Two women look at their cell phones in front of portraits of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, as they arrive at the Union Jack pub in Moscow, Russia, to watch a live telecast of the U.S. presidential election on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016. CREDIT: AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko.
Yet explosive new reporting from the Washington Post tells us that the CIA informed U.S. senators last week that it was “quite clear” from a “growing body of intelligence from multiple sources” that Russia’s goal was to elect Trump.
The “consensus view,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators, according to the Post, is that “it is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.”
The New York Times also reported Friday evening that intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that Russian cyberattacks had the goal of helping Trump because the Republican National Committee was hacked. The data and email traffic was not released. The hacked emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and sent to WikiLeaks gained international headlines for weeks, causing headaches for the Clinton campaign and the resignation of the DNC chair after internal party squabbles became public.
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The idea that Russia actively put its thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor in a very close election where he prevailed in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by almost three million votes alarms more than Democrats.
Trump has shocked people across the political spectrum with his laudatory praise for Russia and Vladimir Putin and his desire to diminish NATO. One of his first staffing choices was former general Michael Flynn for National Security Advisor, who equated a Russian propaganda media outlet to CNN. For secretary of state, he is considering congressional Putin advocate Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), and someone who may be closer to Vladimir Putin than anyone in America: ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
“[Tillerson] has had more interactive time with Vladimir Putin than probably any other American with the exception of Henry Kissinger,” security expert John Hamre told the Wall Street Journal this week.
I find those portraits a bit frightening in their sculpted artificiality and superimposed heroism -- I mean, neither Donald Trump nor Vladimir Putin look so heroically distinguished. Such chiselled features belong on a propaganda poster and are rarely reflected in real life to that same degree.
Anyway. I suppose that’s the point.
Yes, I don’t want to comment on the article itself because I’m cringing on the inside.
Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, the biggest KGB moles in the history of U.S. were both conservative Republicans.
Conservatives have always loved Russia, they loved it when they could point a quavering finger at a made up enemy, manipulating peoples’ fears, and they love it now, when Putin has provided a fine example of how they want things to be here.
I guess they just love freedom a lot. /s
Can you imagine the opposite situation? If Clinton had become president despite losing by two million votes, if a hostile foreign power was regularly hacking the RNC for dirt to leak with Clinton’s explicit approval, if they’d spent years shutting down polling places in republican areas and rewriting election laws to keep away republican voters, if a democrat FBI official had made up a fake scandal just 11 days before the election to make the Republican candidate look bad going into election day?
The right-wingers would go apeshit, they’d be screeching that the vote was rigged nonstop for four years. How do left-wingers react to that situation? By rolling over, surrendering, and bleating about how Trump deserves a chance.
Fuck that. Fuck him and fuck every coward on the left who gives in and tries to play nice with Trump’s illegitimate regime.
Samihawkins:
Right there with you. The Resistance must be real, face up to reality, and fight.
+1
This is one of the most disturbing things about all of this. They hacked the RNC, as well, but chose to hold it back because Putin wanted Trump to win. And, clearly, Wikileaks wanted Clinton to lose, as well. The more I read about this election, the more pissed off and terrified I get…
On a separate note…
When I posted the link to my Facebook page, someone responded saying that they don’t trust the “anonymous sources” because of how bad the mainstream media has been with actually fake news. Now, I don’t blame that person, of course… this has been one of the worst cycles of mainstream news that I’ve seen in my 29 years of life, and that’s allowing for the fact that for my entire 29 years of life, mainstream news has been largely unreliable.
That said… wasn’t WaPo one of the few mainstream media sites pissing off the Republicans for largely relying on accurate news during the primaries and the general, or am I confusing them with another news site?
Regime change: it’s not just for the goose anymore.
At least the Russians haven’t been smuggling weapons to our right-wing crazies. Probably because our right-wing crazies are already pretty well-armed.
The US interferes in other countries’ politics constantly. Other countries interfere with US politics, as well. The president of Mexico took a poke at Trump. Binjamin Netanyahu took a poke at Obama. Etc. Etc.
The two-party system is just mad that someone is interfering with the elections they’ve already rigged. “That’s not sporting!” Really? The Russians cannot possibly interfere with the US elections as much as the Republicans and Democrats already have. I think the US is just mad because the Russians didn’t throw advertising money like the Koch Brothers and Adelson and all the corporations did. The whole election cycle was nothing but a grand guingnol of manipulation, and the pigs lift their heads from the trough to grunt complaints about Russia.
If I can find the strength, I’ll be posting more about the Russian hack tomorrow. Trump, of course, is claiming it’s nothing at all, and is already talking about the next eight years. Not even pres yet.
I am actually terrified of how possible this is. Unless something changes within the next two years, I could actually see that happening…
And that… just…
Funny thing about that Russian hack, it’s barely getting any news time here (oh, look, none!) and not nearly enough in Canadian mainstream news (I mean the CBC has mostly Trump’s reaction, not so much about the hack itself).
Which worries me a bit, of course. But you’d think at least the nationalist contingent here would be on that as proof of… everything they’ve been warning us about already, I guess? Odd silence.
I agree with Nathan #8:
Wikileaks has clearly taken a side here. That is a very overlooked fact in this entire saga. Putin undermining democracies to help Nazis is hardly surprising given his support for every extreme-right, fascist and Nazi party on the globe, from Greece’s Golden Dawn to Franc’s Marie Le Pen to Hungary’s Viktor Orban. But Wikileaks collaborating with it is very uncomfortable for a great many people; many on the left inexplicably respect Julian Assange and many on the right wouldn’t won’t to admit that someone like Assange is helping them.
Even though Assange and Trump have some common qualities. Rapers of the world unite and all that.
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rq #13
I dunno. Remember the false-flag attacks by Operation Gladio? It was everything the Soviets always believed but it got no news in USSR and the attacks themselves were blamed on Italian mafia of all things. Paranoid conservatives sometimes have genuine problems when their deranged fantasies actually correspond with reality. I think “Russia Elects US President” is the kind of phrases that nobody wants to say out loud.
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Marcus Ranum #10
How dare they?!
One can only hope that there will be less election cycles in the future.
500 Billion dollars is at stake. http://freethoughtblogs.com/affinity/2016/12/12/an-unholy-trinity/
Makes all kinds of sense now.
Caine #15
Only in the case of Trump. That doesn’t explain the world trend. Or why Canadian liberal parties, which are stronger and more numerous than in US, also fail to report the Trump-Russian connection through their outlets.
Canada? Oh please, Trudeau just okayed two massive pipelines. I posted about that. Oil and money, nothing more.
Caine #17
I remember, but the Liberals are only one of Canada’s liberal (or liberal leaning) parties. If we only stick to the federal level there are also NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Green party. They’re not nearly as strong as the Liberals (despite some NDP gains), but you can waive away their supposed silence by mentioning Trudeau.