Luke Harding QUOTES

83 " No American press was allowed in to record the meeting. Lavrov, however, had brought a photographer who worked for the state news agency Tass. In Soviet times, journalists for Tass were typically KGB or GRU officers. The photographer took equipment into the Oval Office. What, exactly? The photos show Trump warmly shaking Lavrov’s hand. Another reveals him patting Lavrov on the shoulder. Trump and Kislyak posed together. The president grins. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

84 " The agency had set up fake local internet cafes equipped with key-logging software. This allowed GCHQ to hack delegates’ passwords, which could be exploited later. GCHQ also penetrated their BlackBerrys to monitor email messages and phone calls. A team of 45 analysts kept a real-time log of who phoned whom during the summit. Turkey’s finance minister and 15 other members of his delegation were among the targets. This had, of course, nothing whatever to do with terrorism. The "

― Luke Harding , The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

85 " With or without his senior advisers, this was the moment for Trump to make the American interest clear—namely, that the Kremlin’s hacking of the election amounted to ill-considered interference. And that any attempt by Moscow to do the same in 2018 or 2020 would lead to a stringent U.S. response—more sanctions, travel bans, even a cutoff of Russia’s access to the SWIFT banking payments system. Putin would interpret anything less than this as American weakness. And, practically, a green light for his operatives to tamper again in Washington’s affairs. All done, of course, under the same cover of plausible deniability. There was no official hacking, the government wasn’t involved, et cetera. Apparently, Trump said none of this. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

86 " Nick Hopkins, the Guardian’s investigations editor, had liaison with the intelligence agencies as one of his regular tasks. After the TEMPORA disclosures, Hopkins suggested a peace meeting with a GCHQ official to clear the air. He replied: ‘I would rather gouge my eyes out than be seen with you.’ Hopkins responded: ‘If you do that you won’t be able to read our next scoop.’ Another GCHQ staffer suggested – with tongue in cheek – that he should consider emigration to Australia. The "

― Luke Harding , The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

87 " The NSA’s original mission was to collect foreign intelligence. But it appears to have drifted away from its original goal, like a vast supertanker floating away from its anchor. It is now sucking in a lot of domestic communications. In this new era of Big Data, the agency moved from the specific to the general; from foreign targeting to what Snowden called ‘omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance’. The "

― Luke Harding , The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

88 " The threat of a terrorist attack in Moscow is real enough - a constant beneath the surface. But another, more palpable form of intimidation stalks the city's streets. It targets those from the Caucasus - no longer perpetrators but victims - as well as anyone of non-Slavic descent. This spectre is Russian nationalism, furiously asserting itself. "

― Luke Harding , Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia

89 " Manafort’s specialty, according to Kovzhun, is running expensive campaigns and targeting the “big unwashed.” “It’s the same element who voted for Putin, supported Brexit, back Erdogan, and who like Trump. Manafort works the lowest common denominator. I find him repulsive and his message ugly. He leaves destruction in his wake. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

90 " Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ editor in chief, disputes this and says the leaks didn’t come from a “state party.” The agencies don’t believe him. The report suggests that WikiLeaks had become, in effect, a subbranch of Russian intelligence and its in-house publishing wing. In September WikiLeaks moved its hosting to Moscow. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

91 " A wolf circling sheep. —CHRISTOPHER STEELE ON VLADIMIR PUTIN "

― Luke Harding , Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia's Attack on the West

92 " Facebook would eventually admit that Russia had employed 470 “inauthentic accounts and pages” as part of its influence campaign. It worked. One page, Secure Borders, got 133,000 followers before it was closed down. The page dubbed immigrants “freeloaders” and “scum.” Moscow spent $100,000 on more than three thousand ads, Facebook said. The numbers could be higher, Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO, acknowledged later. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

93 " Trump repeated his demand: “I need loyalty.” Comey replied: “You will always get honesty from me.” Trump then said: “That’s what I want, honest loyalty. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

94 " You need to look at the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals that Trump did. Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” Steele told us. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

95 " ProPublica’s technology reporter Jeff Larson joined the bunker in London. A computer science graduate, Larson knew his stuff. Using diagrams, he could explain the NSA’s complex data-mining programs – no mean feat. "

― Luke Harding , The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

96 " In the period between Obama’s announcement on sanctions and Putin’s clement response, General Michael Flynn spoke to Kislyak, Moscow’s Washington ambassador. Flynn was about to become Trump’s national security adviser. There were five phone calls. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

97 " Overall the CIA-FBI-NSA report was persuasive: Moscow had indeed sought to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, even if the result—a Trump victory—had caught the Kremlin by surprise. It omitted one big truth. Namely that the operation was so successful because it exploited preexisting fault lines in American society. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

98 " [Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert] "

― Luke Harding , The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

99 " Sater was confident he could arrange everything. On November 3, 2015, he wrote to Cohen: I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know that no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. We don’t have Cohen’s reply. But the emails lay out Sater’s plan for glory—a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow and praise from Putin of Trump’s peerless business skills. To achieve this, Sater said he could show video clips to his Russian contacts of Trump speaking glowingly of Russia: “If he [Putin] says it, we own this election. America’s most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald was a good guy to negotiate. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

100 " All of this was happening in private. U.S. electors knew nothing of Sater’s Kremlin outreach scheme. Trump did, though. So did Cohen. Cohen said he talked to Trump about the Moscow tower three times. When it appeared that the project was faltering, despite a letter of intent, Cohen took a bold step. He sent an email to someone big: Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. The email was a petition, a meekly phrased plea for help. It was sent in mid-January 2016. Cohen wrote: Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City. Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled. As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon. Cohen dispatched the email to a generic address, rather than to Peskov’s personal account. Nonetheless, the email would have been found and closely examined. The email’s recipient, Peskov, wasn’t only Putin’s long-serving mouthpiece—he was also in charge of the operation to compromise Clinton, according to the Steele dossier, and someone who saw Russia’s president practically every day. Cohen insisted there was no collusion. And yet this is precisely what his email looked like: a direct (and covert) request for assistance from Team Trump to Team Putin. Was this politics or business or both? As always with Trump, it was hard to tell. "

― Luke Harding , Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win