Engel tweet: fmr Ukrainian lawmaker confirms quid pro quo, "blackmail"

[Dennis Donovan]

Link to tweet

Richard Engel ✔ @RichardEngel

A former Ukrainian lawmaker deeply familiar with the Giuliani dirt-digging campaign told me Trump's phone call to the Ukrainian president asking for an investigation into the Bidens, while withholding vital military aid, was "pressure," "blackmail," and "quid pro quo."

6:21 PM - Sep 30, 2019

[ffr]

1. Backmail, eh?

Arrest these motherfuckers!

[spanone]

2. K&R...👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

[MagickMuffin]

3. Of course it is ALL the above

That's how they roll.

The whole lot of them are guilty.

[triron]

4. Help, I'm drowning in shit today!

[maxsolomon]

5. WHICH ONE, Engel?

Leshchenko?

It doesn't really matter what any Russian or Ukrainian or Republican say - they're all liars until proven otherwise.

[oasis]

6. Every passing day finds Trump in deeper doo doo.

No way out.

[safeinOhio]

7. Does this mean no

Nobel Peace Price?

[lindysalsagal]

9. You have no shame, do you?

[Cha]

13. lol!

[gordianot]

8. I worry for Engel's safety.

He travels and talks to some very dangerous characters. Trump has burnt his bridges with the IC so badly he has to depend on the likes of crooked lawyers such as Barr and Giuliani to do his dirty work. Putin on the other hand has world class killers at his service. Journalism is a dangerous vocation in the 21st Century.

[lunatica]

14. Richard Engel and his cameraman were abducted in the Middle East

once. I think it was by Isis. After a few days of being transported somewhere they managed to escape and make it across the border. He’s no stranger to danger, and in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. He’s amazing.

[Tipperary]

10. And there it is.

No one is going to be surprised at any of this mess.

[hughee99]

11. So does he have information of the call that we do not,

Or is this just his assessment of what is known?

[Duppers]

12. I'd say he's spoken with a Ukrainian official.

R.E. is an amazing journalist.

[hughee99]

17. This say he "confirms" a quid pro quo,

But doesn’t actually say how it is confirmed. Sometimes a tweet isn’t the best way to convey actual news, no matter how good of a journalist one is.

I’m still not clear if this based on the opinion of “a former Ukrainian official”, or on information we don’t yet have.

[Duppers]

19. I'll wait for him to file an official story.

Richard Engel doesn't say anything without proof. He's one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, especially in the ME.

[lunatica]

15. Whatever he says I believe him.

[dalton99a]

16. Kick

[Hortensis]

18. Speaking of the plot behind Trump's "DNC server in Ukraine" conspiracy

theory, ...

We're not of course, but the other part of this extortion IS about getting Ukraine to provide some support for the wingnut conspiracy theories about the company the DNC hired to uncover the hacking a single DNC server smuggled into hiding in Ukraine. (In the real world, over 140 servers were identified as having been hacked.) This article suggests this silly idea is NOT just about feeding Trump and the evil-DNC conspiracy riling up his base and our own wingy left. Instead it's also part of a plot by clever people to cause the entire nation to distrust the Democratic Party in the runup to an existential election and suspected to also plan to massively disrupt the DNC, similar to 2016.

Note the timing of Trump's first demand for "the" mythical DNC server: immediately after meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

But what’s disturbing about the demands for the server — implying the DNC’s email was located on a single computer within DNC’s physical control — is not just ignorance about cloud computing and how it works. It’s that demands for the DNC to turn over their single server went all the way to the top of the Republican Party when Trump himself complained — from Helsinki, under Putin’s watchful eye — about the DNC’s server:

“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why didn’t they take the server? Where is the server, I want to know, and what is the server saying?” And the rest of the right-wing Trumpist ecosphere picked up the refrain and maintains it to this day. Except none of them are demanding Google turn over the original Gmail servers through which John Podesta was hacked and hundreds of contacts phished. And none of the demands are expressly about AWS (Amazon Web Services) servers used to host some of DNC’s email, communications, and data.

The demands are focused on some indeterminate yet singular server belonging to or used by the DNC. ...


The DNC had had to shut down their affected equipment and remove it from their network in order to clean out the intrusion ... highly disruptive. Imagine, too, how sensitive DNC staff were going forward about sharing materials freely within their organization, not knowing whether someone might slip and fall prey to spearphishing. ... All of this done smack in the middle of the 2016 election season — the most important days of the entire four-year-long election cycle ... (This remediation still wasn’t enough because the Russians remained in the machines into October 2016.)

If the right-wing monkey horde cares only about the DNC’s “the server” and not the Google Gmail servers accessed in March 2016 or the AWS servers accessed April through October 2016, this should tell you their true aim: It’s to disrupt and shut down the DNC again. The interference with the 2016 election wasn’t just Russian-aided disinformation attacking Hillary Clinton and allies, or Russian hacks stealing emails and other files in order to leak them through Wikileaks. The interference included forcing the DNC to shut down and/or reroute parts of its operation ... And the attack continues unabated, going into the 2020 general election season as long as the right-wing Trumpists continue to demand the DNC turn over the server. ...

There is no one server. The DNC shouldn’t slow or halt its operations to accommodate opponents’ and suspects’ bad faith. As for Trump’s complaint from Helsinki: he knows diddly-squat about technology. It’s not surprising his comments reflected this.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/05/15/cloud-computing-and-the-single-server/

Btw, this is given as an example of what "the cloud" looks like: In this case many thousands of Google servers at one of its facilities. Crowdstrike, not some nest of evil liberal plotters but the company the DNC hired to uncover the Russian hacking (after the FBI failed to notify the DNC) identified something like 140 affected servers; some may have been here.