Putin Now Argues Russia Could've Been Framed For Election Meddling By The CIA (nbcnews.com)

In a news magazine show premiering tonight, Megyn Kelly reports that Russian president Vladimir Putin "has denied Russian involvement in the hacking and interference with our U.S. presidential eletion for some time. That changed earlier this week, and the story appears to be evolving yet again." An anonymous reader shared two articles from NBC: "Hackers can be anywhere. They can be in Russia, in Asia...even in America, Latin America," he said. "They can even be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very skillfully and professionally shifted the blame, as we say, onto Russia. Can you imagine something like that? In the midst of a political battle...?" The journalist asked the Russian president about what American intelligence agencies say is evidence that he became personally involved in a covert campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and benefit Donald Trump. "IP addresses can be invented -- a child can do that! Your underage daughter could do that. That is not proof," Putin replied...

Kelly told viewers that Putin -- the former director of Russia's domestic spy agency -- also suggested that the CIA could have been behind the hacking and noted that many people were convinced Russia was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy... Earlier, at a Friday forum moderated by Kelly, Putin likened the U.S. blaming his country for hacking the presidential election to "blaming the Jews"...
"Echoing remarks President Donald Trump made on the campaign trail, Putin also questioned the need for NATO."

Comments

Sure thing, Vlad!!

[haruchai]

The CIA also faked all those meetings & communications between Russians & Flynn, Manafort, Kushner too

Re:Sure thing, Vlad!!

[skids]

Which is interesting because the U.S. does not HAVE 17 intelligence agencies which would all have any knowledge or expertise

Gah the idiocy of this comment: 17 intellegence agencies reached a consensus after pooling their collective knowledge of the individual bits and peices.. and yes, every one of them has "expertise" in their own particular areas, which is why they were consulted. Is it that hard to understand?

Stop being a sophomore and realize these agencies do more than you know... because they are fucking intellegence agencies and you're not supposed to know everything they do.

Re:Sure thing, Vlad!!

[Wizardess]

Please explain to me in simple terms what is illegal about this alleged activity? Regardless of whether we can prove it or not there is nothing that makes this activity illegal at the "treason" level so many people are screaming about.

And if it is illegal, perhaps Barack H. Obama should be tried for messing with Israeli election politics and Thai politics among others. If WE do it to others, what right do we have to complain when others do it to us?

This "thing" is a huge nothing-burger.

{o.o}

Re: Sure thing, Vlad!!

[Bartles]

There is no crime. Not even an allegation of a crime. Just innuendo created by nebulous contacts illegally leaked by anonymous sources.

Re:Sure thing, Vlad!!

[haruchai]

If the GOP wants to have an investigation into that money, that's okay with me. The fact that they haven't when they were so eager to have multiple Benghazi investigations repeatedly covering the same ground convinces me that there's a whole lot of nothing there

https://www.mediamatters.org/r...

A sterling character witness...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

"The defense calls Vladimir Putin..."

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

Not one smoking gun in the whole thing. Speaking to ambassadors is not a crime.

It's like listening to a Creationist

[smooth wombat]

"But you see, Evolution can't be right because. . ."

"No, you're wrong. We've gone over this dozens of times before."

"Well then, there's this which means. . ."

"No, it doesn't. You're wrong again. I just explained why you're wrong."

"But that doesn't include this which. . ."

"Yes, it does. You're wrong. Get over it. You're plain, flat out wrong. Nothing you say makes sense. All of it's been shown to be false."

"Nuh uh. I still have. . . . my imagination."

Re:It's like listening to a Creationist

[Fire_Wraith]

Or on Climate Change. Or on really anything else that doesn't fit with their preferred outcome - they'll ignore the facts and focus on any reed no matter how thin to cling to. If you manage to knock that away, they'll shift to something else. They can't possibly admit they just might be wrong. It's a dogmatic, as opposed to scientific, approach. "The earth is flat and the sun revolves around it because clearly it does, and that's what I've always believed, so I always will."

Re:It's like listening to a Creationist

[bongey]

Point to some hard evidence that Russian hacked anything. The only evidence links back to a Russian VPN service IP address, which means anyone could have been hacker.

Re:It's like listening to a Creationist

[sl3xd]

Let's not forget the oldies but goodies:

* Tobacco is a healthy activity everybody can enjoy
* Tobacco is not addictive at all, how dare you suggest it is?
* OK, maybe Tobacco is addictive, but it's not harmful
* OK, maybe Tobacco is harmful, but it's not hurting others
* So we were caught adding additional nicotine to make it as addictive as possible -- how does that make us the bad guys? We haven't done anything wrong

* tetraethyl lead (leaded gasoline) is not harmful, and it makes our cars run great
* Maybe the safety standards were not ideal at the factory, but leaded gas really poses no danger to anyone else
* Just because we detect significant amounts of lead in children's bloodstream does not mean we're at fault - kids must be eating paint chips!
* What do you mean lead paint was banned, and levels of lead in the blood are still rising? That mountain of research over several decades means NOTHING! We're the victim here! Why should everybody suffer poor automotive performance?
* Just because you got one car - which you've spent trillions of dollars to create - run great without tetraethyl lead does not mean banning it is a solution!

At the end of the day, there are always going to be a lot of folks that will try to discredit any sort of new knowledge, especially if it makes their interests look bad.

Re:It's like listening to a Creationist

[DiscountBorg(TM)]

"But but.. humans can't possibly affect the environment! It would be so arrogant to think man could do that!" (Tosses on 30 spf sunscreen to counter the hole in the ozone layer caused by manmade cfcs)

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

You can bring an idiot to school, but you can't make him learn...

There are at least 3 smoking guns in the above:

1: Roger Stone predicting Podesta's time in the barrel, a reference to Wikileaks emails before they were released.

2: Jeff Sessions commits perjury.

3: Donald Trump commits obstruction of Justice.

4: The obvious collusion and criminality peppered throughout the timeline.

Foundations of Geopolitics

[Tenebrousedge]

Any timeline of these events should probably start with this book. So far things are proceeding as planned, and ultimate success seems likely.

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

[Boronx]

The elections wasn't rigged, it was influenced, which is nothing new in general, but rare for the U.S. Certainly undesirable. "Distant" Foreign leader? WTH does that mean? If Putin is stooping to make fake posts on Slashdot, he's doing a thorough job of it.

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

[Kiuas]

If Putin is stooping to make fake posts on Slashdot, he's doing a thorough job of it.

Oh you can be sure he is. How do I know? There are Russian professional trolls even in Finnish news articles and forums which have a readership that's a fraction of Slashdot's. The estimates on how many people are actively working for the so called troll brigades vary, but we're probably talking at least a couple hundred. It's an extremely well orchestrated global operation:

Today, FAN forms the core of a media empire consisting of 16 news websites. Collectively, they employ over 200 full-time journalists and editors whose content attracts more that 30 million pageviews every month.

The monthly cost of running FAN and its sister sites is in the area of 20 million rubles ($350,000), RBC estimates. The source of the funding is unclear too, but most of the websites in the empire attract little if any ad revenue. Allegedly, the group has a mysterious sponsor, believed to be Yevgeni Prigozhin, who also known as “Putin’s Cook.”

Everyday, the sites churn out dozens of articles every day that praise Putin, cast Ukraine as a failed nazi state and expose the nefarious machinations of the United States. Still, FAN stands out. It exploits the unstable media labor market to lure in journalists from other publications with salaries above the market average. FAN even employs foreign reporters — RBC reports they are the most likely to be sent to Syria to provide coverage.

- -

At least one popular pro-Trump, anti-Clinton Facebook group called Secured Borders, says RBC, is managed from the St. Petersburg troll factory.

RBC claims it obtained a screenshot of the group’s advertisement statistics (available only to a Facebook group’s administrator) from someone who claims to be its owner, which confirmed that the group is managed from St. Petersburg.

Secured Borders boasts 140 thousand subscribers, and just one of its posts published at the height of the election campaign and heavily advertised on Facebook, reached 4 million people on Facebook, was “liked” more than 300 thousand times and shared more than 80 thousand times. RBC also reported that a right-wing Twitter account called Tea Party News, which is followed by 22 thousand other accounts, is also run from the St. Petersburg hub.

All in all, RBC’s sources say that at the zenith of the U.S. election campaign, the troll factory’s accounts across different social media platforms would churn out as many as 50 million posts a month, with anti-Clinton messages getting the most attention.

The Russians have an upper hand in this struggle of propaganda at the moment because they can generate any number of conspiratorial blog posts and 'alternative news' and then circulate them throughout social media through different fronts and groups as well as bot-accounts. The thing that makes this so effective is the level of precision in targeting that modern social media platforms allow them to have: you can craft several entirely different or even contradictory attack ads about someone and then target those so that they're only shown to people who're most likely to be influenced by said points.

So for example you can target people for whom gun rights are important and run ,material saying the opposing candidate is going to take your guns away. Meanwhile for the liberal crowd that doesn't care as much about gun rights you can use the 'in bed with bankers' card Etc.

It doesn't have to be true. The point is to flood the key areas/states with enough disinformation and misinformation to tip the balance over to the preferred side. And if you look at the amount of voters that secured him the win in the key states, we're talking about

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

[dbIII]

The evidence of Hillary's election interference is far stronger

Do you really like having people laugh at you?

Inventing IP addresses

[Minupla]

I'm going to assume he's talking about spoofing, or the technique of inserting a packet stream into the internet and making it appear like it's come from somewhere else.

This is in fact easily done if what you're attempting to do is DDOS a system. Doing it in such a way as to hack a system is NOT childsplay.

Here's one problem. You're typically (in the childs play scenario. State actor level games are NOT child's play) transmitting in the blind. TCP requires a three-way handshake. Assuming no one involved in the internet today is dumb enough to allow source routing packets, and that everyone is using decent random number generators for their sequence numbers, you can't see the SYN/ACK response from the host (since that'll have gone to the IP you're impersonating)

Add in ANY type of cryptography and you're totally hosed, as even the oldest version of SSL required you to exchange secrets, and since you're transmitting in the blind you won't see the response secret and it's game over.

There was a time when it was possible, because TCP sequence numbers were guessable due to poor randomness in a number of TCP stacks. You could make an intelligence guess as to what the next sequence number would be and send some bracketing packets in the hopes of getting lucky (more likely on a slow system then on a busy one).

And if you take your waybackmachine to the 90s, you'd find that source routing packets were honoured. It's been awhile since I ran into a version of anything that had that turned on by default.

So unless you can get into the ISP that the victim machine is connected to, not happening for any real world situation. And pawning an ISP is decidedly not childs-play.

So I give this claim 4-CRC errors out of 5.

Min

Re:Inventing IP addresses

[king neckbeard]

Given the low evidentiary standards used for blame attribution in these kinds of things, all that was needed to flag Russia is using a Russian based TOR exit node. IIRC, a large number of IPs associated with "Russian hackers" were just TOR exit nodes. The other evidence is activity times and Cyrillic characters and usernames. All stuff accessible to a moderately competent 4channer.

Re:Inventing IP addresses

[Fire_Wraith]

Not all attribution is equal, just like not all evidence is equal. A lot of evidence cited in attribution is definitely circumstantial. Reuse of malware is just one example I've seen cited. But that's not all there is - there's also a number of other things to look at, such as means and motive.

That said, it's one thing to spoof your IP. It's another to try and convincingly plant enough evidence that someone else did a complex attack, especially after that code has been picked over by experts. That's not to say people don't try it - but when even advanced nation state actors make code errors that cause entire malware campaigns to get caught and unravel (see the programming error that caused Stuxnet to be discovered, for instance), it's hard to think that someone could perfectly fake all the evidence. Not impossible, certainly, but far from easy.

And we've seen at least one recent example of someone trying it and failing. The Lazarus group (commonly linked to North Korea) tried to put in a bunch of Russian/Cyrillic into some of their malware, only to have it pointed out as nothing like what a native Russian speaker would use. (See http://baesystemsai.blogspot.c... )

Ultimately, if someone wants to make an accusation that an attack was a false flag, I'd like to see proof of that. I'm not going to believe some crazy wild Rube-Goldberg-esque scenario over a seemingly straightforward and obvious one, especially when the arguments for the former are coming from the very people who stand most to gain from the attack, or from deflecting blame, or even just sowing confusion about it.

Re:Inventing IP addresses

[king neckbeard]

But I've seen no evidence of a complex attack. We've only seen super-obvious phishing, and nothing that couldn't be covered by using Russian malware over TOR.

Re:Inventing IP addresses

[PopeRatzo]

So I give this claim 4-CRC errors out of 5.

My friend, you better start checking your food for polonium.

Re:Inventing IP addresses

[Sarten-X]

You're not looking in (or being shown) the right places. As one example, I'll explain the Podesta "hack". Everything I say here comes from a particular thread on Twitter, which does a far better analysis than I will attempt here, or sources linked therein.

Yes, it was phishing. I wouldn't call the phish email "super-obvious", as it matches Google's style pretty much exactly. The key detail is that the phish link went to a bit.ly site, notably created via the bit.ly API, which requires creating an account. From information leaked from that account by researchers at the time, the same phishing campaign went to about 1800 people, individually targeted but using a common framework.

It's primarily from that mass of targets that we can determine motive, and from that we can attribute who had that motive. Almost two thirds of the targets were either military personnel or authors. Of the authors, about half were experts on Russia or the Ukraine. Of the military and government personnel, two thirds were U.S.-based, 14% were linked to NATO, and a few key Syrian rebel personnel were targeted as well.

Basically, the campaign that hit Podesta also targeted a lot of other folks, and the common thread is that Russia would want intelligence on them. There was no malware involved to be dissected, and no attempt to hide the origin of the campaign. In fact, the only way the analysis was possible was because the attackers had not set their bit.ly account private before they were discovered (though they did later). If the account were private, tracing a single victim's attack would have led only to a probably-hijacked server with a .tk domain.

(end citing the Twitter thread)

Similarly, other attacks can be attributed by the infrastructure they use. Some recent attacks on election committees, for example, used C&C servers that had previously been used in other attacks against Turkish and Ukranian governments, strongly indicating that the perpetrators of all the attacks were adversarial to Turkey and Ukraine.

In other attacks where malware and persistence are involved (like the DNC hack), expert analysis usually relies on identifying precisely which APT group is responsible for the attack. Each APT typically operates independently, using their own in-house-developed tools and preferred techniques. That's perfectly reasonable, because when the goal is stealth, an attacker will use the techniques they're most comfortable with to avoid costly mistakes. Once they are identified, though, that becomes a weakness, as the same pattern can be identified in other victim systems.

It is easy to spoof identifiers. Names, strings, and addresses can all be manipulated. What is more difficult to fake are behavior patterns. When a server starts seeing access requests for files starting every day at 2AM and ending at 10AM, it's a decent indicator that somebody with a seven-hour time zone difference is poking at your systems. Yes, that can be manipulated by having the attack teams work at odd hours, but it's just another bit of data. Then there's the localization of tools, exempted targets, and even the order in which tools are deployed.

Remember: These aren't amateurs. The attackers involved are professionals, clocking in and doing a job. There are the good ones, there are the sloppy ones, and there are the managers who make stupid decisions they have to deal with, just like in any other government office. They have their routines they follow to make it through the day, and it's through analysis of those routines that analysts learn about the attackers.

Re:Inventing IP addresses

[J Story]

What rings so false about the hacking claims is that a presumed elite hacker or hacking team would be so clumsy as to leave evidence of its true origins. I think that the more valuable question is to ask "who benefits from leaving Russian fingerprints?" The Democrats, obviously, because it feeds into their pre-built narrative, but from all appearances, they're too technologically inept. If it truly was a state actor, then my guess would be China or North Korea, since both have the skill, and both would benefit from the ensuing political chaos, giving them more latitude to advance their interests. More likely, however, is that the Russia connection was simply a by-product of the hackers covering their tracks.

Re:Inventing IP addresses

[Boronx]

What rings false are doubters who think residuals from the hack are the only evidence to be had, or who don't believe the NSA is better at the game than the Russians are, that it's impossible they could detect something that the Russians didn't notice.

For example, U.S. intelligence seems to have very good eavesdropping at the highest levels of the Russian state. Using that kind of intelligence they wouldn't need *any* evidence from the actual hack to determine whether the Russian government did it.

The real point

[kelanos]

Our government has absolutely no transparency and our interests are not represented. Our country is essentially occupied by globalists.

Everything else is a distraction, and odds are you fall for it at least once in a while as we all do.

Engaging in the 'left vs. right' war is profoundly unhealthy. No responsible person acts this way.
The real war is 'rational vs. irrational'. We're all being made to pay for the ignorance of philosophy in education.

Instead of unifying with people we have most in common with we are fighting each other on behalf of our 'political leaders' that we have very little in common with and are indeed cruelly exploited by.

The globalist occupation (and every evil thing that goes with it)might seem like too hard of a problem to take on, but it's the condition under which you live. Deal with it or deal with natural selection.

You can't elect some one to live your life for you.
Picking a side is not a valid choice.

Re:The real point

[MightyMartian]

Congress still holds the cards, and you can be sure the moment the GOP begins to legitimately fear loss of one or both houses of Congress due to Trump, they'll give him the toss. Every day, every outburst, demonstrates, apart from any potential collusion with Russia, his complete unsuitability for the position, but the Republicans have to be sure that impeachment and removal won't do them more harm than good. But really, when you look at what is actually happening in Congress, you can see pretty clearly that the Republicans are being obstructionist, in the nicest possible way. Ryan and McConnell act like they're bestest pals of the White House, and yet there's not much happening at all. Oh sure, it will always be blamed on the Freedom Caucus, or the Democrats, or parliamentary procedures, or any ol' convenient excuse, but Trump has few real fans in Congress. They realize they have an infantile halfwit surrounded by some pretty damned questionable people, so they'll obstruct him, but for their own political fortunes, they have to make it look like it's opposition and process, and not them deliberately sabotaging him.

It seems unlikely the replacement health care will be passed, and really Ryan threw it to the Senate with a big pile of money hoping the Senate can turn this shit sandwich into something palatable. It's even possible it will never get to the Senate floor. Then there's tax reform, good luck with that. Let's talk about all that spending Trump committed to, there isn't going to be a wall, and I doubt there'll be any more infrastructure spending.

Trump can cause a lot more trouble on the foreign stage, but thus far other than insulting foreign leaders, about his biggest impact is pulling of the Paris agreement, which probably the majority of Republicans were in favor of anyways. As to Executive Orders, well, we'll see what the Supreme Court says, but the fact that he and his mouthpieces were so dimwitted as to tell the entire world they were going to seek a Muslim ban will likely compromise the whole damned ban a non-starter due to the First Amendment.

I can't imagine Trump will even want the job in a year or so, even if they decide not to remove him.

Re:The real point

[Gravis Zero]

Our government has absolutely no transparency and our interests are not represented.

Agreed. However, what you lack is the why. The reason why this has happened is because...

• * the reductionist election scheme of first-past-the-post has ensured one two parties can survive. After many iterations of tactical voting we have ended up with only truly horrible candidates.
• * hyperpartisanship has proliferated partly as a result of the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.
• * the extreme influx of money in politics and the extremely poor state of campaign financing.
• * data driven gerrymandering has resulted in a least representative set of officials in a democracy.

Our country is essentially occupied by globalists.

Seems like "globalists" is the replacement boogeyman for "communists".

The real war is 'rational vs. irrational'.

I agree. It's irrational to allow politicians to choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. It's irrational to think one particular ideology is to blame. It's irrational to believe the situation will improve without reforming the system to ensure the fairness of elections.

We're all being made to pay for the ignorance of philosophy in education.

It's not a lack of philosophy that is the problem, it's a lack of basic economics that are based on reality rather than an ideology.

The globalist occupation (and every evil thing that goes with it)might seem like too hard of a problem to take on, but it's the condition under which you live. Deal with it or deal with natural selection.

Replace "globalist" with "communist" and you're a dead ringer for a mccarthyist.

Re:The real point

[buddyglass]

Word salad. Though, this kind of makes me want to print up a T-shirt that says "Proud Globalist" and wear it around town.

Re:The real point

[rholtzjr]

They are doing that all by themselves. They do not need Trump to accomplish that task.

I still think we should fire every single Congress critter and never let them hold office again regardless of which side of the political spectrum they are on

Re:The real point

[Boronx]

"You learned that the "Red Scare" was false in history class and you get stuck on 'labels' thinking you're being smart not falling for a blanket definition for a nebulous enemy presence."

No I didn't. You should go to school instead of just reading about what happens there. Both the communists and the red scare were great. They instilled into the American rich a healthy fear of the working class, which lead to generous concessions.

Your basic error is this: in the US, we allow nebulous enemy presences, because it's a free country. You don't like it, you can leave.

I don't give a shit.

[BarbaraHudson]

Both the US and Russia (and the former Soviet Union) as well as the UK have a LOOONG history of interfering in the internal politics of other countries by covert and illegal means. You reap what you sow - and that applies equally to everyone.

Re:I don't give a shit.

[Fire_Wraith]

That's a great argument for not interfering in the future. It's not a great argument for what we should do about others doing it to us. The US has bombed lots of countries - does that mean we should just shrug our shoulders if other countries decide to come fire cruise missiles at us? My commute is bad enough without having to add road closures from bomb damage to it.

I can freely say that maybe we shouldn't bomb other countries, while simultaneously saying that we should be stopping them from bombing us.

Re:I don't give a shit.

[Boronx]

We can also demand the president reveal his financial entanglements with Russia and cooperate with the investigations.

People forget there are two separate questions

[93 Escort Wagon]

1) Did the Russians meddle in the election?
2) If #1 is true, did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians in their election meddling?

I'm no fan of the guy currently occupying the White House, but given Clinton's statements (while she was Secretary of State) regarding the 2012 Russian election... it's certainly plausible that the Great Bear Wrestler could have directed his hackers to target Clinton without colluding with anyone on the US side of things.

Part of what muddies the waters here is that Trump's narcissistic ego won't allow him to accept that he won the election despite losing the popular vote. In his fantasies he won by a landslide and received a huge mandate from the American populace. So he won't listen to his intelligence agencies who are certain the Russians meddled; he talks about massive voter fraud without the presence of any corraborating evidence whatsoever, and so on. This sort of behavior creates the appearance of guilt in many people's eyes, whether the guilt exists in reality or not.

It's certainly possible that his campaign is guilty of collusion with the Russians... but the mere existence of Russian meddling does not conflate to that.

Re:People forget there are two separate questions

[MightyMartian]

It's probable the Russians would have tried to muck things up without any collusion. Certainly they were doing the same thing in recent European elections, and so far as I know, there's no real evidence in those elections that the Kremlin Approved Party was in any kind of contact. The problem with the Trump campaign is that there are some serious smoking guns here, and whether or not Trump himself has been implicated, he seems to have gone out of his way to surround himself with some people with some pretty troubling ties to the Russians.

Re:People forget there are two separate questions

[kelanos]

It's the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Anyone and EVERYONE in the whole damn world with money and influence meddles in our elections.

Good god, can we demote everyone who takes stock in this "Russian hacking" propaganda to second class citizens without a vote? They clearly just believe whatever they hear with no critical thought involved.

What did the Russians hack? How did they influence the election? Am I taking crazy pills or has NO ONE ever described any of this?

but the FBI is investigating

that's not evidence....that's not even a strong implication....

Re:Putin never drove a truck into pedestrians...

[hey!]

No, he doesn't do DIY; he deals death wholesale.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Kohath]

Jan 19th: Ivanka orders a salad with Russian dressing.

April 5th: Flynn drinks a beer from Russian River Brewing Company

Re:Timeline of Treason

[MightyMartian]

There's going to come a point when just shouting "the Washington Post are poo-poo heads!" won't cut it. The only thing keep the Trump Presidency in place right now is uncertainty among Republicans about the effects on the mid-terms, but with his approval ratings back in decline and growing numbers of Americans clearly no longer buying into the Cult of Personality that people like you so desperately want to propagate, that "guarantee", if you will, won't last that much longer. Pence, if he isn't taken down by all of this (he has his own Russian problem) can do everything the GOP-dominated Congress wants, and what they want more than anything is to keep it GOP-dominated after mid-terms.

So go on, keep spouting the denials.

Of all the candidates...

[Dracos]

Why would the CIA (or any of the alphabet agencies) move to put Trump in the White House? That's ludicrous.

If any sufficiently large group of independent US hackers wanted to get any of the 2016 candidates elected, they probably would have aided Bernie or McMullin.

Re:Of all the candidates...

[bongey]

Hillary Clinton got off for mishandling classified information , which anyone working at the NSA/CIA would have gone to jail for much less than what HRC did. I can specifically someone in the NSA/CIA doing it just for this reason alone.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

Your only source is WaPo, a DNC "rag". Nothing in your post is credible as a result.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[king neckbeard]

I'm sick of naive idiots thinking that US media is above the kind of things that we routinely and accurately suspect from Russia. You have to be a total moron to intrinsically trust them without adequate evidence after they lied us into Iraq. Brian Williams practically jizzed his pants when talking about bombing Syria.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[bit trollent]

This is egregious false equivalence.

Brian Williams jizzed his pants over a missile strike because he is a tool.
This is different than:
In Russia, journalists and opposition politicians are imprisoned or killed. The Trump / Russia scandal has left a trail of dead bodies in Russia.

Russian state run media is not the same as the US media, which may report information given by the government, but isn't controlled by it.

Open your fucking eyes and quit this false equivalence that puts free media at the same level as state run media in a place where journalism that embarrassed Putin often results in the Journalist's death.

The Washington Post news story has links.

[Futurepower(R)]

The first comment is copied from a Washington Post news story that gives links to all the stories in the timeline, from all the news agencies.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[king neckbeard]

I'm not saying that they are equally bad in every single way. I'm saying that without solid evidence, neither should be trusted much more than a Magic 8-ball.

Re: Timeline of Treason

[dcollins117]

You have two choices.

We have many more than two choices. For instance, several house and senate committees could initiate investigations and the justice department could appoint a special counsel to conduct criminal investigations and prosecute government officials found to have committed crimes. Oh, snap, that's actually what they did. As it turns out, there are more than the two choices your limited mind could conjure up.

Re:If they did meddle...

[AHuxley]

The data was given to the US media by a US insider. This was another domestic event with a trusted insider walking out like with the Pentagon Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Julian Assange: 'A lot more material' coming on US elections" (July 27, 2016)
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07...
""Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces."
"... they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for 'disgusted' Democratic whistleblowers" (15 December 2016)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

Staff do not later resign over fake files created by another nation.

They have faked evidence before...

[Roger W Moore]

The CIA also faked all those meetings & communications between Russians & Flynn, Manafort, Kushner too

Well, the CIA have faked evidence of weapons of mass destruction before to justify a war. The only reason the above is not believable is that it's not in the interest of those in power in the US for the CIA to fake evidence of such meetings, not because the CIA wouldn't do such a thing.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the Seth Rich narrative is an obvious scam which only distracts uneducated rubes from Russia, while the rest of us roll our eyes at the fraudulent claims made by known liars and scam artists?

*yawn*

[ArchieBunker]

Let me know when you have evidence that can stand up in court. The dems sabotaged Bernie because he wouldn't take corporate cash. Trump pulled off a victory that nobody predicted. Shut up and vote in 2018.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[bongey]

There comes a time when you need something more than an "Anonymous source from the Washington Post". 2 more months and it will be a YEAR and still NO REAL EVIDENCE of anything but a few illegally unmasked phone calls, that really have "nothing burgers" in the conversation.

Re:People still need something to rally behind

[rholtzjr]

Problem is that BOTH sides have their own nutjobs causing a choice between the lesser of the two evils. I would actually prefer a candidate who is at least not on the evil side.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[acrimonious howard]

Trump fires [Attourney General] Yates after she refuses to enforce his immigration ban[, which was later found to be illegal by the Supreme Court] (NYT, Jan. 30, 2017).

FTFY

I'm surprised you got this comment in before the Russian trolls started, nice.

But you did miss these from the same citation:

April or May
The FBI focuses on Kushner as a person of interest in their investigation as that effort intensifies. (WP, May 25, 2017).

May 10
Trump fires Comey, citing the recommendation of Sessions (WP, May 10, 2017). In the letter firing Comey, Trump includes a line saying that he appreciates Comey telling him “on three separate occasions” that he is not under investigation (May 10, 2017). The president later tells NBC’s Lester Holt that the firing was because “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story” (CNN, May 12, 2017). Sources indicate that Kushner was a prominent voice behind the firing (CBS, May 17, 2017).

May 11
In a private meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump reveals classified information shared with the United States by an ally, later reported to be Israel (WP, May 15, 2017). He also reportedly disparages Comey as a “nut job” to Lavrov and Kislyak and says that he “faced great pressure because of Russia,” which was now “taken off” with the firing of Comey (NYT, May 19, 2017).

May 12
Lawyers representing Trump release a statement indicating that the president’s tax returns don’t show income from Russian sources, with a few exceptions (NYT, May 12, 2017).

May 17
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation

And to Anon Ivan's complaint that many of these come from the Post, the answer is that you can find the same information elsewhere too.

Re: Timeline of Treason

[dgatwood]

On the whole, he's arguably slightly to the left of Hillary Clinton, just less authoritarian (which is really saying something, because he's ridiculously authoritarian). The problem is that by world standards, she's so far to the right that you can't even see her from the center, along with almost all other American politicians....

Re:Timeline of Treason

[acrimonious howard]

I like the response to this:

There's going to come a point when just shouting "the Washington Post are poo-poo heads!" won't cut it.

WaPo didn't have to go to any great lengths to find factual information that made Trump look bad, and that info is interesting enough to sell copy, so don't hold your breath for it to stop.

Re:Sure thing, Sad Vlad the Mad!!

[haruchai]

Obama said that to Medvedev not Putin & he was already president.
And he didn't win TWO presidential elections by narrow margins or through the interference of foreign governments.
It's amusing to hear a Trump supporter talking about Obama being "excused" for anything when if he'd ever behaved like Trump has been doing his whole life, he would never have become a senator, let alone president.

Aside from Manafort, there's also Carter Page who was an utter unknown to the general public until Trump mentioned his name as a foreign policy advisor during the campaign. Page has been courted by Russian intelligence for a while but is probably too dumb to be a good spy so has likely been used as a useful idiot.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Sassinak]

Not to mention, lets face it.. during an investigation, a lot of cards are being held close to the chest.. so their may be no PUBLIC smoking gun as some may claim, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.. All it means is we have to wait..

But lets also be realistic.. if this was a standard criminal trial, a large amount of circumstantial evidence still can and often does lead to a conviction. And in this case, there is a MOUNTAIN of circumstantial evidence.. especially coming from a group that LOVES to brag "if you have nothing to hide then why can't we look through your life?"

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, the same Washington Post that told us Iraq had WMDs and thinks PewDiePie is a white supremacist? Fact checking is not a part "real news", I guess.

Re:Left out some bits

[Boronx]

What you mean is that Obama and the CIA wiretapped the Russians to trap Trump when he colluded with them, and Trump walked right into it.

Trump can get out of this easy. All he has to do is explain what happened in those meetings, and why they needed to be kept secret, explain why he hired people known to be compromised, fire anyone who did anything illegal or improper including any cover ups, and reveal any foreign financial entanglements now or in the past.

If he does all that, then he'll be in the clear. He's got to explain himself.

Re:Sure thing, Sad Vlad the Mad!!

[Boronx]

"Liberals are Demonizing Trump" is not a defense. Trump needs to explain himself publicly, cooperate with any investigations, and clean house if necessary. Some people calling him "Putin's puppet" doesn't change that. If he's not Putin's puppet, he can easily do those things.

He should *not* openly fight the investigation. Even if no serious crime was committed WRT Russia, he *will* screw up and commit a serious crime (maybe already has) should he continue to fight.

Re:Left out some bits

[SuperKendall]

By "Walked right into it", you mean "did what any president would do because they are supposed to talk to other nations as part of the job".

Oh, you didn't realize the president of the U.S. is actually supposed to talk to other countries? Jesus.

I'll let you have the last response because nut-job conspiracy theorists always have to have the last square of tinfoil.

Re:Left out some bits

[Boronx]

"Collusion" means cooperation in order to commit a crime.

Trump's team tried to hide their interactions from U.S. intelligence, but not from Russian intelligence. Trump is in cover up mode. This is not consistent with normal communication between candidates and a foreign government.

Re:People still need something to rally behind

[Voyager529]

Ya, both sides are equivalent. Hilary running her own email server is the same as Trump colluding with a foreign adversary (getting Russian sanctions out of Rep platform, and we've probably not scratched the surface yet).

Hillary explicitly using unsecured communications channels for classified data, not turning over the server when the investigation started ("Did you wipe the server?" "with a cloth?" "No, with Bleachbit..."), cherry picking which e-mails get to be submitted as evidence...maybe not *quite* the same, but still thoroughly inexcusable..

Benghazi is the same as Iraq (the cause of 1+million human deaths).

Iraq, the war that Hillary voted in favor of and Trump spoke out against?

"Obamacare", ugly as it was, added millions to the number of insured and got rid of the donut hole

The 2,300 page bill that Nancy Pelosi said we needed to pass to find out what was in it? The bill that wasn't a tax until the question of whether or not it was Constitutional was raised, then it became a tax? That bill? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that people got coverage, but has this turned into an ends-justifies-the-means situation?

and that's equivalent to Trump Care, which removes those advantages for the non-rich.

Support for TrumpCare was tough to find, even among Republicans.

Climate change is going to affect the poor way more than the rich,

This is true - the costs of addressing climate change are going to roll downhill until they end up manifesting as price increases for household goods, but let's not pretend that taxing companies into compliance is going to come out of the C-level exec's annual bonuses.

AND green jobs in some states already outnumber fossil fuel jobs,

Absolutely...and in other states, fossil fuels are still economic powerhouses (Pennsylvania and North Dakota, I'm looking at you), turning it into a numbers game.

but getting rid of jobs and sacrificing future prosperity, hey it's all equivalent, I don't know which side to support.

Amongst the reasons Trump won was because he promised that manufacturing and oil drilling and coal mining would end up becoming domestic tasks again. Now yes, to an extent he was just making campaign promises (i.e. he was full of it), but the definition of 'getting rid of jobs' sounds different if you're a career machinist. He tapped into the market for that sort of message.

To be clear, I'm not a Trump fan, and I didn't vote for him, but the false equivalences are of limited utility in this context.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

There's going to come a point when just shouting "the Washington Post are poo-poo heads!" won't cut it.

Agreed. I saw the other day something like, well even if there was collusion, we still won, as if winning the presidency in such a manner is perfectly fine. They make such a big deal about Hillary having made poor decisions about email hosting and possibly not enough care to separate potentially classified material and then they defend as if it is absolutely nothing all of this. It make me sick. Hypocrisy, thy name is the republican party.

Even the better ones will tend to shut-up and do nothing more times than not until after they have won. Some have said that Trump is the sickness that will somehow make us stronger, that will somehow make us wiser to see underneath the underneath. To spot the lies in the noise, or at least to look for them.

I hope that is true but am afraid it is not. Oh there may be a Trump backlash, but TRUMP IS NOT THE PROBLEM NOR IS PUTIN or at least not the primary ones! They are playing with the balls we left in the playground. In a democracy the citizen who refuses to search for truth is the problem. Garbage in. Garbage out. The citizens can't demand the government filter the news so they receive truth, though they may of course set some standards. It is in the end their responsibility not only to demand truth, but to use the brain grace has given them to determine it and the harder it gets to accomplish that the more important and more dear the fight is.

If a democracy as old as the United States's is so easily influenced by fake news on facebook, then we have problems. Sure it may self correct, eventually, but the damage done in the mean time is hardly something we can be happy about, and if the damage goes too far the self correction itself is endangered.

Please for the love of truth encourage people to check multiple sources, and not all in the same ecosystem. Hell, currently just typing "subject fact check" in a decent search engine will usually turn up some decent hits, but check the validity of all those sources. If all else fails, buy a decent newspaper subscription, but make sure it is something reputable.

Re:Sure thing, Sad Vlad the Mad!!

[drinkypoo]

First, learn to use paragraph breaks, son. I ignored most of your mad manifesto because I don't read walls of text from ranting children.

Second, "The liberals are demonizing Trump for behavior they excused in Candidate Obama who personally met with Putin, and said on an open mic that he could be more flexible after the election (on matters with Russia)" is a load of shit. Trump is trying to hide everything he's doing with Russia. He continues to claim he has no links to Russia when most of his links are to Russia. So no, kiddo, that's not how it works.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[johanw]

The main problem was that there were 2 choices who to elect, bad and worse. Which candidate played which role was for the voyer to decide.

9/11 Truther

[sycodon]

You people remind me of the 9/11 Truthers.

Admit it. You lit a pan of Jet-A on fire underneath some chicken wire and jumped up and down on it, didn't you?

Re:Timeline of Treason

[WhiplashII]

Everyone, please consider the following:

Is your standard of accepting evidence of Trumps guilt the same as your standard of accepting evidence of Hillary's guilt?

Hillary was not charged. Trump was not charged.

Lots of "dirt" was found on Hillary. Lots of "dirt" was found on Trump.

The only difference here is your politics. If Trump committed treason with the Russians, Hillary committed treason with every country that paid Bill $200K per talk. If Trump interfered with the election, Hillary interfered with the election.

If anything, the evidence against Hillary is stronger than the evidence against Trump. Trump's advisors have circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing, while Hillary's husband provides the evidence against her case.

Re:Timeline of Treason

[jbengt]

You've got that backwards. Trump has had it out for the WaPa ever since they started to run true stories critical of him and his campaign.

Russia, Trump & Flawed Intelligence

[oh_my_080980980]

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2... "But the intelligence report does nothing to clarify the abnormalities of Trump’s campaign and election. Instead, it risks perpetuating the fallacy that Trump is some sort of a foreign agent rather than a home-grown demagogue, while doing further damage to our faith in the electoral system. It also suggests that the US intelligence agencies’ Russia expertise is weak and throws into question their ability to process and present information..."

Re:Timeline of Treason

[slack_justyb]

2 more months and it will be a YEAR and still NO REAL EVIDENCE

Now in all fairness, investigations can take years to conduct. Real evidence belongs in that court of law thing and so citing a lack of it to dismiss allegations brought by news media is a bit apples and oranges. However, on the flip side of that coin, we have to remember that what the media is putting forth are only allegations. Loose threads that may or may not piece together toward anything bigger. How and even if they do piece together is all just a mental process for each reader. It whets the appetite for criminal acts, but only a court of law or in this case an impeachment, actually bring that to the sense of "REAL" as you would have it. Perhaps in good time we will see the outcome of these events into something real or not.

I will say this though, Trump sure hasn't done any favors for himself. If I, myself, were in his shoes I would be looking for some new legal counsel and pretty much hang up the Twitter account. His current array of lawyers do not seem up to task on keeping their client up-to-date on how law functions, creating ideas for programs that are worded so as to work with law as opposed to just how the President feels it should work, recommending bills or legal text that his own party can broadly agree with, how the judicial system works, or more importantly from shooting himself in the foot using his 50 caliber Twitter account. Ultimately it might not be criminal acts that are his undoing but just poor handling of the issues that swirl around his entire administration. There's been lots of points where someone at some time could have just stopped, addressed the issues, and a whole bevvy of other things to cool the flames. Instead, we've only seen Trump ask for more gasoline, double down on his arrogance, and stoke animosity between his office and the other two branches of government, not to mention other international actors and nations.

If we're going to beat up on biased media, then I'm all for it. However, at same time we need to at least partially recognize that some part of this maelstrom is Trump's own creation. The man is a walking PR catastrophe and the media are seizing on it to kill him in a court of public opinion. I'm not sure if he feels that he just doesn't need to address these issues, feels the issues are beneath him, or just simply doesn't have a clue on how serious the situation is and how much he really needs to pull back on the daily diatribe. I mean, c'mon there's seriously a limit to how often a single person can use a public platform to cry victim before we all start getting to the point of thinking it's mostly self inflicted. At least option one and three can be partly blamed on crappy lawyers. There's no fix if number two is the full or partly the truth behind everything wrong that just keeps happening. If the man just refuses to address anything or just keeps shifting the blame to someone that's not him, there's just no course correction that's going to save this man's political appeal. He's not showing strength by his bullish disregard for the political process, he's just goading more people to question him and that's an aphrodisiac for the press. Thinking they would not seize the bountiful opportunity Trump provides daily to crucify himself would be like some billionaire of group of billionaires not taking a tax write off named after themselves.

Re:People still need something to rally behind

[acrimonious howard]

Ya, both sides are equivalent. Hilary running her own email server is the same as Trump colluding with a foreign adversary (getting Russian sanctions out of Rep platform, and we've probably not scratched the surface yet).

Hillary explicitly using unsecured communications channels for classified data, not turning over the server when the investigation started ("Did you wipe the server?" "with a cloth?" "No, with Bleachbit..."), cherry picking which e-mails get to be submitted as evidence...maybe not *quite* the same, but still thoroughly inexcusable..

My point stands.

Benghazi is the same as Iraq (the cause of 1+million human deaths).

Iraq, the war that Hillary voted in favor of and Trump spoke out against?

Ha!, no Trump spoke out FOR the Iraq war, and Hillary as a New York politician was politically forced to make a bad decision, one she open admits to regretting - something that honest people do. The vote was for giving the President a big stick, and he abused that power. This is a reason why we should always take all the evidence into consideration. In this case, there was plenty of evidence the White House put forward that would later be proven untrue. Nothing close to as obnixious as the current pres, but lies nonetheless.

"Obamacare", ugly as it was, added millions to the number of insured and got rid of the donut hole and that's equivalent to Trump Care, which removes those advantages for the non-rich.

The 2,300 page bill that Nancy Pelosi said we needed to pass to find out what was in it? The bill that wasn't a tax until the question of whether or not it was Constitutional was raised, then it became a tax? That bill? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that people got coverage, but has this turned into an ends-justifies-the-means situation?

Support for TrumpCare was tough to find, even among Republicans.

My point stands.

Climate change is going to affect the poor way more than the rich,

This is true - the costs of addressing climate change are going to roll downhill until they end up manifesting as price increases for household goods, but let's not pretend that taxing companies into compliance is going to come out of the C-level exec's annual bonuses.

Silly. Multiple studies have found a correlation between trickle-down economics and reduced growth, and that higher taxes on the wealthy are linked to economic growth.

AND green jobs in some states already outnumber fossil fuel jobs,

Absolutely...and in other states, fossil fuels are still economic powerhouses (Pennsylvania and North Dakota, I'm looking at you), turning it into a numbers game.

You missed the point - renewables are the economic powerhouse of the [present and] future. Backasswards in coal and oil (I'm looking at you Russia) are in trouble, and are going to miss the boat if you don't start working on it, instead of spending your country's resources on astroturfing the internet.

but getting rid of jobs and sacrificing future prosperity, hey it's all equivalent, I don't know which side to support.

Amongst the reasons Trump won was because he promised that manufacturing and oil drilling and coal mining would end up becoming domestic tasks again. Now yes, to an extent he was just making campaign promises (i.e. he was full of it), but the definition of 'gett