Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

[slomo]

My "assumption" is that you didn't seem to have an objective, an assumption which you corrected (with a number of snippy comments in between).

I disagree with your objective, or rather its importance in the larger scheme of things, but that's OK.

[seemslikeadream]

I don't understand why you would ask what my objective was ..it's right there in the OP

it's what I have been posting about in this thread..how could you not know?

[OP ED]

OK, glad to know you have one. I'm not too happy about Trump either, but consider what you get if Trump is impeached. President Pence!! That's a win for you, eh?

Not if you could find something, even something likely innocent or at least inconsequential that linked BOTH of them to pizzagate. I want NO ONE for President.

Trump and Epstein isn't enough. Clinton being funded by Epstein gets barely a raised eyebrow from the other set of gatekeepers. This despite that the court documents themselves imply Epstein was running a ring, not just a hobby.

[slomo]

OK, glad to know you have one. I'm not too happy about Trump either, but consider what you get if Trump is impeached. President Pence!! That's a win for you, eh?

Not if you could find something, even something likely innocent or at least inconsequential that linked BOTH of them to pizzagate. I want NO ONE for President.

Trump and Epstein isn't enough. Clinton being funded by Epstein gets barely a raised eyebrow from the other set of gatekeepers. This despite that the court documents themselves imply Epstein was running a ring, not just a hobby.

In order for Trumpistas to change their mind, evidence that Trump was linked to PG would have to be conclusive. Good luck with that.

[seemslikeadream]

yea good luck with that since Wiki doesn't do Trump


and you accused me of crap and yea I got snippy

[slomo]

Actually, it may warm your heart to know that some Trumpistas on Reddit are slowly beginning to have second thoughts. There are murmurs that he isn't going to drain the swamp after all, and that he may do nothing about PG.

[seemslikeadream]

Actually, it may warm your heart to know that some Trumpistas on Reddit are slowly beginning to have second thoughts. There are murmurs that he isn't going to drain the swamp after all, and that he may do nothing about PG.

that's kinda funny isn't it...I mean it's pretty damn clear already that he is not draining the swamp

he's filling it with OIL

he will do nothing about PG ...he doesn't have tho ...it's done it's job

[slomo]

Actually, it may warm your heart to know that some Trumpistas on Reddit are slowly beginning to have second thoughts. There are murmurs that he isn't going to drain the swamp after all, and that he may do nothing about PG.

that's kinda funny isn't it...I mean it's pretty damn clear already that he is not draining the swamp

Give the public time to catch up... We all cling tightly to our closely held illusions.

[seemslikeadream]

sorry if you thought I was snippy ...I really don't like being called a Clinton lover

[slomo]

No worries.

One of the issues here, and I think I mentioned it before, is that it is sometimes difficult to treat semi-anonymous posters as anything other than symbols of embodied energies/dynamics/etc. in our day-to-day lives, especially when we're discussing topics that are highly charged emotionally. So to the extent that I have conflated your online persona with the impenetrable position held by Clintonistas I know in my real life, I apologize. (Again, I'm not saying at all that you are a Clintonista, just that some of what you sometimes say lends me to be more susceptible to the confusion, a problem for which I bear 100% responsibility.)

[seemslikeadream]

I'm glad we cleared that up....I'm sure it is because I hate Trump so much that you would jump to the conclusion that I am a "Clintonista" which could not be further from the truth


and the fact that I think the pizza thing is insane...not because of Clinton but because it is hurting innocent people and someone could get killed....that makes me ill...very ill...and hence the attitude

[Elvis]

Just a thought: Maybe Wikileaks hasn't published any GOP/Trump emails because Wikileak's source for the DNC emails didn't have any GOP emails to give Wikileaks, or, if they had any, simply didn't give them to Wikileaks.

[slomo]

Just a thought: Maybe Wikileaks hasn't published any GOP/Trump emails because Wikileak's source for the DNC emails didn't have any GOP emails to give Wikileaks, or, if they had any, simply didn't give them to Wikileaks.

I think that's a fair point. But it could also, easily, be that WL is partisan. That doesn't change the damaging nature of the Podesta email leaks. (And I mean the mundane stuff, not the ersatz pizza code.)

[Rory]

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... onviction/

*remember, Seth Rich was murdered*

I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.

The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:

The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.
“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB.

It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.

In the UK, one single article sums up the total abnegation of all journalistic standards. The truly execrable Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian writes “Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump.” Does he produce any evidence at all for this assertion? No, none whatsoever. What does a journalist mean by a “credible source”? Well, any journalist worth their salt in considering the credibility of a source will first consider access. Do they credibly have access to the information they claim to have?

Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.

Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on. What access do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the faintest idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have arrested them. What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake.

In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible” give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants. But in what passes for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous with “establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means “establishment sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You are not to read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite and their disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.

The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This games kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on

[seemslikeadream]

Trump team sneers at CIA Russian-meddling report; Democrats step up call for full-on investigations

By Meteor Blades
Saturday Dec 10, 2016 · 1:12 PM CST

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 15: Ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-MD), speaks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, about the Flint, Michigan water crisis, on Capitol Hill March 15, 2016 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony regarding the Federal Administration of the Safe Drinking Water Act in Flint, Michigan. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Rep. Elijah Cummings is one of the House Democrats calling for a bipartisan commission to investigation Russian meddling in the U.S. elections.

Shortly after The Washington Post reported late Friday that the CIA had briefed key senators this week that Russians had not merely meddled in the U.S. election, but had done so with the specific intent of getting Donald Trump elected, his transition team responded with a brief unsigned statement:

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’"
Today, there was a doubling down as the transition team questioned the CIA’s motives:

On Saturday, spokesman Sean Spicer said there were "people within these agencies who are upset with the outcome of the election." [...]

Given Trump's statements, "there is an added urgency to the need for a thorough review before President Obama leaves office next month," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee. If the administration doesn't respond "forcefully" to such actions, "we can expect to see a lot more of this in the near future," he said.

President Obama has ordered a “deep dive” investigation into the claims. The White House has indicated that at least some of the resulting report will be released to the public. Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is the incoming Democratic Minority Leader, has called for a congressional investigation in the new year. And on Wednesday, before the appearance of the latest revelations recounted to the Post by an unnamed source, a leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Eric Swalwell, and the ranking Democrat on House Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, said they are introducing a bill to create a bipartisan commission on the Russian meddling.

David Corn at Mother Jones reported that the subpoena-issuing committee would be made up of 12 members, split equally between Democrats and Republicans, all of them appointed by the House speaker, the Senate majority leader, and the two Democratic leaders of the House and Senate.

Congressional Republicans have been dedicated over the past few years to running multi-million-dollar investigations on matters already investigated and keep running them even when evidence gathered has proved fruitless. Expect that eagerness to evaporate when it comes to Russian meddling.

Imagine for a moment if Iran were being accused of meddling to elect a Democrat. Tom Cotton, John Bolton and the rest of the Republican Bomb, Bomb, Bomb crowd would be howling for the nuking of Tehran this afternoon, no investigation needed.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/12/1 ... stigations