[News] Trump, Russia, and the 2016 Election

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All news related to Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia and to the Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. New details should be cited to reputable sources.

There's been a lot in the news lately about Trump, Russian, Nunes, Flynn, Yates, Steele, and all the rest of it. Rather than mix it in with the rest of the news about the administration, let's break this out into a distinct thread.

Alright I'm in.

Nunes is having a bad month:

First GOP lawmaker calls for Nunes to recuse himself

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) on Tuesday told The Hill that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) should "absolutely" recuse himself from his panel's investigation into Russia's meddling in last year’s election.

Jones, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who frequently bucks leadership, is the first Republican in Congress to call on Nunes to step aside.

"How can you be chairman of a major committee and do all these things behind the scenes and keep your credibility? You can't keep your credibility," Jones said just off the House floor.

LOL. He said "keep" as if Nunes had any credibility to begin with!

I think this is the thread to say that periodically when I make calls to my congressmen I'll call one of Devin Nunes line and speak Russian to them.

Nunes was on the transition team. He should no more be involved in an investigation than Sessions.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Nunes was on the transition team. He should no more be involved in an investigation than Sessions.

...and is acting quite shady too.

I'm reposting what I posted in the other thread:

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/sta...
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/sta...
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/sta...

I keep seeing these threads retweeted in my Twitter feed. I don't normally read HuffPo so I'm not familiar with the writer, but he basically takes several different stories and attempts to connect them into a narrative. I hate to say it, but some of what he writes seems plausible to me.

Thoughts?

Manafort linked to shady Cyprus bank accounts.

Not exactly shocking given all that we know about Manafort before this.

It is starting to feel like a race between one of these guys becoming an informant with the FBI versus getting whacked by an FSB agent.

If Clancy had written this stuff everyone would have thought he had lost it.

PaladinTom wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Nunes was on the transition team. He should no more be involved in an investigation than Sessions.

...and is acting quite shady too.

I'm reposting what I posted in the other thread:

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/sta...
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/sta...
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/sta...

I keep seeing these threads retweeted in my Twitter feed. I don't normally read HuffPo so I'm not familiar with the writer, but he basically takes several different stories and attempts to connect them into a narrative. I hate to say it, but some of what he writes seems plausible to me.

Thoughts?

Honestly, I would caution against this. The Jester is an interesting follow on Twitter as well.

https://twitter.com/search?q=th3j35t3r

There is something interesting about people actually connecting the dots. If actual lives weren't at stake this would be the most interesting real life caper in my life time. I'm really wary, though, of waking up 3 years from now finding myself following the left-wing Alex Jones because I didn't stick doggedly to known facts.

In short, I only treat people like this as entertainment.

On Seth Abramson: I'm skeptical. Partially because it does seem plausible.

I mean, I've seen people go down the 9/11 conspiracy well and the Obama-will-steal-our-guns mineshaft, so absent proof I'm cautious about ending up in that place. There's a lot of people on the left who really, really want an impeachment.

It's really easy to connect the dots. Humans like stories. Makes us feel like they can understand what's going on. Tying bunch of separate things together into a plausible narrative is easy even when it's not true.

Here's one antidote, an op-ed by Jeet Heer, who, while no fan of Trump, is cautious about taking the evidence too far: Is the Russia Investigation Turning the Left Into Conspiracy Theorists?

I personally think Trump is categorically different from part partisan presidents, but I don't want to overrun the available evidence. It's plainly obvious that some kind of investigation is needed. It's not obvious what the conclusion is going to be, but we need one.

It's been obvious since last fall, really: he refuses to release his finances and the FBI has clear evidence that Russian hackers stole the DNC's emails? At the very least, there needs to be an investigation just to clear the air. (Witch-hunts are unproductive, but allowing innocent people to prove their innocence is valuable.) I'm disturbed by how intransigent the Republicans are being.

If I have to pin down where I'm at right now:

- No voting totals were changed, no voting machines were hacked. It would have been nice to get a complete audit of the voting machines, but that's merely on general principles. There's no evidence of tampering at that level.

- There is, however 100% evidence that Russia attempted to influence the election: both the DNC and Republicans were hacked, but only the Democratic information was leaked. And there was an awful lot of astroturfing on Twitter and so on.

STEFANIK: Stepping back more broadly, in the case of Russia, we know that cyber hacking is just one tactic that's typically part of a broader influence or information warfare campaign and we know the Russian government is ready and willing to employee hacking as but one of many tools in their toolkit to obtain information for use against the United States. Is there any evidence that Russia tried to hack other entities associated with the 2016 presidential campaign in addition to the DNC or the Clinton campaign operatives?

COMEY: Yes, many others.

STEFANIK: Can you specify those others? Did that include the RNC? Did that include any of the other campaigns of candidates in the primaries, either Democrats or Republicans?

COMEY: I think what we can say in an unclassified setting is what we have in the report that there were efforts to penetrate organizations associated with the Republican party and that -- I think that is what we said in the report. And that there were not releases of material taken -- hacked from any Republican associated organizations.

STEFANIK: But the hacking -- the use of cyber tools as part of their broader, whether you call it hybrid warfare or information warfare campaigns, it was done to both parties.

COMEY: Correct.

- I'd say there's a 70% chance that some kind of money laundering was going on in Trump's business dealings (the Panama Papers/Mossack Fonseca scandal showed a lot of corruption in offshore money, and 45 doesn't seem like he has the scruples to avoid it, wittingly or unwittingly. Not to mention that he's blatantly using the Secret Service to drain cash into his pockets every weekend. I don't know if that's related, though.)

- The Steele dossier is...interesting. Still mostly unverified, as of yet, but troubling. Which, once again, is a good reason to have an investigation but not enough evidence to bring out handcuffs. I'm concerned that it seems like an all-or-nothing deal right now: seems like some people want to skip to torches and pitchforks, while others want to deny that anything is happening (which is a good way to get torches and pitchforks aimed at them, but that's a slightly different topic.)

- The New York Times in particular dropped the ball on reporting on the verifiable Trump/Russia connections, not to mention missing the FBI investigation that's been going on since last summer.

DSGamer wrote:

In short, I only treat people like this as entertainment.

Yup. If the person is actually a journalist with a reputable media outlet then they should easily be able to take their sources and write a piece of investigative journalism that will past muster with their editors instead of spinning their story in 50 tweets.

I, too, am wary of Trump's people feeding their detractors enough rope to hang themselves with. Maybe it would include some attrition among his lackeys. That wouldn't surprise me. Proceeding with care is called for, especially when the going seems relatively easy.

It's weird that people seem to emphasize that "no voting machines were hacked" as a some sort this-Russia-talk-is-tinfoil-territory evidence.
No one really claimed voting machines were hacked apart from some journos who heard words "hacking" and "voting" and went all ballistic.
Also, for some reason the DNC emails hacking seems to be considered a big deal, as a big influencer of the voting results. Nothing was really found there, it was trolling move really.

What was of super importance was hacking of states' voter registration databases. Almost half the states reported intrusion attempts. Four admitted getting hacked (which knowing human nature might as well mean that half the attempts went unnoticed and much more were successful because-who wants to get shouted at by angry boss or even lose a job, right?)

Voter regs database would have been...like the uber super duper weapon for Bannon's Cambridge Analytics system. Knowing party affiliation of every voter in the state along with their address and whatnot allows superprecise ad targeting on a city block level. The efficiency of campaign goes through the roof.

Now, important question is - did anyone at any of those unimportant casual meetings with Russians actually asked for such info? Was it delivered? Or did Russians print out US voters registry and wallpapered Kremlin with it for sh*ts and giggles? Can you guys look up close at the systems Cambridge Analytics used and determine sources for their databases?

Dude, right in the article it says that "Trump campaign deployed its custom database, named Project Alamo, containing detailed identity profiles on 220 million people in America".
Such database needs info from lots of various sources, that combined and crosschecked, really make it a powerful tool. If it contains list of people's party affiliation plus their street address, it means you can use FB to target very specific people in very specific gerrymandered city blocks to carve out a very unlikely victory which..surprise surprise, is what happened.
We are talking about custom ad campaigns for couple of hundred people if such a need arises (a tiny geographical speck on the fence, that could swing a bigger region to the right side).
This is the future. It's not even illegal as such, half the lawmakers are old clueless gits and the other half are frantically trying to decide how to use it themselves come next election.
What could be illegal though, is how parts of that database came into the possession of Trump campaign.

In the age of cavalry and knights, someone just came up with the concept of gunpowder warfare and the early adopter just mopped the floor with the opponents. This is textbook definition of disruptive tech and even if the old git in throne has no idea what just happened, the people behind him just tested out a groundbreaking new concept of political warfare.

Most wrote:

It's weird that people seem to emphasize that "no voting machines were hacked" as a some sort this-Russia-talk-is-tinfoil-territory evidence.

I mention it mostly because people (on Twitter and elsewhere) are dismissing the claims about Russian interference by lumping everything under the hacked-voting-machine umbrella. Actual claims about hacked voting machines have died down since the electoral college and the inauguration, but I felt that it was important to set some boundaries on where the evidence lies.

Most wrote:

Also, for some reason the DNC emails hacking seems to be considered a big deal, as a big influencer of the voting results. Nothing was really found there, it was trolling move really.

There was nothing much in the DNC or Podesta emails, but you wouldn't know it by the breathless way they were being talked about during the campaign. Or what loons have been saying since.

The emails were used to drive a wedge between the DNC and Sanders voters, which may have suppressed turnout enough to influence the election.

Also, a lot of people confused Clinton's email server (which wasn't hacked, as far as we know) with the DNC emails (which were, and then leaked on Wikileaks).

What was of super importance was hacking of states' voter registration databases. Almost half the states reported intrusion attempts.

Those would indeed have had useful tactical data for the campaigns.

And, of course, how effective any of this stuff actually was only matters for our defense against future outside interference. They don't need to have been successful to count as a crime. The Watergate break-in itself didn't do much to help Nixon, though unravelling the coverup exposed a lot of other dirty tricks going on.

On that note, it took until December 2016 for us to have hard evidence that Nixon sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks and committed treason to win the 1968 campaign.

Most wrote:

In the age of cavalry and knights, someone just came up with the concept of gunpowder warfare and the early adopter just mopped the floor with the opponents. This is textbook definition of disruptive tech and even if the old git in throne has no idea what just happened, the people behind him just tested out a groundbreaking new concept of political warfare.

Well, we can have a conversation about the ethics behind microtargeting, but you can't pretend this is a new invention or something only used by one side. It isn't. In addition a slew of reports and articles were published on the run up to the election pointing out that the Democratic data machinery was lightyears ahead of the Republicans':

Some Republicans aren’t just nervous about losing to Clinton in November. They’re alarmed at the possibility of falling multiple cycles, even a generation, behind in creating a culture of data-intensive campaigns. Romney hardly had an autonomous analytics department. Trump has called data “overrated.” Kriegel, meanwhile, is incubating the next generation of Democratic talent — his team rivaled the size of Trump’s entire headquarters operation for much of the primary — the no-name analysts of 2016 who will emerge as the key players in 2018 and 2020.

The idea that whatever data Trump had was connected to Russia somehow seems spurious at this point - the connections between the two groups should continue to be investigated, though.

And the Democrats did indeed capture many more votes, overall. It was the targeted methods of Cambridge Analytica that seem to be new. But I don't think that's connected to the Russians.

Robear wrote:

And the Democrats did indeed capture many more votes, overall. It was the targeted methods of Cambridge Analytica that seem to be new. But I don't think that's connected to the Russians.

And even if it is it's the collusion that matters. Politicians trade voter information constantly. And, once again, Facebook is a very good way to access a social graph of demographics, location, associations and to microtarget people. All the voter database gives you is data on who's likely to vote, how they're leaning, etc. Much of that can be gleaned from pages someone follows on Facebook or what things they decide to share.

But if Russia hacked the voter roll data and handed it over to the Trump campaign that's a whole other kettle of fish. That's collusion with a foreign power that broke federal law.

EDIT: Clarified

All the voter database gives you is data on who's likely to vote, how they're leaning, etc.

Doesnt it give your address? Not just the city but actual address? Because that allows to target someone very specifically, it would reduce costs of campaign tenfold.
Your population is apathetic. Your districts are gerrymandered in weird ways. Having information of who might vote, which way and where they live, would be power beyond imagination in such a situation.

Add to that FB data, like which people are actually actively proTrump and which are on the fence, and you dont need 50 million bucks to woo a city. 5mil would do.

Comey tried tried to reveal Russian election tampering as early as the summer of 2016

Newsweek wrote:

FBI Director James Comey attempted to go public as early as the summer of 2016 with information on Russia’s campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election, but Obama administration officials blocked him from doing so, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Newsweek.

Well before the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence accused the Russian government of tampering with the U.S. election in an October 7 statement, Comey pitched the idea of writing an op-ed about the Russian campaign during a meeting in the White House’s situation room in June or July.

“He had a draft of it or an outline. He held up a piece of paper in a meeting and said, ‘I want to go forward, what do people think of this?’” says a source with knowledge of the meeting, which included Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson and the national security adviser Susan Rice.

The other national security officials didn’t like the idea, and White House officials thought the announcement should be a coordinated message backed by multiple agencies, the source says. “An op-ed doesn’t have the same stature, it comes from one person.”

The op-ed would not have mentioned whether the FBI was investigating Donald Trump’s campaign workers or others close to him for links to the Russians’ interference in the election, a second source with knowledge of the request tells Newsweek. Comey would likely have tried to publish the op-ed in The New York Times, and it would have included much of the same information as the bombshell declassified intelligence report released January 6, which said Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to influence the presidential election, the source said.

The other national security officials didn’t like the idea, and White House officials thought the announcement should be a coordinated message backed by multiple agencies, the source says. “An op-ed doesn’t have the same stature, it comes from one person.”

This is a sound reason for holding off initially but why did it never go any further?

At the time, or at least in the Fall, it was put out that the investigation was not at all complete, and Obama and team didn't want to play the "Russians are intervening for Republicans" card, for obvious reasons. They wanted a slam-dunk case and the risks were so high as to present a real problem. "Hillary is so terrified that she has to blame the *Russians* for her failing numbers, and accuse us of treason. Now we're not just deplorable, we're treasonous! What next, folks? Sad... Lock her up!"

DSGamer, as for the Russians hacking Facebook, no. Why would they need to? Why would they care? They were not hooked up with CA on this, and they had a full range of their own info sources to pump propaganda into Facebook (and the right-leaning media) at a moment's notice. CA had full access to Facebook data anyway, commercially, so this conspiracy theory makes no sense.

BBC: Trump Russia dossier key claim 'verified'

The BBC has learned that US officials "verified" a key claim in a report about Kremlin involvement in Donald Trump's election - that a Russian diplomat in Washington was in fact a spy.
karmajay wrote:
The other national security officials didn’t like the idea, and White House officials thought the announcement should be a coordinated message backed by multiple agencies, the source says. “An op-ed doesn’t have the same stature, it comes from one person.”

This is a sound reason for holding off initially but why did it never go any further?

My guess, and this is entirely speculative, is that further reveals were nixed on the basis of not wanting to make it look like Trump was being persecuted, not wanting to reveal sensitive information, and not yet having enough hard evidence to be sure of the case in court. Looking back, I get the sense that Clinton and Obama wanted to talk about something but didn't want to appear partisan. There were also members of congress who spoke up without being able to give details (you'll recall, for example, the petition to brief the electoral college based on recent remarks).

As for Comey and the November talk of Clinton emails, the rumor at the time was that his hand was tipped by agents in the New York office threatening to release the information about Clinton emails potentially being on Weiner's laptop.

So my guess, and I emphasize again that it's a guess, is that they thought Clinton would win and didn't want to make Trump look persecuted.

Given that the Republicans are already circling the wagons to try to shut down and deflect any investigation of this, it's clear that there are some bombshells waiting to go off in public, hidden away in the intel and law enforcement community. Nunes is playing a very dangerous game, and playing it pretty badly.

Robear wrote:

Given that the Republicans are already circling the wagons to try to shut down and deflect any investigation of this, it's clear that there are some bombshells waiting to go off in public, hidden away in the intel and law enforcement community. Nunes is playing a very dangerous game, and playing it pretty badly.

The irony being, it's usually not the crime they nail you for, it's the coverup. It's hard to publicly prove what happened last year when fewer people were looking, it's really easy to prove if you perjure yourself in a public senate hearing.

"As so often happens with Washington scandals, it isn't the original scandal that gets people in the most trouble -- it's the attempted cover-up."

-- Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wisconsin, to the AP, in 2005 about the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby

And that is why the FBI and other investigative entities will sometimes "leak" information. It's how you get the rats to scurry, and it reveals their nests. It also helps point the media in the right direction and ask suspects the right questions.

Robear wrote:

DSGamer, as for the Russians hacking Facebook, no. Why would they need to? Why would they care? They were not hooked up with CA on this, and they had a full range of their own info sources to pump propaganda into Facebook (and the right-leaning media) at a moment's notice. CA had full access to Facebook data anyway, commercially, so this conspiracy theory makes no sense.

Huh? I never said they hacked Facebook. I said they used Facebook. No one needs to hack Facebook to gain access to all kinds of demographic data. You just need to pay them money. That's what they're there for. Fixed above.

Why the FBI can't give us straight answers despite knowing them.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot tell us what we need to know about Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia. Why? Because doing so would jeopardize a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.

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