[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this movie.]
Comments
The Russians are hacking! The Russians are hacking! — 8 Comments
My fondest hope is that entire episode ends up destroying Obama’s reputation and that of the Dem party.
We know that the intelligence community is rife with pro-democrat, anti-republican bureaucrats. We know that till now, all of the leaks target Trump. A false flag operation that deceitfully attributes hacking to the Russians is an obvious ploy. And now, the ability to determine the truth becomes highly problematic. Which perfectly suits ongoing propaganda efforts by the Left.
“The news media reported the leaks. The news media reported the surveillance. They reported it repeatedly. This is the mainstream media, and as far as I know, they’ve never retracted their story,” Hannity said on his show Monday night. “Everybody knew about it. It was not something that was hidden. Now, in fact, Donald Trump mentions that it happened, and suddenly somehow this is outrageous.”
Conservatives say either the Obama administration was spying on the opposition presidential candidate during the campaign, or the mainstream media’s reports about massive interagency investigations into Trump and his allies have been overblown to make the president look guilty of colluding with the Russians.
“They’re all pivoting, including the media,” Levin said Monday night on Hannity’s show. “They were trying to present the case of overwhelming connections, overwhelming concern, overwhelming potential evidence of Trump and the campaign involved with the Russians … I say these are police state tactics, and you have no basis for all these investigations. Now, they’re saying, wait a minute … we didn’t do these wiretaps, eavesdropping, electronic surveillance. Now the media are completely confounded. So which is it?”
…
“For months, the media-Democrat complex has peddled a storyline that the Putin regime in Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election,” writes the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a former attorney and respected voice in the conservative legal world.
“At a certain point, if compelling evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to steal the election did not materialize, the much more interesting question becomes, ‘How did the government obtain all this information that has been leaked to the media to prop up the story?’… In short, the media and Democrats have been playing with fire for months. The use of law-enforcement and national-security assets to investigate one’s political opponents during a heated election campaign has always been a potentially explosive story.”
If the Russians are sure the CIA has been using them to undermine Trump, it’s possible they decided to teach them a lesson by releasing a huge trove of files showing that they know all about the CIA’s hacking operations. It would make sense because one of the chief revelations of the file dump was that the CIA could disguise its own fingerprints as Russian ones, making any hack job appear to be something the Russians did. If the file dump can convince the U.S. public of that, the Russians can dissipate all the heat they have been taking about hacking by being able to claim that the CIA was likely behind the effort to undermine Trump, pinning its deed on the Russians. The timing would support it. Once again, ‘eveerybody does it.’
The bad thing is that it creates a breach of trust between Trump and the CIA and may make the president unwilling to use the agency to find out, via spying, what the Russians may be up to. That could effectively leave the CIA hamstrung, and Trump without a spy agency.
But it also humiliates the CIA as an agency so incompetent it can’t even keep its own cybersecrets and raise questions about its value to its top consumer, President Trump. Trump has gotten word out that government needs to be cut down and the agency needs to be cleaned out. Cutting too far or not using the agency would easily amouint to a victory for Russia.
What it shows is that the deep state’s war against Trump is an open opportunity for the Russians to exploit the existing fissures of distrust between Trump and his spy agency into full blown disarmament. It does so to advance its own national interests, just as the CIA ultimately hurts itself by playing leak games against Trump in Washington. Maybe if the CIA would start behaving itself and drop the phony leaks campaign about Trump being in bed with the Russians, there would be nothing to exploit from Moscow.
As with all of these disclosures from unnamed official sources: caveat lector.
That said, we can take comfort that at least this information isn’t being passed through the usual media channels: the New York Times and the Washington Post. Given how regularly both outlets have been used by Obama administration insiders to sell pre-packaged political narratives in the last eight years, I’m especially leery of anything they attribute to anonymous official sources.
The report in this case comes from Reuters, and appears in Business Insider. Reportedly, U.S. officials are confirming not only that they’ve been aware of a CIA breach since last year, but that the documents published this week by WikiLeaks are valid. In other words, what you’re reading about the CIA using poached malware to make it look like the Russians hacked someone, and the CIA capability to hack automobiles so people can be assassinated undetectably, is…true.
…
As Congress inquires into the alleged Russian attack on the 2016 election, the first thing it will need to establish is that it’s dealing with actions that were actually undertaken by the Russians.
But credibility will be an interesting question. It’s not too much to suggest that, from the public’s point of view, the intelligence community’s credibility is permanently damaged regarding Russia and the 2016 election. Congress can inquire all it wants, but what faith can we really put in any result?
Two big-picture implications emerge in rapid succession. One is that there will be no way to use the congressional investigation — or any other allegations about Russia and the 2016 election — to take down Donald Trump. The whole case has been exceedingly thin from the beginning, and the only thing even real (although virtually irrelevant) has been the cyber-attack forensics. There’s nothing else there at all.
The other is that the CIA’s credibility hit will demand a house-cleaning in the intelligence community.
…
It won’t be surprising if there’s a little surge in employee departures from some of the federal agencies over the next few weeks. As with Trump’s unexpected tweets on 4 March about “wiretapping,” there’s nothing to expose about him — but everything to lose for those trying to sabotage him. In the space of four days, the saboteurs have lost their narrative, their secrecy, and their credibility. In the absence of evidence — which they have never produced — there is nothing left to bring Trump down with.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-russia-story-is-a-minefield-for-democrats-and-the-media-w471074
If there’s any truth to the notion that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian state to disrupt the electoral process, then yes, what we’re seeing now are the early outlines of a Watergate-style scandal that could topple a presidency.
But it could also be true that both the Democratic Party and many leading media outlets are making a dangerous gamble, betting their professional and political capital on the promise of future disclosures that may not come.
We have to remember that the unpopularity of the press was a key to Trump’s election. Journalists helped solve the billionaire’s accessibility problem by being a more hated group than the arrogant rich. Trump has people believing he shares a common enemy with them: the news media. When we do badly, he does well.
…
In the extant case, whether the investigation involved a potential Logan Act violation, or election fraud, or whatever, the CIA, FBI, and NSA had the ability to act both before and after Donald Trump was elected. But they didn’t, and we know why, because James Clapper just told us — they didn’t have evidence to go on.
Thus we are now witnessing the extremely unusual development of intelligence sources that normally wouldn’t tell a reporter the time of day litigating a matter of supreme importance in the media. What does this mean?
Hypothesize for a moment that the “scandal” here is real, but in a limited sense: Trump’s surrogates have not colluded with Russians, but have had “contacts,” and recognize their political liability, and lie about them. Investigators then leak the true details of these contacts, leaving the wild speculations to the media and the Internet. Trump is enough of a pig and a menace that it’s easy to imagine doing this and not feeling terribly sorry that your leaks have been over-interpreted.
If that’s the case, there are big dangers for the press. If we engage in Times-style gilding of every lily the leakers throw our way, and in doing so build up a fever of expectations for a bombshell reveal, but there turns out to be no conspiracy — Trump will be pre-inoculated against all criticism for the foreseeable future.
… through inference, innuendo, and projection. And the JournoLists from the Fourth Estate came tumbling after.
Listening to MainSewerM disinformation is pretty old news, given 2003.
My fondest hope is that entire episode ends up destroying Obama’s reputation and that of the Dem party.
We know that the intelligence community is rife with pro-democrat, anti-republican bureaucrats. We know that till now, all of the leaks target Trump. A false flag operation that deceitfully attributes hacking to the Russians is an obvious ploy. And now, the ability to determine the truth becomes highly problematic. Which perfectly suits ongoing propaganda efforts by the Left.
Shocking source for an almost reasonable article:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-allies-look-to-turn-tables-on-dems-media/ar-AAo0FAH?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
“The news media reported the leaks. The news media reported the surveillance. They reported it repeatedly. This is the mainstream media, and as far as I know, they’ve never retracted their story,” Hannity said on his show Monday night. “Everybody knew about it. It was not something that was hidden. Now, in fact, Donald Trump mentions that it happened, and suddenly somehow this is outrageous.”
Conservatives say either the Obama administration was spying on the opposition presidential candidate during the campaign, or the mainstream media’s reports about massive interagency investigations into Trump and his allies have been overblown to make the president look guilty of colluding with the Russians.
“They’re all pivoting, including the media,” Levin said Monday night on Hannity’s show. “They were trying to present the case of overwhelming connections, overwhelming concern, overwhelming potential evidence of Trump and the campaign involved with the Russians … I say these are police state tactics, and you have no basis for all these investigations. Now, they’re saying, wait a minute … we didn’t do these wiretaps, eavesdropping, electronic surveillance. Now the media are completely confounded. So which is it?”
…
“For months, the media-Democrat complex has peddled a storyline that the Putin regime in Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election,” writes the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a former attorney and respected voice in the conservative legal world.
“At a certain point, if compelling evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to steal the election did not materialize, the much more interesting question becomes, ‘How did the government obtain all this information that has been leaked to the media to prop up the story?’… In short, the media and Democrats have been playing with fire for months. The use of law-enforcement and national-security assets to investigate one’s political opponents during a heated election campaign has always been a potentially explosive story.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/03/wikileaks_cia_dump_has_some_peculiar_timing.html
If the Russians are sure the CIA has been using them to undermine Trump, it’s possible they decided to teach them a lesson by releasing a huge trove of files showing that they know all about the CIA’s hacking operations. It would make sense because one of the chief revelations of the file dump was that the CIA could disguise its own fingerprints as Russian ones, making any hack job appear to be something the Russians did. If the file dump can convince the U.S. public of that, the Russians can dissipate all the heat they have been taking about hacking by being able to claim that the CIA was likely behind the effort to undermine Trump, pinning its deed on the Russians. The timing would support it. Once again, ‘eveerybody does it.’
The bad thing is that it creates a breach of trust between Trump and the CIA and may make the president unwilling to use the agency to find out, via spying, what the Russians may be up to. That could effectively leave the CIA hamstrung, and Trump without a spy agency.
But it also humiliates the CIA as an agency so incompetent it can’t even keep its own cybersecrets and raise questions about its value to its top consumer, President Trump. Trump has gotten word out that government needs to be cut down and the agency needs to be cleaned out. Cutting too far or not using the agency would easily amouint to a victory for Russia.
What it shows is that the deep state’s war against Trump is an open opportunity for the Russians to exploit the existing fissures of distrust between Trump and his spy agency into full blown disarmament. It does so to advance its own national interests, just as the CIA ultimately hurts itself by playing leak games against Trump in Washington. Maybe if the CIA would start behaving itself and drop the phony leaks campaign about Trump being in bed with the Russians, there would be nothing to exploit from Moscow.
http://libertyunyielding.com/2017/03/09/game-change-u-s-officials-say-knew-cia-leak-wikileaks-docs-real/
As with all of these disclosures from unnamed official sources: caveat lector.
That said, we can take comfort that at least this information isn’t being passed through the usual media channels: the New York Times and the Washington Post. Given how regularly both outlets have been used by Obama administration insiders to sell pre-packaged political narratives in the last eight years, I’m especially leery of anything they attribute to anonymous official sources.
The report in this case comes from Reuters, and appears in Business Insider. Reportedly, U.S. officials are confirming not only that they’ve been aware of a CIA breach since last year, but that the documents published this week by WikiLeaks are valid. In other words, what you’re reading about the CIA using poached malware to make it look like the Russians hacked someone, and the CIA capability to hack automobiles so people can be assassinated undetectably, is…true.
…
As Congress inquires into the alleged Russian attack on the 2016 election, the first thing it will need to establish is that it’s dealing with actions that were actually undertaken by the Russians.
But credibility will be an interesting question. It’s not too much to suggest that, from the public’s point of view, the intelligence community’s credibility is permanently damaged regarding Russia and the 2016 election. Congress can inquire all it wants, but what faith can we really put in any result?
Two big-picture implications emerge in rapid succession. One is that there will be no way to use the congressional investigation — or any other allegations about Russia and the 2016 election — to take down Donald Trump. The whole case has been exceedingly thin from the beginning, and the only thing even real (although virtually irrelevant) has been the cyber-attack forensics. There’s nothing else there at all.
The other is that the CIA’s credibility hit will demand a house-cleaning in the intelligence community.
…
It won’t be surprising if there’s a little surge in employee departures from some of the federal agencies over the next few weeks. As with Trump’s unexpected tweets on 4 March about “wiretapping,” there’s nothing to expose about him — but everything to lose for those trying to sabotage him. In the space of four days, the saboteurs have lost their narrative, their secrecy, and their credibility. In the absence of evidence — which they have never produced — there is nothing left to bring Trump down with.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-russia-story-is-a-minefield-for-democrats-and-the-media-w471074
If there’s any truth to the notion that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian state to disrupt the electoral process, then yes, what we’re seeing now are the early outlines of a Watergate-style scandal that could topple a presidency.
But it could also be true that both the Democratic Party and many leading media outlets are making a dangerous gamble, betting their professional and political capital on the promise of future disclosures that may not come.
We have to remember that the unpopularity of the press was a key to Trump’s election. Journalists helped solve the billionaire’s accessibility problem by being a more hated group than the arrogant rich. Trump has people believing he shares a common enemy with them: the news media. When we do badly, he does well.
…
In the extant case, whether the investigation involved a potential Logan Act violation, or election fraud, or whatever, the CIA, FBI, and NSA had the ability to act both before and after Donald Trump was elected. But they didn’t, and we know why, because James Clapper just told us — they didn’t have evidence to go on.
Thus we are now witnessing the extremely unusual development of intelligence sources that normally wouldn’t tell a reporter the time of day litigating a matter of supreme importance in the media. What does this mean?
Hypothesize for a moment that the “scandal” here is real, but in a limited sense: Trump’s surrogates have not colluded with Russians, but have had “contacts,” and recognize their political liability, and lie about them. Investigators then leak the true details of these contacts, leaving the wild speculations to the media and the Internet. Trump is enough of a pig and a menace that it’s easy to imagine doing this and not feeling terribly sorry that your leaks have been over-interpreted.
If that’s the case, there are big dangers for the press. If we engage in Times-style gilding of every lily the leakers throw our way, and in doing so build up a fever of expectations for a bombshell reveal, but there turns out to be no conspiracy — Trump will be pre-inoculated against all criticism for the foreseeable future.
… through inference, innuendo, and projection. And the JournoLists from the Fourth Estate came tumbling after.
Listening to MainSewerM disinformation is pretty old news, given 2003.
https://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/2017/03/11/putin-speaks-on-americas-anti-missile-defenses-and-the-world-balance/
That’s what I prefer to use instead to analyze Putin, same method with Snowden too.