Roger Stone: I’ll beat suit even if jury thinks I’m a devil
Republican strategist Roger Stone said Thursday that jurors may think he’s “the devil” but he still expects to beat a defamation lawsuit accusing him of circulating a mailer calling a political candidate a sexual predator. The civil trial in New York was set to start Thursday but was postponed until at least August. Stone, a longtime Donald Trump adviser who cut his teeth in politics playing tricks on opponents of President Richard Nixon, said he looks forward to testifying — and he also hopes to testify before congressional committees investigating alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. He said he wants to testify before the House Intelligence Committee because ranking Democrat Adam Schiff, of California, “maligned” him by accusing him of predicting the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta‘s email account. “He slimed me in public, and I’d like to have an opportunity to defend myself in public,” Stone said. The defamation suit accuses Stone and two others of sending a flyer to 150,000 New York households during the state’s 2010 election that called the Libertarian Party candidate for governor, Warren Redlich, a “sick twisted pervert.” Stone predicted Thursday that he would prevail in the end because Redlich has “presented no evidence but a wild conspiracy theory.” He acknowledged, however, that a jury drawn from heavily Democratic Manhattan could present a challenge. “We would obviously attempt to get a balanced jury but it’s Manhattan,” he said. “The pool is 80 percent Democratic. And I recognize that to some Democrats I’m the devil. That’s just the way it goes.” Stone did not appear for trial Wednesday, when it was initially scheduled to start. His lawyer, Benjamin Burge, told the judge Stone was busy complying with a notice from the U.S. Senate intelligence committee asking him to preserve any documents that might be related to its investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election. When both sides appeared Thursday, the judge postponed the trial to give lawyers more time to go over exhibits and prepare their cases. Stone has said he communicated with Guccifer 2.0, the shadowy hacker credited with breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s email servers. But he has denied that he worked with Russian officials to influence the presidential election. He said Thursday that complying with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s notice is time-consuming because he has “multiple email addresses and boxes” but he wants to cooperate with both the Senate and House intelligence committees. Redlich’s lawsuit claims that Stone and his accomplices were responsible for the defamatory flyer. The mailing, which included Redlich’s photo and the header “Sexual Predator Alert,” said: “This man constitutes a public danger.” And it warned: “If you see this man in your neighborhood, CALL THE POLICE!” It purported to come from an organization called People for a Safer New York. At the time, Stone was advising two other candidates for governor: Kristin Davis, a former madam of a prostitution ring, and the Republican nominee, Carl Paladino. Redlich also is suing Paladino and his former campaign manager, Michael Caputo. Redlich, who is representing himself at the trial, and is seeking unspecified damages, charged Wednesday that Stone’s failure to appear was part of a defense strategy to prolong what should be a speedy trial. But Redlich agreed Thursday to postpone the trial, saying the delay would give him more time to prepare. Stone, 64, got his start in politics working for Nixon, where he developed a reputation as someone who specialized in campaign trickery and spreading dirt on opponents. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Donald Trump adviser: Secret warrant may have caught hacker contact
Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone says he believes his contacts with a Russian-linked hacker who took credit for breaching the Democratic National Committee may have been obtained through a FISA warrant, which allows the government to collect the communications of individuals suspected of being agents of a foreign power. Stone is among a handful of President Donald Trump‘s associates who are under scrutiny for possible links to Russia during the presidential race. In a statement to The Associated Press, Stone said he’s retained two attorneys to explore whether he can compel the government to “either charge me or admit they have no case whatsoever.” The Republican operative has acknowledged having a Twitter exchange with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker that U.S. officials believe has ties to Russia. Stone said he was “unaware at the time of the brief exchange of allegations that the hacker in question is suspected of being a Russian asset.” “I have no relationship with the Russian state, Russian Intelligence or any other Russians,” said Stone, who split with Trump’s campaign in August 2015 but remains in touch with the president. Stone’s messages with Guccifer 2.0 were first reported by the website The Smoking Gun. He said the story contains information that “could only be learned by surveillance of my domain and eavesdropping on my e-mail, phone calls and texts.” “If these where obtained through a FISA warrant as I believe and the information was leaked to the Smoking Gun, that would constitute a felony,” Stone said. He also suggested, without evidence, the government had Trump under surveillance during the presidential campaign. Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping the New York skyscraper where he lived and ran his campaign, though he has provided no evidence to support his explosive allegation. On Monday, the White House started softening Trump’s claims, with spokesman Sean Spicer saying the president was referring to general surveillance that may have been approved by the Obama administration. The FBI, as well as House and Senate committees, are investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible contacts between Trump associates and Russians. Trump has asked the congressional committees also to investigate his wiretapping allegations, though the Justice Department missed a Monday deadline to provide evidence to the House committee. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says he’s waiting to hear from FBI Director James Comey whether a warrant was issued that would have allowed the Obama administration to tap Trump’s phones during the campaign. Graham says he asked Comey to answer by Wednesday and also to say whether the FBI is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. If Comey doesn’t comply, Graham says Congress “is going to flex its muscle.” “We’ll issue a subpoena to get the information, we’ll hold up the deputy attorney general’s nomination until Congress is provided with the information to finally clear the air as to whether there was ever a warrant issued against the Trump campaign,” Graham, who heads the Judiciary Committee’s crime and terrorism subcommittee, said Wednesday on NBC’s “Today” show. Republican Sen. John McCain has singled out Stone as a Trump associate who should answer questions about his ties to Russia. The Arizona lawmaker suggested in an interview Sunday with CNN that Stone may have ties to ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Stone denied any connection to Yanukovych or his political party. Stone said he did work for a “small pro-Western splinter party” of Ukrainian politician Volydmyr Litwin, calling the effort to help win seats in parliament a “low budget operation.” Stone said he is willing to testify in any Senate hearings that occur “in public and not behind closed doors.” He’s retained former U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey and South Florida lawyer Grant Smith to represent him. Last year, Coffey represented Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski when he was charged with simple battery after an altercation with a female reporter. The prosecutor later dropped the charges. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Blake Dowling: Consumers can avoid feeling the ‘email Bern’ by hackers
Debbie Wasserman Schultz got to “Feel the Bern” in the form of a hostile crowd of Florida delegates at the Democratic National Committee. Why were these Bern Victims so fired up? The email scandal of course, which led to Schultz’s resignation. The pro-Clinton digital documentation that was revealed in this breach and scandal is a mess. There are several old school rules of thumb that my grandparent’s used to use which were “make sure to get it in writing” and “make sure to not put that in writing.” You should have the same approach to writing emails. “I don’t care if anyone reads this ever.” If it’s not that, delete. Emails can be sent/forwarded to the wrong people, handed over to the courts, watched by the National Security Agency, and for Debbie and the gang at the DNC, hacked. The DNC realized something was wrong going back as far as April. They brought in a professional security firm to analyze their network; they found a breach, blocked it, but it was too late. The bad guys had been inside their world for a year, and they had already taken everything they wanted. It is suspected that a nation state was behind the hack (Russian-backed cybercrime syndicate – Guccifer 2.0 is suspected), and I was asked by the Orlando Sentinel this week how you stop something like that? (See my Q & A with Paul Owens later this week.) The short answer is; you don’t. If you have the resources to build nuclear weapons and fly in space, you can pile up enough code, hackers, hardware and software to perpetuate a successful cyber threat against anyone. Like Bill Clinton and the intern, it’s going to happen eventually. What you need to be thinking about is how to minimize the threat. Your password is your front line of defense. To those of you that have a password that is a variation of the word password or a word that can be found in the dictionary. FAIL. Those rules from information technology experts have been read over and over: use a number, a capital letter, and a symbol in every password gives you some security. There are software programs designed to auto-hack passwords, and by following these protocols, you might just stop a threat in its tracks. The most common attacks are Trojans, Phishing schemes, denial of service (DOS) attacks, Ransomware/Malware (Cryptolocker), and password attacks/brute force attacks. In conjunction with a strong password, put your email somewhere smart. Don’t use a free hosting service for email. There are a dozen examples of free email, but I will minimize my risk of a nasty letter in the mail and not call them by name. You get what you pay for, both in life and email. Use a cloud platform with a “Tier 4” data center. Tier 4 is defined as critical servers and computer systems in a Data Center, with fully redundant subsystems (cooling, power, network links, storage, etc.) and compartmentalized security zones controlled by biometric access control methods. If you have your email on a local server, make sure a state of the art firewall is deployed, and in all cases have up to date hardware with the latest patches, as well as anti-virus and antispam solutions in place. Lastly, if an attack, breach or theft occurs, have a solid backup of your email and data in place. The Russians, Chinese, the 14 people in North Korea with internet access and the wacko next door could all be potential cyber criminals. You can buy kits on the dark web to become a cybercriminal in about seven minutes. So keep thinking defensively, to that end, another way to keep the bad guys out is “two-factor authentication.” This is a method of confirming a user’s identity by utilizing a combination of two different components. These components may be something that the user knows, something that the user possesses or something that is inseparable from the user. An example from everyday life is the withdrawing of money from an ATM. You have to have a bank card (something that the user possesses, 1 factor) and a PIN (personal identification number, 2 factor) allows the transaction to be carried out. The same goes to logging into a commercial site, when they text you a code to enter. Criminals are not getting dumber, but the average American is; see the Pokémon Go craze if you need further evidence. So when it comes to email, keep your eyes wide-open, and security top of mind. Be safe out there. ___ Blake Dowling is chief business development officer at Aegis Business Technologies. His technology columns are published by several organizations. Contact him at dowlingb@aegisbiztech.com or at www.aegisbiztech.com.
