event of a conflict.
They said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway. The attackers had compromised some operators in North America and Europe by spring 2017, after President Trump was inaugurated.
In the following months, according to a Department of Homeland Security report issued on Thursday, Russian hackers made their way to machines with access to critical control systems at power plants that were not identified. The hackers never went so far as to sabotage or shut down the computer systems that guide the operations of the plants.
Still, new computer screenshots released by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday made clear that Russian state hackers had the foothold they would have needed to manipulate or shut down power plants.
“We now have evidence they’re sitting on the machines, connected to industrial control infrastructure, that allow them to effectively turn the power off or effect sabotage,” said Eric Chien, a security technology director at Symantec, a digital security firm.
“From what we can see, they were there. They have the ability to shut the power off. All that’s missing is some political motivation,” Mr. Chien said…
Clearly they’re sending a message to Trump, warning him what might happen if he decides to move forward with those sanctions he’s yet to implement, right?
In related news… here, from yesterday, is my response to a Twitter post by John Dingell about the most recent mass exodus from the White House. I thought it was pretty brilliant, even if no one else did.
They don’t have to turn out the lights. The Russians can apparently do that remotely.
— Mark Maynard (@MarkAMaynard) March 16, 2018