It’s not a tough call. Donald Trump is president because Vladimir Putin wanted him to be.
By Lucian K. Truscott IV
Salon (7/14/18)
t’s all right there in the indictment — day by day, hack by hack, theft by theft — how agents of the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, set out in the spring of 2016 to steal the election for Donald Trump. When you track the actions taken by Russian intelligence in the indictment with statements made by Trump and actions taken on his behalf by members of his campaign, the picture is as clear as an iPhone photo. Agents of the Russian government coordinated with members of the Trump campaign and took cues from Trump himself in order to influence the election of 2016.
Right after Trump called on “Russia” to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” the Russians did just that. They went looking for those emails by going after Clinton’s personal email server. If that’s not collusion with the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, I don’t know what is.
In announcing the indictment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have refused to point to a victim of the Russians’ crimes other than to say it was America itself, but the intent of the Russians was clear. They took active measures over a period of at least nine months to aid the campaign of Donald Trump and to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. They stole the election for Donald Trump, and he helped them do it.
From Paragraph 20 of the indictment, “The Object of the Conspiracy”: “The object of the conspiracy was to hack into the computers of US. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 US. presidential election.”
The indictment is breathtaking in the specificity of the crimes it outlines, how those crimes were committed, and by whom. …
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )
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Timeline: How Russian Agents Allegedly Hacked The DNC And Clinton’s Campaign
By Phillip Bump
The Washington Post (7/13/18)
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein on Friday announced the indictment of 12 Russians affiliated with that country’s intelligence services for their alleged role in hacking the networks of the Democratic Party, the congressional campaign arm of the party and email accounts of individuals associated with the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. The indictment was the most significant of those obtained by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team because it, for the first time, directly and publicly implicates the Russian government in the hacking effort, a central part of that country’s apparent attempt to influence the outcome of the election.
The indictment itself offers a flurry of new details about that effort, including, perhaps most importantly, that the hackers tried to access Clinton’s personal server on July 27, 2016 — the same day that then-candidate Donald Trump publicly implored unnamed Russian hackers to hack her server. Another interesting detail: At one point the hackers — believed to be affiliated with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU — allegedly modified the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s website to redirect donations from the popular site ActBlue to a domain they’d established, ActBlues.com.
Below, a timeline of the new allegations included in the indictment. We’ve also included information that was known prior to Friday’s announcement for additional context. They’re identified with a gray background. (Those items generally come from two other timelines.) …
Read the Rest and 3-Minute Video
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Indictment Of Russian Intel Operatives Should Quell Harebrained Conspiracy Theories On DNC Hack
By James Risen
The Intercept (7/13/18)
WITH HIS LATEST indictments on Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller drove a particularly sharp nail into the coffin of the conspiracy theories surrounding the cyber-attack on the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign during the 2016 election.
Spoiler alert: The Russians really did do it.
It wasn’t Seth Rich, the murdered young Democratic staffer whose name has been dragged through the mud by countless fringe theorists, and whose parents are now suing Fox News for propagating such lies.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of possible collusion between Trump and Russia included in the indictment relates to an odd and inflammatory statement that Trump made in the midst of the campaign.
It wasn’t an inside job by the Democrats themselves, as a group of out-of-touch former intelligence officials tried to convince themselves and the world. The Mueller investigation isn’t a “witch hunt,” as Donald Trump and his loyalists have repeatedly claimed.
Instead, Mueller’s prosecutors charged 12 Russian intelligence officials, listed by name, rank, and job title, with engineering the hack of the Democrats during the election. In damning detail, the indictment makes the case that the hack of the Democratic Party was a highly-structured, officially sanctioned covert action operation conducted by Russian intelligence, namely the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm. If the allegations hold up, there can no longer be any question as to whether the cyberattack was ordered and approved by the Putin government.
The indictment also adds heft to the longstanding intelligence community consensus that the target of the covert action was Clinton and her presidential campaign, and that Moscow’s objective was to damage her campaign and help Donald Trump win. …