I can’t think of any other election in which leaked confidential documents have played such a prominent role in driving not only the news of the election, but also how the public views the candidates.
Of course everyone is talking about the mystery of who may have leaked Trump’s tax returns. Just a few weeks ago, hacked emails from the DNC and other sources have ended up on Wikileaks, and there’s been a lot of speculation that Russia is behind those disclosures. (And there’s also been a few leaked audio tapes here and there, but I note that such things have happened in other recent elections, so I’m not really calling out those tapes here.)
So, two questions: First, a poll on whether you are more bothered by either of these leaks, bothered by both, or not bothered by the leaks at all.
Second, a discussion on what these events mean for our elections generally. Are we getting closer to the point that we should just expect candidates for public office to lay bare all their personal matters before voters – taxes, emails, private conversations, business arrangements, and so on? Do you think it will be long before campaign just decide to go full Watergate and hire people to start doing their own hacking against opponents, though perhaps in a slightly more deniable way than the Plumbers did? Does it matter to you whether foreign governments or foreign private individuals involve themselves in our elections this way?
Bother as in we don’t like that they happened? Or that we find their contents troubling?
The DNC and Clinton Foundation hack bothers me in the first sense. The State emails should have been public under the FOIA. The tax thing bothers me in the second sense, but I also think that should’ve been public.
This is a tough one. It’s hard to condone the hacking of private e-mails, but anyone who thinks his/her e-mails are actually “private” these days is an idiot. One can always choose whether to send an e-mail or not. Tax returns, OTOH, are not optional, so I have a bit more sympathy for someone having his/her tax returns outed. My nuanced answer is: No, I don’t “want” to see more illegal activity, but if you have something to hide, don’t expect it to stay hidden when you’re running for office. Not your e-mails, not your tax returns, not your medical records, not the words you whisper to your dying mother.
Schadenfreude is strange. I should be outraged that Trump’s tax info was stolen and publicized. On the other hand, I don’t like Trump and this made him marginally less likely to win the election.
If it was almost anyone else, I’d be outraged. Or at least I think I would be. Maybe I’m experiencing outrage fatigue, in part due to all the outrageous things Trump has done and said.
The email leaks bother me (not the ones that a court decided had to be released, but the outright hacks)… but that’s what you get for putting confidential info on a “home server” with a malfunctioning administrative setup. (I can’t blame Clinton for putting info into email that was later classified. One of the most confidential-marked email chains involved saying nice things to a president of another country who had suffered a death in the family. Clinton screwed up big time, but the classification rules need to change, and maybe they should stop requiring all emails to be stored too.)
When you consider leaks of data and what the data reveals, sometimes its best to consider the source of the leak.
Forty years ago, given the technology available at the time, some burglars tried to get incriminating data from files of the DNC to help with a presidential election.
It led Senate Hearings, Special Prosecutors, indictments, arrests (some people got jail time), and ultimately to the resignation of Richard Nixon.
Today, with computers, those burglars never have to ever set foot inside DC city limits… but the same data is sought after and people are paid handsomely to steal it in the hopes that it can throw an election.
So far in this election, the only result has been the firing of Paul Manafort.
Q: Are we less moral people now than we were in the early 70s that we tolerate Crooks and readily take the tainted fruit they offer us to try to sway public opinion?
I guess my answer is nuanced. Hacks and leaks are troublesome, and shouldn’t happen. But sometimes they serve the greater good. And sometimes the person deserves it. But it’s still troublesome. So I’m confused and don’t quite know what to think. I guess it depends on whose ox is being gored
The leaks and character assassination is out of control in both parties.
Imagine how much digging it took to uncover an obscure outtake from Trump’s interview in 2005. That was a private and very raunchy conversation between the interviewer and Trump. Why was that even saved? They shoot hundreds of hours of footage for these entertainment/news shows. Most of it is deleted. It’s not considered worth keeping.
Trump was just a media personality and businessman then. The research it took somebody to unearth this outtake is staggering. It says a lot about how determined the media is to destroy Trump.
Meanwhile wiki leaks is just as determined to destroy Hillary. There’s no telling what bombshells they’ll drop.
It’s just sickening, to gleefully tear down candidates just for the hell of it.
The 2005 tape was not a hack. The recording was legally obtained. Trump did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy while wearing a mic for a TV broadcast. And there is nothing pointless about drumming up a candidate’s past, as past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
It depends on the source. The single most plausible source for the tax forms, for instance, was Marla Maples. If she was in fact the source, then it’s not even a leak at all: She unambiguously 100% has the right to reveal those forms, if she so chooses, even anonymously, and for any reason she wants. If, on the other hand, the source was an accountant or other professional who helped prepare those forms, and it was done without Maples’ or Trump’s consent, then at the very least it’s a violation of professional ethics, and that professional needs to be fired and face appropriate sanctions. I don’t know if it would also violate any laws, but if it does, then those consequences would and should also apply.
On the e-mails, meanwhile, the hacking was most likely done by agents of the Russian government, which on the one hand means a very troubling security lapse, but on the other hand means that the perpetrators are out of the reach of American justice. So it’s very troubling, but there’s not much we can do about it after the fact. On the other hand, there’s still the unresolved possibility that they were acting in some way in collusion with Trump, and that’s both even more serious, and something that we can do something about.
I didn’t vote because my answer would be that I’m bothered more by who is behind the leaks and what their motives are. Obviously they are not pro-Clinton. I doubt Trump or his supporters have the resources to do it.