BuzzFeed sued over unverified Trump dossier

[GURPS]

BuzzFeed sued over unverified Trump dossier


McClatchy says XBT Holdings, a tech firm with Russian ties named in the document, is suing BuzzFeed, editor in chief Ben Smith and former British spy Christopher Steele over the January 10 publication of what the suit calls “libelous, unverified and untrue allegations.”

The dossier, which includes uncorroborated allegations about Trump, claims the Cyprus-based XBT, which is owned by Russian tech magnate Aleksej Gubarev, “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership” in 2016.

The dossier grabbed international headlines after intelligence officials presented it to Trump and then-President Obama. The U.S. intelligence community says Russia sought to interfere in last year’s election with the intention of electing Trump, and the document — which BuzzFeed published while other news organizations demurred — was presented as evidence that Moscow also sought to compromise Trump himself.
Smith has defended the decision to publish, but in a Friday statement to McClatchy, BuzzFeed apologized over Gubarev’s inclusion.

 

[officeguy]

I hope they win millions.

 

[Hijinx]

I hope they win millions.

Was this the source Obama used to place sanctions on Russia.

Sanctions meant to harm relations between the new President and a foreign power.?
Almost sounds like treason.

 

[PeoplesElbow]

The dossier, which includes uncorroborated allegations about Trump, claims the Cyprus-based XBT, which is owned by Russian tech magnate Aleksej Gubarev, “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership” in 2016.

So wouldn't people in the DNC have to be using their work computers for porn to get these viruses?

 

[littlelady]

So wouldn't people in the DNC have to be using their work computers for porn to get these viruses?

 

[GURPS]

Thirteen Things That Don’t Add Up in the Russia-Trump Intelligence Dossier



The report published Tuesday by Buzzfeed purporting to be the work of a “former MI6 counter-intelligence official” now working in the private sector is a strange document. On the one hand, it contains lots of Kremlin-related gossip that could indeed be, as the author claims, from deep insiders—or equally gleaned from the politics pages of Russia’s Kommersant or Vedomosti newspapers or political gossip sites like agentura.ru, compromat.ru or Sean Guillory’s Russia Blog.

And yet, there are several places where the author seems weirdly ignorant of basic facts about Russia. He or she refers to Alpha Bank rather than Alfa, and seems to be under the impression that the suburb of Barvikha on the tony Rublevskoe highway is a closed government compound, instead of just an expensive vacation home area favored by the new rich. The author also misspells the name of Trump associate and Azeri real estate mogul Aras Agalarov, and reports his association with Trump as news in August 2016—when Agalarov publicly organized Trump’s visit to the Miss Universe pageant in 2013 and arranged a meeting with top Russian businessmen for Trump afterward, both of which were widely reported at the time.

For all its strange mix of the amateur and the insightful, this document seems to be the source that top officials in the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid cited in September when they accused Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page of meeting with “highly sanctioned individuals" during a July trip to Moscow and perhaps even "discussed an unholy alliance between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” as The Washington Post put it at the time.

In September, Yahoo News reported that the U.S. government had received "intelligence reports that Page met with Igor Sechin, a friend of Vladimir Putin who runs Russian oil giant Rosneft, and Igor Diveykin, a high–ranking Russian intelligence official.” This appears to be that report—though Page subsequently denied it in his September 28 Post interview.