That gurgling sound you hear is the undertow of Trump debasement dragging another once-promising civil servant down to their doom.
Between this and her support for kidnapping the children of asylum seekers, she has destroyed her reputation and consigned herself to a future where no decent people will be seen with her.
At some point in the down the line, when she’s speaking at yet another of the right-wing white-nationalist meetings that are now her only source of income, she’ll stop, look around, swallow hard, and feel the last embers of what was once her soul, finally go black.
Mueller (lifelong Republican) what the hell are you waiting for? You have a lot more evidence than Starr ever had on Bill Clinton. Get going…there are at least 6 specific acts by Trump that obstructed justice…start with those. Then move on to the conspiring with the Russians, tax fraud, bribery, illegal money laundering, and finally organized crime.
Mueller…the RICO act was passed for exactly what Trump has been doing. Get on with it!
Ms. Nielsen needs to read the NYT story on the Jan. 6 brief to Trump on incontrovertible evidence that Putin hacked the 2016 election and threw it to Trump, view the video of the Helsinki presser showing Putin admitting he favored Trump and told his government to support his campaign, and then read the appropriate statutes on Obstruction of Justice. Specifically how one becomes an “accessory after the fact.” She is covering up multiple felonies and should either state the truth or shut the hell up.
And I’m not sure that 20+ intelligence agencies all saying the same thing regarding Russia’s election 9/11 (backed up as well by last Friday’s indictments) should be dismissed so easily because of Iraq, which is what you are alluding to.
I would trust the CIA and FBI before any trump minion. Remember that every last one of our intelligence services said it was Russians. Every.last.one.
Who ya gonna believe?
That is what I thought at the beginning of this back in 2016… Putin just wanted to churn the waters, create believable (to Trump & followers) evidence that the election was “rigged” in favor of Hillary, so she’d get even more grief than Obama did during her period in office.
Now its beginning to look like he had quite a lot of infrastructure (spys, people owning voting machines, Trump family) in place, able to do a hell of a lot more mischief than just harass Hillary.
And he had American politicians -maybe the entire GOP- on his payroll, plus a lot of conservative institutions like the NRA, “Focus on the Family” and a lot of religious groups, helping Russia out.
And I think we can be pretty sure a lot of American Oligarchs, such as Kochs, Mercers, Waltons and who-knows? working with him.
An Act of War on Russia’s part, to those dimwits who say Trump’s actions “aren’t treason because we aren’t at war.”
The jailing of babies and hauling 3yr olds into immigration court without a lawyer are two of the things about trump and his admin. I will never forgive.
If your goal is, in part, to foment social discord and political chaos, just breaking in and changing the vote totals is the least effective way and we know what they did was much more effective.
In the former case, you can’t guarantee the outcome but no matter who ultimately wins, you’ve managed to spread social discord and political chaos.
OTH, in the later case, as we do voting in the US, you have to break into countless different voting systems at the county/precinct level without getting caught–with the states and local levels all injecting different people, processes, and systems you have to account for–and manipulate the count in ways that a) are not statistically apparent/aberrant, b) move the correct amount of votes in the correct places, to achieve your desired outcome. And you have to do it on-the-fly during the day or as polls close across the nation and quickly before the “wrong” sets of numbers start getting replicated all over the place. And you can’t mess with things like mail-in ballots the same way or at the same time.
I get that current voting machine and tabulation technology is not very secure. These vulnerabilities do not add up to a credible way to reliably flip a national election. (Elections of smaller scope, even statewide in some states with more uniform statewide voting systems, seem like they would be much more vulnerable.) To drive a national election to a specific outcome, social engineering seems much more likely–indeed I’d say was proven in 2016–to be effective.
Interfering with the election seems to me to be more than just fooling with registration rolls. We already know that more than 50% of the electorate actually fail to show up at any given election.
It’s highly possible that the registrations that were fooled with might have been for voters who didn’t even show up, were no longer registered in the precinct or might even have been dead at the time.
This was certainly a dress rehearsal for a much larger operation, no doubt, but as has been explained above, the machines we have are, for some part, unauditable - there’s no way to tell if the vote(s) was/were changed, helping Trump or anyone else to win.
We can’t go after someone on the basis of feeling it happened. We have to have solid evidence - we have it for the tampering with the rolls. I’ve got that, But actually impacting the election outcome, ala hanging chads? Not so much.
They needed 80,000 votes across three states. If having targets were well targeted, the ‘countless’ districts we had were totally irrelevant. I would be astounded to learn that doing such a hack would be particularly difficult at all.
