obama’s intelligence heads offered up a report on the Russian hacking scandal. The report, which experts called “underwhelming”, revealed little new information or it did, depending on which side of the aisle you sit. There is no question that this entire story is being ginned up by democrats solely for political purposes.
What did we get out of this report?
- The Russians had an axe to grind with hillary clinton for her having meddled in their elections:
Their rocky relationships goes back to her tenure as secretary of state and as senator. At one point she accused his party of rigging an election, and Putin accused her of inciting protests against his government. Even Clinton herself has attributed a grudge toward her as the motivation for the Russian hacks.
Meddle she did:
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov looked on, Clinton told the group the United States had “serious concern about the conduct of the elections,” and called for a “full investigation” of all reports of fraud and intimidation.”
“The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted,” Clinton said. “And that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.”
further:
“When authorities fail to prosecute those who attack people for exercising their rights or exposing abuses, they subvert justice and undermine the people’s confidence in their governments,” Clinton said. “As the Duma elections in Russia clearly demonstrate, elections that are neither free nor fair have the same effect,” Clinton said.
And you know what they say about payback:
“Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime . . . and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him,” the report said.
- It wasn’t about getting Trump elected:
“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
This didn’t stop the NY Times from misrepresenting the report to make Trump look bad:
No, it was aimed at discrediting her.
The Russians were engaged in actions at least as far back as 2015- before Trump was the GOP candidate.
- No vote tallies were altered
“They did not change any vote tallies or anything of that sort,” Clapper said under questioning from Chairman John McCain (R.-Ariz.)
- There’s no evidence any propaganda changed anyone’s minds
I know no one who knows anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone whose vote was changed because of whatever information is supposed to have come from the Russians. Moreover:
Clapper further implicitly conceded that whatever the Russians might have done in making Democratic National Committee emails available to the public, the outcome of the U.S. presidential election nonetheless reflected “the choices” of American voters.
Even the hacks at Politifact agree:
Based on the evidence, it seems highly unlikely that actions by the Russian government contributed in any decisive way to Trump’s win over Clinton.
Let us not forget that the emails became available because John Podesta handed over the password to his account. He got hooked in a phishing trip. Additionally, let us note that none of the Podesta emails were forged. They accurately depicted the chicanery and dishonesty of the clinton campaign.
So the Russian efforts were about undermining hillary, but that really isn’t what should be bothering you. What should be bothering you is why obama allowed it to happen and allow it to go on he did.
In 2014 the Russian hacked the White House computers which were down for “weeks.” It was met by silence from the administraition:
Why the coy silence? Because it was October 2014, weeks before the midterm elections, and the story reflected poorly on the Obama administration, which didn’t even discover the intrusion itself. It turned out that American officials were alerted to the Russian hack of the White House and State Department by an unidentified ally (I’m guessing Israel).
The obama administration has known about Russian hacking since at least 2015.
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.
The DNC did not take it seriously:
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.
Here’s the bottom line to all of this-despite knowing obama did NOTHING
Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.
“We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.”
So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or broadcast what they found, known as “doxing” in the cyberworld.
It is amusing that democrats routinely berate Trump as being Putin’s pal when it is obama who has been Putin’s b*tch for the last eight years. Never mind that obama has interfered in elections both in the UK and in Israel. In 2012 obama promised to be more “flexible” for “Vlad” and since then he has taken it up the wazoo for Putin.
obama didn’t react to any of Russia’s actions- whether it was the Ukraine, Crimea, buzzing ships and aircraft, or hacking US assets. Now he musters a half-assed response after an election he fully expected to go for clinton and only because she lost and he needs badly to save face. Had she won, this would not even be a story the media would care about. obama has done nothing but project weakness around the world and has emboldened these actions against us.
THAT is what should be irritating you.
So you’ll have to forgive some of us if we don’t share your outrage about this now. Some of us were outraged long ago and you should have been too.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.