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

that they would have had to rely on data from the Trump campaign to do so. … [H]ackers believed to be linked to Russian intelligence stole information from the Clinton campaign that could have revealed where they were most concerned about turnout, giving the Russians a map for where to deploy their resources the most effectively.”

·  “But, again, there’s no evidence that they did any particularly sophisticated targeting. … It’s just not as enticing as the idea of savvily deploying American social media users against themselves.”

How the charge aginst Natalia Veselnitskaya could lead back to the Trump campaign (Joshua Yaffa, New Yorker)

·  “On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in New York charged the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya with obstruction of justice, accusing her, essentially, of maintaining a back channel with Russian officials while defending a Russian client in a money-laundering case in New York.”

·  “Veselnitskaya … is most widely known as the lawyer who met with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower, in June, 2016 … But the reason she was in the United States at the time was for hearings in a case launched by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York against a longtime client of hers, a Russian man named Denis Katsyv [who reportedly owns Prevezon Holdings].”

·  U.S. prosecutors are probably less interested in this particular, narrow matter than in what filing charges allows them to do going forward. ‘If the government wants on record that Natalia is a Russian government agent, this indictment serves this purpose,’ the former member of the Prevezon defense team told me. That is to say, if and when charges are filed in relation to the Trump Tower meeting, prosecutors now have a building block on which to argue that, in her actions in the United States, Veselnitskaya did not represent merely herself and her client but the interests of Russian officials.”

Giuliani: Collusion could have happened (Committee to Invewstigate Russia)
Giuliani spoke to NBC News Thursday about his remarks on CNN last night in which he conceded there may have been collusion between someone on the Trump campaign and Russia. 

The circular firing squad: Mueller targets turn on each other (Darren Samuelsohn, Politico)
After Rudy Giuliani’s latest comments, it’s everyone for themselves. And it’s a prosecutor’s dream for the special counsel.
Rudy Giuliani sent an unmistakable message Wednesday night: It’s everyone for themselves.
During a CNN interview, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer blurted out that the only person he knows about who didn’t collude with Russia was Trump himself. Although Giuliani tried to walk back his comments on Thursday, the remarks put the sprawling web of people caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe on notice: No one is coming to save you.

Facebook disrupts new Russian disinformation campaign (Phil Muncaster, Infosecurity)
Facebook has removed hundreds of fake Pages and accounts after spotting a coordinated effort by Russian state-linked actors to spread disinformation in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries.
There were two linked campaigns: the first targeting Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia and Kyrgyzstan.
Although purporting to be independent or general interest Pages on topics ranging from weather and travel to politics, they were actually run by employees of Kremlin news agency Sputnik, according to Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher.
The 289 fake Pages and 75 spoof accounts posted disinformation on local corruption and protests, and anti-NATO sentiment, spending $135,000 on ads, hosting 190 events and attracting 790,000 followers