Slashdot Mirror
US Charges Russian Social Media Trolls Over Election Tampering (cnet.com)
The US Justice Department has filed charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups for interfering with the 2016 presidential election. From a report: In an indictment [PDF] released on Friday, the Justice Department called out the Internet Research Agency, a notorious group behind the Russian propaganda effort across social media. Employees for the agency created troll accounts and used bots to prop up arguments and sow political chaos during the 2016 presidential campaign. Facebook, Twitter and Google have struggled to deal with fake news, trolling campaigns and bots on their platforms, facing the scorn of Capitol Hill over their mishandlings. The indictment lists 13 Russian nationals tied to the effort.
This is just the opening volley.
There's no still evidence of any tampering. This is about memes posted to Facebook. Literally about memes.
This is the best he's got? This is absurd. This is going to get laughed out of court.
It's part time to stop the pointless Mueller witch hunt and time to stop pretending he has anything.
So these are the guys who spent less than 7 figures on propaganda and supposedly bought the most powerful government in the world?
Were so convincing and capable that they swung the entire election.
Right. Pull the other one. It's got bells on.
Nothing on Trump. No collusion. The closest they come is that some members of the Trump campaign "unwittingly" had communication with the bots/trolls. What - did a campaign staffer retweet something?
This insanity has gone far enough. The US was not conquered by Russia. Putin does not control the President.
In fact, the only Russian collusion was between the previous administration and Russia (e.g., the catastrophic "Russian Reset" that led to the problems in the Ukraine), and the sale of 20% of the US's uranium assets to Russia for a massive infusion of cash to the Clinton Foundation.
A story about Russia meddling, and immediately the Ivan's come out to comment first. Right on cue.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I heard the presser for this.. "No Americans involved who knew what was going on or that Russians where involved" is the key thing I took away from it.
Just pointing this important fact out.
Also, they are alleging that these Russians organized rallies for both sides. In one case, they organized two opposing rallies (one pro Trump, one pro Clinton) on the SAME day in the SAME city... Foreign nationals are not supposed to do that kind of thing, at least within our borders where our laws apply.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I don't see Anonymous Coward (a/k/a AC) anywhere on that list. That dude is totally a Russian troll.
Oh, the indictment is juicy, folks. Among other things, it specifically charges that these Russians sought to help the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, and that they also sought to suppress minority votes, and to create social media accounts pretending to be US media outlets and American individuals.
We got us a RICO case against the White House. This is 'bout to get real interesting.
https://www.justice.gov/file/1...
You are welcome on my lawn.
To let the world know what they COULD do, without actually having a clear agenda this time. But if you are nasty to us when you are in office, your reelection is going to be... difficult. A wonderful example of plausible deniability!
This is going to be a very hard case to make and going to set a very dangerous precedent.
Any law twisted enough to make what they do illegal will outlaw astroturfing and potentially even advertising.
And if misrepresenting oneself online is a crime, I shudder at the amount of FBI agents going to jail for pretending to be 14-year-old girls.
Or are they just planning to outlaw foreign nationals from twitter and facebook? Or are they just planning on preventing them from posting? This kind of government intervention should scare the crap out of anyone.
2 of the 3 charges are plain silly. The 3rd is identity theft which is more serious. They are alleged to have 5 stolen SSN.
Being Russian citizens these people are not likely to ever see the inside of a US court.
What is more, these actions are not any different than many other actions that states have taken against each other. The US for example in interfering with Israeli and Iranian elections. Hell we've evens taged coups, and very recently in places like ... Libya.
This is not something a special prosecutor working for the DoJ should handle. This is a job for the CIA and the NSA which are more experienced in such things, and can handle it without starting WWIII.
All it is is cover for the special prosecutor, who has had very little to justify his work. Hell rumor has it Flynn is now fighting back and they may lose his guilty plea.
Who benefits from this ( aside from Rosenstein and Meuller )? The indictment said that the Russians propped up Bernie and Trump. At whose cost? Hillary's. So this announcement props up Hillary who "would have won if not for Russian involvement. Who did most of the members of Meullers team work for before? Hillary. Big surprise.
I want this to be investigated as much as anyone, but the feigned shock and surprise from some Americans feels naive. Considering all the meddling (or outright coup d'etats and invasions) our country has been involved in over the last 100 years, this almost feels a little like a sliver of long overdue karmic payback.
More importantly, I don't think those who want this investigation to go on and on (for whatever reason) understand just how pious and insulting it sounds to those who chose Trump. I mean, dark money and political parties put out metric tons of political "ads" every election cycle, and people see through 99% of it. But they couldn't see through Russian propaganda?
Even if Putin himself was posting fake news content to Facebook, this continued coverage wreaks of Russian xenophopia and pious arrogance emanating from the national media and "holier than thou", ivory tower types: "The independents who voted for Trump had to have been influenced by SOMETHING to make such a horrible choice. We're the enlightened ones, so we have a responsibility to make sure everyone foolish enough to not see just how AWFUL Trump would've been as president NEVER make that miscalculation again."
Let's wipe up this spilled milk instead of crying about it.
The most fascinating part of the indictment is the education of the Russians. They started off not even knowing what a purple state was and ended by being able to micro-target. This leads me to suspect that this indictment is a mere appetizer to the main course.
The Washington Post has a better article on this.
One bit of info missing from CNET is that these indictments are the direct result of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
At this point, I just figure that anyone who posts idiocy about the Russians not hacking the US is either a Russian shill or one of their dupes. Either that, or they're so soaked in conspiracy theories that their brains are addled. It's really no use listening to them. Once you decide that false information is as good as real facts, your mind might as well be gone.
And for the idiots referenced above who say that all this Russsia stuff is "fake", I'll take the CIA, FBI, and NSA's word about spying before any of you conspiracy-spouting morons in the peanut gallery - I do value professionalism, if nothing else.
That is all.
You said it was a RICO involving the White House.
YOU LIED... AGAIN
So now, no Americans involved = White House RICO
No evidence of Carter Page being Russia agent = Proof he is Russian agent
Disagree with PopeRatzo = Terrorist
You are the worst liar that has ever existed. I don't even have to look anything up to know you lie. You are a complete piece of garbage and you haven't said something that wasn't slander for the last month.
PopeRatzo = Pure Shit
Let's just record this as the most desperate measure of pulling something out of one's ass, to use it against somebody, ever seen.
No matter what, doubling down the insanity in ALL the instances, beating even North Korea.
In other words: They pulled a Trump.
Sorry, now not only the entire world os laughing at you, but US citizens aswell. .. Although not quite /stupid/.)
So don't say "US", as this is actually truly anti-American.
(And yes, the Russian leaders are just as much pieces of shit.
as
the American electorate couldn't possibly have voted for Trump of their own volition, without any form of manipulation from malicious foreign agents bent on destroying the USA, could they? What is it that they're trying to say about Trump with all this, exactly?
Slashdot gets slashdotted by Russian Media Trolls.
Film at 11.
Any regulation of speech is a violation of the 1st Amendment, which explicitly states "no fucking law!! Attempting to influence stupid people is not a crime, unless you can prove actual diminished capacity. Voting republican or democrat doesn't cut it.
There can be no debate. We all have a duty to circumvent censorship instead of arguing about it wherever it is encountered.
It does not mean what they think it means.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/trump-administration-breaking-law-failing-issue-new-russia-sanctions
"It seems likely that some observers have mistakenly assumed that the statute requires the administration to issue sanctions against those who are listed in the report. But the statute doesn’t require this; it merely requires the report. There really isn’t any ground to criticize the administration for non-compliance under section 241."
The Trump administration is following the law.
Putin can't have witnesses. I'm betting we're about to see some dead Russians.
If you were one of the 13 indicted Russians, would you be more afraid of the US Department of Justice or Vladimir Putin?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Everyone outside the US knows this.
It is so blatantly obvious.
The mind-blowing thing is, that the system manages to keep up this bubble that so great, it *still* keeps you from seeing and accepting what is right in front of your faces.
Frankl, please don't be offended, because I don't hate you or anything, but from the outside this is like watching North Koreans and their relationship to the "Great Leader". Or an episode of Stargate SG-1.
Perhaps its the evil bastard in me, but I find it somewhat humorous that the same country that supposedly prides itself on things like "free speech" then turns around and pitches a royal effin fit whenever someone uses said speech in a manner one side doesn't like. OMG TRUMP...OMG RUSSIANS...OMG HILLARY...
Mueller?... Mueller?... Mueller?...
and the USA.
From the article: "The trolls took up both sides of the same issue, with the primary goal to misinform and create political divide." - Lol isn't this what MSM does on a daily basis?
You are spreading lies.
Fusion GPS were originally commissioned by Washington Free Beacon, and they have admitted that.
That is the real foreign interference in ALL US elections. Such hypocrisy
...for accepting campaign contributions from foreign donors?
Me neither.
And they did it again in 2012.
No prosecutions for that, either.
But no, let's talk about some Facebook trolls...
Ok, so if you are not a US citizen and attempt to influence an election, its illegal? Sure.
Soros is not an American and spends millions (billion maybe) on DNC races. Does that mean every DNC candidate he supported is guilty of collusion with a foreigner to influence a US election?
Why is Soros not indicted as well?
People who think PopeRatzo is a liar want to know!
Like all the paid shills accusing anyone who questions this crazy narrative of being a paid shill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... that everyone is going to prison. The President, his Cabinet, 100 Senators, 435 Representatives, you, me, really just everyone.
Are Federal prisons privately run yet, and are they publicly traded? Because I have some great investment ideas that involve 100% incarceration rates.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Nobody ever said the American people were unfit to vote. What we _did_ say is that they, like everybody, are capable of being lied to about the sources of information. Kinda like when a Cigarette company backs a study on the health benefits of tobacco. Or when Coke did the same thing. You'd want to know who backed that study. Lying by omission is a thing. A democracy lives and breaths by the quality of information available.
And no, there's still plenty of talk about the Russians hacking the election. They got caught funneling money through the NRA to Trump's campagin, and the only question is are we doing to do anything about it. Then there were all those meetings between high level Trump campaign officials and shady Russians that are still being investigated. Oh, and there's tons of evidence that the Russians have hacked into (literally) our electronic voting systems and that they continue to do so. There's good solid evidence they shared priceless voting record data with the Trump campaign. Again, hard to say if anything will come of this since the Republicans control so much of the government even before Trump won.
Remember, Trump was and is always a patsy. Nobody cares if he knew any of this because his only job was to show up to rallies and say bad things about Hillary and Mexicans. The question is how much did the folks who _really_ run the show know and do. What's clear is that what tattered remains of American democracy are left are being eroded.
But whatever, just keep ignoring the mounting evidence because the word 'hacked' sometimes gets used slightly inappropriately.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Especially this:
Steele - again, the former head of MI6's Russia desk - had been an FBI source for years prior, where he had proved useful in a number of investigations unrelated investigations.
Which must be why the FBI dropped his ass as a source for being unreliable - then didn't tell the FISA court that they'd dropped him as a source:
"Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September –before the Page application was submitted to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] FISC in October –but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts"
So Steele lied to the FBI about what he was doing, and then the FBI continued to use his dossier as the sole source for FISA warrants.
And if Steele wasn't just a cutout for Hillary! via Blumenthal and/or Shearer via Fusion GPS, why was he pushing his dossier to media outlets when, as a "professional intelligence officer" HE DAMN WELL SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER, AND HE DAMN WELL SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THAN TO LIE ABOUT IT TO THE FBI.
What Rosenstein says: "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge."
What Rosenstein thinks: "Please don't fire me, please don't fire me, please don't fire me ..."
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
or if nothing else to raise our voices and try to drown the shills out. Slashdot is a site full of older engineers and tech people (it's a site from the 90s after all). It's bound to be a prime target since older, well-to-do STEM professionals are going to prone to the right wing (since the right wing's co-opted conservatism and, well, like my history teacher used to say when you've got something to lose you get real conservative real fast). Our little community needs more voices of sanity to keep us away from the excesses of conservatism.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...we could simply say "OK thanks Russia. You want to play 'media domination game"?"
The US is already the most staggeringly dominant culture ever seen on earth, without really deliberately trying (not unlikely that's partly why).
If we were a country with any sense of itself, any sense of unity of purpose, and not a fractious bunch of self-hating bitches, with Hollywood's expertise we could without batting an eye SWAMP Russian media, internet, and airwaves with a chaos of propaganda, infowar, fake news, with production values so sophisticated there would be NO WAY any Russian national could tell if that video was real or not, or that email was real or not, or that video of Vladimir Putin having a quiet, gay moment with a young Russian male model followed by an overwhelming wave of irrefutable evidence of that young male model being found murdered brutally and only the faintest traces of official security service involvement.
They spent what, a few $hundred thousand influencing social media? We could drop a few $hundred MILLION and drive their society into outright civil war.
There is no media culture as dominant or efficacious as the American culture in 2018. None.
But we are our own worst enemy, and Russia can do this sort of thing knowing that Americans will cheerfully attack EACH OTHER over it long before they have the cojones to set aside their partisan bitching in favor of their own country's well being.
-Styopa
Smidge is not a russian troll and they post on here all the time. You are simply attempting obfuscation and that is the job of our resident asshole libertardian Obfuscant.
Because the American people are to damn stupid to read the news and figure out what is true and false.
Perhaps we should work on teaching our students how to read articles and determine the difference between opinion pieces and fact reporting.
I've seen way too many factual reporting articles with loads of prejudicial adjectives and assumed-as-fact descriptors. And there are so many of them that folks keep hearing it over and over...and assume it is fact.
And don't get me started on the click-bait headlines. I've read so many "factual" reports from the major news organizations that, after reading the whole piece, I was unable to find the information supposed to be there from the click-bait headline.
Like the current 18 school shootings so fare this year....and no one takes the time to examine the 18 and find that they include incidents on school buses, criminal justice training classes, etc.
Sad.
Like all the paid shills accusing anyone who questions this crazy narrative of being a paid shill.
When you look over the edge of the world, you find that it's shills, all the way down.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I was listening to a bit on the radio yesterday about a woman who contracted a eye worm that normally only infects horses. She ended up pulling a live worm out of her eye, but it didn't really harm her physical health much at all. She was a good sport about it, and emerged with her mental health, too.
So the CBC brings on the guy from the CDC and he's practically jizzing himself with enthusiasm over this rare cross-species infection (due to face flies, which feed on eye secretions, which allows the parasite larvae to jump ship and enter the eyeball).
They also bring on this other guy associated with Monsters Inside Me.
And what he says, basically, is that for almost every mammal (and presumably bird) you will find at least three different parasite species almost exclusive to that animal, so the parasites are always present in greater diversity in any healthy ecosystem.
Just a few parasites, and we're all supposed to quit? What's with that?
Field Guide: Diseases and Parasites of Marine Mammals of the Eastern Arctic — 2003
So the point is, how do whales actually run away from all the parasites? Where is this beautiful, clean oasis that isn't Slashdot the Fallen? Politics used to be like the grizzly bear, one could hibernate for six months and not miss much. But modern politics is way more like the ocean, with bleached coral reefs, red tides, and entire floating islands of petrochemical detritus.
Why Whale Stress Significantly Dropped After 9/11 — February 2015
HowSound #150 - When a Good Idea for a Podcast is a Bad Idea for a Podcast — May 2017
This episode is about the short-lived podcast "How's Your Day?" It's about invisible, unreported stories that got buried on an iconic news day, with a surprising parallel. They found three needles, then caved, even before launch.
Surprisingly, most of this post-mortem episode is about the amazing day of the whales on 9/11.
The whale portion starts at 9m00; the whales on 9/11 portion begins at 16m00. Great place to bury your head in the sand for twenty minutes and not deal with the Great Parasite Load.
They are acoustic animals, and the (normally) unbroken shipping thrum causes them constant stress, because the ocean is now overrun with ships, and maybe it's time for them to all crawl back up onto dry land, lose a few pounds, and live again like God intended for all mammals.
This is the setup to show that these Russians did influence the election illegally. Likewise, Mueller has a number of witnesses that will be forced to tell the truth, or have charges against them increased. Trump and pence will go down for the traitors they are.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How all the Hilda bot shills are out in force to claim that Hillary's gigantic budget and massive lefty propaganda wing is insignificant compared to a few Russian Miscreants that were dreamt up to support their non-starter of a case for impeachment!!
> I believe the original claim was: "The Russians hacked the election", indicating that Trumps victory was illegitimate.
What do you mean "was"? Here's item #6 on the Reddit homepage right now:
Just look up everything cold fjord ever posted if you want examples. Russian trolls had 0 impact on the election.
In the timeline presented it was after Trump had the nomination. So what Republican were they going to start rallies for?
At this point, I just figure that leftys are so brainwashed that they actually believe a few Russian social media "influencers" were to blame for corrupt and rotten Hillary not getting into power. Yes, please remember that Saudi Arabia and the benefactors of the TPP all poured money into Hillary.
The report claims someone used hashtags to support Trump and Hillary on Twitter and this is evidence of Russian "hacking"? HHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA
So these Russians are being charged with crimes concerning the use of stolen identities.... Isn't that partly what most of the DREAMers are guilty of?
Judging from the posts they succeeded in dividing the country with the #notmypresident #blacklivesmatter and other hash tags.
And judjing from Slashdot, they succeeded in even more.
Which leaves the question, what was in it for the Russians? Why did they so clearly support Trump through the primaries and into the election, only to start playing both sides after he was elected?
All of the Bernie and Stein supporters being manipulated too.
Sorry to mention it, but you fell for the weasel words. The weasel words you forgot to include were "relating to _this_ indictment. Wicked fucking weasels these days. Narratives as far as the eye can see. Yawn.
I don't pretend to know this law in that much detail (but I'll be parsing the weasel words in the news over the coming weeks). But I wonder if this is the case, if it is actually a good law? Wouldn't it be better to not have the law, and instead have a populace more skeptical of all political rallies? Aren't there enough non-foreign trolls that people should always be asking themselves about the deeper motives of the mob-leaders? Just sayin, more free speech sounds like a better default legal foundation to me. Let the tourists have as much free speech rights as the natives I say. Now when they lie and misrepresent themselves, then it's time to call the Fraud Police with the handcuffs. :)
https://twitter.com/realDonald...
The US really hit an all-time low with Trump as POTUS.
"Just Let It Go." ;)
"They where spreading FUD about the election SYSTEM in this country."
Sometimes FUD is negative. Other times there is legitimately an irrational lack of fear, irrational certainty, and irrational lack of doubt. I'm not convinced this isn't one of those situations.
Cheney must be kicking himself these days. All that trouble of having Colin Powell lie his ass off to the U.N. and present fake evidence, when he could have skipped that whole "evidence" nonsense and made a series of assertions that Saddam planned 911 and hand WMD's. Because people would eat that shit up with a spoon.
But let's go ahead and say it's all true after all. You going to stop spending billions to subvert other countries governments around the word while whining about a few thousand dollars on Facebook ads?
eagerly and willfully became complicit and remain so.
Hillary bought the Russian crap via a Brit spy (both sources foreign) then Obama's people in the deep state used it to get FISA warrants to spy on Trump and they leaked everything they could to their friends in the mainstream press who eagerly pumped it into the nation's political circulatory system, and holdovers of the Obama team who remain to this day in the government continue to sow chaos to undermine the current edministration - these people are all doing the exact bidding of Putin, while loudly screaming that Trump is the Putin puppet.
Irony of ironies.
All the chaos Putin wanted and paid for is being provided for free by Hillay, Obama, ABC,CBS,NBC,MSNBC,CNN,WaPo,NYT... who keep ranting about Trump-Putin.
had "dreamers" (illegal aliens, i.e. FOREIGN CITIZENS) working on their campaigns.
hmmmm......
Democrats demand that foreign interference in our campaigns is a severe threat to our country and must be punished harshly. Time for A.G. Sessions to get off his butt and start launching indictments over all these foreigners who interfered and the Americans who knowingly colluded with them.
Clinton/Obama people have spent a year-and-a-half leaking every bad thing they could on Trump, including classified stuff from intel agencies and even stuff that later was exposed as false. The leaks have been on a scale never before seen in American history, and were first a desperate attempt to keep Trump from winning, then became a desperate attempt to immobilize his administration and bring him down as fast as possible.
We have clearly seen the worst. If there was anything worse than what has already leaked, the Democrats would have leaked it in time to stop Trump's election, or at the very least in time to stop his inauguration.
Hell, even this current indictment covers NO Americans, explicitly says it had no effect on the election, admits Putin's people helped Bernie too and even worked against Trump, and finally admits that some Trump supporter was tricked into gving some pro-Trump lawn signs to a Russian agent (ooooooh) while not knowing he was a Russian agent.
um
The very definition of "collusion" requires that all parties to said collusion are aware of and willing participants in the scheme. If not all involved are aware, then it's NOT "collusion" by definition.
What we've got here is lawn signs, hash tags, pro- AND anti-Trump internet action on a chump-change scale dwarfed by Hillary's over-a-billion-dollars campaign (which, incidentally, outspent Trump's actual campaign by about 7-to-1 thus putting a nail in the coffin of the leftwing arguments about Citizens United and the influence of cash) all of which did not even have any measurable or documentable impact.
This was the "blockbuster" that had the lefties all squealing with delight. Yikes, these people are in la la land and need to get out of their insular mind-numbing hyper-partisan political bubbles.
Until we grow in numbers, Libertarians should align with the Republican party. Because "it is the economy, stupid". If, Heaven forfend, some ultra-conservative Republican manages to outlaw abortions, for example, I'll still be able to pay for my daughter's trip to Canada, should she ever want the procedure.
But, if the likes of Obama keep running the country, we'd all be so poor, that having a free 24/7 abortion clinic next door will be no consolation.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
and Democratic Socialist. I had several family members screwed over by the US Healthcare system, which opened my eyes. Finding out that Wallet Biopsies were a thing (I experienced one before hearing the Sopranos name it) was a frightening ordeal. College History courses helped too. Finding out that slavery was basically a caste system used to keep poor white southerners in their place (slaves were a poor deal, cheap immigrant labor was much, much more profitable) and getting the internet and finding out that through out history bigotry, racism and caste systems have been used over and over again by the 1% to divide and conqueror the working class cinched it.
The Trump/Russia/NRA isn't made up. It's been pretty well researched. I suppose the point could be made that Trump didn't know about it, but that's part of the whole scam. Trump isn't really a leader, he's a demagogue. So he never has to actually know anything about the corruption that supports him. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't be taken down by it. Trump isn't just a man anymore, he's an administration. He's the executor of the US Government. As a leader he's responsible for what his people do. Especially when it's so obvious he's turning a blind eye.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Your insane interpretations of what this means make me really afraid for the future of humanity.
Nothing in the 'Steele Dossier', also known as the 'Trump dossier', has been verified, corroborated, or confirmed.
In addition, the Steele dossier was contracted by Hillary Clinton. Her campaign ordered it. It did not exist. It was not intelligence. It was not produced by the American or international intelligence communities. It was the idea of the Clinton campaign based on some early efforts by Fusion GPS during the Republican primaries to hire Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, to put together an opposition research document and make it look like it was intelligence product, make it look like it was the result of intelligence agents, spies, doing deep investigations of Donald Trump and his family and associates.
It was made to look like a standard intelligence document that was produced by counterintelligence American patriots, when, in fact, it was nothing more than a painting commissioned by a rich guy. This was a commissioned piece of work that served as opposition research. Everything we’ve known about it remains true to this day.
We now know that the memo asserts that this dossier formed an essential part of the first and subsequently all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page. Now, this we’ve known and talked about. Carter Page was a temporary Trump campaign official who had made some trips to Russia. And it was those trips in Russia that formed the basis of manufacturing out of whole cloth, creating a series of lies that the guy was being used as an agent by the Trump administration, the Trump campaign to seek relationships with the Russians.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
One group talks about how this condemns Trump, because it shows Russian interference on his behalf (note it's interference, not collusion anymore). The other side says it exonerates Trump because the report specifically says that no American willingly participated. What people seem to be failing to notice is that the Russians were doing Pro and Anti-Trump, as well as Pro and Anti-Hillary...and then immediately after the election, kept stirring the pot with anti-Trump. You are being played to create dissent, to create chaos, and you're gleefully letting it happen. You have a media establishment that hates Trump, you have Democratic politicians who are willing to let the country go up in flames because they aren't getting what they want, and instead of saying 'Gee, maybe we'd better notice that Russia is screwing us all up' they're saying 'No sacrifice is too great to bring down Trump'.
AC, I hereby accuse you of being a goat-fucker. I don't know that this information is false, as you could actually be one of those rare, rare people who engage in goat fucking. Now is this a fair framing of how assertions are supposed to work - or is it total BS? You're also ignoring the fact that it's impossible to prove a negative - it's impossible to prove that Trump hasn't been peed on, much less that Steele lied about it. Which is why it's the job of the person making the assertion to back it up.
Nah, just a torturing, murdering, kidnapping piece of imperialist shit:
The kinda guy who should be in prison for war crimes.
People keep saying this as if its supposed to mean something. Past surveillance - that resulted in nothing as he was charged with nothing - does jack to justify future investigations without probable cause.
Neat way of sidestepping the fact that one general election candidate digging up opposition dirt on her opponent was used as the basis for spying on said opposition candidate.
There's a study which shows Russia overwhelmingly puts or right wing bullshit, the FBI said Russia spent millions supporting Trump and sowing discord (with minor support for Sanders, et al), they've been shown to have talked with Trump's kids, numerous Trump officials have been essentially arrested for Russian collusion
And what you got out of all that is that Russia and the liberals are working together?
Fucking how?
"Blah, blah, blah. But Clinton!
Blah, blah, blah. But Clinton!
Blah, blah, blah. But Clinton!"
Get off the Clinton thing. Really, you just look obsessed and stupid by riding that hobby horse.
The issue is Big Giant Orange Head now, his words, his behavior, his fitness for office. Also whether he colluded with the Russians, whether he will start a war with North Korea, whether he will permanently damage civil society with his continual divisive crap.
It would be funny, the accusation that "You're still not geting it", if the matters weren't so serious. Clinton isn't in office, BGOH is. I'd say you were the one "not getting it." Your inability to focus on the matters at hand suggest you need to divert attention away from the matters at hand. Or that you have the attention span of BGOH.