As we enter the new abnormal in the era of President Drumpf where truth isn’t truth, facts aren’t facts and reality isn’t reality there is a recognizable pattern to the process. There are identifiable habits that those who are intent on bamboozling the public tend to have. Those habits include slandering those criticizing or oppose them with false charges of partisan bias, supporting and repeating false delusions which support their argument and strategically ignoring that which opposes that view.
There are many examples of this process on display and today I will quickly walk through several examples by key Trump mouth-pieces.
First we have Alison Camerota arguing with Trump’s selection for Press Secretary Sean Spicer over the President-Elect’s repeated denial that Russia was involved in the DNC hack.
Camerota asked Spicer what Trump knows that the rest of the world doesn’t when it comes to the Russian hacks. Spicer claimed that Trump is privy to a lot of “classified information, intelligence reports.” However, Trump admitted he’s not received an intelligence briefing on the Russian hacks and would do so this week. Spicer also claimed that Trump is getting briefed daily by his national security team, but Trump’s team also admitted that Trump is only taking his daily briefings a few times a week.
Spicer insisted that the intelligence report isn’t a final one and Trump plans to wait until it is final to conclude anything. This also seems to go against anything Trump has said in the past several days about the Russian hacks. The president-elect has said time and time again that the Russians were not behind it and called the CIA’s reliability into question because they were wrong on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
No, there hasn’t been a final report but there have been briefings that were given by FBI Director Comey and DHS Director Jeh Johnston to the “Gang of 12” in Congress as far back as September.
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
The first deflection and slander that people like Spicer have usually gone to is the argument that people who bring this up the Russia hack are only doing so to undermine the legitimacy of Trump — despite the fact practically almost no one has connected those dots with any certainty, not even the USIC who back in October said this.
Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government. The USIC and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assess that it would be extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion. This assessment is based on the decentralized nature of our election system in this country and the number of protections state and local election officials have in place. States ensure that voting machines are not connected to the Internet, and there are numerous checks and balances as well as extensive oversight at multiple levels built into our election process.
As far as I know, I’m just about the only person who had argued that not being connected to the internet is not a perfect deterrent from a malware attack. Or that with an election that was this close the collapsing of confidence in the DNC could have made a significant difference particularly with Bernie Sanders supportors who felt cheated and didn’t support Clinton, and the reports through Mother Jones that the Kremlin may have been cultivating Trump as a asset for as long as 5 years in conjunction with members of his transition team meeting with Russia representatives and his own tendency to openly repeat Kremlin sponsored propaganda.
Yet even the combination of all that doesn’t mean Russia successfully stole the election for Trump despite Spicer’s or other Trump surrogate claims that this is why people keep bringing up the hacking issue. Just the fact that they tried to influence the election AT ALL is already bad enough and Americans should speak as one voice in opposition to that.
Unfortunately Spicer and his ilk can’t bring themselves to do even that.
In this instance though he took the second option, promote the delusion that it’s appropriate for Trump not to respond to this Russia hack because the Obama Administration didn’t respond to the Chinese hack of files from the Office of Personnel Management, except that they did and Camerota caught him on that lie.
Spicer said Trump would talk about his conclusions, his understanding of the situation and where he believes things stand. He then pivoted to slam President Obamafor not discussing previous hacks by China in 2015.
Camerota refused to let Spicer get away with trying to make things up.
“Sean, just to correct you, you say not a single statement was ever issued or made after the Chinese hacking,” she began. “I have the statement right here in my hands,” she said, and went on to read the press release from the White House.
Spicer acknowledged he was wrong but then blamed Obama for releasing a statement too late.
Ok, so Trump ignoring his briefings, ignoring the mounting evidence including the joint report from the FBI and DHS which has already been released on Russian hacking and sitting on his hands is “Good”, but Obama doing nothing about the China hack — even though he did respond — and being slow to release a statement on China is “Bad” — even though he really wasn’t that slow?
In the first-ever prosecution of state actors over cyber-espionage, a federal grand jury indicted the five on charges they broke into US computers to benefit Chinese state-owned companies, leading to job losses in the US in the steel, solar and other industries.
Cyber-spying has long been a major sticking point in relations but Washington’s move marked a major escalation in the dispute.
Analysts said the US was unlikely to be able to put the men on trial but the indictments were an attempt to apply public pressure on China over the issue.
Spicer’s pretzel logic is so ridiculous that a former CIA Operative was outraged by it all.
Former CIA operative Phil Mudd and counterterrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross from the Foundation of Defense of Democracies attacked Donald Trump’s spokesperson Sean Spicer on Tuesday morning’s “New Day.” Spicer attacked CNN host Alisyn Camerota in a Monday interview, asking why the media was jumping to conclusions that it was Russia.
CNN host Chris Cuomo referenced Spicer and asked if there was anyone in the intelligence community that doubted the reports. Mudd said no one doubts them.
“What the hell is that dude talking about?!” Mudd exclaimed. “His boss has come out and already drawn conclusions and said I don’t believe them. Meanwhile, on the other side, Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the intelligence community have come out and said with high confidence we say that the Russians hacked information related to the elections. I agree with the judgment and it’s not clear why they did this or that this had anything to do with swaying the election, but to say either from the Trump camp or from the government camp that we don’t know what happened and we’re going to wait for the report, do we ignore history here? I don’t get it, Chris. This is ridiculous.”
One side point, Cuomo claims we now have the “digital fingerprints” to show Russia’s hand in this hack, but that’s not news. The cyber-security firm CrowdStrike who were hired by the DNC found those fingerprints way back in July.
News of the hack of the Democratic National Committee first broke in mid-June. That’s when Crowdstrike, a firm that analyzes threats to network security, revealed that the DNC had called it in to inspect the party’s servers, where it found “two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network.” Crowdstrike released a comprehensive report of its findings on June 14, which accompanied a Washington Post article detailing the attacks. One of the hacking groups, Crowdstrike found, had access to the DNC servers for almost a year.
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The following week, two cybersecurity firms, Fidelis Cybersecurity and Mandiant, independently corroborated Crowdstrike’s assessment that Russian hackers infiltrated DNC networks, having found that the two groups that hacked into the DNC used malware and methods identical to those used in other attacks attributed to the same Russian hacking groups.
It is ridiculous, but we’ve seen and head exactly his kind of ridiculous time and time again. We heard it when Trump said he liked to “Grab women by the pussy” and then later that it was just “locker room talk.” We see it when Kayleigh McEnany spouts repeated disproven economic theories to Robert Reich a former Treasury Secretary who presided over one of the strongest periods of economic growth in decades. We see it when Jeffrey Lord claims “People of color don’t exist” or Kellyanne Conway supports the attempt by the GOP House to neuter their own Ethics agency by claiming “Consumers” have submitted too many complaints.
We saw this when Trump supporter Ben Ferguson tried to undermine the decision of one member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to quit rather than sing at the Inauguration by claiming she was a hypocrite for having sung at the Obama inauguration except that the Mormon Choir never did that.
“Was the choir endorsing abortion when they sang when Barack Obama was inaugurated?” Ferguson asked. “Because he’s in favor of abortion? I think that would be something, obviously, she just stepped out from if she’s going to claim this holy high ground now. This is nothing but a grandstanding individual who doesn’t get her way so she says I’m going walk away. There are 360 people in the choir. Not all are going to be traveling. More importantly than that when it comes to religion you would think she may actually want to have influence over people that are about to run the government and have peace and harmony which is what the Tabernacle Choir claims to be about. This is nothing but self-righteous grandstanding from a crybaby who never grew up. And guess what? Not everyone believes everything you believe in.”
There’s just one problem with Ferguson’s scathing hit job on Chamberlin, she never sang for Barack Obama’s inauguration. In fact, no one in her choir did because the Mormon Tabernacle Choir didn’t sing at Obama’s inauguration.
A quick google search would confirm this, but it was CNN host Kate Bolduan who had to tell Ferguson that the choir released a statement saying it never happened.
Ferguson’s response to the news was simply, “Well, there you go.”
“There you go?” Uh, where do you go when you’re entire argument is built on hot air? What he’s claiming simply didn’t happen. It was both slander of the singer and also a delusion. Then when he gets caught promoting a delusion — he just ignores the fact his entire argument was built on a house of wet cards.
We have to be ready for this, we have able to reject their slanders, to be informed enough to catch them in their delusions and bring up truths they repeated attempt to ignore in order to prop those delusions up.