Somebody obviously leaked a bunch of DNC emails. The intelligence community seems to think the Russian Gov’t had a hand in it. If so, then clearly they did this to influence the election. Why?
1.) Because Trump is a terrible candidate and they want to weaken us by having him win?
2.) Because Hillary would have provoked war with Russia, and they don’t want to die?
3.) Because demonstrating that they can manipulate our elections will cause a lack of faith in our system?
4.) Because Trump cut a secret deal with Putin to do nice things in exchange for support?
5.) Putin has a bunch of blackmail on Trump, and set him up to win so he can manipulate him as President?
The FBI already looked into 4 and ruled it out. 1 is just a matter of opinion: Russia can think what they want about Trump, but them thinking he’s a bad candidate is no different (to us) than Merkel thinking so or Hillary thinking so. 3 means the DNC is playing into Russia’s hands, but the DNC would have done that anyway even without Russia’s help- they did it to George W Bush, they do it every time they lose at anything. If liberals don’t get their way, it’s because the system is horrible. 2 is possible, but it just makes Trump look good and is certainly no strike against him. 5 is possible, but we don’t have any evidence of it, and a strong bit of evidence against it: namely, that the DNC and others tried and failed for a year to find whatever hypothetical thing the Russians have on Trump; they would have used it to win the election if they had it. Considering the money spent on opposition research and how long they had, the chances that there’s anything the Russians have that they didn’t find is very slim. So we’re left with no credible reason Russia did this that is dangerous to the states that isn’t exacerbated by the left making a big deal out of it. But one also has to consider the impact their manipulation had.
A.) Prior to the election, all HIllary-defenders were saying Comey had a much bigger effect on the polls than Wikileaks. Wikileaks were roundly ignored unless you were Fox News or a conspiracy theorist. Most voters seem not to know the details on anything that was actually leaked.
B.) The DNC has not denied the content of any of the damning links aside from a couple instantly identifiable hoaxes. So the effect of the leaks were to reveal truths about the Democrat Party (and their media shills) that voters ought to have known before going to the polls anyway.
C.) It’s highly unlikely that Putin made Hillary collapse on 9/11, made her call her political oppnents a basket of deplorables, made her lazy in campaigning, made her neglect the rust belt states, made her maintain an unsecured private server and lie about it, or made the DNC screw Bernie out of the nomination. All of these things had a bigger hand in the DNC losing than Wikileaks did, by all accounts prior to this.
In conclusion, it seems the biggest negative effect of this issue is the opportunity it gives the DNC to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the system and our next President. Who ever was responsible for the DNC leaks revealed many legitimate reasons not to vote for Hillary Clinton, but it is uncertain what impact these revelations actually had compared to the Hillary campaign’s many unforced errors.
It will all be buried as soon as Trump takes office. Republicans are making a show of caring now, but the business of sending the country down the toilet will keep them fully preoccupied once the inauguration comes and they’ve all gone out of their minds with completely unchecked power.
Trump is going to cut their pork belly balls off, so they don’t want him playing in the game. Trump is not your typical republican and the typical elephants want to step on him.
You dismiss 1 too readily. Russia quietly thinking to itself, or even loudly thinking, about how they like Trump, is very different from hacking the account of a US political party to put their thoughts into practice. It might be a matter of opinion, but if it’s Russia’s opinion and that opinion motivated illicit actions, it’s super obviously super relevant.
And a foreign country attempting to influence our election by hacking our political parties is dangerous even if Clinton would have lost anyway (and, since she lost by a sliver of a fraction of votes, the hacking can still be a but-for cause).
Did the Republicans not just elect the most anti-establishment candidate ever, who promised to “drain the swamp” and who accused just about everyone of being crooked and corrupt? Everyone hates the system when it isn’t working for them.
It’s all about the money, and open invitation to pizza land is on, even the KGB would enjoy a bit of distraction. It’s all about how to bring world wide ideas home to roost.
I think a variant of the 4th option could be considered. Perhaps Putin knew he could use the Trump presidency to further his own interests without making an explicit deal with Trump.
That makes me want to revise my point a bit: 1 doesn’t have to be about Trump being terrible, just about Russia thinking he’s better for Russia. Whether that’s through making the US weaker, or through something like Statiktech describes, Russia could plausibly be indifferent to the affect on America per se, and only care about the expected effect on Russia.
I don’t dismiss it as being a possibility, I dismiss it’s relevance. Imagine if some other country- I don’t know, Spain- hacked our election to make Trump look horrible, and it turns out the reason they did it is because they think Hillary will make a horrible president and they want to boost her to weaken the U.S. Now, there’s no evidence that Spain has any information about Hillary that you don’t have (in this alternate universe where Hillary doesn’t have 30,000 missing emails, say), they are reacting to the same Hillary Clinton that you have seen on T.V. and heard about from her defenders and critics.
Would that affect your opinion of Hillary Clinton?
My point is that the worst possible fallout of this is precisely the goal the DNC is aiming for- a president for 8 years that is stripped of their legitimate mandate to govern, and future elections that the people don’t trust.
Well of course it is. But like it or not, the DNC are civilians doing civilian things and their cybersecurity is their own responsibility. Especially since, as I said, the only information that was exposed was information that hurts them but helps the voters at large. All sorts of private citizens have information we’d rather foreign nationals not get- banking account information, experimental technology, port security details- and in all of these cases, it’s not the State’s responsibility to make sure your Windows Firewall is on and you don’t use ‘password’ as your password. Not if you’re planning a rocket launch, not if you’re developing a new cancer-fighting drug, and not even if you’re coordinating a political campaign with CNN.
So unless you can show me that Russia actually hacked the election process itself, I don’t see how this hack is worse for our country than those hacks, and in fact it seems to have been overall beneficial. This is just a bunch of assholes who were caught being assholes with their pants down. It only ‘affects the election’ because these particular assholes were running for President and almost won. If Spain hacked the Green Party’s private campaign emails and exposed Jill Stein being a rotten bitch, we’d all be having a good laugh, not treating it like a crisis.
Most of us are anyway.
Unless, of course, you simply take it for granted that Democrats losing an election is a national crisis.
Do you think the DNC email servers were more secure or less secure than the server Hillary was running the State Department through?
You’re comparing the GOP putting up a candidate and winning an election to the DNC making up stories about why election results shouldn’t count when they lose. And it’s not just right now- the last time the Democrats lost the presidency, they whined so much they forced the Supreme Court to pick the president for us. Libs called for a ‘do-over’ in the U.K. over Brexit, too.
Yeah, that’s possible. I think Putin’s interests are going to fall into categories described either by 1 or 2, though: Either Putin thinks he can use Trump for things that make him a bad pick for America like weakening NATO, or Putin thinks he can use Trump for things where his interests align with ours, such as avoiding war. So it still comes down to whether or not you find it likely that Putin knows a bunch of horrible things about Trump that the DNC and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) were unable to dig up over the course of the campaign.
Yes it is, and the only difference about spying now versus in the good old days, is that the media gaining motivation from political elites have been given the go ahead to disclose for political purposes. The quality of it, whether it be cyber, or fly over, or traditional is irrelevant. It has always been assumed to be there, the freedom to authoritively makes the only difference.
Ah, I think I see what you’re saying now. Is the question more about how this should reflect on Trump?
If so, I can think of a couple reasons this should reflect on Trump. First, we’re concerned with Trump’s knowledge or participation in the hacking. If Trump participated, it’s Nixon’s dirty tricks 2.0 and we should care a lot. Second, and less so, Trump made some statements during the campaign that seemed to endorse and encourage that activity. It might be an emotional reaction, but it’s also the normal human reaction to be more mad at someone who wishes for something bad when that thing comes to pass.
Third, and most importantly, Russian interference may have actually affected the outcome, in which case it’s extremely relevant. You’re not wrong that a lot of mistakes led to Clinton’s loss, but if Russian meddling moved ~100k votes, it could be the but-for cause, i.e. Russian government hacking with the intent to affect our election actually changed the outcome. That seems relevant, and it should affect how we see Trump.
I don’t accept this claim, at least not in the way it’s being used. It might be technically correct (I don’t think that’s a cut-and-dry question), but in practice parties are a part of our government structure. Hacking them, disrupting them, intentionally undermining them is targeting the “election process itself”.
Yeah, hacking a major party is different from hacking a minor party. If someone had assassinated Clinton, the reaction and the political implications would be much greater than the reactions and political implications in someone had assassinated Stein. Assuming we agree that a foreign power assassinating “civilians” as a way to influence an election would be significant, asking how we’d feel if Stein were hacked doesn’t tell us much.
First, let’s not forget that the current Republican President-Elect claimed for the last 8 years that the current Democratic president was born in Kenya. Does that not count as “making up stories about why an election shouldn’t count”?
Second, let’s be sure we’re comparing like events. Obama won by a much greater margin than either Bush or Trump. Bush entered the presidency under very unusual circumstances, where the Supreme Court intervened in an unprecedented way to stop the votes from being counted and declare the presidency in a way that later turned out to be wrong (even assuming it was legally correct to do so). Trump won by a very, very thin margin in an election plagued with intrigue that arguably affect the outcome. The situations aren’t comparable. It makes sense that the losing party should feel more robbed in close/controversial elections.
Third, Trump is unusual in a lot of objective ways. He was rejected by large swaths of his own party during the run-up. Many conservatives have rejected him during the campaign, and decried his actions since winning. So if liberals are particularly tuned up over it, it seems like that is what we should expect that given that conservatives are particularly tuned up about Trump, and Trump won as a Republican.
Trump got billions and billions of dollars of free press from the “liberal media”. Hillary couldn’t scrounge up that much time if her life depended on it!!!
To a Trump supporter, yeah. It should take the form of “If you used to like Trump, finding out about this should change your mind because…”
This is true. The FBI cleared him of this ages ago, but it’s still true that IF Trump was complicit, that would certainly be a bad thing. Though, hacking the DNC and giving the information to Russia to give to Wikileaks instead of just giving it to Wikileaks directly makes little sense.
I don’t think that’s sufficient. If they affected the outcome by giving the American voter pertinent information that that they wouldn’t have otherwise had, why would we place greater scrutiny on the presenter of the information than the wrongdoing itself? Put another way, suppose Trump was a Nazi- he’s got a secret Nazi bunker in the basement of Trump tower where he does horrible things to Jews and wears a little mustache while he does it. Suppose further that this is revealed to us because Spanish secret agents snuck into his basement, took a bunch of videos, and released them to the world.
Would the proper reaction then be “How dare you meddle in our election process by revealing this”? If the information is true, I rather think people would be thanking Spain for helping us dodge a bullet, and I think most Trump supporters feel the same way about Russia re: Wikileaks, assuming it really was them. So much of this seems to turn on whether or not you think in advance Hillary ought to have been President.
I addressed this in an earlier post, I think it was in this thread but I’m not sure. Basically, right up until election day the consensus seems to have been that Wikileaks mattered not at all to the election. Fox was the only network that covered it in the slightest, other than in a “We need to vote for Hillary because Russia wants her to lose” kind of way. Virtually all the cries of unfairness I heard from the left up to the election were about the FBI, not Wikileaks. I mean sure, I guess it’s possible that everybody had the whole thing wrong and it really did move some hundreds of thousands of votes, but it seems awfully convenient to only now, based on zero evidence, completely shift the narrative of why Hillary lost to something that just so happens to also let the DNC suggest Trump is in bed with Putin. I mean, what’s the matter, is “The FBI likes Trump” not testing well in opposition research?
Well, all the examples I gave- missile launches, port security, military tech- are pretty damn serious and important to this country, and we’d like foreign Governments to not hack their way into them. However, in all those other cases- say for example, when Sony accidentally gives the Chinese another 10,000 of our credit card numbers as happens about twice a year- habit has been that we blame the hacked party for their shit security. And I am not seeing ANY of that, which makes me suspicious. If this was a real investigation, the cornerstone of it would be “What was the DNC doing wrong that all their shit was wide open for foreign actors?” But there’s zero of that. Instead the narrative is that the DNC being hacked by Russia while Obama was in charge of national security makes Trump look awful.
I think what’s being admitted here is that the information that Russia took (again, assuming it was them) is actually of no great national significance. Really, the only consequence to any of this is that Hillary doesn’t get to be President, and the reason is that we found out a bunch of true, horrible things about her and her campaign. The DNC isn’t being attacked for ‘making the election process vulnerable to attacks’ in the vein of how you’re making it sound because, really, they’re the only victims and the country is actually just fine. You can’t escape the conclusion that if what Russia did was actually dangerous, the blame lies on Democrats- so where’s that blame?
The answer is that this is political opportunism, and the only consequence anybody is actually concerned with is Trump being president, and I’ll remind you that this is…I think the third alleged reason why Trump winning is of grave national concern since he won.
Not at all. In a similar vein we could say that hacking the election computers of Maine is much different than hacking the election computers of New York. Except it isn’t though, is it? If Russia or anyone actually hacked election computers to hijack the result, it wouldn’t be a controversy, it would be a declaration of war. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small state or a big state. It’s also worth reiterating that in this situation we would all be really really mad at whoever is running Maine elections. Hacking the DNC is a bigger deal than hacking the Green Party because Hillary could have actually won. It’s not about the sensitivity of the information or the compromise of important hardware or any of that. It’s about the belief that Hillary should have been president, and the belief that Russia denied us that. This is my point.
Hillary ran with that ball too, we’re so quick to forget. The DNC also started the birther thing in the first place by trying to kick McCain out of the election for being born in Panama. And sure, Trump’s antics then may have been an attempt to delegitimize Obama, but who was on board with him?
The Supreme Court did not ‘intervene’. Al Gore filed a lawsuit to make himself president, and the Supreme Court was forced to adjudicate it. Minus Al Gore’s temper tantrum, it was simply a close election like any other close election. Exactly like this one- a close election turned into a Constitutional Crisis because of what Democrats do when they lose. They are very comparable.
For a fifth time, after the state had declared a winner.
Of course it’s comparable. You’re just leaving out the part where before the DNC pretended the election wasn’t legitimate because of Russia, they too forced a bunch of frivolous, expensive recounts that served no purpose, sued in federal court for even more recounts, and made sure that the only places that got recounted were places that would make it more likely for them to win. The only thing that’s missing is Gore didn’t chastise Bush for hurting America’s faith in the election system before doing all that.
