Former AG Makes Good Case that Russian Hacking Was Not Meant to Elect Trump

[danielpalos]

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal that made some very logical arguments to support the idea that the Russian hacking and leaking was not meant to elect Trump but was meant to serve as a warning to Hillary. Mukasey argues, probably correctly, that the Russians, like most everyone else, believed that Hillary was going to win. Therefore, says Mukasey, they meddled and leaked in order to warn Hillary that they might have her e-mails, including some/all of her missing e-mails. An excerpt:

“Consider the Justice Department inspector general's report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of an unauthorized and vulnerable email server,” Mukasey wrote. “It found that the bureau had concluded the server could well have been penetrated without detection. Recall also that some of the people hacked by GRU [Russia’s military intelligence agency] agents were aware of that server and mentioned it in messages they sent, so that the Russians too were aware of it.”

Mukasey added: “There are some 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton did not turn over, on the claim that they were personal and involved such trivia as yoga routines and Chelsea's wedding. If they instead contained damaging information -- say, regarding Clinton Foundation fundraising -- the new president would have taken office in the shadow of a sword dangling from a string held by the Russians.”

Pointing to the indictment last week of 12 GRU agents, the former attorney general also suggested that Putin wanted U.S. intelligence services to discover Russian meddling in the election -- and that if he really wanted agents from Moscow to go undetected he would have used a far more capable source than the former Russian “special-forces types” that make up GRU. (Russian meddling in election meant as 'warning' to Clinton, former AG says)​

This makes a lot of sense.

At this point does it really matter what it was meant for?

Because you have some Democrats going around claiming that the Russians tilted the election to Trump, that Trump would not have won without Russian interference. I doubt that the votes that the Russians influenced equaled the number of votes that illegals cast. Neither was enough to change the outcome of the election, but the illegal vote padded Hillary's popular vote total.

Yeah it’s a pointless argument not based on facts. I’m talking about both the Russian influence and Trumps retort pivot to the illegal votes. None of it can be substantiated so claiming such is just a waste of time. What we can do is focus on protecting against future efforts to illegally influence elections. That would be a conversation worth having.

The right wing has no moral or legal credibility to complain about less fortunate, immoral illegals.

Neither do abortionist.

do abortionists complain about an ounce of prevention or just the right wing.

 

[bodecea]

Slade3200 I'm curious about something. Did Hillary break the law when she transmitted and received classified materials on her private server?

Has there been charges/indictments saying as such?

 

[bodecea]

If the Russians had hacked the server of the Tea Party, would a special counsel have been appointed? Yea, I didn't think so either.

Liberals like you don't believe in equal application of the law or in "justice for all". Guys like you have NO PROBLEM with a police-state, as long as you're the one running it.

Get it all out man. You’ve had a hard life

There's no victim like a trumpanzee victim....with all three branches of government ....it's hard not to see them as victims.

 

[bodecea]

It’s pretty obvious that Comeys decision was supported by the evidence ...

The evidence supported prosecution, and Comey and the DOJ, whose job is to ENFORCE the law gave Hillary a pass. What's obvious is that you are either ignorant of what transpired or you're a partisan Democrat.

With all three branches of government in the hands of the GOP, why no prosecution? Hmmm?

 

[Dragonlady]

From John Shaw's link:


In the spring of 2016, an international consortium of journalists began publishing revelations from a vast trove of documents belonging to a Panamanian law firm that specialized in helping its wealthy foreign clients move money, some of it ill-gotten, out of their home countries and away from the prying eyes of tax collectors. (The firm has denied any wrongdoing.) The documents revealed that Putin’s old friend Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and the godfather to Putin’s elder daughter, had his name on funds worth some $2 billion. It was an implausible fortune for a little-known musician, and the journalists showed that these funds were likely a piggy bank for Putin’s inner circle. Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing, but the Kremlin was furious about the revelation. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, whose wife was also implicated, angrily ascribed the reporting to “many former State Department and CIA employees” and to an effort to “destabilize” Russia ahead of its September 2016 parliamentary elections.

The argument was cynical, but it revealed a certain logic: The financial privacy of Russia’s leaders was on par with the sovereignty of Russia’s elections. “The Panama Papers were a personal slight to Putin,” says John Sipher, a former deputy of the CIA’s Russia desk. “They think we did it.” Putin’s inner circle, Soldatov says, felt “they had to respond somehow.” According to Soldatov’s reporting, on April 8, 2016, Putin convened an urgent meeting of his national-security council; all but two of the eight people there were veterans of the KGB. Given the secrecy and timing of this meeting, Soldatov believes it was then that Putin gave the signal to retaliate.

The original aim was to embarrass and damage Hillary Clinton, to sow dissension, and to show that American democracy is just as corrupt as Russia’s, if not worse. “No one believed in Trump, not even a little bit,” Soldatov says. “It was a series of tactical operations. At each moment, the people who were doing this were filled with excitement over how well it was going, and that success pushed them to go even further.”

“A lot of what they’ve done was very opportunistic,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russian-born co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which first discovered the Russian interference after the company was hired to investigate the hack of the Democratic National Committee servers in May 2016. “They cast a wide net without knowing in advance what the benefit might be.” The Russian hackers were very skilled, Alperovitch says, but “we shouldn’t try to make them out to be eight feet tall” and able to “elect whomever they want. They tried in Ukraine, and it didn’t work.” Nor did it work in the French elections of 2017.


This sounds right to me, or at least plausible. If you screw with Putin he'll screw you back and I think that's what happened.

It sounds about right to you.

Except that the groundwork was laid, staff was hired, the servers purchased and the infrastructure was in place in 2014, so your timeline is way off.