7 ms·

Extraordinary claims (Trump colludes with Russians, Russians hack DNC) requires extraordinary evidence. In over 5 years, this has not been presented.

belltaco 5y ago
Plenty of evidence has been shown for this part: >Russians hack DNC
- rendall 5y ago
  No. There isn't. There are lots of people saying they have evidence and referring to other people who say no its true they really have evidence. When you dig it's just circular self-references all the way down.
  - adrr 5y ago
    There’s a whole mueller report that was started and run by GOP. Person who started it was Rosenstein, a republican. Who picked Mueller another Republican. Why would they fake evidence against their own president?
    - the_optimist 5y ago
      This is idle speculation at best. It doesn’t attach to evidence, and it cannot be dispositive.
      - adrr 5y ago
        Mueller charged Russians for the hack.
        the_optimist 5y ago
        Indicted. Famously prosecutors can indict ham sandwiches. Conviction is different. No such thing here.
        adrr 5y ago
        He convicted everyone that they could actually arrest.
        the_optimist 5y ago
        If you twist it around enough, it sounds substantial. Then we have to slowly and tediously dig out that your end claim has utterly nothing to do with your beginning claim. Not the same countries, people, timelines, relationships, nothing.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      Again, "Muller has the evidence!" is pointing at someone and making a claim that never seems to have been backed up. It seems to be rather hard to actually cite this mountain of evidence without looking like a partisan hack.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  Nope: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/ https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-r...
  - extra88 5y ago
    Yep. The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has members who have done good work for the public and the country. However, the memo referenced in your link did not even have the backing all the group's members and its arguments have been persuasively criticized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veteran_Intelligence_Professionals_for_Sanity#The_DNC_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veteran_Intelligence_Professio...
    - rendall 5y ago
      These results are debatable and inconclusive, which is the entire point. If you're going to accuse a sitting President of collusion, you had best have all your ducks in a row. Anything less can be perceived as, or even be indeed, partisan hackery.
      - extra88 5y ago
        Why are you bringing up Trump? This is about whether Russians hacked the DNC's email, that doesn't require collusion or even awareness from the Trump campaign. But since you did bring him up, it reminded me that in July 2016, weeks after the DNC announced being breached, he publicly called on Russia to release information about Clinton. Candidate Donald J. Trump, verbally and in writing, called on a foreign government to interfere with the presidential campaign against his opponent; doing it in public doesn't make it okay. "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. […] By the way, they hacked — they probably have her 33,000 emails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted because you'd see some beauties there. So let's see." I don't think "collusion" is the right term for what he did (the attempts to access emails had started in March); I don't know what the right term is, I just know it's not okay.
- the_optimist 5y ago
  Negative. No. Nothing of the sort. We have singularly a “trust me” from several deeply partisan individuals who have been caught directly in other lies. That said, if you have this “plenty of evidence” please lay it forth at the feet of humanity very clearly. It would be tremendously valuable and conclusive. In practice we have waving again and again with more hand waving and assurance on top. A heroic confabulation of nonsense.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> this has not been presented. s/presented/investigated There's a lot of things to investigate https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helped-save-trumps-business/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe... but since the whole world saw what happened on the 6th and what did not after I don't think there'll ever be evidences extraordinary enough to act on any kind of claims.
- nnvcxsstb 5y ago
  What happened on the sixth? You mean the Reichstag Fire? https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-role-in https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-ro... The whole world saw what the FBI wanted them to see on the sixth. Time will tell what actually happened.
- rendall 5y ago
  Lots of "evidence" in the form of breathless articles quoting anonymous sources who say they really have a smoking gun. This evidence is convincing only to those who are inclined to believe it. What we need is extraordinary evidence that is unambiguously convincing to everyone. That we do not have
  - freeflight 5y ago
    To this day most people are still in denial about US involvement in that whole Ukraine situation. Even tho Euromaidan had US senators in person riling up protesters for regime change [0] and the new interim PM, after a bloody revolution, was sponsored by literally the US DoS and NATO [1]. Pointing this pretty blatant evidence out just gets one called a "Russian troll". While in the US some extremely obscure financial connections to Russia, are allegedly responsible for singlehandedly deciding a whole election and making the following one also a rather close call. Maybe it's just me, but this seems like a pretty blatant double standard, one that also disfranchises a substantial part of the US population, as allegedly being nothing than "idiots" brainwashed by Russia. It's no wonder how this kind of narrative keeps increasing the hostility and tribalism, even if Russia wouldn't do anything at all. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-support-just-cause https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-uk... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200328203654/https://openukraine.org/en/about/partners https://web.archive.org/web/20200328203654/https://openukrai...
extra88 5y ago
The claims are not extraordinary. The Trump Tower meeting [0] is clear evidence Trump campaign members' interest in colluding with foreign agents. Donald Trump personally had a fig leaf of deniability about that meeting but in interviews [1] he expressed his willingness to collude. The Trump campaign, at minimum Paul Manafort, colluded with agents of Russia [2]. I'm not going to research how strong the public evidence that Russia was behind the DNC hack but again, it's not an extraordinary claim. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/id-exclusive-interview-trump-listen-foreigners-offered-dirt/story?id=63669304 [2] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf
- rendall 5y ago
  Before you continue with a flood of poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify, the claim that a President colludes with a foreign power is extraordinary.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    Not at all. In wealthy enough circles, power has no nationality. This is just capitalism in action. Where it gets interesting is the ways that power can take advantage of HUNGER for power and money. Trump was a kompromat machine, but remarkably easy to influence as the guy doesn't care about anybody or anything other than himself. He doesn't even particularly care about the Republican Party, then or now.
  - extra88 5y ago
    If that's "a flood," you must live in a very dry place. A. He wasn't president at the time. B. While it's natural to assume that a candidate is aware of, and is ultimately responsible for, everything his campaign does, I've distinguished between his campaign colluding and Trump personally colluding. C. Everything that has already been made public about the campaign makes further claims that are less well documented not extraordinary. > poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify Allow me to spoon-feed an important part to you. Don Jr. publicly released emails about the Trump Tower meeting, those are real and not circumstantial evidence in his desire to collude and others in the campaign attended the meeting with foreknowledge of this. Google 'don jr "i love it"' and there are a zillion news stories about them, I don't know how you missed them at the time. An NPR story linked to a complete PDF [0] of what Don Jr released. Here's the beginning of a NY Times story [1] about them: > The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton. > The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” > If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication. > He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” [0] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3892196/Donald-Trump-Jr-Email-Exchange.pdf [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html
fossuser 5y ago
They traced it back to the IRA and named the specific people involved on the Russian side and the method (email phish of Podesta). The Mueller report goes into specific detail or you can listen to the lawfare blog podcast that goes through it. “Collusion” is a poorly defined term, the report found their actions didn’t rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, but there was plenty of evidence that the campaign was interested in support and responded to it (“collusion”). Donald Trump Jr. just didn’t realize Russia was interested in getting the Magnitsky act revoked when he took the meeting and he was disappointed when the Russians didn’t have the “emails” (from the private server, not the DNC emails). The Russians thought they could manipulate their self-imposed orphan adoption ban issue, but DTJ didn’t care about orphans. American intelligence agencies (or any intelligence agency) are not going to provide you with the precise methods they use to determine where the attack came from. I suspect no evidence will meet your extraordinary standard because you’re only looking for evidence that supports an existing position based primarily on political motivated reasoning and cognitive bias.
- rendall 5y ago
  > I suspect no evidence will meet your extraordinary standard because you’re only looking for evidence that supports an existing position based primarily Let's s start with even minimal evidence before we get to worrying about my cognitive biases. Read #8 in this article: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official-russia https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official... "Shawn Henry of Crowdstrike, testifying in secret to congress, ... saying there was not “concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC,”"
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    You've already been provided and discarded more than minimal evidence. For example, in the muller report, a more extensive investigation, the specific hacking unit is identified. Whether or not crowdstrike knew in 2017 doesn't matter. Today we know APT-28 was responsible, and they're members of the GRU.
    - 5y ago

belltaco 5y ago

Plenty of evidence has been shown for this part: >Russians hack DNC

rendall 5y ago
No. There isn't. There are lots of people saying they have evidence and referring to other people who say no its true they really have evidence. When you dig it's just circular self-references all the way down.
- adrr 5y ago
  There’s a whole mueller report that was started and run by GOP. Person who started it was Rosenstein, a republican. Who picked Mueller another Republican. Why would they fake evidence against their own president?
  - the_optimist 5y ago
    This is idle speculation at best. It doesn’t attach to evidence, and it cannot be dispositive.
    - adrr 5y ago
      Mueller charged Russians for the hack.
      - the_optimist 5y ago
        Indicted. Famously prosecutors can indict ham sandwiches. Conviction is different. No such thing here.
        adrr 5y ago
        He convicted everyone that they could actually arrest.
        the_optimist 5y ago
        If you twist it around enough, it sounds substantial. Then we have to slowly and tediously dig out that your end claim has utterly nothing to do with your beginning claim. Not the same countries, people, timelines, relationships, nothing.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Again, "Muller has the evidence!" is pointing at someone and making a claim that never seems to have been backed up. It seems to be rather hard to actually cite this mountain of evidence without looking like a partisan hack.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
Nope: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/ https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-r...
- extra88 5y ago
  Yep. The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has members who have done good work for the public and the country. However, the memo referenced in your link did not even have the backing all the group's members and its arguments have been persuasively criticized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veteran_Intelligence_Professionals_for_Sanity#The_DNC_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veteran_Intelligence_Professio...
  - rendall 5y ago
    These results are debatable and inconclusive, which is the entire point. If you're going to accuse a sitting President of collusion, you had best have all your ducks in a row. Anything less can be perceived as, or even be indeed, partisan hackery.
    - extra88 5y ago
      Why are you bringing up Trump? This is about whether Russians hacked the DNC's email, that doesn't require collusion or even awareness from the Trump campaign. But since you did bring him up, it reminded me that in July 2016, weeks after the DNC announced being breached, he publicly called on Russia to release information about Clinton. Candidate Donald J. Trump, verbally and in writing, called on a foreign government to interfere with the presidential campaign against his opponent; doing it in public doesn't make it okay. "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. […] By the way, they hacked — they probably have her 33,000 emails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted because you'd see some beauties there. So let's see." I don't think "collusion" is the right term for what he did (the attempts to access emails had started in March); I don't know what the right term is, I just know it's not okay.
the_optimist 5y ago
Negative. No. Nothing of the sort. We have singularly a “trust me” from several deeply partisan individuals who have been caught directly in other lies. That said, if you have this “plenty of evidence” please lay it forth at the feet of humanity very clearly. It would be tremendously valuable and conclusive. In practice we have waving again and again with more hand waving and assurance on top. A heroic confabulation of nonsense.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> this has not been presented. s/presented/investigated There's a lot of things to investigate https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helped-save-trumps-business/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe... but since the whole world saw what happened on the 6th and what did not after I don't think there'll ever be evidences extraordinary enough to act on any kind of claims.

nnvcxsstb 5y ago
What happened on the sixth? You mean the Reichstag Fire? https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-role-in https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-ro... The whole world saw what the FBI wanted them to see on the sixth. Time will tell what actually happened.
rendall 5y ago
Lots of "evidence" in the form of breathless articles quoting anonymous sources who say they really have a smoking gun. This evidence is convincing only to those who are inclined to believe it. What we need is extraordinary evidence that is unambiguously convincing to everyone. That we do not have
- freeflight 5y ago
  To this day most people are still in denial about US involvement in that whole Ukraine situation. Even tho Euromaidan had US senators in person riling up protesters for regime change [0] and the new interim PM, after a bloody revolution, was sponsored by literally the US DoS and NATO [1]. Pointing this pretty blatant evidence out just gets one called a "Russian troll". While in the US some extremely obscure financial connections to Russia, are allegedly responsible for singlehandedly deciding a whole election and making the following one also a rather close call. Maybe it's just me, but this seems like a pretty blatant double standard, one that also disfranchises a substantial part of the US population, as allegedly being nothing than "idiots" brainwashed by Russia. It's no wonder how this kind of narrative keeps increasing the hostility and tribalism, even if Russia wouldn't do anything at all. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-support-just-cause https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-uk... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200328203654/https://openukraine.org/en/about/partners https://web.archive.org/web/20200328203654/https://openukrai...

extra88 5y ago

The claims are not extraordinary. The Trump Tower meeting [0] is clear evidence Trump campaign members' interest in colluding with foreign agents. Donald Trump personally had a fig leaf of deniability about that meeting but in interviews [1] he expressed his willingness to collude. The Trump campaign, at minimum Paul Manafort, colluded with agents of Russia [2]. I'm not going to research how strong the public evidence that Russia was behind the DNC hack but again, it's not an extraordinary claim. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/id-exclusive-interview-trump-listen-foreigners-offered-dirt/story?id=63669304 [2] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf

rendall 5y ago
Before you continue with a flood of poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify, the claim that a President colludes with a foreign power is extraordinary.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Not at all. In wealthy enough circles, power has no nationality. This is just capitalism in action. Where it gets interesting is the ways that power can take advantage of HUNGER for power and money. Trump was a kompromat machine, but remarkably easy to influence as the guy doesn't care about anybody or anything other than himself. He doesn't even particularly care about the Republican Party, then or now.
- extra88 5y ago
  If that's "a flood," you must live in a very dry place. A. He wasn't president at the time. B. While it's natural to assume that a candidate is aware of, and is ultimately responsible for, everything his campaign does, I've distinguished between his campaign colluding and Trump personally colluding. C. Everything that has already been made public about the campaign makes further claims that are less well documented not extraordinary. > poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify Allow me to spoon-feed an important part to you. Don Jr. publicly released emails about the Trump Tower meeting, those are real and not circumstantial evidence in his desire to collude and others in the campaign attended the meeting with foreknowledge of this. Google 'don jr "i love it"' and there are a zillion news stories about them, I don't know how you missed them at the time. An NPR story linked to a complete PDF [0] of what Don Jr released. Here's the beginning of a NY Times story [1] about them: > The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton. > The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” > If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication. > He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” [0] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3892196/Donald-Trump-Jr-Email-Exchange.pdf [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html

fossuser 5y ago

They traced it back to the IRA and named the specific people involved on the Russian side and the method (email phish of Podesta). The Mueller report goes into specific detail or you can listen to the lawfare blog podcast that goes through it. “Collusion” is a poorly defined term, the report found their actions didn’t rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, but there was plenty of evidence that the campaign was interested in support and responded to it (“collusion”). Donald Trump Jr. just didn’t realize Russia was interested in getting the Magnitsky act revoked when he took the meeting and he was disappointed when the Russians didn’t have the “emails” (from the private server, not the DNC emails). The Russians thought they could manipulate their self-imposed orphan adoption ban issue, but DTJ didn’t care about orphans. American intelligence agencies (or any intelligence agency) are not going to provide you with the precise methods they use to determine where the attack came from. I suspect no evidence will meet your extraordinary standard because you’re only looking for evidence that supports an existing position based primarily on political motivated reasoning and cognitive bias.

rendall 5y ago
> I suspect no evidence will meet your extraordinary standard because you’re only looking for evidence that supports an existing position based primarily Let's s start with even minimal evidence before we get to worrying about my cognitive biases. Read #8 in this article: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official-russia https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official... "Shawn Henry of Crowdstrike, testifying in secret to congress, ... saying there was not “concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC,”"
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  You've already been provided and discarded more than minimal evidence. For example, in the muller report, a more extensive investigation, the specific hacking unit is identified. Whether or not crowdstrike knew in 2017 doesn't matter. Today we know APT-28 was responsible, and they're members of the GRU.
  - 5y ago