The smoking gun in the Mueller probe?; Nadler will subpoena Mueller and report; new Russian disinformation campaign, and more

2018, dozens of DNC email addresses were targeted in a spear-phishing campaign, although there is no evidence that the attack was successful,” the DNC alleged, according to court documents filed to the District Court of the Southern District of New York. “The content of these emails and their timestamps were consistent with a spear-phishing campaign that leading cybersecurity experts have tied to Russian intelligence.”
The complaint is part of an ongoing lawsuit against Russia, WikiLeaks, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other key individuals.
According to the complaint, the timing as well as the content of the spear-phishing emails match the practices of Russian hacking group Cozy Bear, one of two Kremlin-tied groups that hacked the DNC in 2016, according to the complaint. Spear-phishing is a cyberattack tactic in which hackers send emails that appear to come from a trusted sender to try to get the targeted individuals to reveal confidential information.
“Therefore, it is probable that Russian intelligence again attempted to unlawfully infiltrate DNC computers in November 2018,” the DNC said in its filing.

Nadler will subpoena Mueller and report if needed (Committee to Investigate Russia)
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) says if likely-to-be-confirmed attorney general nominee William Barr refuses to release Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, he will use his subpoena power to get both the report and Mueller’s testimony to the public. 

“That sophisticated, specific Russian 2016 voter targeting effort doesn’t seem to exis” (Philip Bump, Washington Post)

·  “The revelation on Tuesday that … Paul Manafort, had shared polling data with a colleague in Ukraine who had ties to Russian intelligence predictably kicked up a furor of speculation about the significance of the move.”

·  “This is what one of the Russia-Trump collusion scenarios looks like: Someone from Team Trump passing data to the Russians that the latter group could use to target voters and influence the election. … [T]he common understanding is that Russia’s interference efforts included sophisticated targeting of specific voting groups on Facebook, which could have made the difference in states that Trump narrowly won … That understanding about Russia’s sophisticated targeting, though, is not supported by the evidence—if it’s not flat-out wrong.”

·  “Even if Russia had deployed a particularly insightful, strategic effort … it’s not necessarily the case