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Russian hackers targeted the 2008 Barack Obama campaign and U.S. government officials as far back as 2007 and have continued to attack them since they left their government jobs, according to a new report scheduled for release Friday.

The targets included several of the 2008 Obama campaign field managers as well as the presidents closest White House aides and senior officials in the Defense, State and Energy Departments, the report says.

It names several officials by title, but not by name, including several officials involved in Russian policy, including a U.S. ambassador to Russia, according to a draft version of the report, authored by Area 1 Security, a Redwood, California company founded by former NSAveterans.

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Theyre still getting fresh attacks, the company says.

The attacks on their email accounts have continued as the officials migrated to think tanks, universities and private industry, the company says. The favored weapon of the Russians and other hackers is the so-called phishing email, in which the recipient is invited to click on a innocent-looking link which opens a door to the attackers.

U.S. President Barack Obama, right, meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Los Cabos, Mexico, on June 18, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Michael McFaul, Obamas ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014, told Newsweek Thursday that he gets frequent warnings of phishing attacks by an unnamed foreign government from both his Google email service and Stanford University, where he is now a professor of political science. He says his colleagues, assistants and people like that at Stanford also get attacked on a fairly regular basis.

Read more: Russia's greatest weapon may be its hackers

I have not been successfully penetrated, to the best of my knowledge, McFaul said in a brief telephone interview. So far as he knows, I have not been compromised. There were three other U.S. ambassadors to Russia during Obamas eight years in office who could not immediately be reached for comment.

The role of Russia in attacks on the 2008 campaigns of Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, has not been previously reported. On the eve of a U.S.-China summit meeting in 2013, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that Beijing alone was responsible for a 2008 cyber attack on the Obama and McCain campaigns.

China cant be excluded as a perpetrator in those attacks, Area 1 Securitys report says, but its new data show that Russia tried to hack several members of the Obama campaign and could have done so at the same time as someone that achieved massive data exfiltration.

Blake Darch, a former NSA technical analyst who co-founded Area 1 Security, tells Newsweek that "state-sponsored Russian hackers have been targeting United States officials and politicians since at least 2007 through phishing attacks." Russian hackers reportedly breached the Joint Chiefs of Staff email system in 2015.

The company said one of the Russian targets was a deputy campaign manager in the 2008 Obama campaign, but was otherwise unidentified in its report. There were a number of them over a period of time. One was Steve Hildebrand. Reached in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he now runs a speciality bakery and coffee shop, Hildebrand says he was not aware that he might have been a Russian target and didnt remember being warned about cyberattacks of any kind during the campaign. Another senior 2008 campaign aide (and later White House National Security Council spokesman), Tommy Vietor, tells Newsweek he had no knowledge of Russian hacking at the time.

Besides top officials in the Energy, Defense and State departments, the Area 1 Security report cites a half dozen positions in the Obama White House that were targeted from 2008 through 2016, including the presidents deputy assistant, special assistant, the special assistant to the political director, advance team leaders for First Lady Michelle Obama, and the White House deputy counsel. None of them could immediately be reached for comment.

Among the State Department targets named by Area 1 Security were three top offices dealing with Russia and Europe. Evelyn Farkas, who served as Obama administration's deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia during 2015-2015, said she could not discuss matters that remain classified, but said the biggest impact she remembered offhand was the Russian hack of the Joint Chiefs.

Among the three top, unnamed targets at the Energy Department was the director of the Office of Nuclear Threat Science, which is is responsible for overseeing the U.S. Nuclear Counterterrorism Program.

The Area 1 Security report names the Dukes, also known as Cozy Bear and APT-29, for the Obama attacks, the same Russian actors named in the 2015 and 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the State Department.

In an interview, Darch called the Dukes a front for Russias premier intelligence-gathering arm, which would be the SVR, or External Intelligence Service, the Kremlin equivalent to the CIA, although he declined to specifically name it. As opposed to the DNC hacks launched to steal and publicize information damaging to the campaign of Hillary Clinton, he said, the Russian offensives that Area 1 Security uncovered were clandestine intelligence gathering operations designed to secretly penetrate a wide variety of institutions and industry.

Clinton had harshly criticized the Kremlins suppression of human rights and seizure of the Crimea, while her rival Donald Trump had repeatedly said he wanted to be friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Oren Falkowitz, a former analyst at the National Security Agency who co-founded Area 1 Security, says he launched the company to stop phishing attacks, which until then was thought to be impossible because so many employees continue to click on risky links in emails. The key to the companys success was persuading clients to let it monitor its servers, he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview.

In Fridays report, Area 1 Security says it uses a vast active sensor network to detect and trace phishing attacks. It said it could imagine the Dukes operating a giant spreadsheet where new targets are added, but never leave It moves quickly, compromising a server or service to send out phishing emails from it, and then leaves, never returning to check for bounced email messages to cull from its list.

Most ex-officials dont realize they are carrying the blemish of being a Russian target into their new workplace, the Area 1 Security report says. As a result, they give the Dukes beachheads in companies and organizations they never even planned on or imagined hacking, such as Washington think tanks, defense contractors, lobbyist offices, financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies stocked with high ranking former political, military and intelligence officials.

Russia is notoriously persistent in pursuing targets, the report says. Its a lesson on why every organization needs great security.

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Exclusive: Russian Hackers Attacked the 2008 Obama Campaign - Newsweek

Barack Obama jokingly wipes his brow during a forum with young leaders in Chicago. Photograph: Jim Young/AFP/Getty Images

An American presidents ex-girlfriend who claims she was written out of history. A scathing review from the New York Times. And a literary feud with a rival biographer.

Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, by the Pulitzer prize winner David J Garrow, is no ordinary addition to the annals of political biography. It took nine years to produce and runs to a doorstopping 1,461 pages. Its unusually candid disclosures about Obamas sex life and drug use have generated clickbait headlines. In particular, it contains extensive interviews with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a former girlfriend who claims Obama twice proposed marriage.

But Garrows reliance on Jager as a source has been attacked by the influential New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, as has his own critical portrayal of rival Obama biographies. On Friday, one of those biographers, David Maraniss, weighed in with a tweet: Willl [sic] say this once only. David Garrow, author of new Obama bio, was vile, undercutting, ignoble competitor unlike any Ive encountered.

The controversy comes as Obama himself starts to mould his post-presidential career. This week, he unveiled the conceptual design of his presidential library and museum in Chicago and released a video endorsing the centrist Emmanuel Macron in the French election. On Sunday, the 55-year-old will deliver his first major speech since leaving the White House when he receives a John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award in Boston. He has not, as yet, offered direct criticism of his successor, Donald Trump.

The new book by Garrow, who describes himself as essentially a Bernie Sanders democratic socialist, offers a taste of how Obamas legacy is likely to be contested. Its attention-grabbing element is Jager, now a professor of East Asian studies at Oberlin College in Ohio, who declined to be interviewed for this article.

Garrow writes how Obama and Jager met in mid-1980s Chicago, moved in together and talked about marriage all the time. He continues: In their evenings at the spacious apartment on South Harper, Barack read literature, not history, while Sheila had more than enough course readings to occupy her time. And, of course, there was another dimension as well. Barack is a very sexual/sensual person, and sex was a big part of our relationship, Sheila later acknowledged.

In the winter of 1986, according to Jager, Obama asked her to marry him. But when the couple visited her family home, Obama met her father and his best friend both conservative Republicans. It did not go well. They talked politics and, at least in the view of the friend, Mike Dees, Obama ended up getting beat up. Jagers father came out against the marriage.

The following year, according to Jager, Obama changed and gained a sense of manifest destiny. He became someone quite extraordinary and so very ambitious, and this happened over the course of a few months. I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.

Discussion of marriage dragged on, Garrow writes, but it was affected by what Sheila describes as Baracks torment over this central issue of his life, the question of his own race and identity. The resolution of his black identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career and to the crystallization of the drive and desire to become the most powerful person in the world.

The book claims that even after Obama met Michelle Robinson, a law firm colleague, he continued to see Jager irregularly for a year (I always felt bad about it, Jager says). And it strongly implies that his preference for Michelle, an African American, over Jager, who is half-Dutch and half-Japanese, was politically motivated.

Baracks prior relationships had been with women who, like himself through 1985, were citizens of the world as much as they were of any particular country or city, Garrow writes. But if Barack truly believed that his destiny entailed what he thought, he knew full well the value of having roots in one place and having that place be essential to your journey. And who more than Michelle Robinson and her family could personify the strong, deep roots of black Chicago?

Jager does not appear in Obamas bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Instead, she is conflated with two other ex-girlfriends into a single woman who makes a cameo appearance.

I never understood why he wrote it that way, Jager told Garrow. There are whole passages from that book that are essentially copies of his letters to me. I always found it ironic that he was using his love letters to me to write his book and then completely omitted me from the entire account.

The author said his researcher got the scoop on Jager in 2009 because, knowing what address Obama had lived at, it was simply a case of going to the University of Chicago library and pulling the student directories for 1986, 1987 and 1988 to see who else was living at the address.

Speaking from Pittsburgh on Friday, he said: I find this really quite astonishing and humorous that given all of the inaccurate speculation about Baracks life over the years, it dawned on no journalist that thered be student directories from the 80s that you could go look at. It seemed like an obvious thing to do but nobody had done it.

I was living in Britain at that time in 2009, and so I emailed her out of the blue and that began a very extensive email conversation.

Garrow, who spent eight very intense hours with Obama last year and showed him the manuscript, said he had been taken aback by the intense media interest in this aspect of the book. Im sort of bemused because to me its not surprising that someone, anyone would have prior girlfriends. I dont think thats the most interesting thing about Barack.

The single most important thing about Sheila and Sheilas memories is her crystal-clear recollection of Barack beginning to talk about his political aspirations and sense of political destiny in 1987. That matches up with how everyone who came to know him at Harvard Law School from 88 onward realized from day one: this was someone who was going to be a politician.

For Garrow, if not for headline writers, a more important and equally neglected part of Obamas life is his eight years in the state legislature in Springfield, Illiniois, which were hugely politically formative. He also argues that Obama was once a firm supporter of single-payer universal health coverage and outspoken critic of government surveillance, only to reverse these positions once he reached the White House.

He added: I think its just undeniable that there has been this profound change and an embrace of big money, an embrace of all of these music and movie celebrities and Richard Branson billionaires. To me, its a profound change from who he once was.

Up through 2004, this was someone who lived a very modest, middle-class paycheck-to-paycheck life, and so to see him, as president, get so infatuated with celebrities and weve seen that infatuation with celebrities and all this money and private airplanes continue this spring Ive just really come to feel that who he is now is astonishingly different from who he was up through 2003. To me, this is a much more substantive point than who was his girlfriend in 1987.

But Garrows narrative cannot resist more references to sex than might be expected in an academic history, nor a chance to belittle rival biographers. He states that Maranisss 2012 book, Barack Obama: the Story, contained only two newsworthy nuggets and that reviewers panned the volumes shortcomings. He also quotes Jager as saying Obama called her out of the blue and said he was disgusted by Maranisss interest in his sexual history.

Asked about Maranisss tweet accusing him of being vile and ignoble, Garrow said he had never met or spoken to him and denied feeling insulted.

No, he said. Im an academic. I think American life would be better without Twitter and I think wed have a better country if the president was not on Twitter. What people say in a bar or a pub doesnt necessarily merit being memorialised. So he doesnt like being criticised in print. Im not surprised.

In the New York Times, Kakutani dismissed the biography as a dreary slog of a read: a bloated, tedious and given its highly intemperate epilogue ill-considered book that is in desperate need of editing, and way more exhausting than exhaustive.

A spokesman for Obama declined to comment.

Excerpt from:
Obama biography stirs controversy with tales of politics, sex ...

WASHINGTON Attorney General Jeff Sessionsinstructed federal prosecutors this week to take the most aggressive approach possible against federal criminal defendants. The policy change will result in lengthier prison sentences for drug offenders and likely reverse a recent drop in the federal prison population.

In a memo dated May 10, Sessions wrote federal prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense, calling that a core principle of the Justice Departments charging and sentencing policy.

The new policy replaces the approach of the Justice Department during the Obama administration under former Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. They gave federal prosecutors more leeway to decide when it was appropriate to charge crimes that trigger mandatory minimums, which automatically result in set prison terms.

Mike Blake / Reuters

This policy affirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency, Sessions wrote in the new memo. This policy fully utilizes the tools Congress has given us. By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.

Sessions memorandum nixesHolders 2010 memo, which encouraged federal prosecutors to make decisions on charging, plea agreements and sentencing recommendations. These were based on the merits of each case, taking into account an individualized assessment of the defendants conduct and criminal history and the circumstances relating to the commission of the offense (including the impact of the crime on victims), the needs of the communities we serve, and federal resources and priorities.

Now, under Sessions, if prosecutors want to divert from the new policy and not pursue the most serious charge available, they must get specific approval from the U.S. Attorney or an Assistant Attorney General. Holders policy only required charging decisions to be reviewed by a supervisory attorney.

DOJ

DOJ

Sessions memo also rescinds an Aug. 12, 2013, memofrom Holder which instructed federal prosecutors to ensure that our most severe mandatory minimum penalties are reserved for serious, high-level, or violent drug traffickers. If the defendant met certain criteria if their conduct didnt involve violence, if they werent a leader, if they didnt have significant ties to gangs or drug trafficking organizations, and if they didnt have a significant criminal history Holder instructed them not to charge the quantities that would trigger mandatory minimum sentences.

That was part of a Smart on Crime initiative Holder launched toward the end of his time as attorney general. Holder, a former judge in D.C., told HuffPost in 2014 that he didnt think extremely long sentences would necessarily induce cooperation so much as the certainly of punishment.

Ive been a prosecutor since 1976, I understand the notion of starting at the bottom and working your way up, and I would never put in place a system that would undercut that fundamental part of our law enforcement system, Holder said at the time. And yet I think we can be smarter. We dont have to put people in jail for 10 and 15 years. You could have sentences that are substantially shorter that will, necessarily, continue to induce the kind of cooperation that we need.

By the end of former President Barack Obamas term, he became the first commander in chief since Jimmy Carter to leave office with a lower federal prison population than when he arrived.

Additionally, Sessions new policy gets rid of limitations Holder placed on the use of sentencing enhancements, which allow prosecutors to seek harsher sentences in certain cases based on prior convictions. Sessions said federal prosecutors must disclose to the sentencing court all facts that impact the sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimum sentences. Holders policy only said they should seek those sentencing enhancements in more serious cases that met certain criteria.

While many conservatives backed changes to federal drug sentencing policy, Sessions largely did not when he served in the Senate. Sessions came up as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, amid a crack epidemic as the federal government took a tough approach to the war on drugs. Largely as a result of drug policies, the federal prison populationexplodedfrom 24,640 inmates in 1980 to 219,298 by 2013.

Sessions said in 2015 that he believed eliminating or reducing mandatory minimums reduces the ability of law officers to negotiate and protect the public.

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Jeff Sessions Rolls Back Obama-Era Drug Sentencing Reforms - HuffPost

President Obama took heat from friend and foe alike by signing on for a pair of speeches at $400,000 apiece, but a mystery fee for a climate change address in Milan this week could leave those deals in the dust.

Neither Team Obama norSeeds & Chips, the organization hosting the May 8-11 Italian summit, will say how much Obama is getting paid. That prompted wild speculation from one publication, which did a back-of-the-napkin estimation that put Obama's payment at a potential $3.2 million.

While that number appears to have been the total cost for all 3,500 tickets to the event on how food innovation can save humanity from climate change,which went for 850 euros, or $925, a piece, it still leaves open the question of how much Obama got.

The Express replaced its previous piece withan updated storythat made no mention of any speaking fee, and representatives for the former president did not return Fox News request for comment. Michela Gelati -- a spokesperson for Seeds & Chips, -- told Fox News that they did not have the information.

The secrecy surrounding the ex-president's potential payday comes after he raised eyebrows by striking two lucrative deals that seemed to contradict his image as a champion of the 99 percent.Fox Business Network broke a storyin late April about the $400,000 hell pull in this upcoming September for a talk on health care at a Wall Street conference run by Cantor Fitzgerald, a big Wall Street firm.

With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I'd just point out that in 2008 Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history -- and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR, Eric Schultz, a spokesman for Obama, told Fox News.

He added that the former president will continue to give the occasional speech, but he will devote much of his time to writing his book and focusing his post-presidency work on training and elevating a new generation of political leaders in America.

Less than a week after news broke about his planned speech at the Cantor Fitzgerald conference,The New York Post reportedthat Obama was paid another $400,000 for his appearance at the A&E Networks advertising upfront at The Pierre Hotel in New York City, where he was interviewed by historian Doris Kearns Goodwinfor more than 90 minutes in front of the cable networks advertisers.

United States former President Barack Obama talks during the "Seeds&Chips - Global Food Innovation" summit, in Milan, Tuesday, May 9, 2017. Obama is in Milan to deliver a keynote speech on food security and the environment, two issues that he has long worked on. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

While Obamas speaking fees may be nothing new for a former president, he also has come under scrutiny for allegedly using his tax-exempt Obama Foundation as a money generator.

Obama's foundation is in place to raise money for his presidential library, but critics warn that the operation is starting to look like the controversial Clinton Foundation, which took in tens of millions of dollars and sparked "pay-to-play" accusations. In an apparent effort to avoid such comparisons, Obama said in January that he would not accept contributions from for-profit entities, federal lobbyists or foreign nationals or agentswhile in office.

Despite the criticism, it is not uncommon for former presidents to get big bucks to give speeches once they leave the Oval Office.

Harry Truman wouldnt give speeches for money and called the practice exploitive, but that did not stop Gerald Ford, who was the first president known to take advantage of the speaking circuit after leaving office. Ford earned as much as $40,000 per speech after leaving office in 1977 or more than $165,000 in 2017 if inflation is taken into account.

Bill Clinton, who normally charges between $250,000 and $500,000 per engagement, was paid a whopping $750,000 to give a talk in Hong Kong in 2011, while his successor, George W. Bush, has reportedly made somewhere between $20 million and $35 million in speaking fees since he left office in 2009. Shortly after leaving office in 1989, Ronald Reagan was paid around $2 million to go on a speaking tour of Japan.

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Obama's mystery fee for Italy speech renews debate over lucrative lecturing by ex-presidents - Fox News

Republicans efforts to rescind a myriad of Obama-era rules ended with 14 regulations eliminated from the books but one late failure.

Since Republicans took the reins of government in Washington this year, they useda once-obscure law to rollback regulations issued by the Obama administration. They voted to overturn rules ranging from one that limited the ability of the mentally ill to buy firearms to another forcing oil companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments.

The law, the Congressional Review Act, had been used successfully only once before.

Getting this done hasnt always been easy, and weve met a lot of obstruction along the way, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on theSenate floor Thursday. And while we cant simply turn back time or completely erase the negative impact that Obama regulations have had already, the CRA has allowed us to stop a number of them in their tracks.

Facing a Thursday deadline to use the procedure, the effort ended on a sour note for industry. Republicans came up one vote short in the Senate Wednesday to roll back a regulation forcing oil and gas companies to curb methane leaks.

About 35 congressional review act resolutions were introduced this year, but most failed to win the a vote in one or the other chamber. However, lawmakers exceeded analysts expectations of how many CRA votes could take place, and many of the regulations Congress didnt vote on may be repealed by the Trump administration in the end. Thats just a lengthier process and open to legal challenge.

In their short time in charge, Republicans have put the health and well-being of everyday Americans in jeopardy by opening the door for wealthy oil, gas, and coal donors to pollute our air and water, Representative Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, said in a statement. He labeled it the obscure and ham-handed CRA process.

The review act,which sets expedited congressional procedures to review a regulation including, requires agencies to submit major rules to Congress, and then gives lawmakers up to 60 congressional working days to vote overturn them. The act doesnt require a filibuster-proof 60-vote margin in the Senate during that 60-day period. A reset period at the beginning of a new presidency lets lawmakers torpedo the previous presidents most recent rules. The reset period expires Thursday.

Until Trump was elected, the Congressional Review Act had only been used successfully once before. In 2001 Congress voted to overturn a Labor Department ergonomics rule issued by the Clinton administration. President Barack Obama vetoed the CRA measures that passed the Republican-led Congress during his tenure.

But Trump and Republicans in Congress united in their criticisms of Obamas health, safety and environmental rules, and seized on the CRA as the surest route to repeal them.

Other major regulations rescinded this year include one that required federal contractors to disclose labor law and employment violations when bidding on a new or renewed contract. The rule was opposed by business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Professional Services Council, which has representatives of companies such as Northrop Grumman Corp. and BAE Systems PLC on its board of directors.

The CRA was also successfully used to rescind a federal rule forcing Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and other overseas oil producers to disclose their payments to foreign governments. The rollback was seen as a victory for U.S. oil majors that spent years trying to de-fang the Securities and Exchange Commission effort, a part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation. Oil lobbyists argued it gives global rivals a competitive edge.

But others failed to get a vote, amid competing priorities and some controversy. Others not acted upon include a measure backed by Republican Ted Cruz that would roll back Energy Department rules used to set energy efficiency standards for compressors and one to block Treasury Department rules to close tax-inversion loopholes. The methane rule that failed Wednesday was estimated to cost oil drillers hundreds of millions of dollars a year to comply, but environmental groups argue it mandated common-sense procedures to cut venting and flaring of the greenhouse gas.

Read More: GOP Girds for Race to Repeal Obamas Final Rules Before Deadline

"From their perspective it was incredibly successful,"said Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy for the American Action Forum, a Washington research group that favors smaller government. But "these had targeted impacts to a few industries."

According to the group, the 14 CRAs are projected to save save $3.7 billion in total regulatory costs and eliminate 4.2 million hours of paperwork.

Its time for this sad chapter to end," said Amit Narang, a regulatory policy advocate for the watch-dog group Public Citizen. "The CRA gave Congress and President Trump a shortcut to attack and kill common-sense regulations at corporate special interests behest.

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Still, regulatory roll backs continue, as Trump is already moving to act without Congress. The Environmental Protection Agency issued a delay for safety regulations put in place after a deadly explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. There was a proposal in Congress to cancel that rule but it never received a vote. Trump ordered all of the governments departments to consider what rules can be axed, and set a mandate that two rules must be scrapped for each one new one issued.

The failure on the final rule-- on regulations governing methane emissions -- was a surprise defeat for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after Arizona Senator John McCain broke with most Republicans and voted no. The vote failed 49-51 on Wednesday.

Within hours, the Interior Department announced it was consideringreworking or rescinding the methane rule on its own. Those changes will take time -- and will face inevitable challenges in court -- but the net effect could be the same.

Interior is quite likely to significantly change it, albeit through a rulemaking process that will take time,James Rubin, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney, said in an email. The current rule lives for another day, but its future is not bright.

(Updates with comment from Grijalva in seventh paragraph. A previous version of this story gave an incorrect name for the Professional Services Council.)

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Republican Window to Roll Back Obama's Rules Closes at 14-1 - Bloomberg