After we wake up and stop playing this bizarre “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game with Trump, the hangover from what the FBI (and the CIA) did in OUR elections is going to be massive.
Make distrusting the intelligence agencies cool again!
My first experience being “black pilled” with the Russia hoax was finally getting to the bottom of what that whole “trump tower computer backchannel to Russian Alfa bank” thing was all about[1] (this link will not give you the answer, just allegations)
As a technical person it made me curious. A direct “connection”? Was it an IRC channel? Was trump talking directly to a Russian bank over AOL instant messenger?? Lol what a joke it turned out to be.
Good luck to you as you wade through mountains of MSM excrement in search of answers. It’s easy to find the allegations and hard to find the truth. Is that by accident?
Make distrusting the intelligence agencies great again!
It was three servers doing DNS lookups on each other.
One was Alfa Bank.
One was in Trump Tower.
One was at Spectrum Health, which is owned by the DeVos family. Notable members include Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Erik Prince is known to set up backchannel meetings between the Trump team and Putin associates in the Seychelles.
By this line of reasoning you would not have distrusted the FBI up until the moment these stories broke in the mid 70s, long after the point where that distrust would have been useful in the present moment.
I'm not in favor of vague statements like OP's initial comment, which is compatible with (and on it's own, indistinguishable from) wild conspiracy theories.
It appears from OP's subsequent comment that OP was referring to stories in the run-up to the 2016 election that depended on anonymous/pseudonymous sources with links to the intelligence agencies. In that case there is a wealth of reporting on those issues-- some similar to the one the OP has now posted which were before the election, but many more in the aftermath of it.
Hell, writing on the subject of blind trust in anonymous intelligence sources is apparently the raison dêtre of Glenn Greenwald these days. Pick any piece at random of his from The Intercept or substack and I'd bet you'll find reputable sources regarding trumped-up 2016 election stories that back up his general argument about how problematic that practice is. Other writers have done the same, consistently, for years now.
Given that wealth of easily searchable material (which, btw, has stood the test of time and been corroborating by other sources), being comfortable making vague statements and encouraging blanket distrust is irresponsible. Are you and OP bedfellows with the "stop the steal" idgets who AFAICT are following the "make distrusting the deep state cool again" to the tee?
I'm not. If you aren't either, then I don't see how you would distinguish your positions if not through clear-headed discussion of documented acts of corruption. I also don't see why we shouldn't go out of our way to distinguish our own distrust from the myriad active campaigns to exploit people's growing general distrust to siphon money from them. (The hundreds of millions Trump has raised is one such example.)
Also notice how OP's follow-up essentially implies that I would not be able to easily figure out the truth without doing my own personal research project. MSM can't be trusted. Intelligence can't be trusted. But personal speculation is apparently in play: "Is that by accident?" OP asks, again without explanation as to scope, evidence, etc. of the implication.
> I'm not. If you aren't either, then I don't see how you would distinguish your positions if not through clear-headed discussion of documented acts of corruption.
I’m reminded a little bit about the NRA and their congressional supporters, who block every attempt to fund and study gun violence, and then in the same breath say “There’s no evidence of gun ownership affects violence”
Maybe, but news from 1975 that already was part of revelations of that nature that triggered their backlash, legislative responses, and every other kind of “hangover” they could, before many people voting today we're even born, probably aren't much of a factor in that except as precedent and context, not news or triggering events.
There weren't “FISA courts” before the revelations in the 1970s because there was no judicial oversight or legal limits with penalties applied to surveillance by the national security apparatus at all. FISA, the courts it created, and the criminalization of domestic surveillance outside of specified limitations were part of the backlash against the abuses that were revealed in the mid-1970s.
>It's crazy how the intelligence agencies used Trump to make themselves look like knights in shining armor to liberals
That's not a thing that actually happened - "liberals" don't trust the intelligence agencies any more or less than they did before Trump. And I don't know why this article has people suddenly running defense for Trump when it doesn't even mention him. But interesting play nonetheless.
Remember all the intelligence people, like former CIA director Brennan that became MSNBC pundits? Remember the time they made a big deal of Trump offending the CIA in front of the wall of fallen heroes?
For the record, I despise Trump. I am not defending him, but I don't like people thinking highly of the longstanding dark institutions that have been at the heart of American politics since WW2. Trump = Bad does not mean any other part of the American state is good.
It's not just the intelligence agencies. Gallup polling shows liberals' trust in the media skyrocketed after Trump's election and has remained persistently high despite the whole Russiagate farce.
You mean when the DoJ indicted, charged, or successfully prosecuted a number of Russian nationals and members of the Trump administration for election-related crimes or obstruction of justice? That farce? Like someone said, "For a purported witchhunt, they sure found a lot of actual witches."
As an outsider I don't follow much USA politics, so apologies if I got the gist wrong and I'd appreciate corrections.
For my bias, I mainly read left wing publications, listen to right wing YouTubers and I'm an anarcho-capitalist.
The claim sold by the media was that Russia "hacked" the elections, making Trump win.
(that was before this year's message that election meddling is highly unlikely)
What was found out was contact with Russia to dig dirt on Trump's opponents.
Sure, it may be illegal, but that's hardly interesting.
> The claim sold by the media was that Russia "hacked" the elections
I didn't see that. Most of the claims were about Russian social media campaigns. We'll never know if those campaigns made a significant difference, but they certainly did happen. The other big thing was the DNC hack, also probably orchestrated by Russia.
> What was found out was contact with Russia to dig dirt on Trump's opponents.
I'd call that highly illegal, highly interesting, and even more worrisome than the prospect of a few hacked Diebold machines. A President who conspired with a foreign power to win election? Can you imagine the leverage that foreign power would have over such a President? With machine hacking, the President can claim ignorance. No such chance here.
The last guy who did that was named Richard Nixon.[1][2]
There were not mainstream US media claims that the Russians hacked the 2016 elections. On the other hand, there were lots of stories about Russian influence operations.
Did you watch basically any cable news in 2016? They literally started the Russian collusion special counsel investigations from allegations Russia hacked the DNC and released the emails to help Trump.
The phrase 'Russia "hacked" the elections, making Trump win' implies tampering with the voting and vote counting. You've linked an influence operation that may have involved computer hacking.
It's also, you know, pretty clear that Russia was running influence operations, not a media delusion.
What's your point? People got there because they have trouble interpreting information, not because the information in mainstream media was particularly ambiguous.
What people believed 2 years later is not at all a meaningful survey of what the media was saying at the time!
"Russia hacked voting systems in 39 states before the 2016 Presidential election"
They would stick in a disclaimer like this:
> So, despite assurances from the Obama administration that the election’s integrity was not compromised, there was still a very large-scale Russian effort to mess with it. That means future elections, including ones next year, run the risk of being tainted.
But then proceed with an article like this:
> Apparently, the cyber intruders aimed to delete or alter voter data they got a hold of.
Last line of the article:
> But in the meantime, collusion with Trump or not, we now know that Russia has struck deeper into the heart of America’s democracy: its elections.
The whole thing is structured in the form of "nobody proved they did it but they sure tried so maybe they did/will" and leaves the reader to infer the result based on their political leanings. The polling after two years of that sort of coverage measures the extent to which those insinuations misled the public.
Like I said, people are bad at processing information, the article there isn't ambiguous, it talks about voter data and never about votes. It's sensationalized, but it's not hard to understand what it actually says either.
Voter rolls and campaign contributions aren't even maintained as sensitive information, the latter is published by the FEC, and most states more or less publish voter rolls. The Bloomberg article makes it sound like they tried to access/control the underlying storage, which would actually be problematic...
It's not ambiguous if you read it carefully, but you're essentially arguing "technically correct, the best kind of correct" for sensationalized reporting where it's known that many people won't even read past the headline.
You:
> The phrase 'Russia "hacked" the elections, making Trump win' implies tampering with the voting and vote counting.
Title of that article:
> Russia hacked voting systems in 39 states before the 2016 Presidential election
It's crafted to survive a mechanistic fact check while targeting the fact that people are bad at processing information.
No, it's just over estimating people, it's a matter of fact description of the contents of the article.
If Russia accesses the backend systems storing voter data, what are they supposed to report to ensure that they do not mislead people? (I say backend there because there's actual directly published voter data all over the place that is intended to be accessed by whoever).
It's really actually problematic and news that a foreign power is fiddling around with those backend systems, but apparently if you report that they did it, there will be years of controversy about how you reported that they hacked the election.
If all that was on offer from the beginning was taking out a few lackeys like Manafort and Stone obviously it wouldn't have captured liberals' attention the way it did. They were expecting a big break of evidence that Trump was a Manchurian candidate installed by the master Svengali Putin. It was a classic psychological deflection tactic on liberals' part, "Trump's election can't be a symptom of any real institutional rot in America, it's just a result of dirty foreign tricks that will be exposed and easily rectified by removing Trump."
> They were expecting a big break of evidence that Trump was a Manchurian candidate installed by the master Svengali Putin
"It couldn't be proved to be bad as some people said" is not the same thing as "farce". The stuff that was proven was bad and illegal.
The Mueller report concluded that there was some evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.[1] The investigation achieved multiple convictions and indictments.
> "Trump's election can't be a symptom of any real institutional rot in America, it's just a result of dirty foreign tricks that will be exposed and easily rectified by removing Trump.
It's not an either-or. Trump was only ever a competitive candidate due to real, deep problems and widespread disillusionment with the establishment. But it's also possible that Russian social media campaigns, the DNC email hacks, and the Comey letter tipped the scales (80k votes in 3 states) in his favor in 2016. We'll never really know.
Liberals tripped over themselves to push a story about Russian bounties that can't be corroborated[0] and that was criticized by people like Glenn Greenwald, hardly a right-winger. It's fine to hate Trump I guess and if you think the ends justify the means, that's your right, but it's demonstrably true that people who in normal years would be highly skeptical of anything coming out of the intelligence agencies are eager to promote anything that makes the Trump administration look bad.
Edit: Another aspect of this story is that it was pushed after bipartisan support for exiting Afghanistan was emerging. So basically this "information" was put out there to keep us in a war no one likes and the putatively anti-war party eagerly promoted it because Trump is bad.
Edit 2: I fully expected this comment to be downvoted, but I hope some of you downvoters will engage with my argument in the replies, since most of you have no argument against my claims, which are factually true.
Anyone claiming the Russian bounty program was a certainty or a hoax is misinformed. Some credible agencies had a high degree of confidence; others, such as the NSA, disagreed [1]. “Can’t be corroborated” reflects the NSA’s view, but not the CIA or NIC’s, who found it “credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of certainty.”
I can't even say this without sounding like a "whataboutism," but the main material support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, for the last nineteen years, roughly two decades of war, has been Pakistan, and we've done NOTHING about it but keep shoveling them money in exchange for the transit rights to ship material through to support our troops in a rearguard fight against their minions.
WE are paying people to kill US troops by ignoring what Pakistan does with the money.
And that they were harboring Osama Bin Laden for a decade.
But we need to chase rumors that Russia does the same. Yeah, right.
Maybe we need to stop sending troops to countries where they're not accomplishing anything besides being hostages?
The tone of the initial NYT story that broke the scoop certainly didn't reflect any of this uncertainty. Would have been a good idea for them to check in with the NSA or the DoD first!
"among the left" is a really wide net to throw and I don't think it really does any favors to your statement to be so overly general.
I think it's pretty much the mirror image of the Benghazi investigations. Some investigating needed to happen, but politics got involved and turned the whole thing into a circus. This isn't particularly surprising since the US's two party system usually leads to extremely incompatible "truths" now that social media bubbles exist.
I'm pretty sure the left dislikes James Comey quite a lot since he did a last minute "give Trump's Hillary emails conspiracy a false sense of legitimacy right before the election" thing
"The left" is multiply defined. If you mean Democrats generally, the party has become the number one home of middle class people with college degrees. They are naturally going to be more comfortable with the FBI than, say, old school left wing labor activists.
It seems less likely that opinions are changing, and more likely that people with certain opinions are moving.
Both of these guys have been involved in really shady stuff in America's past, they are career company men and never represented or mounted any real threat to Trump. Comey may even be a big part of how Trump even became POTUS in the first place.
> James Comey and Robert Mueller were popular among the left (of which I consider myself a part) because of their resistance to Trump
Because of their resistance to Trump. That doesn't translate to the left, in general, suddenly being in favor of and trusting the three letter agencies or the military industrial complex. You know, the side of the political spectrum with all of the anti-war protestors and socialists.
The narrative is bizarre.
Edit: never mind, I see this is about discrediting Russiagate for whatever reason, I get it now.
Make distrusting the intelligence agencies cool again!