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.

Comments

Intredasting

[TimothyHollins]

When you require careful and concerted choreography to explain simple concepts to your president, there might be a problem.

Re:Intredasting

[Baron_Yam]

>When you require careful and concerted choreography to explain simple concepts to your president

If you want Trump to believe something, it's best to get Fox News to do a short and aggressive segment on it in which they flatter Trump a lot. Maybe include a short phrase that looks good with a hash tag.

Re:Intredasting

[houghi]

Too much work. Just say that Obama wanted the opposite.

Re: Intredasting

[Killall -9 Bash]

Putin did that, not Trump.

Re:Intredasting

[KHKw2k]

Only if by "Trump" you mean "a russian backed coalition of Syrian Government Forces, International Mercenaries, and Hezbollah Terrorists with little to no US involvement".

Re:Intredasting

[smooth wombat]

Let's take this tripe one by one.

it had nothing to do with his policies

This one is true. Obama told everyone what he wanted to accomplish which then allowed Republicans to state unequivocally their top priority, make him a one-term president. And thus they became the party of No, obstructing everything, even if the people wanted it.

how he enacted those polices

Not sure what you mean by this one. Oh wait. You mean those executive orders and signing statements, don't you? The same ones George Bush and every single president has done since George Washington. Yeah, I can see how that would be an issue. After all, if you do the exact same thing as your predecessor, only you are in the wrong. Not the guy who came after you and does the exact same thing.

his attitude toward the opposition

You mean like reaching out and trying to find common ground? How horrible!

his repeated mishaps (Fast and Furious as example)

You claim multiple mishaps yet cite only one. I'm guessing those 3,000 dead that happened when George Bush ignored months of daily warnings of an impending attack doesn't come close this one issue, right? Nor the financial collapse which was the worst in 80 years. Nor the invasion of Iraq which cost us over 4,000 soldiers and over $4 trillion in costs. How about handing over $700 billion of taxpayer money to Wall Street and banks so they could pay out their bonuses? Forcing phone companies to install illegal wiretaps? Does any of this ring a bell?

his moneyed ties to Wallstreet

You mean unlike the current administration who as as his Treasury chief a person who came from Goldman Sachs, right? Or that he had, until recently, Carl Icahn who is lousy with connections to Wall Street. Here's a list of the Goldman Sachs employees the con artist has in his administration. This is only Goldman Sachs employees. This doesn't include all the other firms people have come from.

This article talks about how the con artist doesn't want to enforce rules against Wall Street and the banks. Instead, he wants them to "self report" whenever they commit a crime. This of course is in no way a sign the con artist has moneyed ties to Wall Street or is doing their bidding. None whatsoever.

his repeated power grabs at various government agencies

Like signing statements above, the same as previous administrations. Were you whining when Bush did this? How about Reagan?

his cozy relationship with MSM

Non sequitor. MSM is a nonsense name, a fake name if you will, made up by those trying to claim the high ground because they have nothing to offer. If you think Breitbart and the Fox tabloid are somehow better news sources than the New York Times, BBC or CNN, it's quite clear facts don't enter into your daily life.

his continuation of Bush policy

Isn't this a good thing? Everyone knows how great things were under Bush what with the financial markets collapsing, the worst recession in 80 years, 14 million people losing their jobs, millions losing their homes. This doesn't even take into account the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history which occurred on Bush's watch. Make up your mind. You criticize Obama for doing his own thing, and you criticize him for doing the exact same thing Bush did. You can't have it both ways.

his lackluster foreign policy

This is the only legitimate issue and is a continuation of your first comment. Obama was lackluster when it came

Re:Intredasting

[MachineShedFred]

Shockingly, "he is an asshole" actually is a valid point for not liking someone. And it's also a majority opinion that Donald J. Trump is, indeed, a huge asshole.

You are correct that "he is an asshole" probably isn't valid criteria for quantifying job performance as President, unless he's actively an asshole to other heads of state during diplomatic events and such. Someone can still be a complete asshole and be an effective President - see: Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard M. Nixon. Both huge, gaping, assholes. But both also passed landmark legislation that has made this country a better place since (Civil Rights Act, Clean Water Act being two examples) and both had major foreign policy victories that have helped to shape the world we live in (for better or worse).

The history books will have the final say on Trump, regardless of what people are saying today (good or bad).

Re: Intredasting

[tbannist]

No, it was literally GWB's policies that helped to create ISIS. The invasion of Iraq set the stage for the rise of ISIS and the Bush policies on torture allowed their future leader to be imprisoned by American troops, tortured and then released. That experience pushed him towards a path to religious fanaticism and mass murder. So if you want to blame an American president for ISIS, the facts say Bush would get the blame.

horse-shoe

[TimothyHollins]

If your boss explodes when reality does not conform to his wishes, he just might be a snowflake.

Another round of nothing

[Baron_Yam]

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.

Re:Another round of nothing

[Baron_Yam]

>Such an obvious cover up that no evidence has been found.

Just lie after lie uncovered about meeting with Russians. Just that.

But if you repeat your lie - "no evidence has been found" often enough, something like 30-50% of the USA will either believe it or pretend to believe it in order to keep your team in power.

Party over country, all the way down!

Re:Another round of nothing

[ReeceTarbert]

This immediately leads to questions about why a president might trust a foreign power over his own agencies.

No, the real question and, as far as I know a question that no one is asking, is: if the elections have really been hacked, why not void them and have a do over?

Of course that's a rhetorical question, since putting the blame one someone else is easier than admit that enough people voted for the man, so you now have to deal with it. Trouble is, so does the rest of the world.

RT.

Re: Another round of nothing

[guruevi]

Itâ(TM)s not about trust but about keeping the peace and politics. Trump may or may not personally believe what the NSA and CIA told him (which has its own agenda) but to accuse or retaliate on Russia could start another Cold War.

In the end, Russia used propaganda to influence an election just like the US does in Russia. They didnâ(TM)t hack it, they didnâ(TM)t make people vote or stop voting at gun point, they got some advertising on a Facebook - voters influenced by that are morons and are spread out evenly across the population so itâ(TM)s unlikely to have had a great effect other than being demoralizing.

Re:Another round of nothing

[squiggleslash]

if the elections have really been hacked, why not void them and have a do over?

Because "elections have been hacked" can mean anything including:

1. Polling machines programmatically hacked (which nobody, so far as I can tell, is alleging.)
2. Infrastructure around polling, such as voter registrations, and tools to make available voter IDs, being hacked to suppress turnout (there were rumors the Russians might have at one point been considering doing this, but nobody has alleged they actually have done this.)
3. The pollution of information sources to ensure voters are given believable false information

Thus far, the allegations concerning the Russians have focused on (3). There's pretty much no constitutional basis for overturning an election on the basis that voters were mislead. Voters are mislead all the time, it's just usually the lies come from fellow Americans, and to some extent there's some balance. On top of that, if the election were reheld today, how many people would go to the polls saying "Well, I've since learned that Clinton was actually the victim of a 25 year long smear campaign and it's highly improbable that 90% of the bad things I've heard about her actually have any basis in reality. I was duped, and will change my vote"?

Any? Nobody willingly admits they were duped over something that basic.

At this point, the only mechanism we have for "correcting" the mistake is to elect an opposition party to power in Congress in 2018. If we consider Trump continuing to be President dangerous (and I do), we also have to hope that party also recognizes that Trump has already broken the law and should be impeached. But that's the extent of it. You can't request a do-over because voters were lied to and manipulated, that'd invalidate almost every Presidential election we've ever had. The fact it's a foreign government that did so means we need to address our relations with that government, not invalidate our own elections.

Re: Another round of nothing

[Bartles]

Literally none of those things have happened. You seem to want them to have happened, so you are pretending that "evidence" suggests they did.

Re: Another round of nothing

[e3m4n]

I do find it ironic that out of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in advertising in this election, so many people are willing to believe that just $3000 in well placed Facebook ads is all it took to 'steal' an election. Does anyone besides Facebook have anything to gain by perpetuation this rumor? I mean that's totally amazing Advertisement for Facebook. "Ads placed on Facebook are 10,000 times more likely to be viewed than traditional media. A 2016 study showed that every dollar spent in ads on Facebook had more impact than $10,000 spent with our competitors" ... then they go about feeding those who are so anti-trump they will latch onto anything, and suddenly half the country believes that Facebook is the ultimate advertisement platform.

Re:Another round of nothing

[king neckbeard]

You left out "a deeply corrupt primary system in the opposition party that coronated the only person in the country that could lose a general election" and "hubris that stopped said candidate from stepping foot in the Rust Belt"

Those were, after all, larger factors than anything you mentioned.

Re:Another round of nothing

[Killall -9 Bash]

What facts? 3rd hand information that someone somewhere saw something they interpreted as Putin giving an order? That's a fact to you?

Show me the actual intercept, then it's a fact. And of course, they won't, because it's completely made up. They'll hide forever behind not revealing their capabilities.... as if the CIA has a tap on Putin's phone they don't want him to know about.... Do you really think that's even plausible?

You don't think the CIA would make shit up to effect an election? They guys flying single engine planes under the radar to bring cocaine into this country wouldn't possibly do something bad like lie to the American public. Nope.

Re: Another round of nothing

[king neckbeard]

We don't need troll factories. We have the world's largest propaganda machine.

Re:Another round of nothing

[swillden]

We now have a couple of criminal convictions, even.

That would be news to those of us who have been following this very closely. Please provide a citation.

Lying to investigators is a crime and guilty pleas are convictions. If you actually need a citation, then you haven't been following closely.

Of course, lying to investigators isn't evidence of an actual conspiracy to do anything, though it looks very bad. The charges against Gates and Manfort are much more substantial, but not related to the Trump campaign.

My guess is that Trump and his staff are too incompetent to have really colluded with the Russians to subvert the election. Putin decided to do what he could to manipulate the election on his own, and that it's impossible to know whether Trump would have lost without the Russian interference (I'd guess that Comey's October surprise had a bigger effect than everything Russia did). Russia did reach out to the Trump campaign (that's well-supported), and the Trump campaign was willing to cooperate but I suspect nothing happened that Putin wasn't already doing anyway, and the Russians were cagey enough not to say anything openly enough that the Trump staffers had a legal obligation to report it to the FBI. Which is good for the Trump team because they were too clueless to have realized they had such an obligation.

So, I think the way this is going to work out is that Mueller is going to shake a lot of trees and a lot of dirt is going to fall out, because Trump is dirty and the people he works with are dirtier. Little of the dirt will be related to the election. Trump will probably have been sufficiently well-insulated from the dirt to escape prosecution, but the issue will dog his entire term of office, and his remaining three years in office will be even less effective than his first, assuming he lasts out his term. I give it even odds that some combination of health and stress over the investigation get him to resign or be removed under the 25th. There's also a chance that he gets frustrated and decides to try to shut down the investigation, which would generate a huge backlash, and probably convince GOP leaders to impeach him in self-defense.

Re:Another round of nothing

[WalksOnDirt]

Have you forgotten Schwarzenegger already?

Cool...

[Zurkeyon3733]

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!

Re:Cool...

[houghi]

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with power. Who's gonna do it? You? You, #4687763? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Net Neutrality and you curse the TSA. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; that Net Neutralities death, while tragic, probably saved money.

And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, *saves money (for a few companies)*. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that firewall. You need me on that firewall. We use words like hacking, code, money. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a computer and stand a post.

Either way, I don't give a *damn* what you think you are entitled to!

--Somebody-in-the-know

Re:Cool...

[Zurkeyon3733]

Thats what redaction is for...

Haven't we heard this before?

[Charcharodon]

At this point I hardly believe anything they say.

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.

Publish them... SHOW us all this "Evidence"

[bradley13]

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?

Re:Publish them... SHOW us all this "Evidence"

[Anonymous Coward]

>big nothing-burger

Except for the guilty pleas...

You're in for a shock if you think this is all made up. Time will tell.

Re:Typical WP - lots of words little substance

[Baron_Yam]

>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.

james clapper

[NynexNinja]

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.

It doesn't matter

[Karmashock]

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.

Re: It doesn't matter

[Graymalkin]

Holy shit your oversimplification of the situation is amazingly intellectually bankrupt. The actual reality of the situation is nowhere near as binary as youâ(TM)re trying to suggest.

The Presidential election is really hundreds of district elections for electors which then cast the votes for the President. Illegally influencing Presidential elections does not require all of the winning partyâ(TM)s voters to be âoesheepâ. It doesnâ(TM)t even need a majority to be âoesheepâ.

Swinging an election through illegal influence can be done by targeting a relatively small number of swing districts in swing states. This effect has been amplified with ridiculous gerrymandering of the last century (thanks so much Reapportionment Act of 1929) and disenfranchisement campaigns.

The allegations against Russia include not just the hacking of the DNCâ(TM)s e-mail but an astroturfing and advertising campaign to help Trump and damage Clinton. Literally fake news articles written by content farms and actual Russian intelligence agents/contractors were pushed by thousands of social media bots and fake accounts. A great many of these have been found to be based in Russia. The same patterns have been seen in several recent elections in Europe as well.

The actual fake news articles used mastheads and site themes aping legitimate news organizations. Facebook and Twitter were gamed to make these sites look like they were widely read and highly regarded. Some people influenced by that misinformation campaign were indeed sheep. It certainly helped Trump in that he routinely decried the mainstream media as collectively untrustworthy. To even the less sheep-like voters the tide of real looking articles confirming their preconceived beliefs put them in a bubble insulated from reality or rationality. Trump campaign officials and Trump himself even amplified these literally fake news stories during the campaign.

Which goes back to swing districts and states. If a few thousand people in a relatively small number of districts were influenced by that PSYOPS campaign to 1) vote Trump 2) vote third party or 3) stay home because Clinton either âoehas it in the bagâ or is a master criminal then the state will go Trump. If you go back to the vote counts in swing states youâ(TM)ll see a lot of districts went Trump by small margins that tended to go contrary to historical voting patterns. Just like regular product advertising you donâ(TM)t need to influence everyone just enough to profit.

Re:Nobody says that.

[CrimsonAvenger]

given that they are staffed with 100% lobbyists (which used to be a crime, treated as treason, punished with a maximum sentence).

I'm curious. When was being a lobbyist treated as treason (a crime defined in the Constitution)?

Re:Excelent

[e3m4n]

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.

Re:Nobody says that.

[rgbatduke]

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.