Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be breezy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 7:01 PM, for 11h 56m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 61.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred fifty-sixth day.
It’s the Ides of March.
Recommended for reading in full:
Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger, and Ellen Nakashima report Documents shed light on Russian hacking of Democratic Party leaders:
Documents unsealed Thursday in a lawsuit have shed new light on how hackers breached Democratic Party email accounts before the 2016 election.
The documents include a forensic analysis by a former top official in the FBI’s cybercrime division, which concluded that a Web server company owned by a Russian Internet entrepreneur was used by Russian operatives to hack Democratic Party leaders.
The Russian businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, has denied involvement in the hack, and his lawyers argued for months that the forensic analysis should be kept under seal and hidden from public view.
The analysis was completed as part of a federal lawsuit Gubarev filed in Florida against BuzzFeed, the online news outlet. Gubarev argued BuzzFeed defamed him by publishing a dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier alleged that hackers used servers from two of Gubarev’s companies — Webzilla and its parent company XBT Holding.
The 35-page Steele dossier also alleged that Gubarev played a “significant” role in the hacking operation “under duress” from the Russian security agency FSB. Gubarev has also denied that allegation — and the new forensic analysis, conducted by an expert paid by BuzzFeed as part of the suit, provides no evidence to support the claim that Gubarev was involved.
The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Wanted Russian “Reported” From Mar-a-Lago:
Sergey Danilochkin, a Russian real estate investor charged with tax fraud in connection with the organized crime figures behind the Magnitsky case, now lives in South Florida and attended a January 2018 fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, during which he made a video bragging about his inside access to the property and noting the surprising number of Russian-speakers in attendance.
While the guests sipped cocktails and studied photos of African wildlife, Danilochkin, who is also an aspiring journalist, filmed the bustling ballroom on a smartphone and posted the footage on YouTube. Holding a flute of champagne and wearing a dark suit, the Russian émigré addressed the camera in his native tongue, alluding to the uncanny way Russians seem to turn up in the president’s orbit.
“The most interesting thing,” Danilochkin said, “is that we met a lot of people here who speak Russian.”
Ceratogyrus attonitifer – new horned baboon spider from Angola: