Languish.org

QuoteSecret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
the Washington Post
By Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller
December 9 at 7:36 PM

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton's chances.

"It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected," said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. "That's the consensus view."

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton's campaign.

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community's findings about Russian hacking. "I don't believe they interfered" in the election, he told Time magazine this week. The hacking, he said, "could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey."

The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now "quite clear" that electing Trump was Russia's goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia's intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency's assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin "directing" the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were "one step" removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said in a television interview that the "Russian government is not the source."

The White House and CIA officials declined to comment.

On Friday, the White House said President Obama had ordered a "full review" of Russian hacking during the election campaign, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to influence the electoral process.

"We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned," Obama's counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Obama wants the report before he leaves office Jan. 20, Monaco said.

During her remarks, Monaco didn't address the latest CIA assessment, which hasn't been previously disclosed.

Seven Democratic senators last week asked Obama to declassify details about the intrusions and why officials believe that the Kremlin was behind the operation. Officials said Friday that the senators specifically were asking the White House to release portions of the CIA's presentation.

This week, top Democratic lawmakers in the House also sent a letter to Obama, asking for briefings on Russian interference in the election.

U.S. intelligence agencies have been cautious for months in characterizing Russia's motivations, reflecting the United States' long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladi­mir Putin and those closest to him.

In previous assessments, the CIA and other intelligence agencies told the White House and congressional leaders that they believed Moscow's aim was to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system. The assessments stopped short of saying the goal was to help elect Trump.

On Oct. 7, the intelligence community officially accused Moscow of seeking to interfere in the election through the hacking of "political organizations." Though the statement never specified which party, it was clear that officials were referring to cyber-intrusions into the computers of the DNC and other Democratic groups and individuals.

Some key Republican lawmakers have continued to question the quality of evidence supporting Russian involvement.

"I'll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there's clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now," said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. "There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it."

Though Russia has long conducted cyberspying on U.S. agencies, companies and organizations, this presidential campaign marks the first time Russia has attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election, the officials said.

The reluctance of the Obama White House to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions before Election Day upset Democrats on the Hill as well as members of the Clinton campaign.

Within the administration, top officials from different agencies sparred over whether and how to respond. White House officials were concerned that covert retaliatory measures might risk an escalation in which Russia, with sophisticated cyber capabilities, might have less to lose than the United States, with its vast and vulnerable digital infrastructure.

The White House's reluctance to take that risk left Washington weighing more limited measures, including the "naming and shaming" approach of publicly blaming Moscow.

By mid-September, White House officials had decided it was time to take that step, but they worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes.

Instead, officials devised a plan to seek bipartisan support from top lawmakers and set up a secret meeting with the Gang of 12 — a group that includes House and Senate leaders, as well as the ranking members of both chambers' committees on intelligence and homeland security.

Obama dispatched Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a "show of solidarity and bipartisan unity" against Russian interference in the election, according to a senior administration official.

Specifically, the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions.

Though U.S. intelligence agencies were skeptical that hackers would be able to manipulate the election results in a systematic way, the White House feared that Moscow would attempt to do so, sowing doubt about the fundamental mechanisms of democracy and potentially forcing a more dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia's role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.

And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as "the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process."

The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.

According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow's hands.

McConnell's office did not respond to a request for comment. After the election, Trump chose McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, as his nominee for transportation secretary.

Some Clinton supporters saw the White House's reluctance to act without bipartisan support as further evidence of an excessive caution in facing adversaries.

"The lack of an administration response on the Russian hacking cannot be attributed to Congress," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who was at the September meeting. "The administration has all the tools it needs to respond. They have the ability to impose sanctions. They have the ability to take clandestine means. The administration has decided not to utilize them in a way that would deter the Russians, and I think that's a problem."

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 09, 2016, 10:25:11 PM
So what's worse?

1) That Russia wasn't just acting in a mischievous manner to "sow doubt" in the entire process as a LOLmindfuck troll, but worked specifically for one candidate to win and the other to lose
2) That not only did Senate leadership know what was happening but they refused to do tell the American public, to the point that if we did find out, they would dismiss it as "an act of partisan politics"
3) That after 8 years, Obama still doesn't learn the lesson, and once again placed his faith in "bipartisanship" and gets bit in the ass

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 09, 2016, 10:25:11 PM
3) That after 8 years, Obama still doesn't learn the lesson, and once again placed his faith in "bipartisanship" and gets bit in the ass

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 09, 2016, 11:30:23 PM
Spoken like a true Russian operative.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 09, 2016, 09:14:07 PM
This has been developing all day.

QuoteSecret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
the Washington Post
...

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.
]

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 09, 2016, 09:14:07 PM
This has been developing all day.

Quote
"I'll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there's clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now," said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. "There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it."

Quote from: citizen k on December 10, 2016, 12:12:13 AM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 09, 2016, 09:14:07 PM
This has been developing all day.

Quote
"I'll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there's clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now," said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. "There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it."

This would be the non-hysterical position to take.  :contract:

QuotePerson of the year shouldn't be Donald Trump – it's clearly Vladimir Putin

Donald Trump should not have been named Time magazine's Person of the Year. That's not to make the schoolboy error of presuming the award to be a badge of moral approval: I know it merely recognises the individual who has dominated the previous 12 months, for good or ill. (It's why Time has no reason to regret handing the 1938 accolade to Adolf Hitler.)

Even so, and even though Trump was clearly the biggest news story of 2016, he still should not have won. For there is another figure who looms larger over this annus horribilis, albeit from the shadows. He ends this year with a wolfish grin, content that almost all his dreams have come true. That man is Vladimir Putin.

He surveys the global landscape and sees almost every sign pointing his way. From Aleppo to the White House, from post-truth to Brexit, this is the year the world was reshaped in his image. He may not have been the guiding hand behind every shift, though he certainly gave several of them a nudge, but together they made him 2016's biggest winner.

Start with Syria, which even in this year of horrors surely merits a special infamy of its own. The leaders of western nations ritually condemn the catastrophe that has been visited upon the people of Aleppo, eloquently denouncing the bombing of hospitals, including makeshift clinics hidden in basements, the flattening of civilian areas, the killing of children, the denial of food and medicine. And yet Putin knows he need not listen. Because the important fact is the one on the ground: no one has stopped him or his Syrian vassal, Bashar al-Assad, from continuing the slaughter.

Plenty have warned that Aleppo will be the Guernica of our generation, remembered among the greatest crimes against humanity. Future historians will ask all the same shaming questions. Why was there not more outrage? Did people not know – or just not care? Why did they not act? But there is another comparison. For Aleppo has received the treatment Putin once meted out to Grozny, when Chechnya dared rebel against Moscow. In 1999 it too was bombed into what the UN called a "devastated wasteland", an act of destruction tolerated because it was deemed to be taking place on Russia's turf.

But the de facto permission granted to Putin's smashing of Syria counts as an even greater victory for the Russian dictator. Not only has he advanced his narrow, strategic interests, maintaining a presence in the Middle East and, in Tartus, a deep-water port with access to the Mediterranean. He has won a less tangible but more valuable prize. He has proved that it is possible to kill or dispossess millions of civilians with impunity.

Of course, some will say George W Bush proved that with his invasion of Iraq in 2003. But until now, Moscow might have felt constrained by the precedent of Slobodan Milošević, fearing that there were limits to how much blood you could shed before, eventually, the west or the US or Nato would act. Now Putin has established beyond doubt that there are no limits. Partly because of Iraq, and the fatigue it left behind, he has seen that once-serious international talk of a "responsibility to protect" endangered civilians is a dead letter. You can kill hundreds of thousands and no one will do a thing.

But 2016 has provided Putin with other reasons to be cheerful. He now has friends in high places, or in places about to get higher. The most obvious is Trump, but there are others, both near and far. Indeed, November was a banner month for the Russian leader, bringing pro-Putin candidates to power in Moldova, Bulgaria and Estonia, as well as teeing up a win-win French presidential contest in 2017. There is a good chance the final round will pit two Putin fans against each other: François Fillon v Marine Le Pen.

Like most on the European far right, Le Pen has long revered Putin as a nationalist strongman and was happy to take a €9m (£8m) loan from a Russian-backed bank. Less predictably Fillon, who will be the standard bearer of the centre-right, also gazes moon-eyed at Putin. Fillon wants to see the lifting of sanctions imposed on Moscow over Ukraine and believes Putin, the conqueror of Crimea, is the injured party, since it was all the western powers' fault that Russia invaded in the first place.

Wherever he looks, Putin can see allies – whether it's Nigel Farage on the right or US Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein on the left. (Stein boasted during the campaign that she had dined with Russia's leader, even sitting at the same table.) Indeed, given the regimes now ruling Hungary and Poland, Putin can smile at the emergence of what political scientist Yascha Mounk calls "the illiberal international", an arc of states led by people who, like him, regard the free press or an independent judiciary as unnecessary irritants.

Yet democratic votes have been good to Putin this year. Brexit was an early gift to a man who has long seen the weakening of the European Union as a strategic goal. Ideally, he'd like to see the EU break up: then he could make a series of bilateral deals with Europe's nations, picking them off one by one. That's the long game; but just to have the EU weakened, distracted and destabilised will do for now. And with Britain's departure, the EU will lose one of its loudest Putin-wary voices.

But of course the sweetest victory came on 8 November. Donald Trump veered wildly during the campaign, but one of the few stances he maintained with iron consistency was his admiration for Putin. The autocrat certainly did all he could to return the favour. As one Kremlin ally puts it, "Maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks." They certainly did.

Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump. As a former KGB man, Putin must be proud of what is surely the most successful espionage operation in history, one that succeeded beyond even Moscow's expectations – installing an admirer and sycophant in the White House.

The benefits are obvious. Given Trump's lukewarm commitment to Nato and the defence of its members, Putin will now have all but a free hand. As one Russia expert observes: "Seen from Moscow, the west has not been in such inviting disarray since the Suez crisis of 1956. Whatever constraints Putin may now feel upon his land-grabbing instincts, Nato is no longer one of them."

As the year closes, each day brings new delights for the master of the Kremlin. The US is about to be led by a serial, if not compulsive liar; the public conversation of the west is polluted by fake news. This new, post-truth world is pure Putinism. For years his propaganda effort, typified by his TV channel Russia Today, has been aimed not so much at pushing a single message as sowing confusion, making even solid facts seem unsteady. As a mission, it once seemed futile when pitted against the solid framework of fact and reason, carefully constructed during the two centuries since the enlightenment. But those timbers have proved alarmingly easy to rot.

He may not have done all this himself. But it counts as a historic achievement nonetheless. If 2016 has been an awful year, and it has, then its true face belongs to Vladimir Putin.

QuoteDonald Trump takes aim at US Intelligence

(CNN)President-elect Donald Trump's transition team slammed the CIA Friday, following reports the agency has concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help him win.

In a stunning response to widening claims of a Russian espionage operation targeting the presidential race, Trump's camp risked an early feud with the Intelligence community on which he will rely for top secret assessments of the greatest threats facing the United States.

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," the transition said in a terse, unsigned statement.

"The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.'"

The sharp pushback to revelations in The Washington Post, which followed an earlier CNN report on alleged Russian interference in the election, represented a startling rebuke from an incoming White House to the CIA.

The transition team's reference to the agency's most humiliating recent intelligence misfire — over its conclusion that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — threatens to cast an early cloud over relations between the Trump White House and the CIA.

The top leadership of the agency that presided over the Iraq failure during the Bush administration has long since been replaced. But the comments from Trump's camp will cause concern in the Intelligence community about the incoming President's attitude to America's spy agencies. CNN reported this week that Trump is getting intelligence briefings only once a week. Several previous presidents preparing for the inauguration had a more intense briefing schedule.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation into Russia's hacking told CNN last week that the US intelligence community is increasingly confident that Russian meddling in the US election was intended to steer the election toward Trump, rather than simply to undermine or in other ways disrupt the political process.

On Friday, the Post cited US officials as saying that intelligence agencies have identified individuals connected to the Russian government who gave Wikileaks thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta.

Trump has repeatedly said there is no evidence to suggest that President Vladimir Putin's Russia, with which he has vowed to improve relations, played a nefarious role in the US election.

"I don't believe it. I don't believe they interfered," Trump said in an interview for the latest issue of Time magazine, adding that he thought intelligence community accusations about Russian interventions in the election were politically motivated.

Trump has also been highly sensitive to any suggestion that he did not win the election fair and square, including claiming that he is only trailing Clinton in the popular vote because of a huge trove of illegal votes -- a claim for which he has provided no evidence.

Earlier Friday, the White House said that President Barack Obama had ordered a full review into hacking aimed at influencing US elections going back to 2008.

Russia has demanded evidence of its alleged involvement in the election and denied any wrongdoing.

Quote from: Syt on December 10, 2016, 02:50:14 AM
Of course, some will say George W Bush proved that with his invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Quote
Republicans ready to launch wide-ranging probe of Russia, despite Trump's stance

By Karoun Demirjian December 8 at 6:55 PM

Leading Senate Republicans are preparing to launch a coordinated and wide-ranging probe into Russia's alleged meddling in the U.S. elections and its potential cyberthreats to the military, digging deep into what they view as corrosive interference in the nation's institutions.

Such an aggressive approach puts them on a direct collision course with President-elect Donald Trump, who downplays the possibility Russia had any role in the November elections — arguing that a hack of the Democratic National Committee emails may have been perpetrated by "some guy in his home in New Jersey." The fracture could become more prominent after Trump is inaugurated and begins setting foreign policy. He has already indicated that the country should "get along" with Russia since the two nations have many common strategic goals.

But some of Trump's would-be Republican allies on Capitol Hill disagree. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (Ariz.) is readying a probe of possible Russian cyber-incursions into U.S. weapons systems, and he said he has been discussing the issue with Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (N.C.), with whom he will be "working closely" to investigate Russia's suspected interference in the U.S. elections and cyberthreats to the military and other institutions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been apprised of the discussions. Burr did not respond to requests for comment.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) also said he intends to hold hearings next year into alleged Russian hacking. Corker is on Trump's shortlist for secretary of state, according to the Trump transition team.

Trump transition officials could not be reached for comment.

The loudest GOP calls for a Russia probe are coming from McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Both have taken a hard line on Russia and have been highly critical of Trump, particularly his praise of President Vladimir Putin.

"They'll keep doing more here until they pay a price," Graham said of Russia. He plans to spearhead legislation and hold a series of investigative hearings next year into "Russia's misadventures throughout the world," including Russian meddling in the U.S. elections.

"I'm going after Russia in every way you can go after Russia. I think they're one of the most destabilizing influences on the world stage. I think they did interfere with our elections, and I want Putin personally to pay the price," Graham said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

McCain said his Armed Services Committee will launch a probe in the 115th Congress into Russia's cyber-capabilities against the U.S. military and weapons systems, "because the real threat is cyber," he explained.


But McCain said he expects the investigation will also dovetail with the topic of Russia's suspected hacking of the DNC and state-based election systems — which include a hack that took place in McCain's home state of Arizona.

"See, the problem with hacking is that if they're able to disrupt elections, then it's a national security issue, obviously," McCain said Thursday.

He added that the Armed Services Committee was "still formulating" exactly how to address the issue during hearings. But despite Trump's dismissal, McCain said that "there's very little doubt" Russia interfered in the U.S. elections, which he called "very worthy of examination."

The U.S. government in October officially accused Russia of hacking the DNC's emails during the presidential campaign. The emails were posted on websites such as WikiLeaks and embarrassed the party, notably forcing Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) to resign as DNC chairwoman.

And U.S. military officials officials are concerned about Russia's capacity to steal military secrets and corrupt operations: Officials already suspect that Russian hackers were behind a major email breach at the Pentagon last year. And the military could be a target for backlash, after an NBC News report widely circulated by Russian media said that U.S. military hackers were ready to launch cyberattacks against Russia in the event of an obvious election hack.

Trump continued to downplay Russian involvement in the elections in an interview released this week for Time magazine's "Person of the Year" feature. In the interview, the president-elect disputed the Obama administration's accusation that Russia interfered in the election.


"I don't believe they interfered," Trump said of Russia. "It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey. I believe that it could have been Russia and it could have been any one of many other people. Sources or even individuals."

Some Republicans delicately demurred, while still defending Trump's ability to negotiate with Putin.

"The Democratic National Committee ... the intelligence community is of pretty much one mind that Russia was involved in that, was behind that," Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said in an MSNBC interview. King is a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism.

King added that he was "confident" Trump "will not be taken in by Putin."

Democrats have also taken issue with Trump's desire to pursue more friendly relations with Moscow, as well as his affinity for Putin.

"The primary area of discomfort for the Republicans here and the Trump administration, in foreign policy and national security, is over Russia," said Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat. He accused Trump on MSNBC this week of becoming "a propaganda piece for the Kremlin," adding: "They may be giving him breathing space right now, but I don't expect that to last."


Since the election, Republican lawmakers have voted to reestablish a U.S. hard line against Russia's global ventures. The House has passed measure to sanction anyone who supports the Syrian government in its ongoing civil war, a category that primarily includes Russia and Iran. There is also language in the annual defense policy bill to provide millions of dollars in lethal aid to Ukraine, where the government in Kiev is engaged in open hostilities against Russian-backed separatists.

But many Democrats are impatient with Republicans for not taking faster and more concrete steps against Russia after the Obama administration officially accused Moscow of meddling in the elections.


Corker expressed early interest in holding hearings on Russia. But months later, those hearings have not been held. "We're getting no pressure from anyone — we just feel like it's something we should do," Corker said in an interview Wednesday, when asked if the president-elect had pressured him not to raise the topic. "As a matter of fact, we attempted to set a classified briefing up this week."

Obama administration officials maintain that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other officials were ready to brief senators about Russia's suspected role in the DNC hack on Thursday. Administration officials said that at the last minute, the committee dramatically broadened the scope of the hearing, forcing them to cancel.

A spokeswoman for Corker said the hearing was postponed because State Department officials were unavailable due to previous travel commitments. She added that Corker and Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's ranking Democrat, received a classified briefing on cyberthreats prior to the election.

Corker pledged Wednesday that hearings investigating Russia's role in the elections would be forthcoming next year. "We're definitely going to look at it," he said.

An aggressive probe of Russia's activities may not extend to the House, where leading Republicans say they have already been investigating Russia and will continue their efforts regardless of Trump's stance.

"[Russia]'s always been a priority for me, and it will remain a priority for me," House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, stressed that his committee has been looking at Russian cyberthreats to the military for the last two years.

"We're going to have to all pay more attention to cyber and to Russian activities to influence things through cyber," Thornberry said.

Democrats, meanwhile, are going to use whatever power they have to ensure that suspected Russian activities in the elections and beyond get attention.

Seven top-ranked Democrats sent a letter to President Obama on Tuesday asking for classified briefings "regarding Russian entities' hacking of American political organizations," including the DNC hack, emails released by WikiLeaks and fake news.

"Regardless of whether you voted for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or anyone else, Russia's attacks on our election are an attempt to degrade our democracy and should chill every American — Democratic, Republican, or Independent — to the core," said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Relations Committee.

Quote from: alfred russel on December 09, 2016, 11:22:23 PM
I'm not sure what you guys think Obama should have done. It isn't as though Russia trying to meddle in the election was a secret pre election. Obama getting on a soapbox and screaming about it doesn't seem like a strategy that would persuade many eventual Trump voters.

Quote from: Syt on December 10, 2016, 03:14:05 AM

QuoteDonald Trump takes aim at US Intelligence

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 09:58:18 AM

Quote from: alfred russel on December 09, 2016, 11:22:23 PM
I'm not sure what you guys think Obama should have done. It isn't as though Russia trying to meddle in the election was a secret pre election. Obama getting on a soapbox and screaming about it doesn't seem like a strategy that would persuade many eventual Trump voters.

yeah, I think this is another instance of the languish echo chamber. the russian hack stuff just wasn't convincing, and hillary's insistence on it rather than discuss the contents of the leaks really hurt her.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 09:58:18 AM

Quote from: alfred russel on December 09, 2016, 11:22:23 PM
I'm not sure what you guys think Obama should have done. It isn't as though Russia trying to meddle in the election was a secret pre election. Obama getting on a soapbox and screaming about it doesn't seem like a strategy that would persuade many eventual Trump voters.

yeah, I think this is another instance of the languish echo chamber. the russian hack stuff just wasn't convincing (edit -- to the people), and hillary's insistence on it rather than discuss the contents of the leaks really hurt her.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 12:43:38 PM
she should have owned up

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 12:43:38 PM
she should have owned up

Quote from: grumbler on December 10, 2016, 02:25:19 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 12:43:38 PM
she should have owned up

Disagree.  She should have doubled down on the lying.  Trump did that, and that was the secret to his success.

Clinton lost because she believed that the truth mattered.

Quote from: grumbler on December 10, 2016, 02:25:19 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 12:43:38 PM
she should have owned up

Disagree.  She should have doubled down on the lying.  Trump did that, and that was the secret to his success.

Clinton lost because she believed that the truth mattered.

Quote from: Razgovory on December 10, 2016, 02:39:22 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 12:43:38 PM
she should have owned up

To what?  Her connection to a Satanic Pizza parlor?  People want unapologetic dishonesty.  Saying "I'm sorry", or "I was wrong" only tells people that you did, in fact, do something wrong.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 10, 2016, 06:37:50 PM

Quote from: Razgovory on December 10, 2016, 02:39:22 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 12:43:38 PM
she should have owned up

To what?  Her connection to a Satanic Pizza parlor?  People want unapologetic dishonesty.  Saying "I'm sorry", or "I was wrong" only tells people that you did, in fact, do something wrong.

The kind of voters Hillary needed were not that type.

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 10, 2016, 06:13:07 PM
So sex change operation

Then lie

Quote from: Razgovory on December 10, 2016, 07:49:00 PM
(https://s29.postimg.org/wgzuxk6p3/BN_QW472_TRANSI_J_20161118165712.jpg) (https://postimg.org/image/ucfhwh52b/)free upload pictures (https://postimage.org/)

Just saying.

Quote from: 11B4V on December 10, 2016, 08:19:42 PM
Hip plus Flynn is a POS to boot.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 10, 2016, 07:29:56 PM
are all these posts saying lying = victory actually serious?? that's such a poor takeaway from the election

Quote from: Razgovory on December 10, 2016, 10:08:46 PM
Even Ed wouldn't eat with Jill Stein.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 10, 2016, 10:06:47 PM
You tell us, Strudelführer.  It's your crowd.

Quote from: Ed Anger on December 10, 2016, 09:20:02 PM
What kind of dinner roll is that?

Quote
Politico.com
Intel world struggles to crack the code of an untrusting Trump
How do you brief a president who refuses to believe what you tell him?
By Nahal Toosi and Darren Samuelsohn
12/10/16 02:06 PM EST

Donald Trump's insult-laced dismissal of reports that the CIA believes Russia hacked the 2016 election to help him is rattling a spy community already puzzled over how to gain the ear and trust of the incoming president.

Some fear that Trump's highly public rebukes of the U.S. intelligence apparatus will undermine morale in the spy agencies, politicize their work, and damage their standing in a world filled with adversaries. After all, if the U.S. president doesn't believe his own intelligence officials, why should anyone else?

"There is nothing more sacred to intelligence officers than their professionalism, honesty and non-partisanship. Trump's charges strike at the core of their integrity," said John Sipher, a former CIA officer with broad expertise on Russia.

Trump, a career businessman with no national security experience, has long taken positions that have alarmed intelligence officials, such as supporting torture and suggesting that it's OK to kill the family members of terrorists.

His choice of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a man who promotes conspiracy theories on Twitter, as his national security adviser has unnerved observers. And his apparent reluctance to accept daily intelligence briefings since winning on Nov. 8 has fueled concerns that Trump will assume the presidency blind to the dangers facing the United States.

But Trump, who often speaks fondly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, really struck a nerve during the latter stages of the presidential campaign by refusing to accept the U.S. intelligence consensus that Moscow was behind cyber-attacks on U.S. election organizations. On Friday, after The Washington Post reported that the CIA believes Russia was trying specifically to help Trump, the president-elect's team compared the allegations to the flawed claims that prompted the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Trump's transition team said in a statement that made jaws drop across the intelligence world, where many blame the George W. Bush administration, not spy agencies, for selective use of the data that led to the war.

Incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on Saturday called for a bipartisan congressional probe into the reports of Russian electoral interference. "That any country could be meddling in our elections should shake both political parties to their core," the New York Democrat said.

But Republicans have remained largely quiet on the subject, possibly out of an awareness of where the president-elect stands. Even Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain, who acknowledged that the notion of Russian interference was not a surprise and signaled plans to probe the matter in the next Congress, noted, "The CIA has not always been exactly right, to say the least."

Trump would not be the first U.S. president to harbor a distrust of the intelligence community, which has worked hard to restore its standing in the public eye since the invasion of Iraq and revelations of intelligence agencies use of waterboarding and other torture techniques.

Richard Nixon, for instance, was deeply hostile to the CIA, which he suspected had caused him to lose his 1960 run for the White House. But Nixon was a former vice president and lawmaker who eventually reached the White House with far more knowledge of foreign affairs and governing experience than Trump, who has spent most of his career in the real estate business.

In interviews with several former intelligence officials and others connected to that community in recent days, POLITICO found a deep wariness of what a Trump presidency will mean.

The vast majority of people who work for intelligence agencies are career professionals deeply averse to the politicization of intelligence; there's also a deep and long-running suspicion of Russia in the intelligence community that Trump is unlikely to root out.

Amy Jeffress, a former Department of Justice official, told POLITICO that she's been in touch with intelligence community officials to discuss the challenge ahead.

"They don't like the president-elect's criticism and are even more concerned that he is skipping his intelligence briefings," Jeffress said. "The new administration will need to reassure the career professionals, who of course include Democrats and Republicans, that they will not misuse or politicize their work."

The question of the intelligence briefings is one that some analysts are more worried about than others.

Most recent presidents-elect have welcomed the in-person daily briefings by intelligence officials as an opportunity to verse themselves in the threats facing the United States before they take office. Trump is reportedly receiving at most one such verbal briefing a week.

Meanwhile, it's not clear if Trump is reading the President's Daily Brief, the written, top secret document produced every day by the intelligence community for the serving president and designated aides and which also is available to presidents-elect. Trump transition officials did not respond to questions about whether Trump is reading the written document and how many in-person briefings he has received.

In the case of Nixon, the CIA could not convince him to take a single face-to-face briefing during his transition to the presidency, according to David Priess, a former intelligence official and author of "The President's Book of Secrets." The CIA delivered Nixon's team the written daily brief every day, but at the end of the transition period, those envelopes were all returned unopened, Priess said.

Once Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, he might feel compelled to pay more heed to intelligence issues. But already people connected to the spy world are wondering if they'll need to radically alter the way they present the information to a man known to have a very short attention span and a dislike of reading.

Trump's favored mode of communication appears to be Twitter, and he's known to watch cable news regularly. He's said in the past that he's learned a lot about military affairs by watching cable shows. People familiar with his reading habits have told POLITICO he likes information delivered in "short and staccato" bursts.

Different presidents have had their preferred modes of getting the daily briefing. President Barack Obama does not take oral briefings — he prefers to read the written version, which usually runs five to 10 pages, on a special secure iPad. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, always had a daily in-person briefing, even when he was on the road, Priess said.

Some presidents want very specific information, sometimes requesting detailed paragraphs on particular countries. Others prefer pithier nuggets of information. Bill Clinton was known to like extremely short statements of analysis referred to as "snowflakes" in addition to more substantive pieces. At times, including during the Ronald Reagan era, the written brief has been supplemented with video footage.

The expectation is that Trump will prefer bullet points to paragraphs, and headlines to details. Said Priess: "I would ask the president-elect directly: In what format would you like it? We can brief it to you. We can write it for you. We can do interpretive dance if you want. Just tell us."

Some sources told POLITICO that it's not a terrible thing if Trump isn't devoting half an hour each day to reading the intelligence brief or listening to a briefer. "It's a misleading metric," said Philip Mudd, a former CIA officer who verbally briefed Bush. "Some people sleep eight hours a night, some people sleep six. Different presidents absorb information in different ways."

Mudd and others added that what may prove more important is ensuring that Trump's closest aides are aware of what the intelligence community needs him to know. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, for example, is reported to be deeply interested in the intelligence briefings and may be a useful conduit to his boss.

At the same time, some of the people Trump has surrounded himself with also are a cause for concern in corners of the intelligence world. Flynn, the designated national security adviser who previously ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, is reported to have scoffed at intelligence that didn't match his opinions. Days before the Nov. 8 election, he used Twitter to spread false conspiracy theories about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Trump has designated GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas as the next CIA director. By many accounts, Pompeo is a sharp thinker. But he's also considered one of the most partisan members of Congress. He was especially vocal in opposing the nuclear deal that the Obama administration struck with Iran. The question for many in the intelligence realm now is whether Pompeo can objectively present their work to a President Trump.

"The poster child is the Iranian nuclear program," Mudd said. "I can guarantee you CIA people are saying, 'We're worried he will shift our analysis on whether Iran is complying with the agreement or not or if he will he put his own spin on it'."

But even if Trump surrounds himself with highly competent professionals, even if he feels pushback from Congress, even if he is attacked in the press, he still has tremendous power in intelligence matters.

"He's a 70-year old billionaire whose entire approach to life was just rewarded. And his approach to life is to not accept facts he disagrees with and attack people who present facts that are inconvenient to him," said Matthew Miller, a former Obama administration Justice Department spokesman who has been highly critical of Trump. "I don't know why on earth someone thinks he'll change just because he takes office. There's zero evidence he's going to change."

Some sources affiliated with the intelligence community also are quietly voicing concerns about Trump's ability to keep classified information secret, given his habit of going off-script. He uses Twitter to post his unvarnished opinions regularly. And as president, he'll be dealing with enormous amounts of information, some of it top secret, some of it not, a regular basis. It's difficult for anyone to compartmentalize all of that data.

It's entirely possible that, if they haven't already, foreign countries will analyze Trump's tweets and public statements and compare them to his calendar to try to see if there are patterns that could offer hints about U.S. national security.

But would it be proper for an intelligence officer to withhold information from Trump if he's worried about what he'll do with it?

No, some observers said.

"He's the president. He gets the best we have to offer," Mudd said. "No intelligence officer would say, 'I'm not offering the best we have to the president of the United States.' We weren't elected. They were."

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 05:55:34 AM
The fact that Reid thinks Trump conspired with Russia is :bleeding: worthy whether he's wrong or not.

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 05:55:34 AM
The fact that Reid thinks Trump conspired with Russia is :bleeding: worthy whether he's wrong or not.

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 09:41:42 AM
Yeah, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he sure ain't making it easy.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 11, 2016, 09:47:36 AM
What is this, the bunker scene?

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 10:13:48 AM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 11, 2016, 09:47:36 AM
What is this, the bunker scene?

He hasn't even invaded Austria yet, let alone Poland.

QuoteTrump also denied the importance of receiving the daily intelligence briefing, a tradition for presidents and presidents-elect. He has received the briefings only sporadically since winning the election.

"I get it when I need it," he said. "I'm, like, a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/12/11/trump-denies-cia-report-russia-intervened-to-help-him-win-election/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumpcia-914am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory)

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 05:55:34 AM
The fact that Reid thinks Trump conspired with Russia is :bleeding: worthy whether he's wrong or not.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 09, 2016, 10:25:11 PM
So what's worse?

1) That Russia wasn't just acting in a mischievous manner to "sow doubt" in the entire process as a LOLmindfuck troll, but worked specifically for one candidate to win and the other to lose
2) That not only did Senate leadership know what was happening but they refused to do tell the American public, to the point that if we did find out, they would dismiss it as "an act of partisan politics"
3) That after 8 years, Obama still doesn't learn the lesson, and once again placed his faith in "bipartisanship" and gets bit in the ass

Quote from: grumbler on December 11, 2016, 03:06:52 PM

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 05:55:34 AM
The fact that Reid thinks Trump conspired with Russia is :bleeding: worthy whether he's wrong or not.

The fact that you would twist Reid's words into "Trump conspired with Russia" is :bleeding: worthy whether Reid is wrong or not.

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 03:56:46 PM

Quote from: grumbler on December 11, 2016, 03:06:52 PM

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 05:55:34 AM
The fact that Reid thinks Trump conspired with Russia is :bleeding: worthy whether he's wrong or not.

The fact that you would twist Reid's words into "Trump conspired with Russia" is :bleeding: worthy whether Reid is wrong or not.

Ok, how does our resident sage interpret "explosive information about close ties and coordination"?

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 11, 2016, 05:44:14 PM
I agree with the Weegro.  Harry shouldn't have put coordinate in that letter.

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 05:55:34 AM
The fact that Reid thinks Trump conspired with Russia is :bleeding: worthy whether he's wrong or not.

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 11, 2016, 05:53:21 PM

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 05:55:34 AM
The fact that Reid thinks Trump conspired with Russia is :bleeding: worthy whether he's wrong or not.

Why is it :bleeding: worthy if he's not wrong?

QuoteDonald Trump says CIA charge Russia influenced election is 'ridiculous'

Donald Trump said on Sunday that a CIA conclusion that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election was "ridiculous", and that he did not believe that the Kremlin had tried to bolster his candidacy.

The president-elect said the CIA's assessment was "just another excuse" for his stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton last month.

"I don't believe it," Trump said in an interview with Fox News Sunday. "Every week it's another excuse."

Two days earlier, the Washington Post reported that in a secret assessment, the CIA had concluded the Russian government sought to influence the election by hacking into Democratic party emails.

During the campaign, the intelligence community accused Russia-backed actors of hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Thousands of the emails, which intelligence officials said were provided by individuals with ties to the Russian government, were published by WikiLeaks. At the time officials said Russia hoped to undermine confidence in the election, but did not explicitly say the Kremlin favored Trump, as the CIA later concluded.

This week, Barack Obama ordered what the White House called a "full review" of Russia's role in the hacks and cyberattacks by Chinese hackers in the 2008 and 2012 campaign cycles.

Trump refused to believe the CIA's findings, saying on Sunday: "Nobody really knows, and hacking is very interesting.

"Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act you're not going to catch them. They have no idea if it's Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed some place."

On Sunday John Bolton, a former ambassador to the UN said any foreign government trying to influence an American election should face "very grave consequences" but questioned whether the hacking of DNC and the RNC computers was "a false flag operation".

Asked by Fox News's Eric Shawn whether he was accusing someone in the administration or intelligence community of trying to throw something, he replied: "We just don't know. But I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree."

On Saturday, Trump's transition team issued a statement that invoked the faulty intelligence used to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," the statement read.

The split was reflective of a growing rift between the CIA and Trump, who has declined daily intelligence briefings. The president-elect, who receives intelligence briefings just once a week claimed on Sunday he could skip the briefings because: "I'm, like, a smart person."

"I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day," he added.

Senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said the CIA's findings about the election were "unfounded" and undercut the peaceful transition of power. In an appearance on CBS' Face the Nation, she said Democrats were refusing to accept responsibility for their loss.

"They did a recount," she said, alluding to a campaign funded by the Green Party. "They're vilifying [FBI director] Jim Comey. It's everybody's false but Hillary Clinton's."

But a bipartisan group of senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two of the most outspoken Republicans on foreign policy, echoed the concerns of the intelligence community.

"This cannot become a partisan issue," the senators said in a statement. "The stakes are too high for our country."

McCain later told CBS: "It's clear the Russians interfered. Whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that's a subject of investigation.

"But facts are stubborn things. They did hack into this campaign."

McCain said he hoped to create a select committee to investigate the interference. He also expressed doubts over Trump's reported decision to nominate Exxon Mobil's CEO, Rex Tillerson, as his secretary of state.

"It's a matter of concern to me that he has such a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. And obviously they've done enormous deals together," McCain said, referring to a 2011 deal to access Arctic oil, potentially worth $300bn.

"That ... would color his approach to Vladimir Putin and the Russian threat."

McCain nonetheless said Trump's appointees would be given a fair hearing in the Senate, where they must first clear relevant committees before receiving a vote in the broader chamber.

On Sunday, Trump said he had not made a final decision on Tillerson, tweeting: "Whether I choose him or not for 'State' – Rex Tillerson, the chairman & CEO of ExxonMobil, is a world class player and dealmaker. Stay tuned!"

Tillerson has engineered deals around the world and is close to Igor Sechin, the head of Russia's state-owned oil giant Rosneft. In 2013, Tillerson was given the Order of Friendship award. In 2014, he called for the US to lift economic sanctions on Russia and leaders such as Sechin.

Reports of the possible nomination of Tillerson stirred criticism even among some Republicans, including two members of the Senate foreign relations committee, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.

"Being a 'friend of Vladimir' is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState," Rubio said on Twitter. Paul said he was concerned should reports be confirmed that Trump plans to nominate former UN ambassador John Bolton, a leading supporter of the Iraq invasion, as the undersecretary of state.

Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, insisted that the decision was not yet final.

"It's amazing to me that immediately everyone's just jumping the shark on this :huh: ," he said on NBC's Meet the Press. "Poking this prematurely is something that just isn't ... helpful. But it's also not accurate.

"I mean this is a guy who has business relationships in every continent in the entire world."

Priebus also denied that Trump lacked confidence in US intelligence, saying the president-elect was rejecting unnamed sources in newspaper reports.

But Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said it was clear "what the Russians were after".

"Plainly they were after discord and in this they were spectacularly successful," Schiff said on NBC. "But it wasn't alone to try and sow discord.

"They had a candidate with pro-Putin, pro-Russian views who belittled Nato, who was willing to potentially remove sanctions on Russia and by contrast they had in Secretary Clinton a candidate very tough on Russia."

Quote from: Legbiter on December 12, 2016, 06:18:36 AM
At this point the most effective opposition to Trump will have to be other Republicans. That's already starting by the looks of it. Rand Paul is for instance saying he'll work on blocking John Bolton from getting nominated to anything.

QuoteAs the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

QuoteAlso watching American liberals uncritically believe rumors sourced to the wretched CIA is more surprising to me than anything else so far about this election.

Quote from: Valmy on December 12, 2016, 09:39:27 AM
I don't understand. If you had all this important information that needed to come to our attention why did not you not bring up serious matters in the campaign and instead acted like a jackass? If you keep all your information a secret we cannot discuss it and therefore there can be no cognitive dissonance, so why would that be fascinating?

QuoteAlso watching American liberals uncritically believe rumors sourced to the wretched CIA is more surprising to me than anything else so far about this election.

Seriously? Did you have this immense and profound respect for American leftists prior to this election? Bullshit. Don't feed me garbage like this. This kind of dishonest shit pisses me off so much.

Quote from: garbon on December 12, 2016, 09:44:53 AM
Just don't read his posts? You know they'll be garbage.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 09:49:10 AM
regardless of how one feels about legbiter's point, a large portion of america largely agrees with him :)

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 09:49:10 AM
regardless of how one feels about legbiter's point, a large portion of america largely agrees with him :)

Quote from: Valmy on December 12, 2016, 09:52:14 AM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 09:49:10 AM
regardless of how one feels about legbiter's point, a large portion of america largely agrees with him :)

A large portion of America agrees with anything partisan. In any case I was addressing his dishonest troll garbage. I found his link interesting.

So, you know, read my posts before commenting on them please.

Quote from: Razgovory on December 12, 2016, 10:01:14 AM
And what do you propose we do about it?

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 09:59:00 AM
I was more referring to the strategy of ignoring what a large portion of america believes.

QuoteI didn't have anything in particular against what you and garbo said, except for the idea of ignoring it--I think that's kinda ostrich in sand.

Quote from: Legbiter on December 12, 2016, 09:30:28 AM
Well because the only presidential candidate to have verified Third World-tier corruption ties to the Russian government was Best Waifu Hillary through the Clinton Foundation (but of course).

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 03:56:46 PM
Ok, how does our resident sage interpret "explosive information about close ties and coordination"?

Quote from: Legbiter on December 12, 2016, 06:18:36 AM
The Russia hack narrative conveniently gives all the moron pundits and fake experts a way out.

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 12, 2016, 11:28:39 AM

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 11, 2016, 03:56:46 PM
Ok, how does our resident sage interpret "explosive information about close ties and coordination"?

I'm no sage, but I interpret it as the CIA has information that Trump is tied closely and coordinates with certain advisors, and those advisors in turn are tied closely and coordinate with people associated with the Russian government.

Quote from: Legbiter on December 12, 2016, 10:15:37 AM
Languish was actually a great spot to camp out this election, with many different viewpoints and pretty much on the money come election night. We all knew Trump was a killer through the combined gestalt intelligence of this forum.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 10:03:54 AM

Quote from: Razgovory on December 12, 2016, 10:01:14 AM
And what do you propose we do about it?

empathize, I guess

Quote from: Legbiter on December 12, 2016, 10:15:37 AM
Valmy; note I'm not accusing you or anyone here of being even remotely anything as butthurt and deranged as the pundit class and media currently is. And oh boy are they Mad Online as it is. :bleeding:


Languish was actually a great spot to camp out this election, with many different viewpoints and pretty much on the money come election night. We all knew Trump was a killer through the combined gestalt intelligence of this forum.

Quote from: Razgovory on December 12, 2016, 11:49:21 AM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 10:03:54 AM

Quote from: Razgovory on December 12, 2016, 10:01:14 AM
And what do you propose we do about it?

empathize, I guess

Why?  There are lots of people with stupid beliefs.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:20:37 PM
to help prevent doing to trump what some on the right did to obama

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:20:37 PM
to help prevent doing to trump what some on the right did to obama

Quote from: Jacob on December 12, 2016, 01:31:14 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:20:37 PM
to help prevent doing to trump what some on the right did to obama

I don't follow. What do you mean?

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:38:07 PM

Quote from: Jacob on December 12, 2016, 01:31:14 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:20:37 PM
to help prevent doing to trump what some on the right did to obama

I don't follow. What do you mean?

partisan hackery. it's generally good to empathize with those one disagrees with because, in one way, it can help with identifying mistakes made by the opposition to help ensure one doesn't repeat those same mistakes.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:38:07 PM
partisan hackery. it's generally good to empathize with those one disagrees with because, in one way, it can help with identifying mistakes made by the opposition to help ensure one doesn't repeat those same mistakes.

Quote from: Jacob on December 12, 2016, 01:47:48 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:38:07 PM
partisan hackery. it's generally good to empathize with those one disagrees with because, in one way, it can help with identifying mistakes made by the opposition to help ensure one doesn't repeat those same mistakes.

Worked out fine for the GOP it seems. And now you suggest - with the GOP controlling all the levers of power - that it's time to show empathy for the party which is built on saying "fuck you, we have no empathy for those who are not like us"?

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 02:05:02 PM
I'm not arguing what's effective to win the game, though I think it's probably more the case that they did well despite their antics rather than because of them.

if you think it's OK to be bring vindictiveness into politics, and it should actually be encouraged, then we're at a fundamental disagreement. seriously, you're like the last poster I'd imagine would say, "fuck empathy"

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 02:29:14 PM
"right did to obama" = the general illwill felt by conservatives, including the various conspiracy theories and other nonsense. I wasn't referring to republican politicians

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 12, 2016, 03:27:52 PM
Republicans are under the impression that their lawmakers have a history of being pussies and getting run over by Dems, and that bipartisanship always involves them compromising but never Dems compromising. So when Jake says maybe it's because of their antics, I can see that.

Quote from: Jacob on December 12, 2016, 03:41:02 PM

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 12, 2016, 03:27:52 PM
Republicans are under the impression that their lawmakers have a history of being pussies and getting run over by Dems, and that bipartisanship always involves them compromising but never Dems compromising. So when Jake says maybe it's because of their antics, I can see that.

Dems are under the exact same impression, it seems to me, with the addendum that when Republicans engage in ridiculous antics and tantrums they bamboozle the Democrats into giving away pretty much everything for the fiction of Republican concessions which the GOP then walks back at the earliest opportunity.

Not saying it's right or wrong, but it's something I hear expressed pretty frequently.

Quote from: Barrister on December 12, 2016, 04:14:20 PM
Apparently this is the first ever conspiracy that Alex Jones demands to see proof of before he'll believe it:

https://twitter.com/RealAlexJones/status/808393500924510209

:lol:

Quote from: Valmy on December 12, 2016, 11:32:56 AMTim being so sure only meant one thing.

Quote from: Jacob on December 12, 2016, 02:20:09 PM
, political intervention in favour of the GOP by the FBI while the CIA sits on intelligence that casts Trump in a bad light to not interfere in the election...

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 12, 2016, 05:17:09 PM

Quote from: Jacob on December 12, 2016, 02:20:09 PM
, political intervention in favour of the GOP by the FBI while the CIA sits on intelligence that casts Trump in a bad light to not interfere in the election...

The CIA went to Obama with their info. Not their fault he chose to do jack with the info.

Quote from: KRonn on December 12, 2016, 04:04:59 PM
Such as pretty much signing off on one of the recent budget deals which angered many repub voters with line items they opposed and expected to be defeated. So much so that I was surprised that voters kept the republicans in the majority in Congress in the last election.

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 12, 2016, 05:53:50 PM... it is difficult to see how the US can continue as a functioning state and a democracy at the same time.

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 02:05:02 PM

Quote from: Jacob on December 12, 2016, 01:47:48 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on December 12, 2016, 01:38:07 PM
partisan hackery. it's generally good to empathize with those one disagrees with because, in one way, it can help with identifying mistakes made by the opposition to help ensure one doesn't repeat those same mistakes.

Worked out fine for the GOP it seems. And now you suggest - with the GOP controlling all the levers of power - that it's time to show empathy for the party which is built on saying "fuck you, we have no empathy for those who are not like us"?

I'm not arguing what's effective to win the game, though I think it's probably more the case that they did well despite their antics rather than because of them.

if you think it's OK to be bring vindictiveness into politics, and it should actually be encouraged, then we're at a fundamental disagreement. seriously, you're like the last poster I'd imagine would say, "fuck empathy"

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 12, 2016, 05:53:50 PM
The fact that a decent bloc of GOP voters considers the act of passing a budget that isn't 100% of what you want is some kind of betrayal or defeat is a very serious problem.  If that view is maintained and hardened, it is difficult to see how the US can continue as a functioning state and a democracy at the same time.

QuoteMcConnell announces Senate probe of suspected Russian election interference: 'The Russians are not our friends'

By Ed O'Keefe and Paul Kane December 12 at 4:09 PM

A Senate intelligence panel plans to investigate Russia's suspected election interference, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced on Monday as he strongly condemned any foreign interference with U.S. elections but rejected calls for an expanded congressional probe.

The plan for a congressional investigation into Russia's potential involvement in the presidential election will be an early test of the relationship between Republicans on Capitol Hill and President-elect Donald Trump, who has disputed intelligence assessments faulting Russia for interfering in the presidential election.

"The Russians are not our friends," McConnell declared to reporters at a scheduled year-end news conference as he announced plans for an investigation into Russia's suspected interference in the elections. McConnell reportedly dismissed intelligence assessments earlier this fall suggesting that Russia was trying to sway the election in favor of Trump.

Members of both parties on Monday called for a public joint House-Senate inquiry that would lead to the public release of any findings. Others suggested an independent commission similar to the panel that investigated the beginnings of the war in Iraq. But McConnell said that any congressional probe of Russia would follow "regular order" through the current committee structure.

"This simply cannot be a partisan issue," he said, before adding that the Intelligence Committee "is more than capable of conducting a complete review of this matter."

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) also dismissed calls for a special panel, saying that the House Intelligence Committee is already "working diligently on the cyber threats posed by foreign governments and terrorist organizations."


Ryan added in a statement that "exploiting the work of our intelligence community for partisan purposes does a grave disservice to those professional and potentially jeopardizes national security. As we work to protect our democracy from foreign influence, we should not cast doubt on the clear and decisive outcome of this election."

McConnell at his news conference declined to address his role in a September briefing for lawmakers, but instead credited Senate Republicans for standing firm against Russia and blamed President Obama for Russian encroachment around the globe.

"The Obama administration for eight years attempted to reset relations with Russia, and sat back while Russia expanded its sphere of influence and intervened in Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, Syria, and attempted to bully Baltic countries. It defies belief that somehow Republicans in the Senate are reluctant to either review Russian tactics or ignore them," he said.

McConnell also expressed strong support for the intelligence community, putting him at odds with Trump's public doubts about the reliability of the nation's intelligence agencies.

"I have the highest confidence in the intelligence community and especially the Central Intelligence Agency," McConnell said. "The CIA is filled with selfless patriots, many of whom anonymously risk their lives for the American people."

Other Republicans may be reluctant to support a wide-ranging investigation of Russia's election-related activities given that Trump has dismissed the CIA claims as "ridiculous."

"I think it's just another excuse. I don't believe it . . . No, I don't believe it at all," Trump said on "Fox News Sunday" of the CIA allegations. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway echoed her boss on CBS's "Face the Nation," saying that such allegations from the intelligence community were "laughable and ridiculous."

Trump again emphasized his disbelief with tweets Monday morning:

Quote from: TrumpCan you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!

Quote from: TrumpUnless you catch "hackers" in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn't this brought up before election?

Contrary to Trump's assertion in the second tweet, the U.S. government officially accused Russia in October of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections through a hacking campaign.

Adding to Trump's criticisms of the CIA, his transition spokesman, Jason Miller, told reporters on a Monday conference call that talk of Russian interference in the election "might upset some people who are bitter that their candidate lost in November, but that's not going to slow us down from focusing on going to work for the American people."

Miller's comments seemed to suggest the "bitter" talk was coming from the CIA, which has concluded privately that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and individuals close to Hillary Clinton in order to release documents tilting the electorate toward Trump. Miller did not mention the CIA directly.

McConnell's calls for a nonpartisan approach to any investigation of Russia echoed comments by incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who pledged on Monday that any inquiry would focus on "just the facts."

"We don't want to point a finger and I don't want this to turn into a Benghazi investigation, which seemed at least to many people to be highly political," he told "CBS This Morning." "This is serious stuff, when a foreign power tries to influence our election or damage our economy, for that matter. This is serious and it's gotten worse. And a bipartisan investigation that's not aimed at one specific instance but looks at the broad scope of this is just what's needed."

Schumer and Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) — the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — and Democrat Jack Reed (R.I.), the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, had called for a bipartisan probe into Russia on Sunday. Their calls came after The Washington Post reported the CIA's conclusion that Russia's activities were intended to tip the scales to help Trump.

"You have the CIA saying one thing — I haven't gotten the briefings yet. The FBI is saying something else. We need to get to the bottom of this in a fair, nonpartisan, non-finger-pointing way," Schumer told CBS, noting that he will not receive any top-level intelligence briefings until he is formally installed as a Senate leader early next year.

McCain, joining the CBS interview from Arizona, said that based on information he has seen, he cannot say for certain that he believes the CIA's assessment that Russia intervened in the election to benefit Trump. But, he added, "there's no doubt about the hacking — let's establish that."

"I was hacked into, my [presidential] campaign in 2008 was hacked into, so there's no doubt about the hacking," McCain told CBS. "Then the question is about the intention. But it's all about the larger issue about the cyber threat we face from Russia, China and other countries. It's another form of warfare and the entire issue is going to be investigated by the Armed Services Committee because it's a threat to our national security."

McCain also said he has no information about whether Russia hacked the Republican National Committee — a point strongly disputed by party leaders who say they've seen no evidence of such an intrusion.

"We do not know what they have done. There's good evidence they've hacked into the DNC," McCain said.

In a separate statement, Schumer said he welcomed McConnell's support for a bipartisan investigation.

But McConnell and Schumer had not discussed the details of how an investigation would unfold as of Monday, aides said. Schumer is expected to call for at least the partial disclosure of any investigation's findings, aides added, a request that would carry significant political weight, given the Intelligence Committee's penchant for secret proceedings and the potential for revelations embarrassing to the Trump administration.

Other senators, including James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), have expressed support for a broad Senate investigation. But Lankford said on Sunday that he has seen no evidence of Russia tampering with election results.

Democrats calling for a joint House-Senate probe believe that a public review of the information, on par with past public reviews of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, would better serve the public.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that a bicameral investigation "would serve the purpose of informing the public, developing a concerted response, deterring the Russians from further malign cyber action and inoculating the public against such manipulation in the future."

Another group of top-ranking Senate Democrats have stated their preference for an independent commission to examine the allegations of Russian interference in the election. The commission they proposed would include individuals appointed by Republican and Democratic congressional leaders, who would have subpoena power and be required to produce a report on their findings within 18 months.

The idea comes from Sens. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who will serve next year as top Democrats on the Foreign Relations, Judiciary and Appropriations Committees, respectively. In a statement, they said the purpose of the commission would be to "seek to identify those responsible, and recommend a response as well as actions the U.S. can take to defend itself in the future."

When asked, McConnell on Monday also praised most of Trump's Cabinet nominees as "outstanding" choices, but declined to weigh in on the potential nomination of ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson to serve as the next secretary of state — signaling that McConnell, like other Republicans, may have doubts about selecting an oil executive with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the nation's top diplomat.

"Let's wait until we get nominees. I think, of the nominees that we're already aware of, I think I'm optimistic that they'll all be confirmed," he said. "But I don't want to comment, comment on a phantom nominee today."

Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 12, 2016, 07:12:49 PM
Where is this notion that the CIA withheld information coming from?

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 12, 2016, 07:01:05 PM
More good news from the senate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/12/12/schumer-on-congressional-probe-of-russia-i-dont-want-this-to-turn-into-a-benghazi-investigation/?utm_term=.a8862d180943

QuoteMcConnell announces Senate probe of suspected Russian election interference: 'The Russians are not our friends'

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 12, 2016, 05:53:50 PM
The fact that a decent bloc of GOP voters considers the act of passing a budget that isn't 100% of what you want is some kind of betrayal or defeat is a very serious problem.  If that view is maintained and hardened, it is difficult to see how the US can continue as a functioning state and a democracy at the same time.

Quote from: derspiess on December 13, 2016, 10:12:24 PM
Wow, so the breach was caused by Podesta responding to a phishing email? :lol:  Dumbass.

Quote from: derspiess on December 13, 2016, 10:12:24 PM
Wow, so the breach was caused by Podesta responding to a phishing email? :lol:  Dumbass.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 13, 2016, 10:26:55 PM

Quote from: derspiess on December 13, 2016, 10:12:24 PM
Wow, so the breach was caused by Podesta responding to a phishing email? :lol:  Dumbass.

By far, still the easiest, most efficient way to hack.  Oooh, a holiday eCard!

QuotePolitics
The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

By ERIC LIPTON, DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE
DEC. 13, 2016

WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named "the Dukes," a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government's best-protected networks.

Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for "the Dukes" and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn't certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.

"I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call," Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.

QuoteU.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack

by William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian and Cynthia McFadden

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.

Ultimately, the CIA has assessed, the Russian government wanted to elect Donald Trump. The FBI and other agencies don't fully endorse that view, but few officials would dispute that the Russian operation was intended to harm Clinton's candidacy by leaking embarrassing emails about Democrats.

The latest intelligence said to show Putin's involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia.

The statement said officials believed that "only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." That was an intelligence judgment based on an understanding of the Russian system of government, which Putin controls with absolute authority.

Now the U.S has solid information tying Putin to the operation, the intelligence officials say. Their use of the term "high confidence" implies that the intelligence is nearly incontrovertible.

"It is most certainly consistent with the Putin that I have watched and used to work with when I was an ambassador and in the government," said Michael McFaul, who was ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014.

"He has had a vendetta against Hillary Clinton, that has been known for a long time because of what she said about his elections back in the parliamentary elections of 2011. He wants to discredit American democracy and make us weaker in terms of leading the liberal democratic order. And most certainly he likes President-elect Trump's views on Russia," McFaul added. Clinton cast doubt on the integrity of Russia's elections.

As part of contingency planning for potential retaliation against Russia, according to officials, U.S. intelligence agencies have stepped up their probing into his personal financial empire.

American officials have concluded that Putin's network controls some $85 billion worth of assets, officials told NBC News.

Neither the CIA nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would comment.

A former CIA official who worked on Russia told NBC News that it's not clear the U.S. can embarrass Putin, given that many Russians are already familiar with allegations he has grown rich through corruption and has ordered the killings of political adversaries.

But a currently serving U.S. intelligence official said that there are things Putin is sensitive about, including anything that makes him seem weak.

The former CIA official said the Obama administration may feel compelled to respond before it leaves office.

"This whole thing has heated up so much," he said. "I can very easily see them saying, `We can't just say wow, this was terrible and there's nothing we can do.'"

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 14, 2016, 11:31:11 PM
NBC reporting that Putin personally directed the operation :bleeding:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-officials-putin-personally-involved-u-s-election-hack-n696146

QuoteU.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack

by William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian and Cynthia McFadden

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.

Ultimately, the CIA has assessed, the Russian government wanted to elect Donald Trump. The FBI and other agencies don't fully endorse that view, but few officials would dispute that the Russian operation was intended to harm Clinton's candidacy by leaking embarrassing emails about Democrats.

The latest intelligence said to show Putin's involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia.

The statement said officials believed that "only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." That was an intelligence judgment based on an understanding of the Russian system of government, which Putin controls with absolute authority.

Now the U.S has solid information tying Putin to the operation, the intelligence officials say. Their use of the term "high confidence" implies that the intelligence is nearly incontrovertible.

"It is most certainly consistent with the Putin that I have watched and used to work with when I was an ambassador and in the government," said Michael McFaul, who was ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014.

"He has had a vendetta against Hillary Clinton, that has been known for a long time because of what she said about his elections back in the parliamentary elections of 2011. He wants to discredit American democracy and make us weaker in terms of leading the liberal democratic order. And most certainly he likes President-elect Trump's views on Russia," McFaul added. Clinton cast doubt on the integrity of Russia's elections.

As part of contingency planning for potential retaliation against Russia, according to officials, U.S. intelligence agencies have stepped up their probing into his personal financial empire.

American officials have concluded that Putin's network controls some $85 billion worth of assets, officials told NBC News.

Neither the CIA nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would comment.

A former CIA official who worked on Russia told NBC News that it's not clear the U.S. can embarrass Putin, given that many Russians are already familiar with allegations he has grown rich through corruption and has ordered the killings of political adversaries.

But a currently serving U.S. intelligence official said that there are things Putin is sensitive about, including anything that makes him seem weak.

The former CIA official said the Obama administration may feel compelled to respond before it leaves office.

"This whole thing has heated up so much," he said. "I can very easily see them saying, `We can't just say wow, this was terrible and there's nothing we can do.'"

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 14, 2016, 11:31:11 PM

"split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.

Quote
The latest intelligence said to show Putin's involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia.

Quote from: viper37 on December 15, 2016, 12:36:38 AM
maybe, just maybe, if there were less agencies, they'd be better at doing their job instead of dividing their efforts everywhere.

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 11:50:47 AM
I am not sure how 16 agencies would be "better at doing their job" (whatever that means) than 17.

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 15, 2016, 12:00:23 PM
Less redundancy leading to more effective use of resources?

Not that redundancy is necessarily a bad thing, but 17 organizations may be overkill.

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 12:22:17 PM
Seventeen or more different restaurants in any city is overkill.  We should reduce that to three or four.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 12:12:55 PM
Yes, the US Navy, for instance, should wait for their intel to arrive in 4 to 6 weeks from another agency instead of collecting it themselves.

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 15, 2016, 12:23:28 PM

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 12:22:17 PM
Seventeen or more different restaurants in any city is overkill.  We should reduce that to three or four.

Not even remotely comparable.

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 12:25:40 PM
:ike:

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 12:24:20 PM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 12:12:55 PM
Yes, the US Navy, for instance, should wait for their intel to arrive in 4 to 6 weeks from another agency instead of collecting it themselves.

Naval intelligence (and, indeed, most us "intelligence agencies") uses almost entirely centrally collected info, and just interprets it in ways meaningful to its customers.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 12:42:50 PM

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 12:24:20 PM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 12:12:55 PM
Yes, the US Navy, for instance, should wait for their intel to arrive in 4 to 6 weeks from another agency instead of collecting it themselves.

Naval intelligence (and, indeed, most us "intelligence agencies") uses almost entirely centrally collected info, and just interprets it in ways meaningful to its customers.

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 15, 2016, 01:13:19 PM
Jesus fucking christ you're a tiresome old man.

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 01:07:07 PM
Yes, your point was the point that Avoid the Facts Teach is probably ignorant of, or at least doesn't care about because the bumper-sticker thinking is so much easier to follow:  there are different agencies because there are different customers, and what one agency is good at analyzing isn't going to be very satisfactory to another customer that needs something else analyzed.  The analyst who understands the implications of a satellite photo of a submarine propeller isn't going to be of much use to a customer who wants to know the range of an ISIS technical.  Different agencies have different "menus' to choose from.

But that comparison isn't even remotely comparable, according to Intel Expert Eddie.  :lol:

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 12:12:55 PM
Yes, the US Navy, for instance, should wait for their intel to arrive in 4 to 6 weeks from another agency instead of collecting it themselves.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 02:54:20 PM
Somebody should get on this right away.

Quote from: grumbler on December 15, 2016, 12:24:20 PM

Naval intelligence (and, indeed, most us "intelligence agencies") uses almost entirely centrally collected info, and just interprets it in ways meaningful to its customers.

Quote from: Berkut on December 15, 2016, 02:00:37 PM
Why not have the number that the people who actually do the work think is appropriate?

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 10:31:17 PM
In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep that will air Friday on Morning Edition, Obama said, "I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections ... we need to take action. And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be." (http://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505775550/obama-on-russian-hacking-we-need-to-take-action-and-we-will)

You better hurry the fuck up then, man.  We've got 30 days, and a lot of people have use-it-or-lose-it vacation time to zburn up.

Quote
By/ David Martin/ CBS News/ December 15, 2016, 6:54 PM

Russian hack almost brought the U.S. military to its knees
Last Updated Dec 15, 2016 7:01 PM EST

Russian hackers struck at the heart of the U.S. military in August 2015 by seizing the e-mail system used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CBS News has learned.

Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey was alerted to the attack by an early-morning phone call from the Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Mike Rogers.

Now retired, Dempsey told CBS News in an exclusive interview that the attack was proceeding at an alarming speed. Within an hour, hackers had seized control of the unclassified e-mail system used by the Pentagon's Joint Staff, the organization of some 3,500 military officers and civilians who work for the Chairman.

In that time, the hackers seized the computer credentials of Dempsey and hundreds of other senior officers -- the passwords and electronic signatures they used to sign on to the network. The only way to stop the attack was to take the network down.

The attack, which officials now blame on Russia, began with 30,000 e-mails sent to a West Coast university. Of those 30,000, four were forwarded to members of the Joint Staff and one was opened -- allowing the hackers in. Since it was an unclassified network, the attack had no real intelligence value.

It was not spying, but a full-on assault whose only apparent purpose was to cause damage and force the Pentagon to replace both hardware and software, which took about two weeks to accomplish.

The motive for the attack was believed to be Russian anger at economic sanctions orchestrated by the Obama administration in response to Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and interference in Ukraine.

Cyber attacks have come to be known as weapons of mass disruption, and it is now clear that Russia has used them not just to meddle in U.S. elections -- but to do harm to the American military.

© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 15, 2016, 10:31:17 PM
In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep that will air Friday on Morning Edition, Obama said, "I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections ... we need to take action. And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be." (http://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505775550/obama-on-russian-hacking-we-need-to-take-action-and-we-will)

You better hurry the fuck up then, man.  We've got 30 days, and a lot of people have use-it-or-lose-it vacation time to burn up.

Quote from: Tonitrus on December 16, 2016, 12:11:11 AM
Use or lose doesn't expire until the end of the fiscal year.  :contract:



*I should know...I'm sitting on about 20.  :P

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 15, 2016, 11:38:59 PM
Christ

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-hack-almost-brought-the-u-s-military-to-its-knees/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab6a&linkId=32446140

QuoteDonald Trump supporters in Moscow as sanctions fight heats up

(CNN)A Donald Trump supporter and former member of Congress is in Russia this week, as questions about the President-elect's policies toward Moscow roil his transition.

Former Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston spoke this week in the Russian capital with American business leaders in a closed-door session. Publicly, however, he suggested that Western sanctions on Russia over its aggression in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea could be lifted.

"Trump can look at sanctions. They've been in place long enough," Kingston said during an interview with NPR in Moscow. "Has the desired result been reached? He doesn't have to abide by the Obama foreign policy. That gives him a fresh start."

A spokeswoman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Kingston's visit or remarks.

The sanctions resulted from a major push from US to coordinate with its European allies, who might see the move as an abandonment of cooperation with Europe. At the same time, the Europeans have been less enthusiastic about the economic restrictions because of their trade ties to Russia and would be unlikely to extend them if Trump no longer backs them.

"Among the many questions the businesses asked ... they had a number of questions, but one of the questions was 'What about sanctions?' to which I said 'Sanctions not something the administrations going to lead with at all,'" Kingston told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead" Thursday. "The sanctions have been in place a while now. The administration should take a look and say, 'Are the results what we were looking for?' Brand new administration, it's a good time to revitalize."

Back in the US, Kingston's former colleagues in Congress are wrestling over how to respond to Russia's alleged interference in the presidential election -- with many, Republicans included, calling for additional sanctions due to US intelligence assessments of hacking of Democratic organizations.

One of the consistent messages of Trump's presidential campaign was a promised push for better relations with Russia, in particular its President Vladimir Putin.

In nominating ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to lead the State Department, Trump again signaled his desire for a diplomatic thaw through the pursuit of shared economic and foreign policy goals. Tillerson, who did extensive business in Russia and was recommended to the transition by a group of Republican establishment foreign policy hands who do business with the oil giant, was awarded the Order of Friendship by Putin in 2013.

But Tillerson's nomination has set off alarm bells among some Senate Republicans. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room" Wednesday, "I can't imagine I would vote (to confirm) anybody that believes that we should not sanction Russia, given the fact that they did in fact interfere in our election."

"If they don't believe sanctions are appropriate, given what Putin has been doing all over the world, including in our backyard, then I don't think they have the judgment to be secretary of state," he added, "because if you don't go after Russia, you're inviting the other bad actors on the planet to come after you."

On Thursday, Graham's Democratic colleague, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, tweeted that she was "down" with his tweeted pledge to put "crippling sanctions against Russia" on Trump's White House desk.

Controversial Trump loyalist Carter Page, who has spoken positively about the Tillerson nomination and opposes sanctions, also raised eyebrows recently when he turned up in Moscow and gave a presentation and news conference at the Russian state news outlet Sputnik.

"If you look at where the current state of US-Russia relations is, it's much more toxic and much more dangerous and there's a lot more work that needs to be done to overcome this," Page said, before suggesting reports on US intelligence assessments about Russian hacking during the campaign "almost borders on the 'fake news' category."

Asked by a reporter if he believed there was a deliberate US government attempt to deceive the American public about the source of the hacks, Page said it is "very easy to make it look like it was country X, in this case, Russia, that did this."

"I've talked with various IT experts that have suggested that (intentional US misdirection) could very well be a serious possibility," he added, "and these guys are pros to make certain paths that can mislead and again we've seen many mistakes from an intelligence standpoint previously."

On Thursday, Trump still publicly questioned whether Russia was involved in hacking American politicians, an assertion uniformly supported by the US Intelligence community.

"If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?" Trump tweeted.

QuoteSen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has said he might vote against confirmation of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, but gave Tillerson directions on how to get his vote. First, when asked if he believes the Russians interfered with the election, the correct answer is: "Yes." Second, when asked if he supports additional sanctions on Russia as a result of the hacking, the correct answer is again: "Yes." If Tillerson passes this simple test, he might get Graham's vote when his confirmation comes to the floor of the Senate. Graham is not on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, so he won't be able to ask the questions himself, but no doubt one of the other members, possibly a Democrat, would be willing to ask them for him.

Yesterday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said he is open to supporting Tillerson. If he does, that makes the confirmation process easier, since then four Republicans would have to defect to defeat Tillerson. (V)

Quote from: FunkMonk on December 16, 2016, 06:21:40 AM
Putin is going to get away with all this, isn't he?  :lol:

QuoteAre we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 16, 2016, 12:47:47 PM
If this had been written as fiction c 2014 no one would have believed the premise would be plausible.

Quote from: PJL on December 16, 2016, 02:09:06 PM
I suspect what is happening is that Dixiecrats who realised in the 1980s & 90s that the Democratic Party no longer represented their views and moved to the Republican Party, are now realising Russia under Putin is not the USSR anymore, and view it as another conservative & Christian country that shares many of their views, and therefore are more likely to be sympathetic to them and their allies.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 16, 2016, 02:21:52 PM
Where is that Putin unfavorability graph?

Quote from: Eddie Teach on December 15, 2016, 01:13:19 PM
Jesus fucking christ you're a tiresome old man.

Quote from: viper37 on December 15, 2016, 01:27:31 PM
That's why there was a need to create the Central Intelligence Agency to coordinate information sharing between various agencies and then create Homeland Security to coordinate information sharing between the agency responsible for this and other intelligence agencies.

Quote from: alfred russel on December 15, 2016, 06:02:08 PM
Does this mean when the a given set of intelligence arrives, it is interpreted as follows:

Army Intelligence: "there is a need to control the situation on the ground"
Air Force Intelligence: "tactical bombing can effectively reduce the threat"
Naval Intelligence: "in a world such as this, a 10 carrier navy is essential"
Homeland Security Intelligence: "TSA officials need more scanners to see what people would look like naked in order to handle this threat"

Quote from: dps on December 15, 2016, 10:12:38 PM

Quote from: Berkut on December 15, 2016, 02:00:37 PM
Why not have the number that the people who actually do the work think is appropriate?

And how many do those people actually think is appropriate?

Quote from: Valmy on December 16, 2016, 02:21:17 PM
Hey the French Right said they would prefer to be ruled by Hitler than Blum. And then they went out and made sure they were.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 16, 2016, 02:51:36 PM
Thanks Haiku.

The point I wanted to make is while that graph does make Republicans look like retards, it doesn't make Democrats look all that good either.

Quote from: Valmy on December 16, 2016, 02:53:09 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 16, 2016, 02:51:36 PM
Thanks Haiku.

The point I wanted to make is while that graph does make Republicans look like retards, it doesn't make Democrats look all that good either.

The issue these days is not that the Democrats are great, they are terrible. The problem is the Republicans are worse.

Quote from: Habbaku on December 16, 2016, 02:58:45 PM
:yes:  The Republicans are measurably worse on this.  I don't think we would have seen something similar to a 20-30 point bump for a Putin-like figure if Hillary won.  That a large segment (call it 40%) of Republicans are willing to turn on a dime on an issue like approving of a strongman like Putin who is actually, actively trying to harm our country is far more worrying than the modest amount of useful idiot Democrats that approve of Putin's actions.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 16, 2016, 10:58:23 PM

Just cannot fathom how people--and Republicans, of all people--can give such high approval ratings for a thug gangster and chauvinistic strongman like Putin, formerly of the KGB.   

Quote from: citizen k on December 16, 2016, 11:24:15 PM
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthemostimportantnews.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F10%2FPutin-Vs.-Obama.jpg&hash=1b89deed7816cb5229c55a610581dcc897558faa)

;)

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 17, 2016, 12:57:31 AM
And yet, no one ever seems to remember Dubya looking into his eyes and seeing Putin's soul.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 17, 2016, 02:29:23 AM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 17, 2016, 12:57:31 AM
And yet, no one ever seems to remember Dubya looking into his eyes and seeing Putin's soul.

Everyone remembers that. :mellow:

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 17, 2016, 09:33:49 AM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 17, 2016, 02:29:23 AM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 17, 2016, 12:57:31 AM
And yet, no one ever seems to remember Dubya looking into his eyes and seeing Putin's soul.

Everyone remembers that. :mellow:

Didn't do anything about it, now did we?

QuoteThat time Monica Crowley tweeted that Putin should hack Clinton's emails

Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's pick for senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council once suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin should hack former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's emails.

In June, Monica Crowley tweeted a Daily Caller article that reported that the State Department wouldn't release Clinton's emails for 27 months.

She wrote in her tweet, "I guess Putin is going to have to do it."

Her message received criticism from followers on Twitter, who -- after her new role was announced -- wrote that a senior member of the National Security Council shouldn't advocate for Russia to hack emails.

The tweet was also resurfaced in light of Thursday's news that US intelligence shows the hacked emails during the 2016 election were carried out with sophisticated hacking tools, the equivalent of those used by the US National Security Agency. The use of the advanced tools suggests Putin was involved in the hacks.

This isn't the first time Crowley has faced criticism for her tweets. In October 2015, she tweeted what appeared to be a message of support for Trump's plan to build a wall between the US and Mexico with a photo of her standing next to what was left of the Berlin Wall, Crowley wrote, "At the Berlin Wall last week. Walls work."

An hour later, in an attempt to clarify her tweet, she wrote that critics "missed the point."

She wrote, "For those of you who have missed the point, this is what remains of the Berlin Wall."

The photo in the tweet shows a marker denoting the years during which the wall, a symbol of the Cold War and communist oppression, divided Berlin.

Quote

FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House

By Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima

December 16  

FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House, officials disclosed Friday, as President Obama issued a public warning to Moscow that it could face retaliation.

New revelations about Comey's position could put to rest suggestions by some lawmakers that the CIA and the FBI weren't on the same page on Russian President Vladi­mir Putin's intentions.

Russia has denied being behind the cyber-intrusions, which targeted the Democratic National Committee and the private emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. Trump, in turn, has repeatedly said he doubts the veracity of U.S. intelligence blaming Moscow for the hacks.

"I think it's ridiculous," Trump said in an interview with "Fox News Sunday," his first Sunday news-show appearance since the Nov. 8 election. "I think it's just another excuse. I don't believe it. . . . No, I don't believe it at all."

At a "thank you" event Thursday night with some of her top campaign donors and fundraisers, Clinton said she believed Russian-backed hackers went after her campaign because of a personal grudge that Putin had against her. Putin had blamed Clinton for fomenting mass protests in Russia after disputed 2011 parliamentary elections that challenged his rule. Putin said Clinton, then secretary of state, had "sent a signal" to protesters by labeling the elections "neither free nor fair."

The positions of Comey and Clapper were revealed in a message that CIA Director John Brennan sent to the agency's workforce Friday.

"Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," Brennan said, according to U.S. officials who have seen the message.

The CIA and the FBI declined to comment on Brennan's message or on the classified intelligence assessment that CIA officials shared with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month, setting off a political firestorm.

In the closed-door Senate briefing, CIA officials said it was now "quite clear" that electing Trump was one of Russia's goals, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

CIA and FBI officials do not think Russia had a "single purpose" by intervening during the presidential campaign, officials said. In addition to the goal of helping elect Trump, Putin aimed to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, intelligence officials have told lawmakers.

A few days after the Senate briefing, a senior FBI counter­intelligence official briefed the House Intelligence Committee but was not as categorical as the CIA briefer about Russia's intention to help Trump, according to officials who were present. The FBI official's more cautious presentation of the intelligence to the House panel left some Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the room with the impression that the FBI disagreed with the CIA.

Officials close to the FBI and the CIA now say that lawmakers had misunderstood Comey's position. "The truth is they were never all that different in the first place," an official said. Similarly, officials said
, Clapper and Brennan saw the intelligence the same way.

Earlier this week, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a Trump supporter, wrote to spy chiefs to demand briefings on the Russian meddling.

But Clapper responded that he wanted to first complete a review of all available U.S. intelligence, as directed by Obama.

Brennan tried to talk to Nunes several times about the dispute. But officials said the congressman didn't take his calls until after he issued a statement Wednesday asking intelligence leaders to "clarify press reports that the CIA has a new assessment that it has not shared with us."




Officials disputed the statement, saying Nunes had been fully briefed on the intelligence.

"In recent days, I have had several conversations with members of Congress, providing an update on the status of the review as well as the considerations that need to be taken into account as we proceed," Brennan wrote in his message to CIA staffers. "Many — but unfortunately not all — members understand and appreciate the importance and the gravity of the issue, and they are very supportive of the process that is underway."

Brennan wrote to the CIA workforce, officials said, to reassure them in the face of accusations from Trump supporters that intelligence was being politicized.

In a statement, Nunes said: "We have not received any information from Intelligence Community (IC) agencies indicating that they have developed new assessments on this issue. I am alarmed that supposedly new information continues to leak to the media but has not been provided to Congress."

In one of the last news conferences of his presidency, Obama defended his administration's response to the Russian hacking and vowed to "send a clear message to Russia" that its meddling was unacceptable.

"I think we handled it the way it should have been handled," he said of the hacking investigation and the lack of a formal accusation of blame until a month before the election. "We allowed law enforcement and the intelligence community to do its job without political influence."

Obama was referring to an Oct. 7 statement by Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson publicly blaming Russia for hacking political organizations, a clear reference to the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic officials.

U.S. officials said an earlier draft of the Clapper-Johnson statement singled out Putin by name for authorizing the influence operation. But before the final statement was made public, Putin's name was removed "so it wouldn't be provocative," one official said. Instead, the statement blamed "Russia's senior-most officials."




At that time, Obama said, the U.S. intelligence community "did not attribute motives" to Russia's decision to intervene in the election.

"Imagine if we had done the opposite," he said Friday. "It would have become immediately just one more political scrum. And part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place — at a time, by the way, when the president-elect himself was raising questions about the integrity of the election."

At Friday's news conference, Obama did not directly point the finger at the Russian president. But he came close to doing so by saying: "Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin."

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 18, 2016, 06:48:48 PM
Well isn't that lovely, wouldn't it have been nice if they had said something about this before the election.

Quote from: alfred russel on December 18, 2016, 07:16:17 PM

Quote from: jimmy olsen on December 18, 2016, 06:48:48 PM
Well isn't that lovely, wouldn't it have been nice if they had said something about this before the election.

Neither the FBI nor CIA has opined on an extremely active yet also extremely annoying online pro Clinton propaganda campaign originating from South Korea. Those with knowledge of the activity note that while it likely had little impact on voters, any effect was likely pro Trump due to a backlash from its extremely annoying nature. They also indicated a belief that the originator of the propaganda is really stupid and needs to be punched.

QuoteA month later, the U.S. used the latest incarnation of an old Cold War communications system — the so-called "Red Phone" that connects Moscow to Washington — to reinforce Obama's September warning that the U.S. would consider any interference on Election Day a grave matter.

This time Obama used the phrase "armed conflict."

"International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace," said part of a message sent over the Red Phone on Oct. 31, according to a senior U.S. official. "We will hold Russia to those standards."

Quote from: citizen k on December 16, 2016, 11:24:15 PM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 16, 2016, 10:58:23 PM

Just cannot fathom how people--and Republicans, of all people--can give such high approval ratings for a thug gangster and chauvinistic strongman like Putin, formerly of the KGB.   

(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthemostimportantnews.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F10%2FPutin-Vs.-Obama.jpg&hash=1b89deed7816cb5229c55a610581dcc897558faa)

;)

QuoteRussian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

Quote from: Syt on December 17, 2016, 03:12:50 PM
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/15/politics/monica-crowley-twitter-vladimir-putin-donald-trump/index.html (http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/15/politics/monica-crowley-twitter-vladimir-putin-donald-trump/index.html)

QuoteThat time Monica Crowley tweeted that Putin should hack Clinton's emails

Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's pick for senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council once suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin should hack former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's emails.

In June, Monica Crowley tweeted a Daily Caller article that reported that the State Department wouldn't release Clinton's emails for 27 months.

She wrote in her tweet, "I guess Putin is going to have to do it."

Her message received criticism from followers on Twitter, who -- after her new role was announced -- wrote that a senior member of the National Security Council shouldn't advocate for Russia to hack emails.

The tweet was also resurfaced in light of Thursday's news that US intelligence shows the hacked emails during the 2016 election were carried out with sophisticated hacking tools, the equivalent of those used by the US National Security Agency. The use of the advanced tools suggests Putin was involved in the hacks.

This isn't the first time Crowley has faced criticism for her tweets. In October 2015, she tweeted what appeared to be a message of support for Trump's plan to build a wall between the US and Mexico with a photo of her standing next to what was left of the Berlin Wall, Crowley wrote, "At the Berlin Wall last week. Walls work."

An hour later, in an attempt to clarify her tweet, she wrote that critics "missed the point."

She wrote, "For those of you who have missed the point, this is what remains of the Berlin Wall."

The photo in the tweet shows a marker denoting the years during which the wall, a symbol of the Cold War and communist oppression, divided Berlin.

Quote
Jan 10 2017, 3:23 pm ET

Pro-Trump Senators Back Intelligence Officials on Hacking Report

by Erik Ortiz

Two of President-elect Donald Trump's biggest supporters on the Senate Intelligence Committee told the nation's top intelligence officials Tuesday they have no reason to doubt Russia interfered in last year's election.

Their decision to endorse the findings comes after Trump spent weeks sowing doubts about Moscow's alleged involvement and its preference that he win the presidency over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — findings that the president-elect said had "absolutely no effect on the outcome" of the 2016 presidential election.

The committee meeting Tuesday was the first time Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, appeared to directly endorse the intelligence findings.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, also a vocal Trump supporter, didn't challenge the conclusions that the Russian government was targeting the election either, but said Clinton was at fault for faltering to Trump.

She "lost this election not because of Vladimir Putin or fake news or that she lost the electoral college, but because she ran a bad campaign," Cotton said.

Senators peppered FBI Director James Comey, along with James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, and John Brennan, the CIA director, with questions about Russian conducting cyberespionage to influence the presidential election.

Comey said that the agency's requests to examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee were denied — disputing a report this month that the FBI never asked for access.

Comey's comments were his first made publicly since the November election and since last week's release of a declassified report into the alleged Russian interference.

He was called to the Capitol to speak about the alleged Russian hacking and was not specifically asked about the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. Comey faced criticism for his decision to notify Congress just 11 days before the election that the agency was reviewing a new batch of emails that appeared to be pertinent to their investigation.

Moscow tried to help Trump "by discrediting Secretary Clinton," according to the 25-page report, the contents of which was met with "high confidence" from the FBI and CIA. The NSA "has moderate confidence" in the findings implicating Russia.

Russia has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks.

Trump met with U.S. intelligence officials Friday after weeks of openly feuding with the community, and stopped short of fully accepting the intelligence report. He insisted in a statement that the hacking had "absolutely no effect on the outcome."

The Democratic National Committee, the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department and American corporations were targeted by the cyberattacks, two U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News about the report. Republicans were also targeted in the cyberespionage campaign although they did not suffer the same email leaks as the Democrats did.

Comey told senators Tuesday that there were intrusions at state-level voter registration databases, but there was no evidence that Russian hackers targeted the Trump campaign or current Republican National Committee domains.

Clapper said that only stolen information from Democrats was released.

He added that Russia could be seeking to influence political views in about a couple dozen other countries.

Commitee member Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, said the Russians got what they wanted by creating chaos "to get us to fight each other over whether our elections were legitimate."

Rubio also raised the worry — and Clapper endorsed it — that the Russians could plant incriminating information on a U.S. politician to discredit him or her.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, said Russia's motive was simply to "help Russia and to weaken America."

"In the next election, the shoe could be on the other foot, and a foreign power could decide they want a Democrat to win next time," he added.

Trump has said he would put together a plan within 90 days to "aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks," but indicated discussions on how to do so wouldn't be done publicly.

In retaliation against Russia, President Barack Obama last month unveiled sanctions against the country's intelligence service and expelled 35 of its diplomats from the United States.
 

Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 30, 2016, 05:11:11 PM

Quote from: DGuller on December 30, 2016, 04:26:25 PM
Seriously, what the fuck is up with Trump and Putin?  Trump is super inconsistent about every single issues I can think of, except for his sycophantic expression of admiration for Putin. 

Something doesn't add up here.  Even if there is no funny business there and he wants to reconcile with Russia out of pure pragmatism, why broadcast your infatuation to everyone and give up all your bargaining power?

He is a compromised asset.  Both he and Flynn have made multiple trips to Russia in recent years--as private citizens, and therefore without benefit of the proper security awareness, or measures such as TSCM taken. 

We don't know how compromised they are, and to what degree.  Phones, laptops, personal devices. The ability to conduct and maintain state espionage starts there.  That's why they are both national security threats in the matter in which they conduct themselves. 

Quote
Breakink News, Yes
Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him

(CNN) - Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.
The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

The classified briefings last week were presented by four of the senior-most US intelligence chiefs -- Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.

One reason the nation's intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-russia/index.html

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 10, 2017, 07:30:27 PM
Comey declined to respond to the question whether the FBI was investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Quote from: FunkMonk on January 10, 2017, 08:46:33 PM
So the rumors of Trump's Russian orgies are true :hmm:

Quote from: CountDeMoney on January 10, 2017, 08:49:54 PM

Quote from: FunkMonk on January 10, 2017, 08:46:33 PM
So the rumors of Trump's Russian orgies are true :hmm:

Knowing Trump, as textbook as his pathologies are, it's probably just basic, run-of-the-mill, boring bang-em-three-at-a-time stuff.  The man's completely predictable.

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 08:54:20 PM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on January 10, 2017, 08:49:54 PM

Quote from: FunkMonk on January 10, 2017, 08:46:33 PM
So the rumors of Trump's Russian orgies are true :hmm:

Knowing Trump, as textbook as his pathologies are, it's probably just basic, run-of-the-mill, boring bang-em-three-at-a-time stuff.  The man's completely predictable.

Nothing wrong wit that

Quote from: grumbler on January 10, 2017, 07:32:53 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 10, 2017, 07:30:27 PM
Comey declined to respond to the question whether the FBI was investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Of course he's not going to talk about it; it isn't weeks before an election, and Trump is Republican, anyway.

QuoteTestifying before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, James Comey said he could not comment in public on a possible investigation into allegations of links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

"I would never comment on investigations – whether we have one or not – in an open forum like this, so I really can't answer one way or another," said Comey, at a hearing into the US intelligence agencies' conclusion that Russia intervened in the election to benefit Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/10/james-comey-trump-russia-links-investigation-senate

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 09:08:58 PM
NOT MY UNPUNCHED THIRD WORLD WAR GAMES!*

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 10, 2017, 07:30:27 PM
Comey declined to respond to the question whether the FBI was investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Quote from: merithyn on January 10, 2017, 09:21:52 PM
Rumor has it that Trump paid the prostitutes to piss on the bed that Barack and Michelle slept in. There is something so wrong with that man.  :yuk:

Quote from: Grinning_Colossus on January 10, 2017, 09:27:29 PM
Interesting. I would have guessed 15 year olds before watersports--or at least that it would be the other way around. In Russia, contractors piss on Trump?

Quote from: Grinning_Colossus on January 10, 2017, 09:27:29 PM
Interesting. I would have guessed 15 year olds before watersports--or at least that it would be the other way around. In Russia, contractors piss on Trump?

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 09:22:38 PM
Your late, sugartits.

Quote from: merithyn on January 10, 2017, 10:08:39 PM

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 09:22:38 PM
Your late, sugartits.

You're, gimpy noodle dick.

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 10:10:51 PM
Spunk in bladder is my Yi approved nickname lady.  :mad:

Quote from: merithyn on January 10, 2017, 10:08:39 PM

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 09:22:38 PM
Your late, sugartits.

You're, gimpy noodle dick.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 10, 2017, 10:13:12 PM

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 10:10:51 PM
Spunk in bladder is my Yi approved nickname lady.  :mad:

Chief Spunk-in-bladder. :contract:

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 10, 2017, 10:13:12 PM

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 10:10:51 PM
Spunk in bladder is my Yi approved nickname lady.  :mad:

Chief Spunk-in-bladder. :contract:

Quote from: FunkMonk on January 10, 2017, 10:26:42 PM
Trump made a national laughing stock before he's president? :hmm:

Quote from: jimmy olsen on January 10, 2017, 10:38:16 PM
GOP should be happy, looks like Trump has finally embraced trickle down economics. :)

Quote from: CountDeMoney on January 10, 2017, 09:29:28 PM

Quote from: Grinning_Colossus on January 10, 2017, 09:27:29 PM
Interesting. I would have guessed 15 year olds before watersports--or at least that it would be the other way around. In Russia, contractors piss on Trump?

Me too, actually.  Always figured him for the Barely Legal types.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on January 10, 2017, 10:39:54 PM

Quote from: jimmy olsen on January 10, 2017, 10:38:16 PM
GOP should be happy, looks like Trump has finally embraced trickle down economics. :)

Good one, Timmay.

Quote from: jimmy olsen on January 10, 2017, 10:38:16 PM
GOP should be happy, looks like Trump has finally embraced trickle down economics. :)

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 10:15:44 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 10, 2017, 10:13:12 PM

Quote from: Ed Anger on January 10, 2017, 10:10:51 PM
Spunk in bladder is my Yi approved nickname lady.  :mad:

Chief Spunk-in-bladder. :contract:

:)

I'm 1/4th semen.

QuoteFAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 12:34:22 AM
Dayum, it's ALL CAPS time.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/818990655418617856

QuoteFAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

QuoteIt's the article by Toby Young in the Spectator defending watching prostitutes piss on each other I'm looking forward to
— rob manuel (@robmanuel) January 10, 2017


*Drinks from 'Liberal Tears' mug*
*SPITS LIQUID*
HOLD ON. THAT'S NOT TEARS#watersportsgate
— Jody Smith (@ToastMaster) January 11, 2017


WikiLeaks takes on a whole meaning tonight, doesn't it?
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 11, 2017


I mean, what color did you think the shower was gonna be?
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C12WYxGVEAAtku5.jpg)
— Dan Rubenstein (@DanRubenstein) January 11, 2017


Free headline
Trump: Urine Trouble!
— Scott Weinberg (@scottEweinberg) January 10, 2017


This gives a whole new meaning to trickle-down economics. #GoldenShowers
— Patrick Quaife (@pquaife) January 11, 2017


Like most American remakes, this isn't as funny as the pig thing
— meat crime (@TomWaits4NoMan) January 11, 2017


At last! A celebrity has agreed to perform at @realDonaldTrump 's inauguration.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C12eWilWQAI1aJQ.jpg)
— Simon Hickson (@simonmhickson) January 11, 2017


It could just have been a jellyfish sting
— David O'Doherty (@phlaimeaux) January 11, 2017


Apparently Urethra Franklin just agreed to perform at the Inauguration. #goldenshowers #Trump #Russia
— Steve Sobel (@steve_sobel) January 11, 2017

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 12:34:22 AM

QuoteFAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 03:33:23 AM
What if this was all a tragic farce?

Trump goes to Russia, has a great time, courtesy of Putin, not thinking bad of it.

Putin creates a rather damning dossier on Trump and uses it to blackmail him into becoming a presidential candidate and the Kremlin's puppet in the White House.

Trump reluctantly plays along, but tries to sabotage himself by becoming the most outlandish and polarizing candidate he can possibly be. He dialy his obnoxiousness up to 11, he lies, contradicts himself and surrounds himself with a rogue's gallery of incometents, sycophants, and conspiracy theorists.

Only this backfires. Unexpectedly he not only wins the nomination, but also the election, despite losing the popular vote by a huge margin. (His efforts are intercut with Russian operatives trying to patch things up and fix his "unintentional" blunders.)

At least that's how I would write the movie of this. :P

Quote from: celedhring on January 11, 2017, 05:13:56 AM
:whistle:

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 03:47:07 AM
Honestly, though, if "Grab'em by the pussy" didn't topple him, I doubt this will.

One side will believe the stories, both about sexual adventures and untoward business dependencies with hostile nations, and the other side will brush it off as fake, exaggerated, or a distraction from the real problems.

Quote from: garbon on January 11, 2017, 06:16:41 AM
I think the response is interesting. Buzzfeed was irresponsible for releasing the report that is unverified but it was okay last year to publish hacked emails that weren't verified. :hmm:

Quote from: garbon on January 11, 2017, 06:19:16 AM
Only person I see it really potentially hurting is Tillerson as such a pro-Putin figure will be harder for Republicans to stomach in light of so much talk and details around Russian meddling.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on January 11, 2017, 07:16:33 AM

Quote from: garbon on January 11, 2017, 06:19:16 AM
Only person I see it really potentially hurting is Tillerson as such a pro-Putin figure will be harder for Republicans to stomach in light of so much talk and details around Russian meddling.

I would think Tillerson would probably be the least vulnerable.  Senior executives for a company like ExxonMobil are protected better than politicians when it comes to potential blackmail or other state-sanctioned business intelligence operations.  Corporate security for ExxonMobil is the real deal, not crowd control thugs and limo drivers like Trump's.  Because if there's anything more important than national security, it's share price.  Were anything ever happen to Tillerson, it would affect the stock market the next day.  That's completely unacceptable for a corporate security operation.

Quote from: garbon on January 11, 2017, 07:24:57 AM
Vulnerable as in Republicans wanting to confirm his nomination.

QuoteRussia has no compromising info on Trump or Clinton, report is 'total bluff' – Kremlin

Moscow says documents alleging that Russia has compromising information on Donald Trump are a fabrication and a "total bluff." Russia has never gathered information of this kind on either the US president-elect, or his former rival, Hillary Clinton.

"The Kremlin has no compromising information on Trump. This report does not correspond to reality and is nothing but an absolute fiction," the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Wednesday.

"This is a total bluff, an absolute fabrication, complete nonsense," he said.

He reiterated that there is no compromising information on Hillary Clinton either, and that the Russian authorities do not accumulate this type of information.

"Of course not. The Kremlin does not collect compromising information. :lmfao: The Kremlin [and] the Russian president are engaged in building relationships with our foreign partners, firstly – in the interests of the Russian Federation, in the interests of the Russian people, secondly – in the interests of global peace, stability and security," Peskov said.

On Tuesday, CNN published an article stating that US intelligence handed over a two-page synopsis of classified documents, which included claims that Russian operatives have compromising personal and financial information about Trump, to the president-elect and US President Barack Obama.

The information was included as an annex to a classified version of the report prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election, according to CNN.

Buzzfeed picked up the story, publishing the entire dossier purportedly "prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent."

The most appalling part of the dossier was the claim that Donald Trump has "personal obsessions and sexual perversion," including graphic sex acts, and a report that the president-elect once had Russian prostitutes urinate on each other in a hotel bed that the Obamas previously shared.

Apart from sex orgies, the dossier also suggests Russian officials offered the Republican real estate magnate lucrative deals in order to win influence over him ahead of the election.

The story exploded on Twitter with the hashtag #GoldenShowers shooting up the trending charts.

Later in the day, however, an anonymous member of the chatboard on 4chan posted a refutation of the now infamous "golden showers" story, calling it a hoax and "fanfiction." He or she claimed that several months ago, the story was sent to Republican political strategist Rick Wilson, who proceeded to send it to the CIA, which then put it in their official classified intelligence report on the election.

Moscow considers the scandal a clear attempt to damage relations with Washington and the president-elect personally. 

"This is an obvious attempt to harm our bilateral relations," Peskov said.

"Pulp fiction, that's what it is called in English. Of course, probably the best way to react would be accordingly – with a certain sense of humor."

"Although there is a downside – indeed, there are those who are stirring up the hysteria, who go out of their way to maintain this state of a witch-hunt," he added.

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 07:38:08 AM
"Of course not. The Kremlin does not collect compromising information. :lmfao:

QuoteRussia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is "A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE." Very unfair!

Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!

I win an election easily, a great "movement" is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. A sorry state!

Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

Quote
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

Quote from: LaCroix on January 11, 2017, 07:57:22 AM
anyone wondering how people bought all the crazy shit about hillary can just read the past eight hours of posts here

Quote from: garbon on January 11, 2017, 08:01:58 AM:console:

You're going to have to find a fresh angle.

Quote from: LaCroix on January 11, 2017, 08:56:48 AM

Quote from: garbon on January 11, 2017, 08:01:58 AM:console:

You're going to have to find a fresh angle.

I don't get it

Quote from: Jacob on January 11, 2017, 02:33:41 AM
Alright, at this point I'm thinking LaCroix is right and that the peeing on the bed thing is too outlandish to be true. The problem, of course, is that many people want to believe it's true and Trump's character being what it is it is just possible that it could be true, so we're running with it. So even though it's probably not true it's still believable, and that's good enough.

I agree with grumbler that the real thing is probably underage sex, maybe with some nasty intimidation thrown in - i.e. it's not of the "but she loves me" kind but the "use, discard, and humiliate with threats to keep them silent" type (that's speculation of course).

My guess is that something did happen in that hotel room and there are enough details in there for Trump to realize that the people who are circulating the story know what happened for real. So it's a warning to Trump - whether from the Russians, the CIA, or whoever - to not to piss them off, as it were.

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 03:47:07 AM
Honestly, though, if "Grab'em by the pussy" didn't topple him, I doubt this will.

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on January 11, 2017, 12:06:24 PM
I think he had sex with miners.  it's the only explanation for the coal fetish.

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 03:47:07 AM
Honestly, though, if "Grab'em by the pussy" didn't topple him, I doubt this will.

One side will believe the stories, both about sexual adventures and untoward business dependencies with hostile nations, and the other side will brush it off as fake, exaggerated, or a distraction from the real problems.

Quote from: Tamas on January 11, 2017, 05:49:32 AM
You have to concede though, the "alt-right" and the Russians are much better in how online communication works.

Quote from: Jacob on January 11, 2017, 12:45:20 PM

Quote from: Syt on January 11, 2017, 03:47:07 AM
Honestly, though, if "Grab'em by the pussy" didn't topple him, I doubt this will.

One side will believe the stories, both about sexual adventures and untoward business dependencies with hostile nations, and the other side will brush it off as fake, exaggerated, or a distraction from the real problems.

If people hear variations of the same story repeated again and again, it will sway some of them. That's how this stuff works, I reckon.

QuoteFormer MI-6 spy known to U.S. agencies is author of reports on Trump in Russia

Christopher Steele, who wrote reports on compromising material Russian operatives allegedly had collected on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, is a former officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, according to people familiar with his career.

Former British intelligence officials said Steele spent years under diplomatic cover working for the agency, also known as MI-6, in Russia and Paris and at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

After he left the spy service, Steele supplied the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with information on corruption at FIFA, international soccer's governing body.

It was his work on corruption in international soccer that lent credence to his reporting on Trump's entanglements in Russia, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

Emails seen by Reuters indicate that, in the summer of 2010, members of a New York-based FBI squad assigned to investigate "Eurasian Organized Crime" met Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA, the Swiss-based body that also organises the World Cup tournament.

People familiar with Steele's activities said his British-based company, Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired by the Football Association, Britain's domestic soccer governing body, to investigate FIFA. At the time, the Football Association was hoping to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cups. British corporate records show that Orbis was formed in March 2009.

Amid a swirl of corruption allegations, the 2018 World Cup was awarded to Moscow and Qatar was chosen to host the 2022 competition.

The FBI squad whose members met Steele subsequently opened a major investigation into alleged soccer corruption that led to dozens of U.S. indictments, including those of prominent international soccer officials.

Senior FIFA officials, including long-time president Sepp Blatter, were forced to resign.

SHIFTING GEARS

Steele was initially hired by FusionGPS, a Washington, DC-based political research firm, to investigate Trump on behalf of unidentified Republicans who wanted to stop Trump's bid for the GOP nomination. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that Steele was initially hired by Jeb Bush, one of Trump's 16 opponents in the 2016 Republican primary. It was not immediately possibly to verify the BBC's report.

He was kept on assignment by FusionGPS after Trump won the nomination and his information was circulated to Democratic Party figures and members of the media.

Steele's dealings with the FBI on Trump, initially with the senior agent who had started the FIFA probe and then moved to a post in Europe, began in July. However, Steele cut off contact with the FBI about a month before the Nov. 8 election because he was frustrated by the bureau's slow progress. 

The FBI opened preliminary investigations into Trump and his entourage's dealings with Russians that were based in part on Steele's reports, according to people familiar with the inquiries.

However, they said the Bureau shifted into low gear in the weeks before the election to avoid interfering in the vote. They said Steele grew frustrated and stopped dealing with the FBI after concluding it was not seriously investigating the material he had provided.

Steele's reports circulated for months among major media outlets, including Reuters, but neither the news organizations nor U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been able to corroborate them.

BuzzFeed published some of Steele's reports about Trump on its website on Tuesday but the President-elect and his aides later said the reports were false. Russian authorities also dismissed them.

Associates of Steele said on Wednesday he was unavailable for comment. Christopher Burrows, a director and co-founder of Orbis with Steele, told The Wall Street Journal, which first published Steele's name, that he could not confirm or deny that Steele's company had produced the reports on Trump.

QuoteHowever, they said the Bureau shifted into low gear in the weeks before the election to avoid interfering in the vote.

Quote from: Syt on January 12, 2017, 05:32:55 AM
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-trump-steele-idUKKBN14W0HV

QuoteFormer MI-6 spy known to U.S. agencies is author of reports on Trump in Russia

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on January 13, 2017, 02:55:03 PM
So Britain also tried to hack the election?  :lol:

Quote from: LaCroix on January 13, 2017, 09:26:35 PM
where do these allegations come from?

Quote from: DontSayBanana on January 13, 2017, 09:34:21 PMhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/christopher-steelethe-former-british-spy-created-donald-trump/

Which was, BTW, linked in the Trump Presidency thread, making me wonder whether you've been taking the time to actually fact-check your repartee over there if you haven't even been checking the links.

Quote from: LaCroix on January 13, 2017, 09:38:27 PM

Quote from: DontSayBanana on January 13, 2017, 09:34:21 PMhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/christopher-steelethe-former-british-spy-created-donald-trump/

Which was, BTW, linked in the Trump Presidency thread, making me wonder whether you've been taking the time to actually fact-check your repartee over there if you haven't even been checking the links.

did you edit out this part because the link wasn't in that thread or?

Quote from: LaCroix on January 13, 2017, 09:38:27 PM

Quote from: DontSayBanana on January 13, 2017, 09:34:21 PMhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/christopher-steelethe-former-british-spy-created-donald-trump/

Which was, BTW, linked in the Trump Presidency thread, making me wonder whether you've been taking the time to actually fact-check your repartee over there if you haven't even been checking the links.

did you edit out this part because the link wasn't in that thread or?

Quote from: DontSayBanana on January 13, 2017, 09:47:35 PM

Quote from: LaCroix on January 13, 2017, 09:38:27 PM

Quote from: DontSayBanana on January 13, 2017, 09:34:21 PMhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/christopher-steelethe-former-british-spy-created-donald-trump/

Which was, BTW, linked in the Trump Presidency thread, making me wonder whether you've been taking the time to actually fact-check your repartee over there if you haven't even been checking the links.

did you edit out this part because the link wasn't in that thread or?

:lol: Nice jumpy trigger finger on the reply, as I almost immediately edited that out for that reason, realizing I found that particular link on Reddit.

Quote from: grumbler on January 13, 2017, 09:47:57 PM
*Pops popcorn*

Quote from: DontSayBanana on January 13, 2017, 08:39:54 PM

Allegedly, Jeb Bush hired Steele to do oppo research on Trump, and this is what Steele came up with.

Quote from: PRC on January 15, 2017, 09:22:18 PM
It would be easy to dismiss all the talk of Trump being a Russian asset as the new version of Obama is a Muslim... but damn when you hear Trump criticizing NATO again, encouraging more "Brexits" from the EU, all the close ties in the inner circle and his never wavering compliments about Putin (possibly the only thing Trump hasn't flip-flopped on) it's getting harder to laugh off.

Quote from: Phillip V on January 15, 2017, 09:40:00 PM

Quote from: PRC on January 15, 2017, 09:22:18 PM
It would be easy to dismiss all the talk of Trump being a Russian asset as the new version of Obama is a Muslim... but damn when you hear Trump criticizing NATO again, encouraging more "Brexits" from the EU, all the close ties in the inner circle and his never wavering compliments about Putin (possibly the only thing Trump hasn't flip-flopped on) it's getting harder to laugh off.

Obama settled my fears by sending Soldiers and drones to kill thousands of Muslims.

Trump now needs to send Soldiers and drones to kill thousands of Russians.

QuoteFake news makers 'worse than prostitutes': Putin slams those behind Trump 'leak'

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he has no grounds to attack or protect US President-elect Donald Trump, since he does not know him personally. He added though that those behind the recent allegations against Trump have "no moral scruples."

"I don't know Mr. Trump personally, I have never met him and don't know what he will do on the international arena. So I have no grounds to attack him or criticize him for anything, or protect him or whatever," Putin said.

Despite the fact that elections in the US are over and ended with a "solid win" for the Republican candidate, an intense political struggle continues in the US, the Russian president observed, adding that there are certain forces that aim "to undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect."

"I have an impression they practiced in Kiev and are ready to organize a Maidan in Washington, just to not let Trump take office," :blink: Putin said, apparently referring to anti-government protests in the Ukrainian capital in 2014, which resulted in the leadership being ousted.

Those anti-Trump forces in the US also want to "bind hand and foot" the newly-elected leader, Putin added. He said that in this way, they aim to interfere with the domestic and international policies outlined in Trump's presidential campaign.

By doing so, these forces "severely harm US interests," Putin said.

The campaign to discredit the president-elect shows that certain "political elites in the West, including in the US," have "significantly" worsened, according to the Russian president.

"Prostitution is an ugly social phenomenon," he told reporters, adding that people who stand behind "fabrications" being used against Trump "are worse than prostitutes."

"They have no moral scruples," he said.

The Russian leader also called the allegations that Moscow might have blackmail material on the US president-elect "evidently fake."

"When Trump visited Moscow several years ago, he wasn't a political figure. We didn't even know about his political ambitions, he was just a businessman, one of America's richest people. So does someone think that our intelligence services go after each American billionaire? Of course not, :lol: it's complete rubbish," Putin said.

Commenting on reports spread in the Western media accusing Trump of frolicking with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, the Russian president said he doubted that a man who had been organizing beauty pageants for years and had met "some of the most beautiful women of the world" would hire call girls in the Russian capital.

Quote from: Berkut on January 17, 2017, 10:30:53 AM
It's nice to see that Putin has Trump's back.

Quote from: grumbler on January 17, 2017, 10:41:26 AM

Quote from: Berkut on January 17, 2017, 10:30:53 AM
It's nice to see that Putin has Trump's back.

You know that Putin is in on it when he calls trump "one of America's richest people."  Even if Trump was worth the four billion that Trump says he is really worth, where would that place him in the pecking order of America's rich?  400th?  500th?

Quote from: grumbler on January 17, 2017, 10:41:26 AM

Quote from: Berkut on January 17, 2017, 10:30:53 AM
It's nice to see that Putin has Trump's back.

You know that Putin is in on it when he calls trump "one of America's richest people."  Even if Trump was worth the four billion that Trump says he is really worth, where would that place him in the pecking order of America's rich?  400th?  500th?

Quote from: jimmy olsen on January 17, 2017, 11:06:41 AM
Doesn't Trump claim to be worth $10 billion?

Quote from: Syt on January 17, 2017, 10:22:13 AM
Commenting on reports spread in the Western media accusing Trump of frolicking with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, the Russian president said he doubted that a man who had been organizing beauty pageants for years and had met "some of the most beautiful women of the world" would hire call girls in the Russian capital.

Quote«Трамп приехал и тут же побежал встречаться с московскими проститутками». Это человек, во-первых, взрослый уже, а во-вторых, человек, который не всю жизнь, но многие годы занимался организацией конкурсов красоты, общался с самыми красивыми женщинами мира. Знаете, я с трудом могу себе представить, что он побежал в отель встречаться с нашими девушками с пониженной социальной ответственностью. Хотя они самые лучшие в мире, безусловно. Но сомневаюсь, что Трамп клюнул на это.

Quote from: derspiess on January 17, 2017, 11:26:23 AM
I like what John Mulaney said about Trump-- that he's not really that rich, but is a comic book/hobo's vision of a rich person.

edit: https://youtu.be/dBNBAgtjYV8?t=30

Quote from: Tonitrus on January 17, 2017, 12:49:29 PM
Overall, the article's portrayal of what Putin said is quite fair/spot-on.

QuoteИ наконец, знаете, что я хочу сказать? Проституция – это серьёзное, безобразное социальное явление. Ведь молодые женщины занимаются этим в том числе и в связи с тем, что они по-другому не могут обеспечить себя достойным образом. И это в значительной степени вина общества и государства.

А вот люди, которые заказывают фальшивки подобного рода, которые сейчас распространяются против избранного Президента США, фабрикуют их и используют в политической борьбе, – хуже, чем проститутки. У них нет никаких вообще моральных ограничений

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on January 17, 2017, 01:17:56 PM
Putin's argument is  . .. interesting.  Trump likes to hang out with beautiful women who are much younger then him, and that proves he is unlikely to seek the services of prostitutes?  It seems like he is trying to subtly add fuel to the fire.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 17, 2017, 01:40:35 PM
I get a kick out of the insinuation that pageant organizers get to bang all the contestants.  :lol:

Quote from: Tonitrus on January 17, 2017, 01:41:45 PM
I don't think that quite was his argument.  More along the lines of "he's involved with the most beautiful women in the world, so I doubt he would need the service of prostitutes".


So a bit more like Yi said.  :P

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on January 17, 2017, 12:55:26 PM
There's something to that, but the simple truth is that Trump is extremely rich by any rational standard.  Once you are in the billion dollar range, it's silly to say otherwise.

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on January 17, 2017, 02:22:26 PM
He owns Trump Tower, valued at 600M, with a mortgage of 100M.  He owns Doral, valued at around 330 with a mortgage of 150.  add up a few other resorts and the net gets close to about a billion.  Then there are the minority stakes.  Those are harder to value but there are a bunch of them and some of the properties are quite substantial.  IMO it's unlikely he's worth significantly less then a billion.

He's not one of the richest men in America though - that's true.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 17, 2017, 02:25:47 PM
Forbes said 4 and change not to long back.

Quote from: grumbler on January 17, 2017, 12:18:06 PM

Quote from: jimmy olsen on January 17, 2017, 11:06:41 AM
Doesn't Trump claim to be worth $10 billion?

On what day was he making the claim?  Tuesdays, it's $4 billion.  Thursdays, I believe, are his $10 billion dollar days.

Quote from: Tonitrus on January 17, 2017, 01:41:45 PM
I don't think that quite was his argument.  More along the lines of "he's involved with the most beautiful women in the world, so I doubt he would need the service of prostitutes".

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on January 17, 2017, 01:17:56 PM
Putin's argument is  . .. interesting.  Trump likes to hang out with beautiful women who are much younger then him, and that proves he is unlikely to seek the services of prostitutes?  It seems like he is trying to subtly add fuel to the fire.

QuoteThe Real Meaning of Putin's Press Conference

The Russian leader tries to claim the role of senior partner in relationship with the U.S.

You have to feel bad for the Moldovan president. The newly elected Igor Dodon had traveled to Moscow to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin for the first Russian-Moldovan bilateral meeting in nine years. Yet here he was, standing side by side with Putin, his hero and model for emulation, at a regal-looking press conference and some reporter has to go and ask about the prostitutes.

"You haven't yet commented on the report that, allegedly, we or in Russia have been collecting kompromat on Donald Trump, including during his visit to Moscow, as if he were having fun with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel," said the reporter with the pro-Kremlin LifeNews. "Is that true? Have you seen these files, these videos, these tapes?"

Dodon looked half mortified, half amused as he looked over toward a laughing Putin.

"You know," Putin said, "there's a category of people who leave without saying goodbye, out of respect for how things have come together, so as to not disturb anything. Then there are people who endlessly say goodbye. The departing [U.S. presidential] administration, in my opinion, is in the second category."

Then he tried, barely, to suppress a smirk.

A week ago, Buzzfeed published a dossier of unverified allegations reportedly compiled by a former British spy, a partial summary of which intelligence officials had presented to President-elect Donald Trump and outgoing President Barack Obama. Officials were concerned, in CNN's words, that Russian operatives could have "compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump." For a week, Trump vocally contested the claims, but Putin said nothing. Putin has no computer, no Twitter account. Whatever denials we heard came from his spokesman, the mustachioed Dmitry Peskov.

What we saw today was the old Putin, the classic Putin, the one all us Russia correspondents loved writing about.

Unlike Trump, who tends to react immediately and viscerally, Classic Putin likes to keep people waiting in suspense. Whenever something big and important happens, don't expect Putin to speak. For days. When pro-democracy protests broke out in Moscow in 2011, Putin was silent for more than a week. He was one of the first to personally congratulate Trump on his election victory, but he said nothing publicly about the results of the election until November 21, nearly two weeks after the fact. When he meets with pretty much anyone—Queen Elizabeth, the Pope, the parents of children who were killed in a plane crash—he keeps them waiting for him. (The Queen waited 14 minutes, the Pope for 50 minutes, and the grieving parents for two hours at a cemetery. According to The Guardian's Shaun Walker, "Ukraine's ousted president Viktor Yanukovych ... was once kept waiting for four hours, while European leaders regularly report a wait of an hour or more.") Because suspense is power. It underscores the dynamic that people will keep waiting just to hear what Putin has to say.

Classic Putin is both a master bureaucrat and a salt-of-the-earth guy; he is fluent both in cunning bureaucratese—as when he described the alleged prostitutes referred to in the dossier as "women of decreased social responsibility"—and in the language of the muzhik, the hearty, salty Russian man—as when he then joked that, regardless of anything else, Russian prostitutes "are undoubtedly the best in the world." (The beauty of Russian women is a matter of national pride, though a common joke in Russia is that, in addition to oil and gas, they are Russia's other export.) We've seen a little less of the latter Putin over the years as he has finally grown into the role of international statesman, but once upon a time, this was just how this guy from the mean streets of Leningrad talked. He said he would get terrorists in the outhouse, and told journalists not to smear their snot on paper and call it journalism. He once threatened to string up then-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili "by the balls." Later, when asked on national TV if he really did "want to string up Saakashvili by a certain spot," he responded, "Why by just one?"

Classic Putin is a master of the confirmation-by-denial trick, as he was Tuesday when he said that the DNC hacking scandal was a false flag, "but I want to reiterate, the hackers didn't doctor anything, they didn't make anything up. Whoever they may have been, they just unearthed the information." Or when he said that whoever is doing this—all of this—is trying "to undermine the legitimacy of the newly elected president. And in regards to that, I'd like to note, whether the people who are doing this want to or not, they are doing massive damage to the interests of the United States. Massive damage."

Which brings us to another trait of Classic Putin: Blame others for doing the things that you're doing. Typical example: Putin accused those same pro-democracy demonstrations of being paid for and organized by the U.S. State Department while he was organizing and paying for protestors to attend Potemkin rallies in support of himself. Which is also what he claimed was happening on the Maidan in Kiev in 2014—the American government trying to implement regime change by paying people to protest against a Moscow ally—so Moscow paid people to protest and take over government buildings in Eastern Ukraine.

Because this is a massive sore spot for Putin still, he brought it up again on Tuesday. "There's an impression as if, having practiced in Kiev, they want to organize a Maidan in Washington just to keep Trump from taking office," Putin said. That is, this is all about the thing Putin hates most: American-organized efforts to topple leaders, especially pro-Russian leaders—like Trump. What's happening to Trump, Putin said, is people trying to "tie the hands and feet of the newly elected president as he tries to fulfill the promises he made to the American people during the electoral campaign, [regarding what he would do] both inside the country and on the world stage." One such promise, per Trump's April foreign-policy speech: "I believe in an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia."

And this is another thing Classic Putin does: He's a master of using provocation as a smoke screen. What the American media will most likely take away from his comments at Tuesday's Kremlin press conference is that Putin praised Russian prostitutes, which he did, or that he slammed Obama for lingering, which he also did. But those things were not the most important part of the press conference.

What was important was Dodon, who few people on this side the Atlantic even know. Putin was having a celebratory press conference with the new Moldovan president, who ran on a platform of tearing up Moldova's trade agreement with the EU, having his country join the Russian-led Eurasian Customs Union, and mimicking Putin. "The only difference between me and Putin right now," Dodon told The Daily Beast's Anna Nemtsova during the Moldovan presidential campaign, "is that I am not the president, yet, as soon as I become one in a few days, I will run Moldova just the same way Putin runs Russia, I assure you."

And Moldova is important because, for much of 2014, as Putin was carving up Ukraine, Western observers feared Moldova would be invaded next, followed by the Baltics, which are NATO members. Yet Putin didn't have to invade Moldova, a former Soviet republic, to bring it back into Moscow's sphere of influence. Moscow had created within the country the breakaway Republic of Transnistria—recognized by no United Nations member countries—which makes Moldova ineligible for membership in NATO because it has a territorial dispute in its borders. And then it reeled in the rest of the country with promises of trade and political power.

Moldova is also important because it is another sign that, thanks to Putin's efforts, the hairline fractures in the EU's foundation are growing larger, and whole sections are breaking away from its embrace. Moldova was one of those impoverished nations that had once been part of the Soviet universe and, after its collapse, pushed Moscow aside and strained to get into Brussels's orbit. Now that Western universe looks increasingly chaotic and unsavory, while Putin's looks gilded and welcoming.

Amid all the attention for Putin's comments on "women of decreased social responsibility," we will have missed yet another critical development. On Sunday, in an interview with Germany's Bild and the U.K.'s Times of London, Trump not only called NATO obsolete—another victory for Putin to hear this from the country that created NATO—he also finally outlined the "deal" he wanted to cut with Putin: America lifts sanctions, Russia cooperates on a nuclear disarmament deal. Both the Kremlin and the Russian parliament immediately said that they won't bargain to get sanctions lifted. "Russia didn't initiate these restrictions, and Russia, as the President of Russia made clear, is not going to bring up these sanctions in the course of our international contacts," Peskov said. We didn't impose the sanctions, in other words, and we're not the ones who can lift them, so you do you, America. Which means that Trump, who ran on being the kind of tough negotiator that can finally cut a deal with Putin, has no bargaining position to even start the negotiations.

What Putin's comments showed is that he is, finally, after all these years of frustrated ego, the senior partner in this relationship. He has to defend Trump's sullied reputation; he has to defend his undermined legitimacy; he is now Trump's protector, guarding him the way a mob capo might protect a diamond shop. And that's Classic Putin, too.

Quote from: Phillip V on January 20, 2017, 09:06:53 AM
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2kiXWVVEAA6oyo.jpg)