I don't get it, what is the problem with this? The United States has been and does far more direct meddling with boots on the ground than Russia ever could. Meddling in elections is one of the few categories we are still undisputed leaders of. Is this illegal? I don't think so. Did they influence any votes with these tweets? Probably, good for them and bad for anyone who is influenced by such silliness as a tweet. I hope Putin gives those trolls and bot creators raises, they have done a good job. How many voting machines have they hacked into and changed the results on? Wake me up when you find that.
"The more secretive government becomes, the less trust it deserves. Secrecy empowers politicans to manipulate public opinion with self serving disclosures." James Bovard
concerning the current production?
i think in the end they've got to come up with something/anything
even if it is inventing a new "political" standard on a go-forward basis
BY JAMES BOVARD, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 01/29/18 11:47 AM EST
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
When Robert Mueller was appointed last May as Special Counsel to investigate Trump, Politico Magazine gushed that “Mueller might just be America’s straightest arrow — a respected, nonpartisan and fiercely apolitical public servant whose only lifetime motivation has been the search for justice.” Most of the subsequent press coverage has shown nary a doubt about Mueller’s purity. But, during his 11 years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mueller’s agency routinely violated federal law and the Bill of Rights.
Mueller took over the FBI one week before the 9/11 attacks and he was worse than clueless after 9/11. On Sept. 14, 2011, Mueller declared, “The fact that there were a number of individuals that happened to have received training at flight schools here is news, quite obviously. If we had understood that to be the case, we would have — perhaps one could have averted this.” Three days later, Mueller announced: “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.” His protestations helped the Bush administration railroad the Patriot Act through Congress, vastly expanding the FBI’s prerogatives to vacuum up Americans’ personal information.
"The more secretive government becomes, the less trust it deserves. Secrecy empowers politicans to manipulate public opinion with self serving disclosures." James Bovard
The FBI’s disappointing surveillance of Carter Page illustrates the difficulty of implicating the president in illegal collusion.
Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who called Donald Trump an "idiot" and rooted against him in 2016, was nevertheless reluctant to join the investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians who sought to influence the presidential election. Strzok, who was removed from the probe after his anti-Trump comments came to light, expressed his qualms in a May 19 text message to FBI lawyer Lisa Page, his girlfriend at the time: "I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big 'there' there."
It is looking more and more like Strzok's gut was right. The FBI's surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee criticize in a memo that was declassified last week, shows investigators putting a lot of time and effort into a line of inquiry that apparently led nowhere.
Given the low legal bar for wiretapping suspected foreign agents, it seems likely that the FBI could have obtained permission to wiretap Page even without the evidence that the memo portrays as questionable and tainted by partisan bias. But that does not mean the bureau's investigation of Page, an oil industry consultant known for his pro-Russian views, was fruitful.
The FBI questioned Page in 2013 about his encounter with a Russian intelligence agent (who he apparently did not realize was a spy) and reportedly monitored his conversations in 2014. In October 2016, after press coverage of Page's chumminess with the Russian government led him to part ways with the Trump campaign, the FBI obtained a new warrant, which lasted 90 days and was renewed three times, meaning he was under FBI surveillance for a full year.
Despite all this interest in Page, a peripheral figure in the Trump campaign who served as a foreign policy adviser for half a year, he was never charged with a crime.
Some interesting comments that follow, pointing to Greenwald himself failing to correctly quote...eg, California did in fact say they were hacked. Who to believe anymore?
Don't hold your breath. The kleptocracy model of civilization (using the term in Jared Diamond's sense, not Wikipedia's) has sustained itself uninterrupted for centuries, and consistently demonstrated the ability to conquer or eliminate more egalitarian societies/political models.
