Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/16/fbi-now-backs-cia-assessment-t.html
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Whaaaaaaaa??
And I thought the FBI was doing a good job fucking up the election without Russia.
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WTF?!? There are people are the FBI who care about the good of the country?!?
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Which version of ‘country’ are you referring to? Because Trump’s version seems to be the preferred one at the FBI.
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And thank God the Russians did, too, or our next president would be bad at email!
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That was before the election, when we were upset about email. Now we’re upset about Russia.
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Sure, all of this is important…blah dee blah…but the next four years with Trump and his ass leaches loom on the horizon. I guess we can yell “He cheated with help from the Russians” at rallies while 'murica goes down in flames. We win…?
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Exactly. As I understand it the famous mail server was nothing to do with Russian hacks, and that’s what Comey used as his attack vector.
Accepting that Putin himself, stroking the inevitable white cat, personally carried out the hacking with the assistance of an army of FSB-trained computer scientists while riding a horse across a stream in Siberia - it still isn’t clear to me how this affected the election result. I’m also pretty clear that if the CIA was not trying to access the servers of the Russian government and oligarchs, someone would be saying they were negligent. Symmetry in this is expected.
It does look as though this is an FBI-CIA turf war. Clinton is a foreign policy raptor, so the CIA support her, while Trump doesn’t seem that interested in pursuing the plot of 1984. On the other hand Comey seems to have decided - perhaps due to better intel on the US - that Trump might win and decided to dig in good with the new master. The Russians are being used as a McGuffin because nobody wants to admit that Trump was elected by gerrymandering, social media and the dissatisfied middle class. Sometimes when the scales are very heavily on one side the possible explanation is the 800lb gorilla on one scale pan rather than the Arctic gust of wind blowing on it.
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I bet if Comey turned his keen analytical mind to the task he could identify someone suspiciously likely to be on the side of Russia, perhaps even someone very close to himself.
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good point. I had forgotten there were different America’s based on a person’s insanity…um I mean, political outlook.
Those diabolical Russians, so cunning to plant all those fake emails showing how corrupt the DNC is!
/sarcasm #fakenews
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So…the Russians finally won the cold war?
The cold war never ended and its still going on. They won this battle, thou.
What’s more amazing is seeing the FBI backing an assessment that the CIA made before they did. These situations are usually occasions for territory-marking pissing contests between the two agencies.
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Well, if you look down below…
I think that shows pretty well what the effect of the steadily leaked out DNC emails was on a lot of potential voters, especially the Sanders supporters. There’s a ton of that going around lately.
Never mind that hardly anybody read the emails - how could they given the volume? - and that it doesn’t appear there was anything terribly bad in the emails, mostly a few Hillary supporters engaging in petty bellyaching about the Sanders campaign - but the public was told it was very scandalous and they should be shocked, so they were.
The leaked emails only had to depress the Democratic voter turnout by less than 100K in a few states to win it for Trump, and it appears that happened, and that’s what won it for Trump. (Well, that and voter suppression, and in Michigan apparently a lot of voting machines in black neighborhoods in Detroit mysteriously dropping all votes for President on thousands or tens of thousands of ballots - it’s really fucked up that that will never be investigated.)
It’s not like the DNC email dump was the only thing that caused Trump’s election, but it’s one of a number of factors which combined to cause it. Because of comments like the one I quoted (and frequently see elsewhere) I don’t think it was insignificant.
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The hilarious part is that this super-secret breach was done using a stoned slacker level phishing technique. FFS this didn’t need to be the preferred bogeyman ‘da Russians!!!’ This could have been done by the Antiguans or the Hmong or by a conspiracy of one Starbucks barista with some time on his hands.
Is our democracy so fragile and our politician system so inept that the ‘hacking’ version of a rubber band gun shooting a spitball can bring the whole thing down?
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Also of interest is all the irony at work.
Irony 1: Bernie supporters were already pissed at what they perceived as DNC dirty tricks and a rigged primary. Then when a leak and a phishing attack reveal that the DNC did use dirty tricks and the primary was rigged… wait for it… the DNC blames the leakers and blames Berners for being pissed. In any reasonable scenario Hillary would have disqualified and Bernie would have been the Dem candidate by default. (And he would have won).
Irony 2: Isn’t ‘interfering in overseas elections’ kind of, like, an American thing? Whether it’s supporting a coup somewhere or financing someone somewhere? Or when we get tired of sugarcoating things and just go balls out and call it ‘regime change?’ And then someone somewhere dares send a phishing email to the DNC and we need to get out the national smelling salts. If anything the complaint should be patent infringement, how dare someone else try to affect an election?
Irony 3: even if someone in Russia did send the phishing email, they didn’t ‘hack the election.’ Amid all of the ‘fake news’ noise, that is the fakest news of all. That clearly implies that a foreign power used sophisticated state-level technology and intelligence resources to literally hack the election, ie by hacking voting machines, etc. Fake news indeed.
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Presidents come and go. Agencies are eternal. Some things will just look bad in January 2021.
Well, that or the good of the country.
I still think the Comey letter hurt Clinton more than any Russian mischief.
And as shitty as I’m sure our intelligence agencies have been, screwing around with other countries’ elections, politics, and not-being-in-the-middle-of-civil-wars, I’m a little surprised by the attitude of the too-cool-for-schoolers here.
“Ha ha! Suck it, my country!”
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Well, there is this team operating out of the basement of the Hoover building, but one is a kook obsessed with aliens who he thinks abducted his sister, and the other is a physician who if anything, ignores evidence if it doesn’t fit with her predetermined ideas.
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