The FBI Did Their Best NOT To Protect The DNC From The Russians

Hillary Clinton's campaign head is angry about how the FBI didn't protect them from the Russians. He wrote about it in the Washington Post. Here's an article about it from Daily Beast.

If I were Podesta I’d be mad too. I’d feel betrayed. I feel betrayed as it is. The FBI let all of us down.

For years I have gotten numerous phone calls a week from helpful experts saying I have a problem with this or that, usually with my credit card or my bank accounts. You get them too.

The most laughable ones come routinely, once a week sometimes, from “Windows Technical Support”. “Hello this is Windows Technical Support and we need to fix a problem you may be having with your computer security.” They sound kind of nerdy and nerdy often means trustworthy, especially in technical areas, but I know they are bogus. I have fun with them, asking for their office address so I can bring my computer in. I sometimes send the information to my local FBI office. They are obviously criminals trying to gain access to my computer. I have never owned a Windows computer.

Now I am wondering if I was wise to contact the FBI. They appear to be ignorant of this kind of crime. Ignorant of their technique at least, because they use it themselves.

When the FBI learned of a Russian campaign to compromise the DNC, agents phoned the DNC's IT help desk and said "Hello this is the FBI and we need to fix a problem you may be having with your computer security.”

The DNC is blocks away from FBI headquarters. They did not go to the DNC and show their FBI identification. They phoned in a rough imitation of a phone scammer. If someone called me and said “This is the FBI and we need to fix a problem you may be having with your computer security” I would have laughed and hung up. I might have said “Is this you, Phil?”

Was the FBI this clueless? Were they being intentionally unhelpful? Contacting a person when you know they aren’t at home or sending them a letter with the wrong address and postage are good ways of not contacting them and saying you did. (There must be a term for this kind of intentional failure.) Was this a way of crossing the Russian hack off the FBI's to-do list without doing anything about it?

Did they not want to help the DNC confront a serious violation of our democracy? Our national sovereignty was also being threatened. Did the FBI not care about our national sovereignty as long as the violation helped a Republican become president? However it was allowed, the threat was fulfilled. We now have a president-elect chosen by a foreign enemy.

FBI? Is this what you wanted?

Did Russia Win The White House?

The American voters chose Hillary Clinton by more than a million and a half votes and the margin is growing as absentee votes are counted. The ongoing updated vote tally is shown here.

But Russia and the Russian spy agencies and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin wanted Trump and it looks like they got what they wanted.

Esquire's very readable and credible political reporter Charlie Pierce reports on the Russian connection here, and here.

The Hill newspaper reports on it here.

Mother Jones reports on it here.

The Russian government wanted someone weak, inexperienced, irrational, incompetent and vacillating and Americans who voted for Trump helped them achieve that.

With perhaps some additional help from voter intimidation and voter suppression and election rigging.

David Pakman addresses vote anomalies in key swing states

Published on Nov 14, 2016
--According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Hillary Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI and FL), but ultimately lost those states according to computerized vote counts

The data from TDMS Research

BBC journalist Greg Palast addresses these concerns more directly here

(This sounds like the kind of rhetoric Trump was shouting just before the election. But it isn’t rhetoric. It has to do not with predictive polling but with information collected as the vote was happening, which is less prone to deviations. The deviations are what alert the public to irregularities. That is what this information suggests may have happened.)

So there were a number of very disturbing forces pushing for a Trump victory.

Another mechanism that distorted this election was the way social media amplified and disseminated the lies being told. Because of the greater skepticism of progressive voters most of the fake stories that worked their way into this election were biased toward Trump.

The story from WIRED

Fake news sites sold more Americans on bogus negative stories about Hillary (I read one that reported that close associates said she emitted a sulphuric smell indicating she was in league with Satan. She does not, and she is not. People believe this crap because if it’s on the internets it must be true) and bogus positive stories about Trump (the one having the greatest effect may have been the one saying Pope Francis endorsed Trump, when in fact Pope Francis clearly and forcefully rebuked Trump and the hateful policies he calls for.)

Untrue stories and rumors are often in play during elections, but this year the untrue stories outplayed the true ones.

The story reported by Buzzfeed

(I realize Buzzfeed sounds a bit like a fake news source. This is actually a very well founded story.)

Trump benefited from the sad fact that many Americans base their most important decisions on feelings rather than facts. Which is ironic, because it wasn’t very long ago that Republicans were the party that prided itself on being rational and responsible. They derided liberals as being fact averse. That has flipped entirely.

Vox discusses the fact that conservatives believe the false stories far more than liberals do

One of the Big Lies cited in the Vox story was broadcast to the millions of gullible Trump supporters is now the top advisor in Trump’s White House, the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon.

One of the fake news creators discussed his filthy profession with the Washington Post. He seems to be enjoying the damage as much as Putin is, while frantically denying any blame for the millions of people he lied into voting for Trump. He has a point: if you can persuade a stupid person to drink poison the joke is on them, right? Too late to apologize now.

The Oxford English Dictionary announces a Word of the Year each year. This year’s word is “post-truth”. We’ve reached a point when what is true doesn’t matter to millions of people. This should be troubling. This is one of the first corruptions that occurred during the Nazi era in Germany. Now I realize Donald Trump is not Hitler because Hitler was a vegetarian, but apart from his eating habits there are a disturbing number of close similarities, not just in what Trump promises to do but in the kinds of poisonous rhetoric he used to get people out to vote for him. The only real difference is that Trump shouted these things in English and not in German.

The true story about "post-truth" via the BBC

Nothing we can do, right? Too late now, right? Let’s all curl up in fetal positions underneath our beds, right? They won’t find us there...

Actually? Actually there is something that might prevent the inauguration of President Trump.

Something called the Electoral College. It’s the old device the slave states put in place to increase their influence in Congress by adding electoral power for people they owned as property.

But it was also put in place to keep power from being given to dangerous people who catered to the mob. Not the Mob, as in the Mafia. The mob as in the unwashed and volatile public. The ignorant folk who are easily fooled by fake stories about an honest candidate being dishonest and a dishonest candidate being truthful. The Electoral College was created to prevent people like Donald J. Trump (con man, fraudster, tax evader, sociopath, fascist, incompetent) from gaining power.

And to avoid that outcome we can still hope that enough of these carefully selected Electoral College Electors will refuse to ratify the presidency of Vladimir Putin’s favorite.

I am recommending that everyone who knows rational people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida or any state that swung or squeaked by for Trump to phone them and ask them to write sincere and respectful personal letters to the Electors in their state. Other letters can be written to respected Republicans who might have some influence, who those Electors might respect.

One argument that might be persuasive is that Trump is erratic and irrational and likely to fail in a manner that will reflect very badly on the Republican Party. His errors and his poor judgment will be the party’s fault forever. The Republicans now own all three branches of government. They will own whatever unfolds whether they intended it or not.

Many conservatives have already disowned him. And are continuing to after the election.

The story from SLATE

Folks in the redder parts of the country tend to revere America’s military. You might inform these Republican in the Electoral College that our nation’s military rate climate change as one of the greatest security threats America faces today.

The story about the security threat from global warming via Scientific American

If Trump is inaugurated there are other things we’ll need to do. But let’s try to stop him before we get to that point.

Your Daily Trump––How Did America Fall In Love With Putin's Candidate?

We used to admire people like Hillary Clinton. No woman has topped Gallup’s most admired list as many times as she has. And there are reasons for that. There is one reason her positives have gone down: She announced her candidacy. There are people in the world who hate the idea of a woman president, and hate all Democrats. Those people own networks and newspapers and have a ready audience. So the smear began. We should admire someone who could endure that, someone willing to endure that. We used to admire guts and endurance and unflappability and grace under pressure. What’s happened to us that we no longer admire admirable people but suddenly are entranced by a con man and a liar?

The National Observer examines the anti-Hillary prejudice and how we now hate what we once admired.

A lot of the negative feeling about Hillary has been manufactured by FoxNews. They would have smeared anyone they thought was likely to win the Democratic nomination. This has been the Republican approach for years: go after the opposing side's strongest candidate.

What’s weird is the Republican Party and Fox are suddenly allied with the Russians. Why? Because they prefer fascism and don't mind U.S. submission to a Russian dictator? They think that’s better than electing a Democrat. They will collude with an enemy dictator if it helps them gain power.

Why does Wiki Leaks only target Hillary Clinton? For the same reason Roger Ailes targeted her.

The Russia/GOP/Wikileaks alliance explained at VOX.

Because she’s the strongest presidential candidate we have. Assange wants to pull the whole U.S. government down. His sponsors, the Russians, also his sources on this information, want to pull the U.S. down. Hillary Clinton would oppose that. Assange and Putin would like our security agencies dissolved. Hillary opposes that. And she’s the strongest choice for president. Assange and Putin oppose that.

She’s the sane one, the experienced one, the competent one, the one who’d strengthen Russia’s age-old enemy, the U.S.

Remember Wikileaks hacked information about the DNC and the Clinton campaign. They didn’t leak anything about Trump because Trump is their guy. The Russians own Trump. He owes them millions.

He’s gotten almost as many millions from the Russians as he has leeched out of the pockets of U.S. taxpayers. This story is worth reading. American Prospect reports on Trump the Parasite Who Lives Off the Taxpayer.

The Russia Card in Trump's Deck (or is it the Trump card in Putin's deck?)

Was the hacking of the DNC's private emails done by Russian hackers? It's more than a rumor.

The DC political newspaper The Hill reported on this story the other day.

As did the Daily Beast.

Trump admires Nixon, but when it came to dirty tricks Nixon hired domestic thugs.

Donald Trump invites Russian mobsters and friends of Russian dictator Putin to do his ratf***ing for him. He offshores everything.

That’s what the FBI is saying happened to the private emails of the Democratic National Committee.

Trump’s “friendship” with Putin is a real thing. Josh Marshall lays out the disturbing aspects of it here. Trump has relied on the Russians the way the beleaguered business owner relies on the loan sharks and their mobster pals.

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...
Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”


3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."

Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.


So is Trump in bed with America’s most dangerous superpower enemy? There’s hard evidence and circumstantial evidence that Trump has either asked for the help of Russian spies and mobsters or they have decided that backing him is the best way to destroy us.

Nixon at least employed domestic burglars. Trump offshores everything. If he promises to create jobs why not criminal hacking jobs? There are a lot of smart cynical jobless young Americans who will do anything to pay down their college debt. Why not hire American? The Russians must have made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They do that when you owe them lots of money.

The word Treason should be in some of the headlines about him, but that’s a hard word for front page editors to spell. They’ve backed off on similar treasons in the past.

Really? Have we seen treasonous behavior like this in a presidential campaign?

Actually yes. When Nixon sabotaged the tentative Vietnam peace agreement in 1968. (The war lasted another five years and killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.)

Politico reported on the Nixon treason here. Even George Will says it happened and it was treason.

Nixon's more famous dirty tricks occurred in 1972, when Nixon hired his own burglars to break into the Democratic committee headquarters in the Watergate. They made a movie about it. It's quite good.

And then there was the time in 1980 when the Reagan campaign persuaded the Ayatollah to hold the 44 American hostages until after he was sworn into office. (Members of the foreign service have been in far greater danger from Republicans than Democrats. They see diplomats in danger as a political opportunity.) Ayatollah? Iran? Enemies? The Reagan team was very chummy with them.

Reported in TruthOut.

And by WRMEA here.

And then there was the period when Reagan’s people traded weapons with terrorists in the Middle East and used the proceeds to finance terrorists in Central America. Iran Contra broke federal laws and resulted in many top level indictments and guilty pleas in the Reagan administration. (There have been no similar indictments much less prison terms during Obama’s presidency…much to Republicans’ chagrin.)

Going back further, to 1933 (not during a presidential campaign but after they lost) a group of Wall Streeters and industrialists tried to hire a retired general to overthrow FDR.

The BBC, perhaps the greatest and most reliable source of global news, reported on it in a documentary.

Here's another BBC link to that story.

Treason. It’s an old Republican tradition.

Trump has been very open about what world leaders he admires. Saddam Hussein. Putin. Kim Jong Un of North Korea. All ruthless dictators with no scruples and no respect for human life or democratic principles. Gangsters in charge of nations. Criminals with armies and security police under their command. That is the direction Trump would like to take us.

So if you kind of don’t like Hillary and “want to send a message”... consider the message you’re sending.

If you’re frustrated with how dysfunctional our political system is… consider how it got that way. It got that way because on the day Barack Obama was sworn into office all of the Republican leaders and their strategists got together and vowed to derail and block and oppose every single thing the new president proposed. They ended up opposing quite a few things they’d supported previously. With the ObamaCare system they opposed key elements that originated at their own think tank, the Heritage Foundation. (As Trump would say, compromise is for losers.)

For the past eight years Republicans have done their best to make democracy fail. Of course you’re angry.

So why hand over government to the party that made democracy fail?

It’s like the Chris Rock bit from a couple of years ago. “I’m angry at Obama because he didn’t cure Cancer. So you know what? I’m gonna vote for Cancer!”

How dumb are we?

This could explain why the Russians see us as a ripe pigeon ready for them to pull apart.