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MAD magazine is seeing red over Time’s new cover, which shows the onion domes of Moscow looming over the White House of President Donald Trump. Time also released an animated version of the cover online: But MAD featured a similar image in December, although not as a cover

John Podesta, special counsellor to President Obama and Hillary’s 2016 campaign chairman, may have violated federal law by not disclosing 75,000 shares of stock from a company with close ties to the Kremlin, the Daily Caller reports. Podesta received the shares from Joule Unlimited Technologies while serving on the company’s board back in 2010. After announcing he was leaving the company to work at the White House in 2014, he was awarded an additional 75,000 common share stocks. The Schedule B section of the financial disclosure forms for government officials demands that new employees "report any purchase, sale or exchange...

(Full article title: Hillary Clinton's team met with Russian ambassador, says Kremlin spokesman, as he warns against 'hysteria') Hillary Clinton’s team members met with the Russian ambassador during the election as well as Donald Trump’s, the Kremlin spokesman has alleged, as he set out to dismiss the “hysteria” surrounding Mr Trump’s links to Russia. The house intelligence committee will hold its first session on Russia on March 20, with the heads of the FBI, national security agency and CIA expected to appear, plus previous intelligence chiefs. But Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that America...

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said in an interview that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who met with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, also met with advisers to the Hillary Clinton campaign. “Well, if you look at some people connected with Hillary Clinton during her campaign, you would probably see that he had lots of meetings of that kind,” Dmitry Peskov told CNN’s GPS host Fareed Zakaria on Sunday. “There are lots of specialists in politology, people working in think tanks advising Hillary or advising people working for Hillary.”

RUSH: Now, I mentioned at the beginning of the program a piece that I read at a publication called Foreign Policy. It’s a magazine. It’s owned by the Washington Post, and it’s an effort to compete with another magazine called Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is a very august publication of the Council on Foreign Relations — which, of course, has a symbiotic relationship with the Trilateral Commission. Now, this is the Washington Post attempt to get in on the business of elite establishment types reading about foreign policy. Now, these people have nothing to do with foreign policy. Foreign policy...

The recent National Intelligence Council report assessing the involvement of Russia in last year’s U.S. presidential elections spurred a flurry of media reports suggesting that Russia is heavily involved in anti-fracking campaigning. Some authors interpreted this involvement as a “propaganda effort”, while others claimed the Kremlin was financially backing anti-fracking groups in the U.S., without, however, providing any evidence for this claim. The basis for all these reports is part of the report, in which the authors discuss the agenda of RT, a state-funded TV channel and website that is widely seen as the Kremlin’s chief megaphone abroad. They quote...

In an amusing twist, Julian Assange whose Wikileaks has now had 20 individual releases of hacked John Podesta emails over the past three weeks and who has been accused by Hillary Clinton of collaborating with the Russians in an attempt to disrupt and subvert the US electoral process, accused the Clinton campaign of attacking the servers used by WikiLeaks. Speaking via telephone at a conference in Argentina on Wednesday, RT reported that Assange claimed the daily email release ritual has “whipped up a crazed hornet’s nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign” leading them to attack WikiLeaks. “They attacked our...

“Russia views these not as U.S. sanctions, but Obama sanctions, so he will go and we can both decide that we don’t bear any responsibility for the actions of a jackass,” Fyodor Lukyanov told Bloomberg News. Fyodor Lukyanov is chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a Kremlin foreign-policy advisory group. Russia is displaying grace, restraint, reason and humor in this matter as Obama launches accusations against the Kremlin and inflicted retaliatory sanctions. "Russia hopes that it can ride out the storm and put relations with the U.S. on a better track once [President-elect] Trump takes office," said...

John F. Kerry was late to his own party. Staffers, journalists and other officials were gathered in the ornate Benjamin Franklin salon at the State Department on Dec. 14 for early Christmas festivities. But the secretary of State was nowhere to be seen. Kerry was on the telephone to various world leaders, trying to find out about a major diplomatic meeting — from which the United States had been excluded. The gathering, which sought to broker a resolution to the devastating Syrian conflict, took place six days later in Moscow and involved the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey.

"We need to take action and we will," he told US radio station NPR. Russia stands accused by the US of hacking the emails of the Democratic Party and a key Hillary Clinton aide, which the Kremlin strongly denies. Republican president-elect Donald Trump has also dismissed the claim as "ridiculous" and politically motivated.

Third-party presidential candidates have participated in acts of civil disobedience, risked arrest, been arrested and been jailed with some frequency over the past 150 years. So the fact that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein faces misdemeanor criminal charges in North Dakota stemming from a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline is hardly unprecedented. But it is politically significant. https://www.thenation.com/article/there-is-an-arrest-warrant-out-for-jill-stein/

Vladimir Putin is considering quitting as Russian President, a Kremlin expert has claimed. The 64-year-old may stand down due to 'certain circumstances' that mean he will need to be out of the spotlight next year, it is suggested. Russian political analyst Valery Solovey hinted that Putin, who welcomed the election of Donald Trump as US President, may be forced to step aside due to illness. Mr Solovey, professor at Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs, said the president might need to 'avoid publicity in 2017 for several months or will appear very rarely'.

•Axelrod wanted campaign manager Jim Messina fired, but he wound up the odd man out himself• Palace intrigue led 'Axe' to refer to Messina and White House messaging chief David Plouffe as 'two strongmen running the Kremlin'• The two men resented Axelrod for getting rich by taking a percentage of the hundreds of millions spent on campaign ads •An aloof Obama stayed out of the way as his inner circle fought a political gladiator game that pushed out Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs The man most responsible for getting Barack Obama to the White House – the man who...

Recent headlines have brought attention to the seedier side of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term. This scheme, which gives every appearance of being about pay-for-play, solicited donations from foreign big-shots in exchange for access to the boss of American foreign policy. I’ll leave to others to assess the legality of this shady business—for now it’s the national security implications we need to discuss. It’s a big deal when the person who’s possibly our next president—and if polls are accurate, she probably will be—has sold access to foreign bidders before taking the oath of...

The bad legal news for Hillary Clinton continued to cascade upon her presidential hopes during the past week in what has amounted to a perfect storm of legal misery. Here is what happened. Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s five closest advisors when she was Secretary of State, four of whom remain close to her and have significant positions in her presidential campaign, were interrogated by the FBI. These interrogations were voluntary, not under oath, and done in the presence of the same legal team which represented all five aides. The atmosphere was confrontational, as the purpose of the interrogations is to...

A former analyst for the National Security Agency is calling on Hillary Clinton to explain the emerging details of her campaign chief's connection to the Kremlin. Lobbying forms made public last month indicate that the U.S. branch of the Russian bank Sberbank has retained the Podesta Group, a Washington-based lobbying firm founded by Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and his brother, Tony, in 1998. John Schindler, a security expert and former counterintelligence officer, notes that the bank's majority stockholder is the Russian Central Bank, which controls more than 30 percent of the country's banking assets.

The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth. Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO...

The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth. Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, DC. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO...

A massive fire raged at a former headquarters of the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow on Sunday before it was brought under control several hours later. Hundreds of firefighters and several cranes were seen battling the blaze Sunday afternoon after the fire broke out hours earlier. […] The Defense Ministry moved to a new headquarters on the Moskva River in 2014, but still kept the old building near the Kremlin. …

As Belgium and Europe mourned and condemned the senseless terrorism in Brussels, some officials in Moscow seem to be gloating. The first outcome of new terror attacks in the heart of Europe will be a more severe stance on the migrant crisis, a fresh debates over EU border controls, in particular those in the Schengen zone as well as a further rise of ultra-right parties in the EU countries. The extreme right wing politicians have already seized the opportunity to push anti-Muslim sentiment and this discourse divides Europe even more. The atmosphere of fear and division will also worsen social,...