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Facebook Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign (nytimes.com)
Facebook is preparing to announce that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity ahead of November's midterm elections, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three people briefed on the matter. From the report: In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week, the company told lawmakers that it detected the influence campaign as part of its investigations into election interference. It has been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two of the officials. Facebook is expected to announce its findings on Tuesday afternoon. The company has been working with the F.B.I. to investigate the activity. Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues. Update: Facebook has confirmed the story, adding: Today we removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior. This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don't want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they're doing. We're still in the very early stages of our investigation and don't have all the facts -- including who may be behind this. But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change. It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.
People are saying collusion isn't illegal...
Collusion is just descriptive shorthand for "conspiracy to defraud the United States" which is an actual crime that is being investigated.
Conspiracy actually is illegal. And no, the point of the Mueller investigation is to investigate claims of illegal conspiracy between members of the Trump organization and the Russian government. Of which multiple Russian nationals have been indicted, and at least one American citizen has pled guilty. It is currently unknown how far into the organization it went- we can speculate, but as of yet only his NSA has pled guilty and only his campaign manager has been indicted on related issues with Russia, so we'll have to see where the evidence goes when a final report is issued.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
That's just a factually incorrect statement. Look at the indictment against Papadopoulos, for example. I haven't looked at all of the other indictments, but that one example is enough to disprove your claim of zero.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I don't mean delegitimization as in impeachment and removal. If the Dems take the House, impeachment becomes a possibility, but even if they do manage to take the Senate, it would probably be by the same margins the Republicans hold it now, which means they won't have the 2/3s vote to remove Trump, so I think removal is incredibly unlikely.
The effect of delegitimizing Trump is more an issue of political capital. If Mueller draws a straight enough line, even if it isn't straight enough to pull the plug on Trump's presidency, and in particular if the Dems do very well this November, delegitimization will greatly reduce cooperation between Congress and the Administration. Even with a Republican-dominated Congress, there's already talk of Congress taking back some of the powers (particularly trade powers) that had been "loaned" to the President, and you can be sure that such delegated powers would start to be stripped from the Executive, particularly if the balance tips towards the Democrats. The President has a lot of constitutional powers all his own, but a lot of what he does is essentially statutory in nature; Congress has passed laws allowing the Executive to do lots of things in many areas of government, and if Congress decides it can no longer trust the Executive, whether out of misdeed or incompetence, or in this situation, simply because the Presidency lacks the political credibility, that is where a loss of legitimacy could see the White House become isolated. And Trump would hardly be the first president to find himself largely shoved in to a corner, and the powers of Congress and the courts to restrain the Executive could make it pretty miserable for him.
The problem for the Republicans in general is that they're stuck between the rock (Trump himself) and the hard place (that solid Republican base that is loyal to Trump). The base can't win a lot of races for them, but they will win a lot less races if that base abandons them. So right now, with mid-terms just a few months away, they have to at least keep bailing water out of the hold to maximize their chances. I think to some extent they're probably overestimating the threat the Democrat's represent; the House is in play (and will likely flip) but the Senate is most likely to stay in Republican hands, though with pretty similar margins as they have now. I think the act of tying themselves so firmly to Trump will in the long run do them more harm than good, and at least a modest break with him, at least on specific files, would probably assist them, but obviously they have their own metrics for that that indicate otherwise.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.