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Archive 2017-2019 Political Thread

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Matt said:
I have a question. Who was President and Vice President during this so called Russian interference and collusion ? What did they do about it ? Why was the Trump campaign not warned as is customary ? I think we all know why!
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Obama. They screwed up.

The Trump campaign was briefed.

apple.news

William Barr Says Trump Campaign Was Warned About Russian Interference — Newsweek

President Donald Trump has claimed he was given no such warning.
apple.news apple.news

Why are your facts always wrong?
 
Matt said:
He was upset at the medias reaction to Barr summary. Not that there was anything factually wrong. Mueller was getting skewered and his feelings were hurt. Poor baby!
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You really need to start reading the documents you like to discuss.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions,”
 
I hope to high heaven Nicholas Sandman gets every penny of his lawsuit against these liberal media outlets. Time someone begins holding them accountable for libel and slander.

And I hope he goes after the diocese as well. Insincere apologies aren’t enough.
 
Kory said:
I hope to high heaven Nicholas Sandman gets every penny of his lawsuit against these liberal media outlets. Time someone begins holding them accountable for libel and slander.

And I hope he goes after the diocese as well. Insincere apologies aren’t enough.
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It was at best extreme laziness by the media. At worst it was malicious manipulation. Either way, they should pay.
 
Jacob said:
Heh, I don't think a fiction writer could come up with a more ironic tweet if they tried to.

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Yeah, Holder claiming to be Obama's wingman definitely undermines his critique here and is quite ironic. Barr and Holder show how partisan the AG position has become. Loretta Lynch as well. It's not good for America. Amazingly, I think Jeff Sessions acted less partisan than Barr, Lynch, and Holder. And that's exactly why he had such a falling out with Trump.

I've seen a bit of commentary out there saying Holder was held in contempt for "lying to Congress" or refusing to provide documents. I have zero desire to defend Holder, but I do believe a DC Judge squashed his contempt citation and said it was meritless. The issue was that DOJ had the right to withhold a certain type of document, but Holder had instructed them to withhold all the documents while appealing the Congressional subpoena. The judge said DOJ needed to turn over the other type of document, even if awaiting appeal, (which wasn't really what Congress wanted) and said the contempt citation wasn't needed and unnecessary.

Quite honestly, especially when you consider the precedent set in the Holder case, I'm not sure why Barr is trying to withold the unredacted Mueller report and refusing to testify. If the House issues a contempt citation, it will get litigated in court, and Barr will be forced to turn over the report. Barr surely knows this so it seems his actions here are for an audience of one. That's not healthy for American politics or our justice system.

I'm even more confused by Barr's refusal to testify before the House and the White House attacking Congress for wanting to have an attorney question Barr. Didn't the Republican Senate hire an attorney (Rachel Mitchell) to question Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh instead of questioning them themselves? Maybe I'm confused, but why is Barr and the White House going bezerk over a strategy that they themselves just recently used? Again, it's almost as if all this drama and "Barr resists/fights" is entirely aimed at an audience of one. How is this healthy or good for our country?
 
JayF said:
Oh if only I could attach an image of Captain Picard lowering his head into his hands. I just wish you all would do some research instead of spouting your opinion. Just do some I mean even a simple google search. I mean it doesn't even have to come from Wikipedia, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Choose whatever news organization and do some real research. You all make me sad.
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This is one of the odder claims I've ever had someone make towards me on this forum. I've been accused of a lot of things, but implying that I'm uniformed or don't research things I say is definitely a first for me.

I'm going to re-quote the part of your original post that sparked this debate between us.

JayF said:
Now I do want to say this. If Hillary didn't have her own personal server located in her house, with this information in it and also using it for Government business, most of the information that the Russians stole, would have never been able to have been used against her. And some of this information was stolen and used before Trump was even a front runner or even a candidate. The Russians started this campaign in 2014. Are you saying that the Russians were communicating with Trump in 2014 about his possible run for president? I do not believe this was true.

Heck read this from Wikipedia (no I do not believe Wikipedia is always correct, but go read the references in regards to this).

Clinton's server was configured to allow users to connect openly from the Internet and control it remotely using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services.[75]

It is known that hackers were aware of Clinton's non-public email address as early as 2011.[82] Secretary Clinton and her staff were aware of hacking attempts in 2011, and were reportedly worried about them.[83]

In 2012, according to server records, a hacker in Serbia scanned Clinton's Chappaqua server at least twice, in August and in December 2012. It was unclear whether the hacker knew the server belonged to Clinton, although it did identify itself as providing email services for clintonemail.com.[75]During 2014, Clinton's server was the target of repeated intrusions originating in Germany, China, and South Korea. Threat monitoring software on the server blocked at least five such attempts. The software was installed in October 2013, and for three months prior to that, no such software had been installed
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Your quote in bold seems to imply that you believe that either:

1. Some/most of the information that Russia hacked and stole came from Hillary Clinton's personal email server.
2. The Russians were only able to use hacked and stolen information against Clinton because of the prior controversy relating to her email server.

If you meant option 2 then it doesn't make sense why you also said "If Hillary didn't have her own personal server located in her house, with this information in it..." considering you directly refer to information located on her server right before stating "most of the information that the Russians stole, would have never been able to have been used against her." My original response to you was that you were "marrying wholly separate and unrelated events." You denied that, and then proceeded to say: "In reference to to leaks from Hillary's emails" and posted a link to an excerpt of a Wikipedia article on the Hillary Clinton Email controversy that stated the following:

"According to security researchers at Secureworks the email leak was caused by Threat Group-4127 (TG-4127), a unit that targets governments, military, and international non-governmental organizations. The researchers report moderate confidence that the unit gathers intelligence on behalf of the Russian government.[98]"

I responded by pointing out that the Wiki excerpt and link you posted are in reference to the spearfishing attacks that the GRU's APT28/Fancy Bear/TG-4127 conducted against the DNC, Clinton Campaign, Podesta, and other entities, and that it had NOTHING to do with Hillary Clinton's email server that she used as SoS. Your response was that I should do some research before giving my opinion.

In fact, what I said was not my opinion, but was actually a summary of the SecureWorks report taken DIRECTLY from the link you posted as supporting your claim of "leaks from Hillary's emails."

Here's the actual footnote link that is contained within the Wikipedia excerpt that you posted. Footnote 98 -- a link to the Archive.org version of SecureWorks June 2016 review of Spearfishing attacks on the DNC, Clinton Campaign, etc.

To further bolster what I am saying, here is a direct quote from Volume I and Page 4 of the Mueller Report:

"At the same time that the IRA operation began to focus on supporting candidate Trump in early 2016, the Russian government employed a second form of interference: cyber intrusions (hacking) and releases of hacked materials damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The Russian intelligence service known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army (GRU) carried out these operations. In March 2016, the GRU began hacking the email accounts of Clinton Campaign volunteers and employees, including campaign chairman John Podesta. In April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks. Around the time that the DNC announced in mid-June 2016 the Russian government's role in hacking its network, the GRU began disseminating stolen materials through the fictitious online personas "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0." The GRU later released additional materials through the organization WikiLeaks."


Link to the full Mueller Report
 
Finally, let's address your claim that I underlined above. First and foremost, your claim is a strawman fallacy as I never stated that the Russians were in contact with Trump in 2014. But that's really a minor point. More importantly, the overall claim you make is inaccurate or misleading. Fancy Bear/APT28/TG-4127 has actually been around since 2007/2008. They've attacked and compromised dozens of targets across the globe.

Here's a FireEye cybersecurity report on the group's earlier activities such as attacks on the country of Georgia in 2007/2008, Eastern European governments, and NATO.

What's most important, however, is the actual timeline of the GRU's hacking unit activities and the coordinated effort between the GRU's hacking activity and the IRA's social media influence operations to influence the 2016 Election by positively promoting Trump and undermining Hillary Clinton with negative claims and select leaks of hacked data.

You specifically mention the Russian's campaign as starting in 2014, and I believe that because of that you have made a mistake that I've seen commonly made by both the mainstream media and partisan new sources. The IRA started THEIR campaign to influence the US elections in 2014. However, the GRU's principal hacking activities related to the election occurred in 2016. Mueller explains this in the report excerpt that I posted above. However, there's another excerpt from his report directly before the one I posted above that ties things together even better by showing how the IRA shifted their influence campaign from undermining the election in general to favoring Trump and attacking Hillary Clinton.

Here it is:

"The Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified by the investigation- a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States. The IRA was based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and companies he controlled. Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The IRA later used social media accounts and interest groups to sow discord in the U.S. political system through what it termed "information warfare." The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate Clinton.

I'll finish my reply by quoting from what you told gangstonc when he asked if you had read the Mueller report:

JayF said:
I have a majority of it. I skipped the parts that detailed what the Russians did because that had nothing to do with obstruction or detail anything Trump or the campaign did.
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Perhaps it was a mistake to have skipped that section. Same goes for pages 61-65 of the Mueller report that discuss Hillary Clinton's private email server and the attempts by the Trump campaign to obtain the 33k emails that were marked personal and deleted (hint: they were never found and all the other emails that were on her server were previously released through the State Department which again directly refutes the idea that Russia released information stolen from Clinton's email server).
 
Matt said:
I have a question. Who was President and Vice President during this so called Russian interference and collusion ? What did they do about it ? Why was the Trump campaign not warned as is customary ? I think we all know why!
Click to expand...

Shouldn't your question be why didn't Trump and his campaign heed the FBI's warnings?

Hmm, seems like FBI warnings were pretty concrete and specific and that Barr was misinformed as usual.

Of course Barr's walk-back tried to minimize the fact that the campaign was warned specifically about Russia.
 
Evan said:
This is one of the odder claims I've ever had someone make towards me on this forum. I've been accused of a lot of things, but implying that I'm uniformed or don't research things I say is definitely a first for me.

I'm going to re-quote the part of your original post that sparked this debate between us.



Your quote in bold seems to imply that you believe that either:

1. Some/most of the information that Russia hacked and stole came from Hillary Clinton's personal email server.
2. The Russians were only able to use hacked and stolen information against Clinton because of the prior controversy relating to her email server.

If you meant option 2 then it doesn't make sense why you also said "If Hillary didn't have her own personal server located in her house, with this information in it..." considering you directly refer to information located on her server right before stating "most of the information that the Russians stole, would have never been able to have been used against her." My original response to you was that you were "marrying wholly separate and unrelated events." You denied that, and then proceeded to say: "In reference to to leaks from Hillary's emails" and posted a link to an excerpt of a Wikipedia article on the Hillary Clinton Email controversy that stated the following:

"According to security researchers at Secureworks the email leak was caused by Threat Group-4127 (TG-4127), a unit that targets governments, military, and international non-governmental organizations. The researchers report moderate confidence that the unit gathers intelligence on behalf of the Russian government.[98]"

I responded by pointing out that the Wiki excerpt and link you posted are in reference to the spearfishing attacks that the GRU's APT28/Fancy Bear/TG-4127 conducted against the DNC, Clinton Campaign, Podesta, and other entities, and that it had NOTHING to do with Hillary Clinton's email server that she used as SoS. Your response was that I should do some research before giving my opinion.

In fact, what I said was not my opinion, but was actually a summary of the SecureWorks report taken DIRECTLY from the link you posted as supporting your claim of "leaks from Hillary's emails."

Here's the actual footnote link that is contained within the Wikipedia excerpt that you posted. Footnote 98 -- a link to the Archive.org version of SecureWorks June 2016 review of Spearfishing attacks on the DNC, Clinton Campaign, etc.

To further bolster what I am saying, here is a direct quote from Volume I and Page 4 of the Mueller Report:

"At the same time that the IRA operation began to focus on supporting candidate Trump in early 2016, the Russian government employed a second form of interference: cyber intrusions (hacking) and releases of hacked materials damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The Russian intelligence service known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army (GRU) carried out these operations. In March 2016, the GRU began hacking the email accounts of Clinton Campaign volunteers and employees, including campaign chairman John Podesta. In April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks. Around the time that the DNC announced in mid-June 2016 the Russian government's role in hacking its network, the GRU began disseminating stolen materials through the fictitious online personas "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0." The GRU later released additional materials through the organization WikiLeaks."


Link to the full Mueller Report
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I ran with some Misinformation and I apologize. I need to do better research myself.
 
JayF said:
I ran with some Misinformation and I apologize. I need to do better research myself.
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We're good. No apology was necessary, but all the same I thank you for being a man of integrity.

The election related influence campaign and Russian hacking campaign are complicated subjects with multiple layers and unique backgrounds, but they also contain a number of similarities that have evoked a lot of confusion for a lot of people. Same goes for the various email hacks, leaks, and releases related to Hillary Clinton. I don't know or anyone that has been immune to it myself included.
 
Sad we don't have an AUMF for Venezuela so that the Code Pink protesters inside the Venezuelan embassy can be designated unlawful enemy combatants and jailed in a military brig. I'm only halfway joking. The Trump admin is failing to resolve that situation, and I believe it is undermining our recognition of Guaidó as the legitimate President of Venezuela.

Outside of the embassy debacle, I'd give the Trump admin a B- or a C+ as it relates to how they have handled the crisis in Venezuela. I think that Bolton and Abrams don't have much credibility in Latin America (neither does Trump) which has hurt our efforts to get the Venezuelan military to enforce the Constitution of Venezuela. But, outside of that, I think the admin has done a fairly decent job. It's a very difficult situation fraught with potential stumbling blocks everywhere you look, but I've actually been impressed with Pompeo's diplomacy and coordination.

Although I'd love for the US military to accelerate Maduro's downfall, I fully recognize that would backfire in a very negative way. The only military option that would potentially be palatable would be an operation to evacuate or protect US citizens inside of Venezuela. Even then, there's not currently enough of an issue with American citizens inside of Venezuela to intervene on even a small-scale.

With all that said, it was disturbing that Trump yet again believes Putin's proposterous lie that Russia "is not looking to get involved at all in Venezuela." Perhaps Trump is blind and deaf and hasn't heard what his own SoS, National Security Advisor, and military have said about Russian assets and actions in Venezuela. This is the kind of typical Trump stupidity that undermines the hard work that our diplomats and others have done to weaken Russia's grip on the Venezuelan state, economy, and military.

Trump claims that Putin only wants something "positive" as it pertains to Venezuela. Evidently Trump's ignorance is so vast that he doesn't understand that what Putin sees as a positive outcome is the complete opposite of our own foreign policy goals in Venezuela and Latin America. Pretty amazing that yet again a short phone call or meeting is all it takes for Putin to convince Trump that Russia is our friend and to throw his own admin's policy under the bus.

Someone please explain how this makes any sense.
 
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