As of yet, I am unaware of anything that Mr. Whitaker has done that was illegal.
He failed to recuse himself, but that’s the extent of his immorality at the moment and it’s not a crime to need a toilet that has room for a long penis.
I would guess that ‘obstruction of justice’ may well be found to characterize some of Whitaker’s actions since he took (acting) office.
We’ll see.
What actions?
That could be mainly because he doesn’t have the legal authority to *do *anything.
Still, just imagine how much pruno he could make in one of those bad boys.
Not obstruction of justice (but I’ll still say fucking annoying): his attempt, last week, at announcing that the Mueller investigation is “close to being completed”.
Whittaker’s goal-post moving was awesome in this article, starting with a headline that stated the near-closure of the investigation, and then the following bolds:
and, well, actually:
Ah, right then.
Fuck this douche hat.
I used the phrase “may well be found to” advisedly, as in: I am not in a position to know all that Whitaker has done since taking office.
But others are in that position, and we may see results of their assessment in the fullness of time.
I just got to the Jan. 2 episode of Sam Harris’s podcast (recently rebranded “Making Sense”), in which he interviews Renee DiResta. She provides a spellbinding and sickening account of how exactly the Russian agents provocateurs manipulated people online.
I had assumed it was just a lot of sharing of ultra-right-wing memes targeted at people who were already inclined that way. But while there was certainly some of that, what really horrified me was the diabolical way they drove down support among black voters for Hillary Clinton. They started years ahead of the election and built up identities as black activists to gain credibility. Then once their reputations were established, they started floating narratives about how “Hillary isn’t on our side”, and how “fellow” black people may as well not vote because “there’s no place in this country for us” (even though Obama was president at the time!).
That’s pretty sickening.
Anyone want to bet that they haven’t already started doing this for the 2020 candidates?
For Kamala Harris, no doubt it will be “black people” saying ‘she’s a corporatist who doesn’t have black people’s back, just look at her record as a prosecutor.’
For Corey Booker, some similar variation. And for the rest who aren’t people of color, it will be straight-up ‘they are not on our side’ (as with Hillary).
I’ve seen some of this on Twitter already. Some could be the genuine opinions of the posters, sure…but I bet it isn’t all genuine.
It’s worth noting that Russian propoganda to manipulate the American public was dwarfed by American propoganda to the same purpose. The big thing that Russia did was to provide hacking services to the Trump campaign (whether in coordination or not). Everything else that they did was, likely, swamped out by homegrown swamp.
Granted, it’s possible that the Russians were doing something that our parties weren’t, but the only reason to think that might be the case is to assume that Americans are more moral than Russians. Roger Stone, Manafort, etc. pretty well prove that’s not the case, and those guys were in politics well before Trump arrived. Dollar for dollar, I think it would be a pretty safe bet that the RNC did more to target people by race to influence them negatively towards Clinton than the Russians did, and in no lesser a flagrantly racist way.
The DNC, if you examined every single thing any subgroup did, probably also had at least one or two completely unethical Roger Stone types committing equally immoral initiatives. You just don’t have that many people involved with something without at least some part of it falling to slime.
In both cases, though, this almost certainly a minority of their activities - limited to the few complete sleazeballs who happened to get some amount of funding. I do expect that there were more of them in the RNC, and that each got a much bigger slice of the pie with Trump as the candidate, than in previous years.
I can’t find it now, but a graphic I saw (perhaps on Twitter) indicated that it was far more than a little spit in a hurricane. It showed what looked like nearly half of BLM online activity (and that in the most extreme sector on the far left) being ginned up by the IRA.
I did find this, from Wired:
The other thing I wonder is how well Republican dirty tricksters would do at simulating left wing black activists. As weird as it sounds, this may be easier for Russians. (If and when I get to an “Americans” rewatch, it’s definitely all going to appear under a new light, and it will be harder to root for the protagonists.)
Hard to tell from the numbers given how that lines up with anything. Engagements in the 70 millions might be chickenshit, minus anything to compare to.
On YouTube, for example, Alex Jones’ YouTube channel had 2.4m subscribers and got 17m views per month, before it was shut down. The Internet Research Agency generated, in total, something like 310k views during 2016.
Alex Jones had 800k followers on Twitter last year, so I would expect that it’s reasonably likely that any one tweet might get over a million or two engagements. Over the course of a year, I would expect probably 5-10m individual users engaging with those posts (though, granted, that’s just a guess). If the IRA got 1.4m people engaged with their posts in 2016, I’d expect that that’s smaller than Alex Jones.
It looks like he is still active/allowed on Instagram. He has about 280m followers - so slightly worse than the best IRA account. At a guesstimate, he gets about 20k views per post and posts once a day, so in a year he’s getting about 7.3m+ views. I think views is a subset of reactions, but I’m not sure. If so, I’m guessing that he’s probably about of equal popularity as @blackstagram_ was, or just slightly less. That account had 28m reactions.
Across everything, I’d probably guess that Russia, the country, was slightly less effective than Alex Jones. On Instagram, they were stronger than Jones, perhaps by a few times (once you add all of their accounts together).
It would be interesting to know, however, if the Trump campaign was conspicuously absent on Instagram.
Widdle ol’ Joe Rogan, on YouTube, seems to get about 300k views per video and puts out about 300 videos per month (busy man!)
90 million views per month. Wallops the Internet Research Agency.
You’re talking about titans. If the Russkies can marshall any fraction of their reach and power, it’s impressive, chilling, and infuriating.
You are assuming that Russia did not feed conspiracy theories to InfoWars. There is a saying attributed to Lenin: “The Capitalists Will Sell Us the Rope with Which We Will Hang Them”. That is pretty much what happened. They used the technology the west developed along with the western value of freedom of speech to sabotage democracy.
As they say in business, ideas are a dime a dozen. If all Russia has are ideas, that ain’t worth much.
Ideas control how elections go, you know.
And I’m not sure it’s reasonable to equate Alex Jones openly being Alex Jones with russans impersonating reasonable people. Everybody knows who Jones is and the only people influenced by him are people who already believe him. The deceptive accounts fool otherwise reasonable people. I strongly suspect that the deceptive accounts are much more effective on a tweet-by-tweet basis.
And if Russia is feeding Infowars its information, that means you should actually add the effect of Infowars to the Russian’s effect, not use it as a counter to it. If Putin is pulling the strings…Putin is pulling the strings.
So, you’re David Pecker, cooperating with the US on the Trump investigation. And, in the spirit of cooperation, you and your team decide that it is best if you try to squash investigative reporting into Trump dealings with the Middle East, reporting coming from the Washington Post.
What way do you think this was done, gentle reader?
- Pecker called Bezos himself, asked him to stop?
- Peckers legal team sends the WaPo legal team a strongly worded letter?
- Pecker and his legal team try to blackmail the richest man in the world by threatening to publish dick picks, only to have said Richest Man in the World expose the scheme, including the threatening emails, on Medium?
I mean, anytime you can blow up your sweetheart cooperation deal in the biggest counterintelligence investigation in American history by committing other crimes aimed at the richest man in the world, you gotta take the chance, right?
That’s a tough one, so I’m just gonna click the link in option 3! 
(Flounder: Oh boy, is this great!)