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The Manchurian Candidate

Tiberius

By Tiberius
in Politics, Polls, and Pundits

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B-Man Hall of Famer

B-Man

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The Sunday Talk Shows are filled with various left-wing punditry using two media reports from the Washington Post and New York Times claiming anonymous, albeit transparently political, “intelligence officials” who state: the Russian government “hacked the U.S. election“.

 

First, the media’s choice of wording is critical within both reports.

 

It is impossible to “hack an election“. What was hacked was the DNC email system, and John Podesta’s email. WikiLeaks published the content of both “hacks”.

 

Additionally, WikiLeaks has denied the source of the information was a foreign government.

 

Both The Washington Post and New York Times, simultaneously, published articles on Friday claiming anonymous sources within the CIA (note: intensely political CIA Chief John Brennan in charge) point to the Russian government as the originators of the hacking. However, both articles are written with very obtuse and non specific language intended to cover over the fact these reports are not actually stating the official intelligence community are making these specific claims.

 

All other media outlets subsequently take this illogically based presentation and spin their coverage whereby the “DNC hacked” becomes “the election hacked“.

 

In essence, the MSM takes a politically manipulated original intelligence claim and pushes a political media angle within a manufactured story of their own creation.

 

When the media reports on their own media reports the concentric circle of a self fulfilling narrative expands toward the infinite horizon of nothingness.

 

Various Trump administration officials are then commanded to show up for interviews where they are asked to respond to the content of media reports which are based entirely on other manipulated media reports….. And that’s where we are today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Edited by B-Man
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B-Man Hall of Famer

B-Man

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Follow up to Post #27:

 

The NYT headline says "C.I.A. Judgment on Russia Built on Swell of Evidence" and I'm instantly skeptical about whether what's in the article supports that headline.

Because there's so much fake news these days.

Ever notice how cries of "fake news!" slip out of the news when the news outlets have some fake news to slip over?
Now, let's get down to the work of checking to see whether the NYT really presents evidence to justify that headline. I'm reading every word of the rather long article but will only give you the actual evidence offered for the proposition that the Russian government intervened in the U.S. election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win. There's a lot of material in the article that is not about that at all. I'm excluding that, which is padding if the headline is the correct headline. Go to the link if you want to see what it is.

The first relevant material comes in the 16th paragraph: The DNC's servers and John Podesta's email account were hacked and a lot of damaging and embarrassing material was released onto the internet.

Next:
American intelligence officials believe that Russia also penetrated databases housing Republican National Committee data, but chose to release documents only on the Democrats. The committee has denied that it was hacked.

 

So here's the crucial disputed question of fact: Were the GOP servers also hacked? We're not told what evidence supports the belief that the GOP servers were also hacked, but the GOP says they were not. Yet some "intelligence officials believe" it was. Why? Where's the "swell of evidence" you were going to tell me about?

Even if that fact were nailed down, there would still be more leaps needed to get to the conclusion.

 

First: Was there any embarrassing material? What? If I knew what, I could begin to think about the next question: Why would embarrassing material be withheld? All I can see from the supposed "swell of evidence" here is an assumption that if the DNC was hacked, the GOP committee was also hacked, and that if bad material was found in the DNC server, bad material would also be found in the GOP server, and since we only saw the DNC material, there must have been a conscious decision — by whom?! — to leak only the DNC things and that decision must have been made to help Trump win.

 

That's not evidence itself, only inference based on evidence.

Finally, there are a few paragraphs about why "Putin and the Russian government" might be thought to prefer a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency. Trump and Putin have given each other some compliments.

That's no swell of evidence! That's a lot of leaping guesswork. And this is nothing more than I already read in the article the NYT put out on December 9th, which I put effort into combing through and rejected for the same reasons I'm putting in this new post.

This might be the biggest fake news story I've ever seen!

Squirreled away at the end of the article is the admission that people at the FBI are skeptical about the conclusion. An unnamed "senior American law enforcement official" told the NYT that "the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions" and that "any disagreement between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and suggested that the C.I.A.’s conclusions were probably more nuanced than they were being framed in the news media." The NYT observes that the FBI holds itself to "higher standards of proof," since its work is geared toward prosecuting criminal cases in court, but: "The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments."

More at the link:

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DC Tom Hall of Famer

DC Tom

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The NYT observes that the FBI holds itself to "higher standards of proof," since its work is geared toward prosecuting criminal cases in court, but: "The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments."

 

 

The FBI is also concerned with cybersecurity and prosecuting computer crime, where the CIA isn't even remotely.

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KD in CA Hall of Famer

KD in CA

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They are laying the groundwork to take the election away from Trump.

 

Just like the Brexit vote is being undermined in the UK.

 

Ah yes, I wonder what date they'll propose for the 'revote'.

 

Hillary on election night:

Edited by KD in CA
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