Yes, Mother Jones is a lefty publication, but here’s Ron Wyden’s Press release.
And here’s the actual letter to the President.
So what is it, why does Wyden feel the need to let the public know that they’ve requested that Obama declassify it, and why have only Democrats signed the request?
And why isn’t Dianne Feinstein a signatory? She’s a Democrat and on the committee.
This could turn out to be something very interesting, or nothing at all. Why are Republicans seemingly uninterested in declassifying it?
The usual rationale about not declassifying something is that it lets “the other side” know that we know it. And that lets them make some pretty educated guesses about how we know it.
He apparently didn’t have this particular piece of information before. The letter states that they are sending it to him by a secure channel, whIch seems to imply that he doesn’t already have it.
I find it interesting that they felt the need to also send him an unclassified letter stating that this was something that the public should know. It seems redundant. Why not just include that in the secure message?
The most obvious answer is that the letter is aimed at the public as much as it’s aimed at the President. The fact that Wyden issued a press release about it supports that conclusion.
So why create public pressure on the President to declassify the Info? Could it be something so damning that they fear he may want to suppress it out of fear of destabilizing the Republic? Or could the letter simply be an attempt to deligitimze Trump in the minds of the public and the electors?
The latter reason seems unlikely as it could be too easily exposed as such.
The letter carefully doesn’t say there is information, merely that they believe there is information, and that Obama should reveal such information
Full Text:
“We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels,”
It is the same as all the UFO/Aliens people who demand the US Government reveal anything they know and stop suppressing the truth. Doesn’t mean there is a truth.
[ And only very few politicians want action to investigate aliens from outer space, such as Reagan or Hillary Clinton. ]
Ron Wyden is a very serious, credible Senator, so there’s probably at least something interesting in there that he thinks the public should know. And as a very serious, credible Senator, he’s not doing it because he expects something sensational to happen. Not everything has to be earthshattering or “just the break the Clinton campaign was waiting for” to justify letting the public know about it.
I very much doubt that it’s simply a bluff to make Trump look bad. It was Senator Wyden who asked James Clapper “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”, when of course he knew (and Snowden later revealed) that the true answer was “yes”, despite Clapper’s denials at the time. So when he again says there’s classified information which the public ought to be informed of, I give him the benefit of the doubt.
It’s not at all like that. These are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. They have seen the classified information. They just aren’t legally allowed to tell the public, unless the information is declassified.
[Off-topic] When I click those links here in The Land of Smiles I get
From a TOR browser, I get in via Iceland (IIUC). Didn’t see what was so special that Thailand had to be barred. What Wunder-kind thought blocking Thailand was a path to security?
There’s nothing sensitive at either of those links, and I can’t see any reason why the US would want to block the senate.gov domain from anyone in Thailand. Maybe the government on your end blocks it for some reason. Can you get to other .gov domains, like whitehouse.gov?
I’ve done some experimentation, with results too complicated to discuss in this thread. I’ll just say that whitehouse.gov works fine; the symptoms from senate.gov are NOT what I usually see from Thailand’s censorship; and the choice http/https makes a difference though neither always works nor always fails. :smack:
It still comes down to their own belief that such documents reveal anything they allege, as distinct from the administration’s belief to the opposite.
And if some documents are entered by a concerned amateur intelligence person that state LBJ personally shot JFK from The Grassy Knoll, that doesn’t mean the administration is bound to make these allegations public.