Clues are not so hard to buy considering now that the Mueller indictment of the Russian troll farm has happened. More fascinating are all those denials even as more #TrumpRussia indictments emerge and plea deals get made.
and now… #ReleaseTheDemMemo has been realized
Only hours ago, the Democrats’ counter-memo to Devin Nunes’s dud bombshell memo gets released. It has the IC material redacted and takes on the Nunes memo point by point.
The Schiff document is only six pages longer than the Nunes memo, a document which may have been contrived simply to support other CT memes and GOP active measures discrediting the DoJ and FBI (#ReleaseTheMemo was multiplied by RW twitter-bots).
More interesting is that the WH, in editing Nunes’ memo (Nunes refused to deny WH participation in his memo-writing), couldn’t see those darn facts that really couldn’t be spun.
Even with significant redactions, @RepAdamSchiff’s memo about the Carter Page #FISA application drives home why the only scandal here was @DevinNunes’ irresponsible and indefensible frolic and detour into #ReleaseTheMemo conspiracy-theory land -— Steve Vladeck
and HuffPo: Russia did swing votes to Trump:
They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.
-Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment against multiple Russians
“Defendants and their co-conspirators began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate,” according to a Feb. 16 grand jury indictment obtained by Mueller.
In fact, the day before Obama visited Jacksonville, Florida, to support Clinton, Russians purchased an ad for the Instagram account of a fake group called Blacktivist. It urged African-Americans to vote for a third-party candidate. “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote,” the ad read, according to Mueller’s indictment.
It is impossible to know precisely how many voters nationally stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate because of the Russians’ social media campaign. Nevertheless, the details from the indictment raise new questions about the legitimacy of Trump’s victory.
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Although Trump lost the popular tally by nearly 3 million votes nationally, he won three states that most observers expected to go to Clinton by a total margin of 77,744. Were the Russian efforts enough to have moved 77,744 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?
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The fact of Russian interference in the election and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s preference for Trump was detailed in a Jan. 6, 2017, report released by the U.S. intelligence agencies. That conclusion was reinforced by Mueller’s Feb. 16, 2018, indictment.
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Rick Tyler, the Republican consultant, wonders how Trump supporters can argue that the social media ads and fake stories had no impact, when it was exactly the sort of thing the Trump campaign was doing itself. “You can’t say that what you were doing was effective, but what the Russians were doing wasn’t effective,” he said.
www.huffingtonpost.com/...