Thread by @steveparks

Next up at @BylineFest is a conversation between two of the UK’S leading investigative journalists @carolecadwalla and @lukeharding1968

Thread of live tweets starts here…

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Carole begins by asking Luke when he began investigating Trump. He says he first investigated Manafort, when he was a senior Republican strategist who got involved in the Ukrainian elections… and began to see patterns that linked back to emerging Trump campaign
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Carole says her investigations into Brexit began doing features on technology, noticing tech companies popping up linked to fake news stories, election campaigning and so on… then the election and she began seeing links between it all, and the name Cambridge Analytica came up…

Luke says the pioneers of fake news a long time ago were the KGB with massive efforts on disinformation. And the events of now can be linked back to them, there are KGB staffers memoirs that talk about memos to recruit powerful Americans. Included personality guidance…

…potential candidates needed to be vain, narcissistic, bribable, unfaithful, poor analytically, etc.
Soon Russian ambassador met Trump, invited him on expenses paid luxury trip to Moscow. Three weeks later Trump announces for first time he’s interested in running for president

Christopher Steele came out with his dossier that said there was ‘kompromat’ (blackmail material) on Trump that the FSB (run by Putin before he became PM and president)

(Luke was Guardian correspondent in Moscow and learned there were even video bugs in his own apartment)

And so the question is what do they have in Trump and how is that used.

(Aside: Luke says the FSB like to mess with you, so would make it very obvious when they broke in to his apartment. One day they left a Russian sex manual by his bed with a bookmark in chapter on orgasms!!)

What is interesting now is what the Mueller investigation is uncovering about all this.

They think Trump couldn’t work in the UK, but what works here is a kind of laddish, Top Gear style, approach - Arron Banks, Farage and Andy Wigmore.

In Banks’ autobiography he boasts about meeting the Russian ambassador and drinking vodka... then there was a leak of their emails and it turns it there were many meetings.
They even invited the Russian ambassador and their FSB handler to LeaveEU campaign hq on results night!

There is a documentary trail of Russia offering Banks sweetheart secret business deals of gold and diamonds. Banks denies he took them, but had tweeted at the time ‘I’m investing in gold’
It’s not known if the £9m banks gave to leaveEU is his or from ‘elsewhere’

“There needs to be an equivalent of the Mueller investigation here in the UK” into where money came from, who was pulling the strings. The referendum was not a Free and fair election. It was a car crash of illegality. There will be a public enquiry, but maybe not for 20 years

Audience Q: it seems what you are doing is what the intelligence services should be doing. Where are they on this?

A: Think the intelligence services are well aware. The problem is moral cowardice in political leaders they report to. House committee wrote to May, no action

There’s discussion that our law enforcement agencies just aren’t geared up for this kind of scale of crime. The FBI, the Mueller investigation, have a lot of power and freedom. With suspicion over Trump campaign they raided offices, seized phones, issued indictments
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Meanwhile the investigation here had to be done by the Electoral Commission which is a bunch of civil servants with no investigations experience or real power... or much appetite for controversy
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And the people behind the Leave campaigns who have sought to make the funding trail muddy are very good at this, it’s what they do. Offshore companies, investments, loans and so on. Electoral commission just not geared up for that
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Carole says she interviewed Banks, and he was boasting about his diamond mines, and also that he has a diamond shop. She said ‘that’s a common pattern for money laundering isn’t it?’. He snapped ‘you can’t prove that!’

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Luke says he did an investigation into a massive international money laundering operation, involving high street banks. He met with the National Crime Agency and presented evidence. Followed up later to see if they were investigating. They said ‘it seems a bit complicated’

The intelligence services report only to the government, in secret, with no public facing role.
So we’re left with no powerful law enforcement agency in the UK able to work independently in the public interest to investigate such massive and complicated crime #BylineFest

Next, discussion on the way that Isabel Oakshott and Andrew Marr both undermines and attacked Carole’s investigation when she appeared on the Marr show. Carole says Marr simply didn’t understand the story, and the main problem was the BBC attitude that they had to ‘balance’ her..

... bit the issue is that they balanced a journalist with an evidence-based story with a commentator who just had beliefs. Carole says “I said to BBC researcher ‘I have evidence, so the opposite side to balance that is a liar’ - and so that’s what they got”

Carole wraps up by saying that they really appreciate all the support - the people who read the articles, tweet about them and keep the story in the public attention - and those who support them financially by buying papers, buying books.

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And that’s it from the session with the brilliant @carolecadwalla and @lukeharding1968 at the @BylineFest on their investigations into Trump and Brexit, and the links back to Russia.

The audience gives them a long standing ovation.

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