Putin DENIES Russia involved in DNC hack — SCOOP: Shultz alludes to JOINT Clinton endorsement with Kissinger — State Dept. to release ALL Clinton schedules before election — The Politico Playbook Interview: Al Sharpton

— “Clinton’s advisers tell her to prep for a landslide: Displaying unchecked confidence, the Democrat’s paid consultants see plenty of paths to the White House,” by Annie Karni: “Advisers to Hillary Clinton’s campaign have identified so many paths to an Election Day victory they are now focusing not only on the one or two battlegrounds that would ensure a win but on opening up the possibility of an Electoral College landslide. ‘Hillary Clinton has many paths to 270 electoral votes, more than any candidate in a generation,’ said Jeff Berman, a paid consultant to her campaign.

“Revealing a level of confidence Clinton’s inner circle has been eager to squash for weeks, outside advisers have now identified victories in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire as the path of least resistance, delivering for the Democratic nominee more than the 270 electoral votes needed to take the White House. And they are projecting increased confidence about her chances in Republican-leaning North Carolina, a state that could prove as critical as Ohio or Pennsylvania.”  

How differently the year 2016 turned out, first the UK got Brexit and in the US the conservatives swept into power …

Jacob Rees-Mogg met Steve Bannon to discuss US-UK politics  

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a favourite among Conservative members to be the next party leader, spent more than an hour at the meeting in a Mayfair hotel with Bannon, who was at one point seen as Trump’s most influential adviser.

The American also met Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, and another Conservative MP during a short trip to the UK.

The meetings took place on the day of the diplomatic spat between Trump and Theresa May, after the US president retweeted anti-Muslim material from the far-right fringe group Britain First.

Rees-Mogg confirmed the encounter, saying Bannon was “an interesting man to have met” and they talked about US and UK politics. Farage also confirmed he had met Bannon, who is a friend.

Bannon, who describes himself as a populist and economic nationalist, was forced out of the White House in August. He then rejoined the rightwing news website Breitbart as executive chairman, but he remains in close contact with Trump.

More below the fold …
How many tweets originated from Russian bots in St. Petersburg to influence the outcome of the U.S. Presidential Election? What was the influence on the UK referendum for the Leave campaign?

The Life of a pro-Kremlin troll | NY Times – June 2015 |

The Agency

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

The Columbian Chemicals Hoax – Sept. 11, 2014

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”

It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

…
As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian.

Several Russian media outlets have claimed that the agency is funded by Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch restaurateur called “the Kremlin’s chef” in the independent press for his lucrative government contracts and his close relationship with Putin. When a reporter from the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta infiltrated the agency posing as a job seeker, she discovered that one of the team leaders was an employee of Prigozhin’s Concord holding company [Konkord Kulinarnaya Liniya].  (The reporter was familiar with her because the woman was famous among journalists for having been deployed by Prigozhin to spy on Novaya Gazeta.) The suspicion around Prigozhin was bolstered when emails leaked by hackers showed an accountant at Concord approving payments to the agency. If the speculation is accurate, it would not be the first time that Prigozhin has used his enormous wealth to fund quixotic schemes against his enemies: According to Novaya Gazeta, a documentary he backed, which later ran on the Kremlin-controlled NTV, claimed that the protesters who participated in the enormous anti-Putin demonstrations of 2011 were paid agents provocateurs, some of them bribed by United States government officials, who fed them cookies. “I think of him as Dr. Evil,” says Andrei Soshnikov, the reporter at Moi Raion to whom Savchuk leaked her documents. (My calls to Concord went unreturned.)  

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