This statement was not partisan. It was not about Donald Trump being a white man. It was not about him being conservative, it was about foreign nation aided and abetted by others in our government trying to pick our President for us — instead of us making a clean choice of our own.
We seem have lost the thread and missed the point, but it’s significant that Congressman Lewis said this right after being briefed by the FBI on Russia’s involvement in our election and the reaction of Democrats was explosive.
It’s very likely has said was he said, because he'd just discovered it was very likely true.
Interviewed this morning on CNN Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) continued the core of Lewis’ argument stating that if America knew what Congress [now] knows, they’d probably boycott the inauguration too.
It’s about how badly our election was improperly influenced by external forces who should have had nothing to do with it. Some of the key information about this remains classified, but much of it is not.
The reason of course is that it’s not the job of the CIA or NSA to tell us their opinion of politics, or political campaigns. Secondly the key to whether their influence campaign wasn’t the hacks itself, it was the propaganda coming directly out of the Kremlin through RT and Sputnik News that repeated ended up as talking points for the Trump campaign.
Many have discounted the importance of Russia’s influence largely because there is little evidence that the changed the vote tallies, arguing that since those machines are safe because they are not attached to the internet, but that’s not really relevant. The U.S. managed to install the Stuxnet malware virus on the Iranian centrifuge servers and those weren’t attached to the internet either. That’s not proof the count was hacked, but it’s not disproof either. That point is effectively moot.
The FBI announced that Clinton was not going to be indicted for her private email server in July, but following that and the RNC convention It’s very clear that after the bump of the Democratic convention in August Hillary Clinton had a steady slide — mostly driven by more and more corruption rumors following not just the DNC hack, but also the frankly wrongful allegations of “pay to play” by her husband’s foundation right up until the point that the “Grab them by the Pussy” tapes were revealed in early October.
For a moment there she recovered what she had been steadily losing.
Then she started to lose ground again when FBI Director Comey sent his letter to the House about the Abedin/Weiner laptop emails, which at the time I correctly predicted were likely duplicates from Abedin’s email account on Clinton’s server and nothing new.
To say that Russia’s influence campaign which was wide and extensive had the sole decisive impact isn’t the point, but it clearly did have a significant impact along with several other factors. And it should be noted that this wasn’t a casual effort on the part of the Russia, this — according to the intel report — was a full court press.
Russian Propaganda Efforts. Russia’s state-run propaganda machine—comprised of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik, and a network of quasi-government trolls—contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences. State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about Presidentelect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.
The Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks. RT’s editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT, according to Russian and Western media. Russian media subsequently announced that RT had become "the only Russian media company" to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to "new leaks of secret information." RT routinely gives Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States.
And it wasn’t just the information coming through the hack and Wikileaks.
Putin’s chief propagandist Dmitriy Kiselev used his flagship weekly newsmagazine program this fall to cast President-elect Trump as an outsider victimized by a corrupt political establishment and faulty democratic election process that aimed to prevent his election because of his desire to work with Moscow. Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems.
,,,
Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign. Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if President-elect Trump won, Russia would “drink champagne” in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.
RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism. Some Russian officials echoed Russian lines for the influence campaign that Secretary Clinton’s election could lead to a war between the United States and Russia.
The report confirms that Putin directed this disinformation campaign against Clinton on behalf of Trump personally.
All of these issues were injected directly into our campaign, not just Wikileaks which Donald Trump mentioned 164 times during the campaign but also the idea the Hillary Clinton was on the edge of a stroke, that she was corrupt, that Trump would be a positive shift for Russia.
Not only was Russia an influence, so was the FBI.
Director Comey’s decision to have huge negative public critique of Secretary Clinton and her email server while at the same time not recommending any charges or indictment was literally unprecedented. This followed up by his testimony before the House where he essentially admitted that the entire basis for the investigation and his extensive public drubbing of Clinton was based on a set of wrongfully marked documents that were never classified in the first place.
At the same time we’ve now learned that the FBI was obsessing over Clinton and making public pronouncements about their investigation in direct violation of DOJ regulations prompting an investigation by the FBI Inspector General, they were also flatly ignoring the memos from former MI6 case officer Christopher Steele which described not just Trump’s sex life in Moscow but also his extensive vulnerability due to his business corruption which gave him the impression that their was an active conspiracy inside the FBI to bash Clinton and support Trump.
Mr Steele claimed that the Trump campaign was taking this path because it was aware that the Russians were hacking Democratic Party emails. No evidence of this has been made public, but the same day that Mr Trump spoke about Crimea he called on the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.
By late July and early August MI6 was also receiving information about Mr Trump. By September, information to the FBI began to grow in volume: Mr Steele compiled a set of his memos into one document and passed it to his contacts at the FBI. But there seemed to be little progress in a proper inquiry into Mr Trump. The Bureau, instead, seemed to be devoting their resources in the pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions.
The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city.
…
However, say security sources, Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
And on top of Giuliani there’s apparently also the involvement of Education nominee Betsy DeVos’ brother Erik Prince former CEO of Blackwater.
Late last night, HuffPo columnist Seth Abramson discovered that Prince gave a rather interesting interview to Breitbart News Daily on November 4—less than 24 hours before Comey announced there was no there there in the new emails. Prince claimed that the FBI’s hand was forced by hopping mad NYPD detectives investigating Anthony Weiner. Supposedly, they found “State Department emails” and evidence of a trove of criminal activity involving the Clintons and other prominent Democrats.
According to this narrative the NYPD gave the FBI an ultimatum—reopen the investigation, or we will hold a press conference to announce a ton of arrests. Supposedly, this “pushed the FBI off their chairs,” prompting Comey’s now-infamous letter.
Yeah, ok.
So when Rep. Lewis said “and others” I don’t he was just saying those words without having someone specific in mind. He knew who he was talking about and it’s not just Russia.
The investigation of Director Comey by the Inspector General is not a small thing, it’s quite serious and also put the legitimacy of the Trump administration in question.
On top of the Steele dossier there are reports of the FBI and 5 other organizations are investigating payoffs from the Kremlin to Trump.
The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.
Investigators are examining how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win, the two sources said. One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said.
The informal, inter-agency working group began to explore possible Russian interference last spring, long before the FBI received information from a former British spy hired to develop politically damaging and unverified research about Trump, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry.
…
Trump and Republican members of Congress have said they believe Russia meddled in the U.S. election but that those actions didn't change the outcome. However, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that she believes that Russia's tactics did alter the election result.
Just to be clear, it’s not just John Lewis now, Senator Feinstein has agreed on his basic point, Russia’s efforts were strong enough to change the results.
One point on Christopher Steele, it appears that while he was with MI6 he was the case officer for Alexander Litveninko a former FSB officer, dissident and defector who was killed, poisoned with Polonium 210, by Putin after Steele’s premature retirement.
So there’s very good reason to take the things Mr Steele has said about Russia and Trump seriously, and the fact that he has gone into hiding, even more seriously.
We seem to have reached a point, at least with the media, where we've given up on untangling this gordian knot. That it’s just too difficult to tell if this smear about Hillary’s email server, or than slander about her taking money from Saudi Arabia, or this other lie about her being on the edge of dying — all hyped by Russia, bogus FBI leaks and Trump — were the one thing that tipped the election one way or another.
It’s seems to me that’s because no one has bothered to really try. Well, except for fivethirtyeight whose results were inconclusive.
There just isn’t a clean-cut story in the data. For instance, you might have expected a decline in the percentage of Americans who trusted Clinton after Wikileaks began its releases. As Politico’s Ken Vogel pointed out in mid-October, both Trump campaign officials and even progressives said the Wikileaks emails revealed that Clinton would be “compromised” if she became president. But the percentage of Americans who found Clinton to be honest or trustworthy stayed at around 30 percent in polling throughout October and into November.
The evidence that Wikileaks had an impact, therefore, is circumstantial. Trump, for instance, won among voters who decided who to vote for in October 51 percent to 37 percent, according to national exit polls. That’s Trump’s best time period. He carried voters who decided in the final week, when you might expect Comey’s letter to have had the largest impact, 45 percent to 42 percent. (Although, Trump’s margin among those who decided in the final week was wider in the exit polls in some crucial swing states.) And while Clinton’s lead was dropping in the FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast before the Comey letter was released, the drop accelerated slightly afterward.
Of course, one thing didn’t sink Clinton. The evidence suggests Wikileaks is among the factors that might have contributed to her loss, but we really can’t say much more than that.
But as we’ve now learned this isn’t just about Wikileaks or just the Comey letter, it’s about both and considerably more if much more severe information about Trump and Russia was being suppressed or ignored while this was going on.
Why is it that no one can conduct a specific exit poll with people who actually voted on these about several of these leaks and “scandals” — both those about Clinton and about Trump — and get a sense of how much each of these issues affected their vote?
Did the Clinton email server issue make a significant difference in your vote?
Did the information leaked about the DNC’s negative views of Bernie Sanders affect your vote?
Did the Comey letter about “newly found” emails affect your vote?
Did the allegations of sexual misconduct by Donald Trump affect your vote?
Did the Donald Trump attack on a Gold Star family affect your vote?
Did your concern about the economy affect your vote?
Did your concern about terrorism affect your vote?
Did your concern about racism and attacks on immigrants affect your vote?
I don’t understand why we can’t do a definitive post-mortem on this. It doesn’t even have to be a poll of the entire nation, just one in the each of the key “blue wall” states that were slated to go for Hillary Clinton according to all the polls but at the last second, didn't by a margin of just 80,000 votes.
The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too.
Or put another way: But for 79,646 votes cast in those three states, she'd be the next president of the United States. The 540-vote margin in Florida that swung the 2000 election is still the modern record-holder for close races, but this is a pretty remarkable result. (Especially since the final gap between Al Gore and George W. Bush was only a little over 500,000 votes nationally.)
More people were in attendance as the Ohio State Buckeyes beat a high school football team in Columbus last weekend. More people live in Gary, Ind., than made the difference in this presidential race. In fact, Clinton's margins in 51 counties were larger than the deficit in these three critical states. That's margins, not the number of votes she actually won
This was the margin. 79,646 votes. Fewer people that could fill a single football stadium. That’s what the difference was in those states in the end. It’s not about whether Clinton had a national lead of 5% — hence fivethrityeight’s 50,000 ft view is of course inconclusive — because at the end in key rust belt states that no one thought would break red, this race was close enough for it be blown over by a feather.
It makes a difference if those feathers came from Russia or was held in the hands of an FBI that was biased politically for one candidate over the other and violated DOJ regulations in order make sure every one was hand delivered to Trump’s side of the scale.
If Rep. John Lewis feels that the electorate was hacked by a deliberate strategy of improper propaganda by foreign sources and biased law enforcement leaks and allegations, he has a right to that opinion.
And the American people have a right to demand that view be vigorously tested to see ultimately if it’s valid or an unfair characterization, but in the end I don’t think it’s a matter of “If” this election was wrongfully influenced, it’s simply a matter of “how much.”
As Bill Moyer’s posted yesterday Americans deserve to know what happened here.
No, this crisis requires a more thorough, bipartisan and select committee or commission — not unlike the 9/11 Commission — that has adequate staff, funding and subpoena power to conduct as thorough a probe as possible.
Perhaps even better, before Friday’s inauguration, there is still time for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special prosecutor. Fordham legal historian Jed Shugerman notes, “A special prosecutor’s term does not end with an administration. It is open-ended, so the special prosecutor would continue to serve during the Trump administration… unless the new Attorney General fired him or her, [but] only for ‘good cause.’”
In whatever form it takes, said investigation also must include a careful examination of action — or inaction — by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Justice Department’s inspector general has begun a probe but it also should be within the purview of a select committee, commission or special prosecutor.
…
This is deadly serious business. It is a heinous threat not only to America’s future but to other Western democracies, fragile as they are just now. Putin and his kleptocrat cronies aren’t limiting their cyberwarfare and other meddling to the United States but encouraging right-wing populism that actively undermines member nations of the European Union and the NATO alliance as well. So far, Trump seems to be acquiescing to this and to other Russian encroachments around the world. And several people around him — close aides such as Gen. Mike Flynn, his national security adviser; and “The King of K Street,” Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign manager — are reported to have had business ties to Putin’s world.
The truth must be known.
Frankly I suspect the reason we haven’t seen a comprehensive after action report on his is because, besides the fact pollsters usually work for campaigns and the money spigot turns off when the campaign ends, but also because many of us are afraid of what it might actually reveal. if a Russian disinformation campaign that fed information directly to Trump in exchange for his providing info on Russian Oligarch’s in the U.S. — which is a key allegation in the Steele dossier -— while coordinating strategic leaks through RT, Sputnik News and a army of cyber trolls was implemented as the FBI turned a blind-eye to it all and instead improperly leaked untrue negative information about Clinton and the DNC only managed to move the needle in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by just 2% — that was ultimately the whole race.
That’s all it would have taken.
Just that small amount and instead of a second President Clinton we now have the administration of Kompromat-Elect Drumpf to contend with.
To be fair the Senate Intelligence Committee is looking into this is a bipartisan manner, but will that be enough?
Time will tell.