WATCH: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Responds to Chinese New Year Question By Talking About Chinese People Eating Dogs https://t.co/XArnBJJA5p pic.twitter.com/36vD7s9XCg— Mediaite (@Mediaite) September 12, 2018
A Democratic PAC focused on flipping Republican-held House seats in California is out with a provocative new digital ad that seeks to exploit Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s ties to Russia.
The new spot from Red to Blue California, obtained by NBC News before its Tuesday release, is styled to look like a message from the Russian government endorsing Rohrabacher.
In it, photos of Rohrabacher and Russian President Vladimir Putin are shown in front of a Russian flag as a narrator thanks Rohrabacher. One version of the ad is in English, while the other is in Russian with English subtitles.
“The Russian Federation is proud to endorse Dana Rohrabacher for Congress, You are true Russian hero. Thank you, Dana Rohrabacher, for standing with Putin and Russia,” the narrator says.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating a cyber attack on the congressional campaign of a Democratic candidate in California, according to three people close to the campaign.
The hackers successfully infiltrated the election campaign computer of David Min, a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives who was later defeated in the June primary for California’s 45th Congressional district.
FBI agents in California and Washington, D.C., have investigated a series of cyberattacks over the past year that targeted a Democratic opponent of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Rohrabacher is a 15-term incumbent who is widely seen as the most pro-Russia and pro-Putin member of Congress and is a staunch supporter of President Trump.
The hacking attempts and the FBI’s involvement are described in dozens of emails and forensic records obtained by Rolling Stone.
The target of these attacks, Dr. Hans Keirstead, a stem-cell scientist and the CEO of a biomedical research company, finished third in California’s nonpartisan “top-two” primary on June 5th, falling 125 votes short of advancing to the general election in one of the narrowest margins of any congressional primary this year. He has since endorsed Harley Rouda, the Democrat who finished in second place and will face Rohrabacher in the November election.Maya Kosoff at Vanity Fair:
Similar phishing attacks have been reported by the campaign for Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill—according to the Daily Beast, Russian operatives tried and failed to access the McCaskill campaign’s data using a variant of the password-stealing technique employed by “Fancy Bear” hackers who targeted Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in 2016. (In that instance, hackers sent fake e-mails to targets alerting them that their Microsoft Exchange password had expired, and asking them to enter a new one.) Last month, Microsoft revealed that it had detected and blocked hacking attempts against three different congressional candidates so far in 2018; the hackers, Microsoft V.P. of security and trust Tom Burt, announced at the Aspen Security Forum, had used “a fake Microsoft domain . . . as the landing page for phishing attacks.” Separate attempts at meddling have occurred on social-media sites. A few weeks ago, Facebook announced that it had discovered new, malicious accounts on Facebook and Instagram designed to influence elections by targeting divisive social issues, similar to the effort put forth by the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency in advance of the 2016 election. The operators behind the 17 profiles and 8 Pages, which were set up between March 2017 and May 2018, appeared to be more sophisticated, disguising their identities more effectively than the I.R.A.
You only need to go back less than two decades ago to put, I think, the current cyber threat into its proper context. In 2001, our vulnerability was heightened because of the stovepipe approach of our intelligence and law enforcement communities that produced what they called "silos of information." At the time, intelligence and law enforcement communities were identifying alarming activities that suggested that an attack was potentially coming to the United States. It was in the months prior to September 2001 when, according to then CIA Director George Tenet, the system was blinking red. And here we are nearly two decades later, and I'm here to say the warning lights are blinking red again. Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack.
Every day, foreign actors — the worst offenders being Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — are penetrating our digital infrastructure and conducting a range of cyber intrusions and attacks against targets in the United States. The targets range from U.S. businesses to the federal government (including our military), to state and local governments, to academic and financial institutions and elements of our critical infrastructure — just to name a few. The attacks come in different forms. Some are tailored to achieve very tactical goals while others are implemented for strategic purpose, including the possibility of a crippling cyberattack against our critical infrastructure.
One of California’s most hotly contested congressional races — the campaign between incumbent Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and his Democratic challenger, Harley Rouda — is starting off as a dead heat, according to a new poll that shows a Democratic edge on enthusiasm countering the Orange County district’s Republican leanings.Jordan Graham at The Orange County Register:
Rouda, who barely squeaked through the June primary to emerge as Rohrabacher’s opponent, has a 46%-43% edge among potential voters, the poll found — a nominal lead well within the survey’s margin of error.
inRead invented by Teads
The survey by Monmouth University is the first public, nonpartisan poll of the district since the June primary. The poll is one of a series that Monmouth, in West Long Branch, N.J., is conducting of key congressional races nationwide. The nonpartisan survey has compiled one of the country’s best records for accuracy in recent years.
Orange County GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher met in Russia in 2015 with a woman later charged by federal officials for allegedly acting as an unregistered agent of the Kremlin in a covert endeavor to shape American politics.
News of the 2015 meeting — confirmed Tuesday by Rohrabacher’s office — came the same day he told Politico that Monday’s indictment of 29-year-old Maria Butina was “bogus” and “stupid,” saying he believes the allegations are part of a larger plot to undermine President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia.
The Justice Dept. accused Butina of establishing back-channel lines of communications to American politicians in recent years “to penetrate the U.S. national decision-making apparatus to advance the agenda of the Russian Federation.”
The indictment states that as part of that plot, Butina had discussions with a Russian official – reported to be Alexander Torshin, an influential deputy governor of the Russian central bank – about his plans to “meet with a U.S. Congressman during a Congressional Delegation trip to Moscow in August 2015.”Gideon Resnick at The Daily Beast:
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) lashed out Monday against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen after appearing in a damning segment featured in Cohen’s new Showtime series Who Is America?
The segment in question features a number of Republican members of Congress endorsing a fictional program to train preschoolers to fire guns as a means to preventing school shootings. All Rohrabacher says in the segment is: “Maybe having many young people trained and understand how to defend themselves and their school might actually make us safer here."
Among the other members featured are freshman Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who remained skeptical of the proposal from Baron Cohen’s character, Col. Erran Morad, a self-proclaimed Israeli anti-terror expert.
Rohrabacher, who is viewed as an endangered incumbent in an Orange County district won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, wrote in a statement: “Cohen’s people apparently used footage from an interview I submitted to earlier this year for a bogus Israeli television company supposedly celebrating the country’s 70th anniversary.”
Buried in the plea agreement documents released Friday for former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates was one remarkable detail. Just this month, Gates lied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and to the FBI about what transpired during a spring 2013 meeting held by his longtime boss and fellow Trump campaign veteran Paul Manafort.
Per the court filing, Gates on Feb. 1 knowingly and falsely testified that “there were no discussions of Ukraine” at a March 19, 2013 meeting between Manafort, “a senior Company A lobbyist,” and “a Member of Congress.”
Though the document does not name the other two participants, their identities can be pieced together from contemporaneous news reports and recent filings with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The member of Congress appears have been Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), jokingly nicknamed “Putin’s favorite congressman” for his strong pro-Russia stance. Manafort’s June 2017 FARA filing– which acknowledges that his firm, DMP International, LLC, conducted millions of dollars in business with the pro-Russia Ukrainian Party of Regions –notes that he met with Rohrabacher on that day. Three days later, Manafort donated $1,000 to Rohrabacher’s congressional campaign.
The lobbyist appears to have been Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman who now works for Mercury Public Affairs, a global PR giant. The meeting between the trio was disclosed on Mercury’s own retroactive FARA filing, submitted in April of last year.
18 The number of Democratic challengers who raised more than $500,000 by the end of 2017.
That's a staggering number of candidates compared with previous years. Just four challengers in the 10 GOP-held seats we're currently watching raised that much in the entire 2016 election cycle. None of them had raised $500,000 by the end of the first year.
By raising such substantial sums so early, these candidates have passed a key test for demonstrating viability: amassing enough money to run a competitive campaign and get their messages out to voters.
While Republican strategists argue that Democrats are going to spend a lot of this money fighting each other in crowded primaries, it's also likely that many of the ads, mailers and campaign messages will focus instead on the already-vulnerable Republicans they are attempting to unseat. Donors who are getting engaged early also could consolidate behind a single Democratic candidate once the field dwindles.
Polls in a pair of Southern California congressional races that show voters unwilling to re-elect to GOP incumbents could be bad news for Republicans across the state.
The separate polls, done by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, found a majority of voters disinclined to cast their ballots for Rep. Steve Knight, R-Lancaster (Los Angeles County), and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Costa Mesa (Orange County).
But those results may spread far outside those district boundaries, since they track closely with voter disapproval of President Trump and general unhappiness with Republican control of Congress.
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In Rohrabacher’s district, where Republicans hold a 43 percent-to-30 percent registration margin over Democrats, 51 percent of likely voters said they were disinclined to vote for the 14-term incumbent, compared with 41 percent who favored his re-election.
The so-called enthusiasm gap is even wider, with 28 percent of likely voters strongly inclined to vote for Rohrabacher and 44 percent strongly convinced they will not support him.
It’s a similar situation for Knight, magnified by the fact that in his once strongly Republican district in northern Los Angeles County, Democrats now have a 41 percent-to-36 percent registration edge.
After winning a tough re-election campaign in 2016, Knight now finds that 56 percent of his district’s likely voters don’t support him, compared with 38 percent who do. Only 27 percent enthusiastically back his re-election, while 50 percent of those voters are strongly disinclined to vote for him.
Polling suggests that Trump, his policies and his GOP congressional supporters bear at least part of the blame for the poor showings by Rohrabacher and Knight.
.@DanaRohrabacher has so many ties to Russia it is hard to get them into a 30-second ad. But we did. Replace him in 2018. pic.twitter.com/j5fS2dF50P— Pac For A Change (@PacForAChange) January 8, 2018