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Top Democrats Request FBI Investigation of Trump Campaign Ties To Russia Over Hacking (politico.com)
As the Trump campaign refuses to point blame at Russia for the DNC hacks, top democrats on four House committees are questioning possible connections between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. They have formally asked the FBI to investigate the matter, citing new comments from a Trump confidant. Politico reports: "Troubling new evidence appears to show that the Trump campaign not only was aware of cyber attacks against Secretary [Hillary] Clinton's campaign chairman, but was openly bragging about it as far back as August," said Reps. Elijah Cummings from Government Affairs, John Conyers from Judiciary, Eliot Engel from Foreign Affairs and Bennie Thompson from Homeland Security. "For months, we have been asking the FBI to examine links between the Trump campaign and illegal Russian efforts to affect our election, including interviewing Trump advisor Roger Stone," they said. "In light of this new evidence -- and these exceptional circumstances -- we call on the FBI to fully investigate and explain to the American people what steps it is taking to disrupt this ongoing criminal activity." Earlier this week Stone said that "I do have a back-channel communication with Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose organization has been dropping documents online from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and has been unloading documents from other Democrats as well. U.S. intelligence agencies last week declared that a connection exists between Russia and allegedly hacked documents leaked by WikiLeaks and others.
Can we see some of this troubling new evidence before we go to war with Russia please?
Right after they get on investigating the Clinton Foundation.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Enough already. We get it, Democrats, you really want to go to war with Russia for some reason. It's as blatant as Bush's desire to go to war in the Middle East.
Enough. Stop with the pretending that an insider leaking your dirty laundry A) excuses your corruption or B) is a justification for war.
Just, give it up. Please.
The whole, "The Russians did it!" is completely irrelevant. The hacks/leaks/whatever show that these people are complete slime and probably shouldn't be trusted to clean your toilet, let alone run your country. If the Russians have this information, it's safe to assume that *everyone* who wants this information has it. This entire crescendo of "The Russians!" is just a ploy to try to get people to ignore the horrible facts in these leaks and instead build up a bogeyman to redirect the peoples anger. It's grade A+ politics.
I don't know it for sure, but I heard about it on the internet. I think Trump needs to produce papers proving he's not a KGB agent. (I believe he is their most tremendous agent - there has never been a better KGB agent than Donald Trump.)
Disclaimer: I don't think either Trump or Clinton is suited to be president, for different but equally important reasons, and we desperately need a real third party candidate better than Johnson or Stein.
That said, the level of political gyration in this election is beyond astounding. I and many others have lost complete faith in journalistic integrity and ethics, and we are approaching Soviet-era levels of information control with respect to the leaks. In those leaks are very serious allegations of fraud, illegal collusion with the media and with other parties inside and outside the government, perjury and other criminal acts, the hypocritical content aside.
You will also notice that no politician has forwarded these allegations for investigation to the FBI, nor has the FBI apparently undertaken any effort to investigate these allegations. You will notice that the FBI has begun investigating the source of the leaks, but this action is contradictory in and of itself. Either the leaks are false, in which case there is nothing real that was leaked, or the leaks are true, in which case both the leaked material AND the source of the leaks are investigated.
What we have now is an overt subversion of the rule of law and the distraction pointed at our old enemy Russia. Russia, of course, isn't too happy with us meddling in Ukraine or Syria because we can't get our fucking noses out of those places and nearly every other country where we have some cold war or energy interest. As much as I regret saying this, the Arab Spring has shown that having a dictator in the Arab world is preferable to having tribal religious extremism tear the country apart, destroy some of humanity's oldest heirlooms in the name of religious extremism, and spawn terrorism all over the world.
But even that isn't enough. Now there's word the CIA will organize a cyber-attack against Russia soon. I'm definitely not a big fan of Russia with their imperialistic ambitions and the oligarchs robbing common people their blind, but this country is doing everything but deescalating conflict and creating an extremely dangerous situation.
Perhaps it's finally time to clean up our own house, first and foremost. If we can't fight the level of corruption that the Wikileaks emails and subsequent actions of the current administration have shown, then there's no doubt that using yet another foreign conflict as a distraction is driving this country headlong into disaster. Too bad people can't get together and put their partisanship aside to have a million people march outside the Capitol or down Pennsylvania Avenue to attempt to get them to investigate everything and everyone impartially, foreign and domestic, Republicrat and Demican, and everyone in between.
In other words, if we don't get our shit together, welcome to the alternate version of Alien vs. Predator. Whoever wins, we lose.
The verdict: the Trump Campaign wasn't "tied" to the Russian state-sponsored hacking group(s), but their relationship was just extremely careless.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Can we see some of this troubling new evidence before we go to war with Russia please?
I'm not counting out Trump losing for about the next 2 weeks. We have yet to see the following:
1) Wikileaks has said it has evidence that will get Hillary indicted. As yet, the Podesta E-mails haven't done that, so everyone is expecting a big drop sometime soon. Probably on Hillary's birthday, October 26th.
2) We haven't seen the last of the Podesta E-mails. A recent drop shows the democrats creating two organizations to infiltrate the Catholic religion, to create a "Catholic Spring" at some point of their choosing. (Yikes! WTF, Democrats?)
3) It seems that Hillary had a hand in Kim Dotcom's arrest (remember him?). In response, Kim has promised a surprise birthday present for Hillary. (Many people will be quick to point out that Kim is various flavors of asshole, but that's beside the point - he's tech savvy, has lots of contacts, an axe to grind against Hillary, and a ton of money.)
4) Someone over at Reddit/4chan has Clinton's deleted E-mails, and will be releasing them. These are apparently the ones deleted from her server before turning it over to the FBI.
5) One of the recent Podesta dumps included his iPhone account password, and someone hacked his account, post a screencap proving that they were in the account, and sent all the data to Wikieaks. This means that Wikileaks not only has Podesta's E-mails up to whenever, they've got more recent ones up to about 2 days ago.
6) ...and apparently remote-wiped his phone.
7) Hillary is not appearing in person *anywhere*. (Check her rallys and engagements: it's all Bill, Barak, Michelle, and Chelsea. Hillary appears in person once from now to the end of the month.) Conspiracy theorists think that this is because of some hidden illness, but that's probably not the case. The Podesta E-mails reveal that the reason she's not being seen is because she's perceived as untrustworthy in person. Her campaign is being run largely by remote control.
8) A couple of tapes of Clinton have yet to be released.
9) And weirdly, during the last debate a fly landed on Hillary's face. That's not a problem or even especially interesting, but the fact that it landed, walked around and she never flinched or even notices is creeping out a lot of people.
I'm not giving up on Trump just yet, and I've still got lots of popcorn.
In Soviet Russia, KGB Trumps YOU!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What election rigging?
Not one voter was forbidden to vote, not one vote was switched.
Hillary got more votes, and that is why she is beating Trump with his own mouth
Right, because the head of the DNC always resigns in disgrace when nothing wrong was done...
To people like you, women are an entirely different species. In the words of Trump, sad.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I mean, it seems pretty weird to "not give up on Trump" at this point. You really genuinely want a republican president so badly that you're willing to elect a kiddy fiddler?
Heh.
That is sooooo far away from important to me that it doesn't even register.
Important to me is turning away from globalism, making the government work for Americans, and fixing some of our obvious problems.
Of those, the most important to me is the globalism thing. If you look at economics from a math perspective (specifically: game theory, and I'm a math person) you see that economics is based on flawed rationalizations. It's patently obvious that the rationalizations are true and correct given their assumptions, but that the assumptions are wrong.
The thing that made America great in the last half of the 20th century was the ability for citizens to build and keep wealth. Many people could get an education with little-or-no money, find a job, buy a house and raise a family.
People are finding that they can't do that any more, largely because of globalism. When a wealth-building country partners with a non-wealth-building country, all the wealth flows out of the great country and into the poor country.
England can partner with Germany or Norway and would do well. England partnering with Poland, Spain, or Greece is a disaster - Greeks can move to England and take high-paying jobs, but the English can't do the same in Greece. Greece is full of corruption, which limits personal wealth building.
To take a clear example, Clinton wants a 65% estate tax. This is a clear burden on creating and keeping wealth, it's double taxing, and it will be a disaster.
Farms can't be left to children, they'll have to be sold to pay the taxes. Family-owned businesses too. And houses.
And if there's no one interested in your farm, or business, or house at the time you need to sell it, it'll be sold for a lot less than it's worth just to pay the taxes.
That's only one example, but there are a ton of others. Pretty-much everything Clinton is for will pull the country down into poverty.
Yes, I'm for Trump simply because he wants to reverse that trend.
I don't care if he's Sithrak the blind gibberer in his private life.
If he's not Clinton, he's better.
Let's for a moment pretend it was the Russians...
Yes, let's.
In this case illegal or not is not the primary issue. Democracy works to the extent it does because the playing field is nearly level. If one side has far more power to dig up dirt on the other side that is a perversion of the process.
Hillary has the actual sitting President of the United States working for her campaign at this point. He's making speeches and so forth. He is the head of our government, and has at his disposal the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Suddenly, even with those "Russian" hacks, the field seems like it's tilted at about an eighty degree angle. Two guesses which side has the better position.
IOW, that was a terrible argument if you think supposed "Russian" involvement is somehow making the field less fair.
That said, in case you couldn't "tell", I still haven't seen even a shred of evidence that the Russians are involved. All I hear is Hillary screaming it at the top of her lungs. Funnily enough, at the beginning of this cycle, I was deeply concerned about Trump's lack of diplomacy and what it would do for foreign relations. I never expected to be terrified of Hillary reaching office for the very same reason, albeit on a far more immediate and concrete level.
Some of the younger folk around here are probably too young to remember the cold war. I remember the tail end of it, and that was bad enough. I'd really rather not go back to that, especially with an opposing Russian government that seems far less stable and far more aggressive. I doubt it would be so cold this time.
Let's face it: both candidates suck, and Hillary will probably have us at war with Russia halfway through her first term.
What we should be doing is having a meaningful conversation about the alternative candidates, and convincing everyone to vote for neither of the current major party candidates. If nothing else, we as citizens should be sending a loud and clear message that the behavior of the major parties -- BOTH of them -- is unacceptable to the American people. Yes, I know I'm dreaming.
Hey... are write-ins still allowed? Maybe Bernie or Ted can still win!
-- sigs cause cancer.
So we should go ahead and do what Putin wants, because everybody wants something? That makes Trump sense.
If there is evidence of criminality in his tax returns he would be under prosecution.
The question is ethics, not criminality. When you are running for leader of the free world, this is kind of an important personality trait.
He may have a personal, business, or even political (i.e., he'll release his taxes when Hillary produces her missing email) for not releasing them.
Who cares, when you run for office you are expected to be accountable and transparent. Whether you are left right or other, accountability and transparency should be a mandatory requirement.
Do you make your taxes public? If not, then why not?
I'm not running for public office, but I did do a low level government contract once and was required to declare not only my taxes, but my income, outgoings, all the places I've traveled to, and any connection via family and friends to foreigners and/or foreign governments. This is standard security/anti-corruption practice which I did, why would you not expect the same of anyone attempting to run the country?