This seems really important and as the author of the piece says, terrifying, which is why I gave it it’s own thread.
Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek, along with Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold, has done some amazing investigative journalism unearthing Donald Trump’s history. However Eichenwald just published a piece in which reveled something about Trump’s present.
The piece, entitled Dear Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, I Am Not Sidney Blumenthal, made the writer news because Russian propaganda mill Sputnik used his own words in a piece prompted when WikiLeaks unearthed emails taken from John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign:
Eichenwald noticed the Sputnik article “quoting two sentences from a 10,000 word piece I wrote for Newsweek, which Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta… There was no mistaking that Blumenthal was citing Newsweek—the magazine’s name and citations for photographs appeared throughout the attached article. The Russians had carefully selected the ‘of course’ paragraph, which mentions there were legitimate points of criticism regarding Clinton and Benghazi.”
Of course the Russian outlet did not quote the part of the article summing up the Benghazi investigation as “a political show trial disguised as a Congressional investigation.”
Sputnik quietly removed the piece soon after publishing it - the only evidence of it gaining any traction was a link to the Sputnik article in a Turkish publication.
So, Russian hackers and their state-controlled media are incompetent. But that’s not where the story ends because mere hours later at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, Trump inexplicably referenced the fleeting-yet-bogus article as red meat to his rabid supporters.
I realize that none of this is as “sexy” a story as Trump’s recent and well-publicized problems with that 2005 video, but it seems to me to be a hell of a lot more important - and yes, terrifying.
If Trump is not being run directly by Russia, then he is serving as their useful idiot. I suspect that there is a direct connection from Russia running through the Briebart organization. Whether Trump is fully cognisant of this connection or not… is an open question, considering how fundamentally stupid he is.
Regarding the Eichenwald story, is it reasonable to assume that someone on Trump’s staff was keeping a watchful eye out for all Wikileaks-related stories, even ones published by the sketchy state-run Russian news agency, and printing them out for DT as soon as they dropped? Does that theory leave anything unexplained? Because that would be a more “innocent” (and slightly less terrifying) read of this whole thing.
Trump’s campaign seems to be VERY quickly connected to much of the disinformation coming from Russian propaganda sources. If the campaign is not being sent it directly, then they certainly regularly check the Russian sources for new leads.
The various folks in Trump’s campaign over the months seem to have close Russian ties…
This is possible, but I have to think that there are plenty of people, journalists, bloggers, etc. constantly scouring the web for these kinds of leaks, yet apparently none of them saw this. If they had then it almost certainly would have been all over the web in short order.
So Trump’s campaign just happened to stumble across this when no one else did? It’s not impossible but it seems unlikely.
That certainly seems plausible to me, but it’s still terrifying, because it shows how easily Trump is manipulated into acting in the interests of a foreign power. It doesn’t really matter if Trump is doing it knowingly or not if Putin can pull his strings and make him dance whenever he wants.
Terrifying or otherwise, I think we need to accept this as the new normal and take measures to minimize the risk/impact. And yeah, it’s not like we’re innocent virgins on this matter…
Russians Attempting to Influence the US Election? Sure. Evidence? This? No.
It’s bog standard Vast American Right Wing Conspiracy stuff, a la Breitbart and Infowars. No need to drag any Russians into this.
Clearly Trump got this piece of conspiracy mongering, like many other ones, through his well known Breitbart connection, not through the Russians.
It’s true that there’s an obscure Russian site out there that carries some of this routine anti Hillary right wing conspiracy material. Why not? I don’t see why that’s so significant. It’s the exact same stuff that has been peddled on any number of American sites for decades.
This blog by Glenn Greenwald argues that Hillary supporters making a big deal out of this are just as blinded by their zealotry as the anti Hillary conspirationists.
My current working hypothesis for the Trump candidacy:
As Trump became increasingly toxic to investors, he found that the only folks who would still lend him money were those who took collateral in kneecaps and blood. Since he’s thoroughly addicted to spending other peoples’ money, he couldn’t just stop borrowing, and so he accepted a deal with one or more such shady moneylenders. One of the lenders he borrowed from was the Russian mob, of which Putin is one of the more prominent members. When it became apparent that he couldn’t afford to pay them back any more than he could pay back any of his legitimate creditors, they offered him a deal: Run for President under their orders. They probably figured it was a longshot, but with a sufficiently-high potential payout to be worth the gamble. Now, even if he loses, they can still assassinate a few of his family members, but that won’t get blood from a stone, and they’d much prefer for their gamble to pay off, so they’re spending a little of their own money to try to help him.
I think you are constantly ignoring that me an others here do think that the leaks are not fake, but the spin and the reporting of them by Trump, Fox news and others is.
As pointed before, you only need to check that virtually the same groups that are twisting the leaked material did just about the same maneuvers with the mundane leaked emails from climate scientists.
Since first hearing this story I’ve thought it would make an excellent Tom Clancy type book. Russians find some TV star sympathetic to their cause, flood his coffers with money and get him elected POTUS. Then he turns over all US secrets to the Russians, etc, etc.
Really, somebody here needs to wrote this book. Maybe that will finally get people and this country to take internet security seriously.
What we know is, it appeared on a Russian run Web site.
What we can see is, that same site carries a large quantity of the exact same Right Wing Conspiracy material (high grade, quality stuff) that has been carried for decades on equivalent American sites.
My conclusion from this is that it’s part and parcel of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, although possibly contributed, or endorsed, or maybe just duplicated by some of their ragtag Russian sympathizers.
And if that was your angle that would be ok, but that is not what the twice cited blogger you linked to does:
The writer dumps the point I was making about Trump being most likely a stooge and just goes about the ridiculous item of being an agent. It is indeed trying to make a lot of the supporters of Clinton to sound silly but It becomes a straw man when you use bits like that when trying to keep the Russians away from any wrongdoing.
And nowhere else, as I understand it. And it was a kind of dumb mistake, which that one Russian site took down within hours. But Trump was already using it.
Either it was handed to the Trump campaign by Russians, or it didn’t have to be, because the Trump campaign is following Russian propaganda pretty closely on its own already.
Or, as I pointed out in another thread, someone in the Trump campaign has a google alert set up to pick up any stories about “Clinton AND wikileaks AND Benghazi”.
