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You are mis-stating the assertion. The Government said that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. They didn't say it changed the results.

rayiner 6y ago
No, Democrats said Russia hacked the election results. For example Neera Tanden, Biden's OMB appointee, the President of a major liberal think-tank: https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442 https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442 Trump claimed that "Voting machines were not touched" by Russians in the 2016 election. Tanden said that was a "lie." The media massively amplified claims of Russian election hacking that never panned out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi.... They played fast-and-loose with terminology, saying that "Russia hacked the 2016 election" when they meant that Russia hacked and leaked DNC emails. (Part of the problem here is that the media has taken to regurgitating Democratic talking points. Saying "Russia hacked the 2016 election" is a clever way for an Democratic activist to describe what happened, but its misleading when that same "hacking" terminology is used by the media.) Nalder said that, without impeachment, Trump would "rig" the 2020 election: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-says-without-impeachment-trump-may-try-to-rig-election https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-sa... And people believed them. Even as of 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President": https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2018/03/09/russias-impact-election-seen-through-partisan-eyes https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
- tptacek 6y ago
  The comment to which you're replying said "the government" didn't claim Russia tampered with the results. You can't rebut that with a cite of Neera Tanden, who was not in the government.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    The 2 parties govern the US, for better or worse. The good faith interpretation allows for more than the official press releases (eg Trump talking points), which are presented to be in dispute.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Fair point, I read "Democrats" rather than "Government."
    - tptacek 6y ago
      I'm going to gently push harder, because I don't think you can reasonably compare what angry Democrats said and did in 2016 to what's happening in 2020. Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors. The sitting Democratic president didn't directly lobby state governors and state house speakers to decertify results. For that matter: Democrats didn't deliberately fuck up tabulation processes to sow chaos to exploit later in the month.
      - zaroth 6y ago
        There were many calls by Democrats for faithless electors to flip to Clinton. See, for example, #UniteForAmerica video plea https://youtu.be/0z0iuWh3sek https://youtu.be/0z0iuWh3sek They then spent the next few years making up conspiracy theories and trying to delegitimize his election. I’d gently suggest that there are no clean hands here, and what Dems did 2016-2019 was sufficiently reprehensible.
        tptacek 6y ago
        You've met my example of the outgoing administration lobbying state legislatures to overturn their own votes with a hashtag.
        zaroth 6y ago
        You said, “Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors.” I thought you might like to know that is not true. I posted a video which calls for exactly that in 2016. It’s a pretty amusing piece of history actually. To her credit, “Clinton’s team and the Democratic National Committee have steadfastly refused to endorse the efforts spearheaded by a group of electors in Colorado and Washington state.” NY Mag wrote a piece on the eve of the electoral vote documenting the extent of the harassment campaign, including hundreds of thousands of emails, hate mail, and death threats. Of course it also mentions Russia. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/12/final-push-to-sway-electoral-college-voters-intensifies.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/12/final-push-to-sway-e...
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I follow politics pretty closely and this is literally the first time I've heard that anyone was alleging Russia actually hacked voting machines or switched votes. I had only heard about social media disinformation and social media disinformation campaigns. I also never really heard many assertions that any of this was significant enough to have likely swayed the election.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    Russian "collusion" was the primary topic on twitter for most neoliberal pundits and party consultants in 2017
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      As someone who followed things fairly closely at the time, that's not true. There was talk of meddling with voter rolls, but changing of votes was basically not discussed and was quickly dismissed.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Well, that was found to be absolutely true. Just look at the emails released by Don Jr. himself. They planned to meet with someone who they believed to be working for the Kremlin in order to get dirt on their opponent.
  - Gunax 6y ago
    So I think you're right in the literal sense, but rainer is accurate in the sentiment. The media used the word 'interference' in an exaggerated and nefarious context, and they didn't seem very interested in clearing it up. Election interference--without context--is usually taken to mean vote interference. Like many things, it isn't an outright lie. But I do think it was misleading. And while you might not have been mislead, enough people were--as evidenced by that poll.
- akavi 6y ago
  My reading of Tanden's tweet is that she's rebutting Trump's first sentence, not the second. Ie, Asserting that Russian hacking (in the form of releasing sensitive emails) was plainly sufficient to flip 70 kVotes (Donald Trumps cumulative margin in the states over the tipping point) and ignoring the question of whether "voting machines [were] touched".
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Trump's second sentence clarifies and elaborates that the first sentence is referring to voting machines.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      So what? I ask this very specifically because you're applying precisely the same rhetorical device that Tanden is.
  - rhino369 6y ago
    Even if they meant Russian hacking influenced people enough to flips 70k votes, that's still unsupported conjecture worded in way that strongly implies actual hacking of votes. Calling it 70k votes makes it sound small, but its more like 1% of voters. 1% of voters making their mind up based on TRUE stories about inside baseball at the DNC? Unrealistic. I bet 99% of voters couldn't even tell you what the emails were about. And that's without considering the negative affects of the Democrats attacking Trump for being in bed with Russia, which probably cost him votes too.
- ilikehurdles 6y ago
  Neera was clearly saying that she believes that Russia’s actions affected the election results. Trump made two distinct and unrelated claims in that tweet. One claim was a lie, one was true. You dishonestly pretend there is only one claim. Neera was not addressing the true claim about voting machines being touched. Trump has a habit of mixing in things he’s not accused of and running on them to acquit him of the things he is accused of. He consistently did it by attacking nonexistent and unprovable accusations of “collusion” (an imprecise term that is not a crime one can be charged for) when the actual investigations, hearings, and findings centered on Russian interference and any of the campaign’s coordination of it. This includes direct communication with Assange as well as the Trump Tower meeting over Magnitsky Act sanctions. Your NYT article, in opposition to your stated conclusion, addresses infiltration attempts related to voting and voter registry systems, not the DNC hack. Nadler’s claim is only unbelievable if you memory-hole Trump’s attempt two months ago to start another misinformation and character-smear campaign against Hunter Biden. The impeachment hearings specifically addressed and exposed the early stages of this campaign. 66% of democrats in that poll are wrong, so we agree there.
djsumdog 6y ago
That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years. Even if Russian "meddled" in the US elections, so did Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Facebook, Northrop Grumman, Softbank, YCombinator .. anyone who bought a fucking ad or funded one campaign. What the Russian/2016 narrative really was: Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda. There has been a four year campaign to condemn every single Trump supporter as some kind of racist, white supremacist Nazi, and it's been big media and big tech (FOX/MSNBC/CNN/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/NYTimes/etc.) that's literally been pouring petrol on the American people and the world.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  Believe it or not, there's a whole host of laws around and against foreign involvement in American elections, going back basically forever. Comparing Boeing and Russia is pretty ludicrous.
  - Gunax 6y ago
    I am curious what these laws are, and what constitutes involvement. Am I allowed to comment on American elections even if I am not American? A lot of people here are talking about interference, which sounds like a very nefarious thing. But in reality, what they mean by 'interference' is just posting on the internet about why one candidate (let's be real, probably Trump) is better.
    - sdenton4 6y ago
      The two big categories in my mind are foreign campaign contributions (usually misdirected through others, so sometimes also fall out as fraud and money laundering charges) and failure to register as a foreign agent. As a reminder, both of these categories have seen grand jury charges and subsequent guilty pleas by Trump associates. These have often paired nicely with 'lying to prosecutors' charges, which help clarify that they knew they were up to no good... https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giuliani-associates/a5dd834e350dc3b860c2/optimized/full.pdf#page=1 https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giul... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_after_leaving_the_Trump_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_...
cwkoss 6y ago
"Meddled" is such an ambiguous term and we are part of an international community. Using such loose terminology, couldn't you accurately say dozens of nations meddled with the majority of federal US elections in the past 50 years? If you disagree, what do you think the function of AIPAC is?
- shakezula 6y ago
  Yes, including Iran, so what's your point? A bipartisan commission found overwhelming evidence of a widespread, organized, and coordinated effort from several foreign agencies to spread misinformation during both the 2016 election and the 2020 election. What term do you want to use besides "meddling" then?
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    Would be great if they used a term that correlates to a specific crime. "Meddling" is pervasive and legal, so accusations of meddling seem like propaganda from the intelligence community.
kart23 6y ago
This documentary got nominated for tons of awards. And it heavily insinuates that the election was stolen/cheated and the outcome could have been different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack

rayiner 6y ago

No, Democrats said Russia hacked the election results. For example Neera Tanden, Biden's OMB appointee, the President of a major liberal think-tank: https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442 https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442 Trump claimed that "Voting machines were not touched" by Russians in the 2016 election. Tanden said that was a "lie." The media massively amplified claims of Russian election hacking that never panned out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi.... They played fast-and-loose with terminology, saying that "Russia hacked the 2016 election" when they meant that Russia hacked and leaked DNC emails. (Part of the problem here is that the media has taken to regurgitating Democratic talking points. Saying "Russia hacked the 2016 election" is a clever way for an Democratic activist to describe what happened, but its misleading when that same "hacking" terminology is used by the media.) Nalder said that, without impeachment, Trump would "rig" the 2020 election: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-says-without-impeachment-trump-may-try-to-rig-election https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-sa... And people believed them. Even as of 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President": https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2018/03/09/russias-impact-election-seen-through-partisan-eyes https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

tptacek 6y ago
The comment to which you're replying said "the government" didn't claim Russia tampered with the results. You can't rebut that with a cite of Neera Tanden, who was not in the government.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  The 2 parties govern the US, for better or worse. The good faith interpretation allows for more than the official press releases (eg Trump talking points), which are presented to be in dispute.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Fair point, I read "Democrats" rather than "Government."
  - tptacek 6y ago
    I'm going to gently push harder, because I don't think you can reasonably compare what angry Democrats said and did in 2016 to what's happening in 2020. Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors. The sitting Democratic president didn't directly lobby state governors and state house speakers to decertify results. For that matter: Democrats didn't deliberately fuck up tabulation processes to sow chaos to exploit later in the month.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      There were many calls by Democrats for faithless electors to flip to Clinton. See, for example, #UniteForAmerica video plea https://youtu.be/0z0iuWh3sek https://youtu.be/0z0iuWh3sek They then spent the next few years making up conspiracy theories and trying to delegitimize his election. I’d gently suggest that there are no clean hands here, and what Dems did 2016-2019 was sufficiently reprehensible.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        You've met my example of the outgoing administration lobbying state legislatures to overturn their own votes with a hashtag.
        zaroth 6y ago
        You said, “Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors.” I thought you might like to know that is not true. I posted a video which calls for exactly that in 2016. It’s a pretty amusing piece of history actually. To her credit, “Clinton’s team and the Democratic National Committee have steadfastly refused to endorse the efforts spearheaded by a group of electors in Colorado and Washington state.” NY Mag wrote a piece on the eve of the electoral vote documenting the extent of the harassment campaign, including hundreds of thousands of emails, hate mail, and death threats. Of course it also mentions Russia. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/12/final-push-to-sway-electoral-college-voters-intensifies.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/12/final-push-to-sway-e...
jjeaff 6y ago
I follow politics pretty closely and this is literally the first time I've heard that anyone was alleging Russia actually hacked voting machines or switched votes. I had only heard about social media disinformation and social media disinformation campaigns. I also never really heard many assertions that any of this was significant enough to have likely swayed the election.
- cwkoss 6y ago
  Russian "collusion" was the primary topic on twitter for most neoliberal pundits and party consultants in 2017
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    As someone who followed things fairly closely at the time, that's not true. There was talk of meddling with voter rolls, but changing of votes was basically not discussed and was quickly dismissed.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Well, that was found to be absolutely true. Just look at the emails released by Don Jr. himself. They planned to meet with someone who they believed to be working for the Kremlin in order to get dirt on their opponent.
- Gunax 6y ago
  So I think you're right in the literal sense, but rainer is accurate in the sentiment. The media used the word 'interference' in an exaggerated and nefarious context, and they didn't seem very interested in clearing it up. Election interference--without context--is usually taken to mean vote interference. Like many things, it isn't an outright lie. But I do think it was misleading. And while you might not have been mislead, enough people were--as evidenced by that poll.
akavi 6y ago
My reading of Tanden's tweet is that she's rebutting Trump's first sentence, not the second. Ie, Asserting that Russian hacking (in the form of releasing sensitive emails) was plainly sufficient to flip 70 kVotes (Donald Trumps cumulative margin in the states over the tipping point) and ignoring the question of whether "voting machines [were] touched".
- rayiner 6y ago
  Trump's second sentence clarifies and elaborates that the first sentence is referring to voting machines.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    So what? I ask this very specifically because you're applying precisely the same rhetorical device that Tanden is.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Even if they meant Russian hacking influenced people enough to flips 70k votes, that's still unsupported conjecture worded in way that strongly implies actual hacking of votes. Calling it 70k votes makes it sound small, but its more like 1% of voters. 1% of voters making their mind up based on TRUE stories about inside baseball at the DNC? Unrealistic. I bet 99% of voters couldn't even tell you what the emails were about. And that's without considering the negative affects of the Democrats attacking Trump for being in bed with Russia, which probably cost him votes too.
ilikehurdles 6y ago
Neera was clearly saying that she believes that Russia’s actions affected the election results. Trump made two distinct and unrelated claims in that tweet. One claim was a lie, one was true. You dishonestly pretend there is only one claim. Neera was not addressing the true claim about voting machines being touched. Trump has a habit of mixing in things he’s not accused of and running on them to acquit him of the things he is accused of. He consistently did it by attacking nonexistent and unprovable accusations of “collusion” (an imprecise term that is not a crime one can be charged for) when the actual investigations, hearings, and findings centered on Russian interference and any of the campaign’s coordination of it. This includes direct communication with Assange as well as the Trump Tower meeting over Magnitsky Act sanctions. Your NYT article, in opposition to your stated conclusion, addresses infiltration attempts related to voting and voter registry systems, not the DNC hack. Nadler’s claim is only unbelievable if you memory-hole Trump’s attempt two months ago to start another misinformation and character-smear campaign against Hunter Biden. The impeachment hearings specifically addressed and exposed the early stages of this campaign. 66% of democrats in that poll are wrong, so we agree there.

djsumdog 6y ago

That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years. Even if Russian "meddled" in the US elections, so did Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Facebook, Northrop Grumman, Softbank, YCombinator .. anyone who bought a fucking ad or funded one campaign. What the Russian/2016 narrative really was: Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda. There has been a four year campaign to condemn every single Trump supporter as some kind of racist, white supremacist Nazi, and it's been big media and big tech (FOX/MSNBC/CNN/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/NYTimes/etc.) that's literally been pouring petrol on the American people and the world.

sdenton4 6y ago
Believe it or not, there's a whole host of laws around and against foreign involvement in American elections, going back basically forever. Comparing Boeing and Russia is pretty ludicrous.
- Gunax 6y ago
  I am curious what these laws are, and what constitutes involvement. Am I allowed to comment on American elections even if I am not American? A lot of people here are talking about interference, which sounds like a very nefarious thing. But in reality, what they mean by 'interference' is just posting on the internet about why one candidate (let's be real, probably Trump) is better.
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    The two big categories in my mind are foreign campaign contributions (usually misdirected through others, so sometimes also fall out as fraud and money laundering charges) and failure to register as a foreign agent. As a reminder, both of these categories have seen grand jury charges and subsequent guilty pleas by Trump associates. These have often paired nicely with 'lying to prosecutors' charges, which help clarify that they knew they were up to no good... https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giuliani-associates/a5dd834e350dc3b860c2/optimized/full.pdf#page=1 https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giul... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_after_leaving_the_Trump_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_...

cwkoss 6y ago

"Meddled" is such an ambiguous term and we are part of an international community. Using such loose terminology, couldn't you accurately say dozens of nations meddled with the majority of federal US elections in the past 50 years? If you disagree, what do you think the function of AIPAC is?

shakezula 6y ago
Yes, including Iran, so what's your point? A bipartisan commission found overwhelming evidence of a widespread, organized, and coordinated effort from several foreign agencies to spread misinformation during both the 2016 election and the 2020 election. What term do you want to use besides "meddling" then?
- cwkoss 6y ago
  Would be great if they used a term that correlates to a specific crime. "Meddling" is pervasive and legal, so accusations of meddling seem like propaganda from the intelligence community.

kart23 6y ago

This documentary got nominated for tons of awards. And it heavily insinuates that the election was stolen/cheated and the outcome could have been different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack