"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
"Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 33,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."
The president was encouraging a foreign adversary to illegally hack into messages by a former secretary of state that might contain sensitive information, then release them publicly.
Trump had good reason to believe that Russia was listening. The previous month, his son, Donald Jr.; son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians who they believed were offering damaging information about Clinton. (The meeting wasn’t revealed to the public until 2017, and both the Russians and the Trump campaign officials say no dirt was exchanged.) Prior to the meeting, Trump Jr. had received an email stating that the meeting was “ part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Mueller’s indictment offers new evidence that Russia was listening—and acting on Trump’s request. The indictment charges 12 officers of the GRU, Russia’s military-intelligence agency, with hacking intended to interfere with the election. According to the document:
The Conspirators spearphished individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.
In other words, a Russian attempt to penetrate Clinton’s server and her campaign came around the same time that Trump was publicly pleading with Russia to do just that. (Mueller alleges that there had been attempts to hack Clinton’s campaign since at least March 2016.)
www.theatlantic.com/...
#TrumpRussia has no smoking gun, but instead it has a smoldering arsenal.
The hackers are Guccifer 2.0, according to a December report in The New York Times, and they made public the names, cell phone numbers, email addresses and even personal addresses of the Democratic candidates they went after. But they didn’t stop there – they also released batches upon batches of internal party documents, seemingly with the intent to influence the closest House races in the country.
And how is Paul Ryan involved in any of this? The National Republican Campaign Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a superPAC that’s tied to Ryan, both used stolen D.C.C.C. documents to mount an attack campaign against Joe Garcia, a Florida Democrat who lost a very competitive race with Carlos Curbelo who unseated Garcia in 2014.
The illicit material was used in other states as well, including swing states like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio and North Carolina; as well as in Illinois and New Mexico. Anywhere where Democratic candidates were in very tight races against their GOP opponents.
Whether Paul Ryan knew about the CLF’s use of material hacked by the Russians is anyone’s guess. The point remains, though, that his own super-PAC used information that came courtesy of Russia, which means that Russia didn’t just influence the presidential side of things — they influenced the Congressional side of things.
linkis.com/...
Saturday, Jul 14, 2018 · 6:03:06 AM +00:00 · annieli
Trump is waking up in Scotland and as of yet there haven’t been any tweets, but chances are that he won’t be able to help himself, considering the articles on his continuing failures at making Turnberry profitable.
Saturday, Jul 14, 2018 · 6:16:10 PM +00:00 · annieli
Donald Trump is a Black Swan:
“Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as "stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability".[2]”
the four stages of Soviet ideological subversion:
1.) Demoralization, which takes about a generation’s time, 15-20 years;
2.) Destabilization, which takes about 2-5 years;
3.) Crisis, which is a matter of months; and finally
4.) Normalization, basically the mopping up operation once an authoritarian system is in place.
Many would also put the election of Donald Trump into this category of an unpredictable black swan event.
stellamorabito.net/…