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CIA Captured Putin's 'Specific Instructions' To Hack the 2016 Election, Says Report (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: When Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James B. Comey all went to see Donald Trump together during the presidential transition, they told him conclusively that they had "captured Putin's specific instructions on the operation" to hack the 2016 presidential election, according to a report in The Washington Post. The intel bosses were worried that he would explode but Trump remained calm during the carefully choreographed meeting. "He was affable, courteous, complimentary," Clapper told the Post. Comey stayed behind afterward to tell the president-elect about the controversial Steele dossier, however, and that private meeting may have been responsible for the animosity that would eventually lead to Trump firing the director of the FBI.
When you require careful and concerted choreography to explain simple concepts to your president, there might be a problem.
If your boss explodes when reality does not conform to his wishes, he just might be a snowflake.
The real surprise would be if they didn't find any evidence of this.
If you show the average person evidence that someone is doing something bad, they might ask questions about the reliability of the evidence.
If his own spy agency shows Trump evidence that Russia is doing something bad, he denounces them and has an off-the-record chat with Putin.
I wouldn't trust a spy agency as a general rule - their whole existence is about getting what they want by deception - but I'd hardly trust the Russians when it comes to a domestic agency's claims against them.
This immediately leads to questions about why a president might trust a foreign power over his own agencies. And more questions when there are records of his team attempting to work with that same power to scuttle an opponent's election bid, that have been consistently lied about in an obvious cover-up.
But this is Trump, so this will amount to another round of Twitter outrage and blow over.
Publish them... SHOW us all this "Evidence" I want to SEE it. Not hear about it. I can hear lies from ALL directions. SHOW ME THE TRUTH!
Don't forget the uranium. And the Russians.
Just forget the part about those things already being looked into and dismissed.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-14/new-russian-hacker-claims-putin-ordered-theft-clintons-email-after-first-one-refused
There is the simple fact that even if the DNC and Hillary were hacked by the Russians, which evidence shows that it was mostly leaked data by their own people, they were acting in a criminal manner to rig the nomination process and to burn Trump with made with a made up dossier
I for one do not care how the information came out. The fact that it came out was good enough for me. I actually hope hackers all over the world do this every election. Break in to both sides as show where all the bodies are buried. Maybe then we can end some of the corruption that plagues governments.
Exactly.
The media has been pounding on the Russian drum for over a year now. So far, it's a big nothing-burger. A few alleged Facebook ads, not even a molecule in a drop in a bucket. Otherwise, endless allegations, but a stunning lack of actual proof.
Really, it's like the media are trying to distract from something. Like, maybe, Trump isn't doing such a bad job after all?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Turns out the entire FBI leadership was, and mostly still is, a rat's nest of opposition to him filled with unethical bureaucrats who think it's their right to have "insurance policies against the President" among other things.
If this were happening in 2009, the Democrats would have been giving Obama--rightly--carte blanch to purge the entire agency's leadership above the level of GS15. It doesn't matter what you think of Trump or Obama. Neither of them were Hitler or Stalin or anything like that. The only proper response from the federal civil service to their every lawful order is "yes, sir." Anything else is insubordination; this is approaching mutiny.
>Up to this point it still appears that Russia bought some ads to try to sway the vote.
Well... more than that. There's also the bot net deployed to make certain opinions look vastly more popular than they were.
But how upset are you supposed to get about that when your own country has a history of funding outright revolutions and installing puppet regimes?
>There is no evidence that they hacked any voting machines.
I really don't understand why Americans tolerate their current voting system. Computer-tallied paper ballots and pencils with ballot boxes and any manual counting observed by the candidate's representatives is pretty solid.
Computer kiosks with known flaws, with the electronic records purged ASAP looks an awful lot like the dream system of someone who wants to generate whatever result they like and should offend (and terrify) the average voter.
Trump was too casual on this. And like this intelligence world is holding more. If Trump/pence loved America, they would simply step down and allow ryan to take over. Neither trump nor pence love America enough to do what is right. They are going to force America to release more which will only help Russia/China know how and where we monitor them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, the public record shows that Putin is playing Trump like a banjo.
This is the same James Clapper who lied under oath in proceedings in Congress. Not sure he can be trusted to make any comments at this point.
Hillary didn't lose because of Russia. Trump didn't win because of Russia.
Ignore Russia for five seconds if you can... Hillary was a weak candidate and so was pretty much the entire republican field.
Jeb Bush for example carried 3 percent of the republican vote. Hillary is generally disliked by most of her own party. Trump naturally is one of the most disliked presidents in US history. But he didn't win the election because people liked him. He won because for whatever reason... he said he was going to do things and people believed him.
Pretending that the current political circumstances are the result of the Russians is deranged. This is the same sort of blind spot that lead to Al Gore losing the election against Bush 43. Anyone that studied the gore vs bush election knows that Gore made a lot of mistakes. If you tell yourself you lose because of the Russians or because the Supreme Court robbed you... then you're going to keep losing and you'll deserve to lose.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm curious. When was being a lobbyist treated as treason (a crime defined in the Constitution)?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Probably not from Putin either. Someone at some level in the Kremlin said "FUCK HILLARY" once, and that equates to "hack the election and put Trump in."
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
the fact that we learned that the HRC team contributed to the campaign of an FBI deputy directors wife, to escape indictment; and another special prosecutor's wife works for Fusion GPS, the same wife who provided this 'dirt dossier' to the FBI, to her husband, the same person who spearheaded the wire tap in trump tower. (remember back in may when you insisted that trump was making that part up about an illegal wire tap?)
Here is why his investigation is struggling:
Peter Strzok - dismissed for bias and losing objectivity. This was more than saying something negative in a text, his entire career just got sacked to a shitty desk job in human resources. This wasnt a small thing, according to Meuller.
Buce Ohr - we learned that he met with Fusion GPS many times during the campaign, and his wife WORKS for fusionGPS and was part of the anti-trump dossier
Andrew McCabe - Deputy FBI Director and husband to Jill McCabe, while running for a Senate seat, received $467,000 in contributions from Terry McAuliff right around the time that her husband, Andrew, edited the words 'grossly negligent' to 'extremely careless' in Comey's statement, because 'grossly negligent' is the precise words in the law that would have triggered an indictment.
now stand back and look at this objectively... if HRC had won, and this same investigation was underway trying to impeach her, and you have all these examples of the investigation team being packed with hillary haters... so she screams VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY at the top of her lungs again... would you consider the fact that the prosecution would have a hard time moving anywhere with this?
You do understand impeachment right? Simple majority of the House has to vote for impeachment and 75% of the Senate has to vote to remove him. With all this 'reasonable' doubt and allegations of bias flying around, its never ever ever going to cross the 75% threshold and most of the senate republicans do not even like the guy.
I'm curious. When was being a lobbyist treated as treason (a crime defined in the Constitution)?
Quite the contrary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is just one of the things that Madison, and the court, have gotten wrong. The forces do not, in fact, tend to balance out in time because Madison had no concept of the degree of accumulation of wealth that would occur over the next two centuries and how much this would lead to a small oligarchy controlling immense resources and correspondingly acting as a superselector for the actual private citizen's choices. Shockingly, the courts have even recognized corporations themselves as having many of the rights of private citizens, in particular the "right" to petition the government via lobbying. In this way, the entire concept of democracy (republican or not) is subverted, as in the actual constitution corporations are NOT recognized as political entities -- all political power ultimately devolves to we, the people, the citizen. A corporation is not a citizen, nor is it a democracy.
Sadly, the only way we can get out of this at this point is EITHER having a congress that passes laws that muzzle lobbying -- personally I'd prohibit ALL lobbying, as the baby drowned long ago and all that is left is the sewer sludge swamp water of extremists on all sides, fueled by the oligarchs who maintain power as long as they keep wethepeople too distracted to care and too stupid to want to. Then we'd have to have a court that would actually consider the point that corporations are NOT citizens and do NOT have a right to "freedom of speech" -- only individual persons (owners or employees alike!) do, and only to the extent that they are willing to expend their own personal resources on it. OR we'd have to pass an amendment to the constitution specifically limiting the power of corporate entities to participate in or influence government decision making. Frankly I'd prefer the latter, but it will probably require the second American revolution to bring it about.
In the meantime, much as I appreciate the sentiment that corporate lobbying SHOULD be, well, not "treason" but a pretty serious crime, the lobbying part per se is the tip of the iceberg. I could even live with it as long as the real problem is repaired.
That is the simple fact illustrated here: https://www.opensecrets.org/ne...
and here: https://www.opensecrets.org/ne...
Scroll down to the graphic detailing PAC contributions. To put that graphic in perspective, one has to look at the numbers:
https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
and
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
Opensecrets (among other places) follows this all the way down to the following brutal fact. It costs an average of around 11 million dollars to run for the Senate. It costs almost 2 million dollars to run for the House. It costs well over 100 million dollars to run for President. Actual donations from private citizens making less than $200,000/year constitute about 6 or 7 PERCENT of this. Well over 90% of the cost of running for office comes not from We, The People, but from corporations, filtered through PACs and the parties themselves, and those corporations are controlled by a tiny handful of the world's wealthiest people.
Nothing illustrates the corruption more clearly than the fact that many -- arguably most -- of the PACs contribute roughly equal amounts to Republicans AND Democrats running against each other. They don't care who wins, regardless of their stated position on whatever "issue" the PAC is supposed to give a shit about.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
In the meantime, much as I appreciate the sentiment that corporate lobbying SHOULD be, well, not "treason" but a pretty serious crime, the lobbying part per se is the tip of the iceberg. I could even live with it as long as the real problem is repaired.
Accepting money, property, or favors either directly or indirectly (e.g., "campaign contributions", "donations" to foundations, etc.) in exchange for influence betrays the office and is thus inherently in opposition to a representative government. Do it at a thus level (congress) and it's counter to the design and law of the nation, and I consider anyone engaging in this practice (on either end of the transaction) to be a traitorous enemy of the state. If you don't, you're part of the problem.
I really don't understand why Americans tolerate their current voting system. Computer-tallied paper ballots and pencils with ballot boxes and any manual counting observed by the candidate's representatives is pretty solid.
Computer kiosks with known flaws, with the electronic records purged ASAP looks an awful lot like the dream system of someone who wants to generate whatever result they like and should offend (and terrify) the average voter.
You are right. In my state it it still done on paper with optical scanners. The electronic voting machines are not ubiquitous in the USA.
Best as I can determine the electronic voting machines without a paper trail is only done in the following 11 states: Virginia, Texas, Tennesee, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Louisiana, Kentucky, Indiana, Florida, and Delaware.