At Trump's bidding CIA Director met with promoter of conspiracy theory that DNC hack was an inside job, and NOT the Russians.

Courtesy of The Intercept: 

CIA Director Mike Pompeo met late last month with a former U.S. intelligence official who has become an advocate for a disputed theory that the theft of the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign was an inside job, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence. 

Pompeo met on October 24 with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community’s official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year’s theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was “leaked,” not hacked, “by a person with physical access” to the DNC’s computer system. 

In an interview with The Intercept, Binney said Pompeo told him that President Donald Trump had urged the CIA director to meet with Binney to discuss his assessment that the DNC data theft was an inside job. During their hour-long meeting at CIA headquarters, Pompeo said Trump told him that if Pompeo “want[ed] to know the facts, he should talk to me,” Binney said.

So if you are wondering if this is about that old debunked story about the murder of Seth Rich by Hillary Clinton (Which is referenced below.), yes it most certainly is.

This Binney guy is a frequent guest on Info Wars with Alex Jones and just about any fringe conspiracy focused radio show or blog that will have him.

He has some impressive credentials so people often take him seriously, but the majority of the charges he makes remain unsubstantiated. 

This particular conspiracy theory has been debunked by essentially every intelligence agency in the country, including the CIA by the way, so the very fact that Pompeo talked to this guy speaks to Trump's desperation to get Robert Mueller and the other investigators off his back.

This of course is another reason why I was so frustrated with Donna Brazile, because her mentions of Seth Rich in her book only pour more gasoline on the dying embers of the "DNC hack was an inside job" conspiracy theory.

The information that Trump leaked to the Russians visiting the White House was that Israel had hacked ISIS computers.

Hey you wanna hear some of the nuclear codes I memorized?

This is from a New York Times article detailing how hard it is to use cyber weapons against ISIS: 

Even one of the rare successes against the Islamic State belongs at least in part to Israel, which was America’s partner in the attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Top Israeli cyberoperators penetrated a small cell of extremist bombmakers in Syria months ago, the officials said. That was how the United States learned that the terrorist group was working to make explosives that fooled airport X-ray machines and other screening by looking exactly like batteries for laptop computers.

The intelligence was so exquisite that it enabled the United States to understand how the weapons could be detonated, according to two American officials familiar with the operation. The information helped prompt a ban in March on large electronic devices in carry-on luggage on flights from 10 airports in eight Muslim-majority countries to the United States and Britain. 

It was also part of the classified intelligence that President Trump is accused of revealing when he met in the Oval Office last month with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak. His disclosure infuriated Israeli officials.

To be clear this incredibly sensitive information was just revealed to two Russian spies simply as a way for Trump to brag about what great classified information to which he had access.

Imagine how that must have made the Israeli intelligence community feel, and how it impacted our allies ability to trust this country with confidential information that if revealed might put their agents in danger or reveal tactics that could help our mutual enemies.

And somebody tell me what information leaked about Donald Trump even comes close to being as damaging to our national security as what he simply volunteered to two Russian operative who should never have been allowed into the White House in he first place.

Dozens of countries hit by hacks using stolen NSA tools.

Courtesy of the New York Times: 

Hackers exploiting malicious software stolen from the National Security Agency executed damaging cyberattacks on Friday that hit dozens of countries worldwide, forcing Britain’s public health system to send patients away, freezing computers at Russia’s Interior Ministry and wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers elsewhere. 

The attacks amounted to an audacious global blackmail attempt spread by the internet and underscored the vulnerabilities of the digital age. 

Transmitted via email, the malicious software locked British hospitals out of their computer systems and demanded ransom before users could be let back in — with a threat that data would be destroyed if the demands were not met. 

By late Friday the attacks had spread to more than 74 countries, according to security firms tracking the spread. Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm, said Russia was the worst-hit, followed by Ukraine, India and Taiwan. Reports of attacks also came from Latin America and Africa. 

The attacks appeared to be the largest ransomware assault on record, but the scope of the damage was hard to measure. It was not clear if victims were paying the ransom, which began at about $300 to unlock individual computers, or even if those who did pay would regain access to their data. 

Finally this hack was stopped by a British blogger who triggered a "kill switch" and essentially turned it off.

Of course Edward Snowden was quick to jump in and blame the whole thing on the NSA.

If @NSAGov had privately disclosed the flaw used to attack hospitals when they *found* it, not when they lost it, this may not have happened https://t.co/lhApAqB5j3

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

However let me point out once again that many of these hacks are directly related to the NSA tools that Snowden smuggled out of the country and which ended up in the hands of the Russians.

I know that there are still some Snowden apologists who refuse to believe he is not a hero, but the evidence of his crimes are all around us.

Snowden took sensitive data from the intelligence agency designed to protect America, and let it fall into the hands of those who want to cause harm to America, and other countries as well. 

And Hollywood even made a fucking movie about him.

Another news outlet has essentially reached the same conclusion that I have about the Wikileaks dump of hacked CIA materials.

As most of you know I posted about this Wikileaks dump on Tuesday.

During that post I stated that it was unlikely that this leak was a coincidence, that the Russians likely did the hacking, and that Trump's supporters would use it to suggest that the CIA had hacked the DNC computers and then blamed it on the Russians.

I know, crazy right?

However this news outlet, which specializes in foreign policy, does not think it so crazy.

Courtesy of the FP Group: 

In the first place, WikiLeaks has often timed its leaks for maximum political impact. It released 20,000 stolen DNC emails just three days before the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. As expected, WikiLeaks generated headlines about DNC staffers disparaging Sen. Bernie Sanders, buttressing a Trump campaign effort to prevent Clinton from consolidating Sanders supporters. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as a result, and the Clinton campaign suffered significant public relations damage. 

In the second place, WikiLeaks, which has often leaked American but never Russian secrets, has been identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a front for Russian intelligence. In January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified estimate that found “with high confidence that Russian military intelligence … relayed material to WikiLeaks.” This was done with a definite purpose: “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

 .........

It is significant, therefore, that one of the major storylines to emerge from the latest WikiLeaks release is that the CIA supposedly has a program to reuse computer codes from foreign hackers, thus disguising CIA fingerprints on a hacking operation. Never mind that there is no evidence that the codes used to break into the DNC were part of this CIA database. Right-wing outlets are nevertheless trumpeting these revelations with headlines such as this one on Breitbart: “WikiLeaks: CIA Uses ‘Stolen’ Malware to ‘Attribute’ Cyberattacks to Nations Like Russia.” Russian-controlled Internet “bots” are also said to be playing up these claims online. 

The implication is clear. Trump was a victim of a “false flag” operation wherein CIA hackers broke into the DNC and blamed the Russians. This may be nutty, but it’s eminently believable to an audience conditioned to believe that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged — favorite tropes of the radio talk-show host Alex Jones, whose work Trump has praised. Other WikiLeaks revelations — for instance, that the CIA can use Samsung smart TVs as listening devices — lend further credence to Trump’s charge that he was secretly wiretapped. 

Quite apart from its specifics, the WikiLeaks release changes the subject after a bad few days for Trump highlighted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from any Kremlingate probe after he was revealed to have lied under oath when he denied meeting any Russian representatives. Last week it was Trump on the defensive. Now it’s his nemeses in the U.S. intelligence community who are answering embarrassing questions about how this leak could have occurred and the contents of the leaked information.

Yep, those are the same conclusions that I reached as well.

Trump's supporters and his fellow Republicans are looking for some reason to reject the fact that the Russians hacked various computers to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign and help Trump win the election, and this is all they need to make that to happen.  

Now Julian Assange is going to deny that the Russians provided him with the CIA data, just like he denied that they were behind the DNC hack and the John Podesta phishing expedition. But of course we now know that he was lying then, and so it is safe to assume that he will be lying this time.

And what is undeniably true is that he is now handing out the CIA's hacking tools to various technology companies, knowing full well they will find their way into the hands of America's enemies.

The idea presented by Assange is that this will help these technology companies patch their software therefore making it harder to hack, but it of course will also mean that the foreign agencies will now know how to block intelligence agencies from spying on them and that will likely make any further investigation into Trump's ties with Russia just that much harder to prove.

All of this will also undermine the credibility of the American intelligence agencies which will make what they DO reveal that much easier to dismiss by the public at large. 

What is that called? "Collateral damage?"

Or perhaps that was really the target all along.

P.S. It appears that Josh Marshall over at TPM has some more interesting crumbs that involve possible Trump representative Nigel Farage meeting with Assange before his big press conference today: 

During Sean Spicer's daily press briefing, an AP reporter asks Spicer about the Farage/Assange meeting and whether he carrying a message from President Trump. Spicer basically ducked the question. But when asked specifically whether Farage was "delivering a message" from Trump, Spicer replied: "I have no idea."

Hmm, curiouser and curiouser.

VP Mike Pence discussed classified issues on a personal email account, and it was hacked. How do you perform CPR on an irony meter?

Oops?

Courtesy of The Guardian:

Vice-president Mike Pence used a personal email account to discuss security issues as governor of Indiana and was hacked last summer, it was reported on Thursday. 

Pence’s AOL account was compromised by a scammer who sent an email to his contacts claiming Pence and his wife had been attacked on their way back to their hotel in the Philippines, losing their money, bank cards and mobile phone, the Indianapolis Star reported. 

“In response, Pence sent an email to those who had received the fake communication apologising for any inconvenience,” the paper said. “He also set up a new AOL account. Because the hacker appears to have gained access to Pence’s contacts, experts say it is likely that the account was actually penetrated, giving the hacker access to Pence’s inbox and sent messages.”

Here is more from Indy Star:  

Emails released to IndyStar in response to a public records request show Pence communicated via his personal AOL account with top advisers on topics ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. In one email, Pence’s top state homeland security adviser relayed an update from the FBI regarding the arrests of several men on federal terror-related charges.

AOL? What is this 1991?

Here is Mike Pence back in October of 2016 attacking Hillary over her private server, while the crowd yells "Lock her up!"

"Truth is a force of nature, and truth has a way of making its way out."

It certainly does, doesn't it Mikey?

Yeah I don't just want Donald Trump impeached I want this asshole taken down as well.

POS!

So thanks to Wikileaks everybody has finally had a chance to see those scandalous Wall Street speeches of Hillary Clinton's. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

Wikileaks continues this slow dribble of hacked information that they once claimed would destroy the Clinton campaign.

However all it seems to be doing is reinforcing that Hillary Clinton is essentially a very knowledgeable, experienced, and capable politician.

Here are some excerpts courtesy of NBC News.

On the Syrian no fly zone:

She also discussed a no-fly zone, and said putting one in place could draw the U.S. and NATO further into the conflict, according to the documents. 

"To have a no fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our pilots at risk — you're going to kill a lot of Syrians," Clinton said, according to the documents. "So all of a sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians."

What? She doesn't think killing innocent civilians is a good way to end a conflict in Syria?

And she wants to be leader of the free world, please!

On working with Russia: 

Although Clinton has been making that case that she would be far tougher on the Putin regime in Russia than her opponent, she did tell audiences in 2013 that should would "love it it we could continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia." She described her efforts as Secretary of State to improve relations with Russia and expresses hope that President Vladimir Putin would be "less defensive" towards working with the U.S. on issues where the two nations have mutual agreement. 

Oh sure, be reasonable. Too bad half of the country seems willing to embrace the unreasonable.

On Wall Street (Okay now we're getting somewhere.): 

Clinton spoke in great detail about what she saw as the root causes of the Great Recession and its fallout in subsequent years. In part, she said there should have been "greater transparency" on what went wrong from not just bankers but regulators and lawmakers, too. She also argued that an effort to prevent another crisis will require a buy-in from Wall Street itself, which she calls 'the nerves, the spinal column" of the economy. 

"If you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing," Clinton conceded. "But what you do is really important."

That, that was what the Sanders' supporters were convinced would cost her the nomination?

There are a few more examples that you can find on various news sites, but unless they are prone to wild exaggerations or outright deception there is really nothing revealed that hurts Hillary even a little bit.

Here is how CNN summed it up:

Clinton collected at least $1.8 million for at least eight speeches to big banks, according to figures released by Clinton's campaign and tax documents she released earlier this year. 

And while the transcripts show a more blunt, less reserved Clinton, much of what the former secretary of state said to Goldman Sachs and other groups appear generally in line with some of what she has said publicly.

So essentially Clinton made almost two million dollars to say in private speeches essentially the same thing that most of us could hear for free, only with a little more candor.

Well that's a hell of a gig if you can get it.

Let's face it all that we have learned by reading these hacks from Wikileaks is that Hillary is an actual person who tries to keep at least some of her life from the prying eyes of the media, and who is essentially a more approachable and human person behind closed doors than she is in public.

However there is literally NOTHING scandalous and certainly nothing that is going to negatively impact her candidacy.

And yes I know that Wikileaks is going to continue to release more information up until the election, but since early voting has already started in a few states, do we honestly think that they are holding onto some bombshell for release right before election day?

I don't.

You know I thought this tweet perfectly summed up my feelings about Hillary Clinton's supposed "criminal" behaviors.

If Hillary Clinton is a criminal, as you allege, she is Danny Ocean meets Keyser Soze. The greatest criminal mastermind of all-time.

— Will McAvoy (@WillMcAvoyACN) October 15, 2016

Well said.

Donald Trump caught using Russian propaganda to attack Hillary Clinton.

Courtesy of Newsweek: 

The documents that WikiLeaks has unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the WikiLeaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal. 

The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.

Here was the "smoking gun" according to Sputnik:  

In a major revelation from the second batch of WikiLeaks emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta it was learned that Hillary's top confidante Sidney Blumenthal believed that the investigation into Benghazi was legitimate because it was "preventable" and the result of State Department negligence. 

In an email titled "The Truth" from Hillary's top confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the adviser writing to undisclosed recipients said that "one important point that has been universally acknowledged by nine previous reports about Benghazi: The attack was almost certainly preventable" in what may turn out to be the big October surprise from the WikiLeaks released of emails hacked from the account of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta. 

Then came the money quote: "Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate," said Blumenthal, putting to rest the Democratic Party talking point that the investigation into Clinton's management of the State Department at the time of the attack was nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.

The problem with this "smoking gun" is that the words attributed to Sid Blumenthal were actually from a Newsweek article written by the same reporter that wrote the piece I am quoting from here.(And of course they were taken out of context.)

Which he sort of noticed.

As it turns out Sputnik finally recognized their mistake and took the article down.

So that's that, right?

Wrong. Because as it turns out somehow the article ended up in the hands of Donald J. Trump. You know, that guy who is turning American democracy into a joke and destroying the Republican party?

At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.” 

“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article. 

“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.” 

The crowd booed and chanted, “Lock her up!”

The author of the article quoted by Sputnik was more than slightly disturbed by all of this, to put it mildly:

This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin? (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment).

The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them—falsifying them—in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election. The big question, of course, is why are the Russians working so hard to damage Clinton and, in the process, aid Donald Trump? 

Good question.

And one that any politician endorsing Donald Trump, or any American voting for him, should stop and ask themselves. 

About those new hacked e-mails about Hillary Clinton's speeches released by Wikileaks. Ho and hum.

Courtesy of ABC News: 

The leaks were the result of another email hacking intended to influence the presidential election. 

Excerpts of the speeches given in the years before her 2016 presidential campaign included some blunt and unguarded remarks to her private audiences, which collectively had paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees. Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders. 

The excerpts were included in emails exchanged among her political staff, including Campaign Chairman John Podesta, whose email account was hacked. The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of Podesta's emails. It wasn't immediately clear who had hacked Podesta's emails, though the breach appeared to cover years of messages, some sent as recently as last month.

Some of the e-mails it seems dealt with concerns about how portions of Hillary's speeches might be received by the public if they were made public.

Here are some of the portions that concerned the campaing:

One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her "dream" is "a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders" and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America "would mean for everybody in this room."

I don't think that anybody would be too surprised by this.

After all though Hillary is now opposing TPP, she does NOT oppose trade deals in general.

Courtesy of Politico: 

Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, agreed that nothing in the excerpts “seems inconsistent with her positions on trade today.” 

“As I understand her position, she is against TPP in its current form but is open to moving forward with TPP if it is restructured in some way,” Schott added. “The No. 1 issue that is cited as part of the fix for TPP is provisions that prohibit currency manipulation.” 

Like I said, nothing burger.

Moving on:

"Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it," Clinton said. "New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it's also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy." 

In the same speech, Clinton was also deferential to the New York finance industry, exhorting wealthy donors to use their political clout for patriotic rather than personal benefit. She also spoke of the need to include Wall Street perspectives in financial reform. 

"The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry," Clinton said.

Now if this were coming from Bernie Sanders, who ran a fairly anti-Wall Street campaign, then I think people might be legitimately scandalized.

But Hillary Clinton was never anti-Wall Street, she was just in agreement that it needed serious reform, which thanks to President Obama and Elizabeth Warren is now being addressed aggressively.

Next?

In an April 2013 speech to the National Multifamily Housing Council, Clinton said politicians must balance "both a public and a private position" while making deals. Clinton gave an example from the movie "Lincoln," and the deal-making that went into passage of the 13th Amendment, a process she compared to sausage-making. 

"It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be," Clinton said. "But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."

Okay if you are surprised, or upset by this admission then you REALLY don't understand how politics works in this country.

EVERY politician has a public persona they present when being interviewed by the press or interacting with their constituents.

In 2008 President Obama stated in interviews that he did not support same sex marriage, and yet has been one of the leading advocates for making it legal in America.

Was he really against is?

Probably not.

Could he have been elected if he had said he was for same sex marriage in 2008?

Absolutely not.

So yes we have to take things politicians say in public with a grain of salt.

No shit Sherlock.

In fact these revelations were so underwhelming that some folks decided to spice thing up a little with some creative editing.

WIKILEAKS BOMBSHELL: Hillary Clinton Smeared Poor Americans, Called Them "Bucket Of Losers" In Paid Goldman Sachs... https://t.co/KZwlS6FeUS

— Mark D. Ellis (@MarkDEllis1) October 8, 2016

Problem with that, as revealed by Snopes, is that nowhere on the actual documents does it say anything like that.

Which of course did not stop Fox News and other conservative outlets from running with it. 

In other words the hacked documents, which we believe came from Russia by the way, were so flaccid that disappointed Right Wing nutjobs decided to manufacture some real dirt in order to help their man Trump a little.

Nice try Wikileaks. What do you have for us next? Is Hillary secretly dying her hair? Or does she sometimes eat dessert before she has had her dinner?

Talk about a "bucket of losers."

Colin Powell hacked emails show him calling the Benghazi investigations a "stupid witch hunt" and referring to Donald Trump as a "national disgrace."

Courtesy of TPM:  

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell dismissed the years-long Republican outcry over the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya as “a stupid witch hunt” in leaked emails published by BuzzFeed News on Tuesday. 

“Benghazi is a stupid witch hunt. Basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thoughts Libyans now love me and I am ok in this very vulnerable place,” Powell wrote in a December 2015 email to former Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, according to BuzzFeed. 

His email refers to Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, one of four Americans killed in the 2012 raid.

I think this is my favorite tidbit of information because it confirms what those of us on the Left have been saying for years.

However that was by no means the ONLY explosive bit of information exposed by this hack.

Courtesy of the Buzzfeed: 

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star general who served under three Republican presidents, slammed GOP nominee Donald Trump as “a national disgrace” and an “international pariah,” according to his personal emails seen by BuzzFeed News. 

The remarks came in a June 17, 2016, email to Emily Miller, a journalist who was once Powell’s aide. In that same email Powell also said Trump “is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him. [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan is calibrating his position again.

”In an Aug. 21 email from Powell to Miller, he blasted Trump for embarking on a “racist” movement that believes President Obama was not born in the US. 

“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Powell wrote. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim.”

So apparently Colin Powell has the same opinion of Donald Trump as every other rational halfway intelligent person in this country.  Most of who are apparently NOT members of the Republican party.

In other e-mails shared by CNN Powell also expressed irritation with Hillary Clinton and her team for drawing him into the whole e-mail investigation kerfuffle:

"The only thing I would add is to simply say she had a private account on a public server before becoming SecState and continued to use it when she became SecState. On the other hand this might to lead to questions about the basement," Powell said.

His main point seems to be that he advised her to use a private e-mail address, but not a private server which in his eyes is completely different. However he also fails to mention that the entire Bush administration used the RNC's private email server and then deleted 22 million emails which was against the law.

Which does not do much to support his faux outrage over Hillary's choices.

The Hillary Clinton campaign was also hacked by the Russians.

What the hell Russia?

Courtesy of Reuters:  

A computer network used by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign was hacked as part of a broad cyber attack on Democratic political organizations, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. 

The latest attack, which was disclosed to Reuters on Friday, follows two other hacks on the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, and the party’s fundraising committee for candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives. 

A Clinton campaign spokesman said in a statement late on Friday that an analytics data program maintained by the DNC and used by the campaign and a number of other entities "was accessed as part of the DNC hack." 

"Our campaign computer system has been under review by outside cyber security experts. To date, they have found no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised," said Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill.

So at this point we now know that the Russians hacked the White House, the State Department, the DNC, and now the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Do you know who WASN'T hacked?

The hack did not involve the private email system Clinton used while she was secretary of state.

Here's an idea.

Instead of everybody freaking out about Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server, and  accusing her of putting top secret information at risk, they should instead ask her to set up every other e-mail server used by government agencies or political organizations in order to protect them from hackers as well.

Just a thought.

And by the way can we now stop pretending that the Russians are not trying to stop Hillary Clinton from being elected?

Sarah Silverman's Twitter account was hacked after she endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Courtesy of Fox 25 Boston:

Confusion abounded Wednesday morning when comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted an anti-Hillary Clinton message just days after voicing support for the Democratic presidential nominee.

MY TWITTER ACCT GOT HACKED THIS IS NOT ME https://t.co/hmZYLdrjxi

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) July 27, 2016

A tweet sent around 7:50 a.m. from Silverman's account asked, "America, are you awakening?" 

A video posted by Anonymous in 2016 titled "Anonymous - Message to Hillary Clinton," appeared with the tweet along with the hashtags #Hilary4Prison and #Anonymous. 

It was promptly deleted.

Gee one would almost get the idea that Anonymous is working along with Russia to help get Donald Trump elected.

Or is that just a conspiracy theory?

Slate reveals the importance of the Russian DNC e-mail hack.

Source

Courtesy of Slate: 

A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy. 

It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks. 

 .............

What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon’s dirty tricksters didn’t mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff. 

 ..............

The DNC dump may not have revealed a conspiracy that could end a candidacy, but it succeeded in casting a pall of anxiety over this election. We know that the Russians have a further stash of documents from the DNC and another set of document purloined from the Clinton Foundation. In other words, Vladimir Putin is now treating American democracy with the same respect he accords his own. The best retaliation isn’t a military one, or to respond in kind. It’s to defeat his pet candidate and to force him to watch the inauguration of the woman he so abhors.

Yes this is a big fucking deal, and we need to start treating it like it's big fucking deal.

Vladimir Putin is attempting to alter an American presidential election so that the tough minded candidate that he fears will lose, and the orange tinted candy ass he can control will win.

You know in the old Republican party even a hint of collusion with Russia would have inspired them to take their candidate out behind RNC headquarters and beat him with axe handles until he promised to surrender the nomination and leave the country on the next flight to Moscow.

This new RNC is run by a bunch of traitorous wimps.

Wikileaks threatens MSNBC that their lawyers will start watching their programs if they report on the ties between Russia, Donald Trump, and those leaked e-mails.

@JoyAnnReid You are pushing a discredited conspiracy theory. There is no affinity, whatsoever. Our lawyers will monitor your program.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 24, 2016

Courtesy of Mediaiate:

WikiLeaks, the site that dumped the DNC email leak a few days ago, warned MSNBC’s Joy Reid yesterday after she teased a discussion on her show about the “affinity” between Donald Trump, Russia, and WikiLeak. 

The emails were reportedly breached by hackers connected to the Russian government, which has led to talk that maybe Russia is doing this to help Donald Trump, who has said things that Putin might find attractive in an American president. (There’s also the fact that the only part of the GOP platform his team amended was the anti-Putin part.)

This led to Rachel Maddow tweeting this in response:

"our lawyers will monitor your program"? seriously? and will you lurk in the alley, too? https://t.co/Jw09jrkP5K

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) July 24, 2016

Personally I'm not sure how offering to increase MSNBC's viewership is supposed to intimidate them, as I am fairly sure that they want EVERYBODY to tune into their programs.

And to be fair to MSNBC they are certainly not the first ones to made the connection between Russia hacking the DNC and these leaked e-mails from Wikileaks.

Courtesy of CNN:

Hillary Clinton's campaign manager is alleging that Russian hackers are leaking Democratic National Committee emails critical of Bernie Sanders in an effort to help Donald Trump win the election in November. 

 It comes on the heels of "changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian," Robby Mook told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" Sunday. 

"I don't think it's coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that's disturbing," he said. 

The DNC has previously had its files hacked by an individual named "Guccifer 2.0" that may have had ties to the Russians. 

Hackers stole opposition research on Donald Trump from the DNC's servers in mid-June. Two separate Russian intelligence-linked cyberattack groups were both in the DNC's networks.

Got to admit, that is a pretty interesting coincidence.

And at least one news agency has essentially referred to Trump as a Russian operative running for President:

The Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has chosen this week to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a KGB-trained dictator who seeks to rebuild the Soviet empire by undermining the free nations of Europe, marginalizing NATO, and ending America’s reign as the world’s sole superpower.

While another claims that Trump is in bed with Vladimir Putin politically and owes the Russians millions of dollars:

Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

You know what, I think I will join the lawyers for Wikileaks in watching Joy Reid's program.

Sounds like it might be very informative.

Russian government hacks DNC computers.

Wait, they got what?

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach. 

The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts. 

The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some GOP political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available. A Russian Embassy spokesman said he had no knowledge of such intrusions. 

The DNC said that no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed or taken, suggesting that the breach was traditional espionage, not the work of criminal hackers. 

So I guess the question that needs to be asked is whether a story like this undermines charges that Hillary Clinton's personal server was less secure than the ones used by the State Department, which was also hacked several years ago, or of every other agency operating in Washington?

Even if it turns out that she was hacked, how could you possibly suggest that she was more careless than the DNC, Donald Trump, or the State Department?

Security logs show that Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server was not hacked.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

A former aide to Hillary Clinton has turned over to the F.B.I. computer security logs from Mrs. Clinton’s private server, records that showed no evidence of foreign hacking, according to people close to a federal investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. 

The security logs bolster Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that her use of a personal email account to conduct State Department business while she was the secretary of state did not put American secrets into the hands of hackers or foreign governments. 

The former aide, Bryan Pagliano, began cooperating with federal agents last fall, according to interviews with a federal law enforcement official and others close to the case. Mr. Pagliano described how he set up the server in Mrs. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and according to two of the people, he provided agents the security logs. 

There is evidence of spam e-mails sent to the server, some coming from Russia, but apparently no evidence that they were successful in breaching Clinton's security protocols.

Remember the entire argument put forward by the conservatives is that the private server was less secure than the State Department servers, and that it potentially put classified information at risk.

However what needs to be pointed out is that those Russian hackers DID breach the state department e-mail servers, and probably got their hands on all kinds of sensitive information, while Hillary's supposedly "at risk" private server remained secure.

Guess which presidential candidate's brother has an Ashley Madison account? Did you guess Chris Christie? Because it's Chris Christie.

Courtesy of the Daily Mail:  

Chris Christie's brother had an Ashley Madison account in which he appealed for 'someone to bring some more spice into my life'. 

Todd Christie, a married father of five who is working on Chris's bid to be U.S. president, reportedly had sex 'a dozen times' with one woman he met via the cheating website. 

InTouch also spoke to a source who revealed that Todd and a woman he met online had sex 'about a dozen times.' '

Todd knows that he‘ll probably lose his family - and that it could cost Chris the Republican nomination,' said the source. 

'Chris should not be guilty by association, but Todd's actions will surely be associated with the Christie family's character.' 

Well I disagree, I think that this fits right in with what we know about Chris Christie's character.

It may not reveal anything new about the Christie family, but it does help to reinforce what we already think of them. 

However should Christie be blamed for his brother's actions?

No of course not.

But will it bang yet another nail into the Christie campaign's coffin?

Oh hell yes!

Is that a good thing for his future in politics?

Probably not.

Is it however good for the country?

Once again, oh hell yes!

As expected Josh Duggar's wife "partially blames herself" for his infidelity.

Courtesy of the Daily Mail:

 Anna Duggar partially blames herself for her husband Josh's admitted infidelity, it has emerged. 

The 27-year-old - who shares four children with Josh - will likely 'on some level.... absorb some of the blame' for her spouse's cheating and addiction to online porn, a Duggar family insider says. 

And she will 'no way' leave Josh for his actions - which the 19 Kids and Counting star confessed to after he was named as one of the 37million spouses to allegedly have Ashley Madison accounts. 

'Anna will not leave him. As with her in-laws, she is turning more to her faith than ever,' the insider told PEOPLE Magazine. 'She is fully and permanently committed to her marriage and children. 

Can't say this surprises me. These women are trained to believe that everything is ultimately their fault, and that all they need is more faith to overcome it.

In fact Josh's mother even has a tip to keep marriages happy. Always offer up your body even if you are tired or sick. After all isn't THAT all women are really good for?

If Anna has been adhering to her mother-in-law Michelle's top marriage tip, she will have said 'yes' to sex whenever her husband has wished to have it - regardless of how tired she may have been. 

'Be available. Anyone can fix him lunch, but only one person can meet that physical need of love that he has,' Michelle, 49, told TODAY Moms in an interview last year, citing a friend's advice. 

'You always need to be available when he calls.'

You know I'm not gonna lie, the idea of my wife ALWAYS being in the mood when I want sex sounds pretty good to me.

However as a human being the idea that she would force herself to do it just to keep me happy is a little repugnant.

I am not a rapist, so if my partner feels pressured or coerced into providing intimacy, that makes me uncomfortable, and it is ultimately not at all sexy.

One has to wonder if Anna also feels partially responsible for Josh sexually abusing his sisters? Or is that simply THEIR fault for being females while in his presence?

Let's face it this guy has quite a number of problems as it pertains to sex, and those certainly did not start with his marriage.

It appears that Hillary's use of a private e-mail account while Secretary of State was not illegal. But was it wrong?

Courtesy of Mediaite:  

The New York Times reported Monday evening that Hillary Clinton had used a private email account while Secretary of State, which “may have violated federal requirements.” Why the “may have”? 

The issue quickly gets murky. For one, previous secretaries of state had all used personal email accounts; John Kerry is the first to use a State Department email address. Why, besides the 2016 implications, was it a big deal for Clinton to have used a personal email account but not, say, Colin Powell? 

According to Times reporter Michael Schmidt, who broke the story, new regulations were implemented in 2009 requiring the archiving of electronic correspondence, which were then followed by a major update to the Federal Records Act in 2014 that forbade the use of personal email accounts for government business. 

The former was before Clinton became secretary, the latter after she’d already left. The only 2009 amendment to the law this reporter could find was Executive Action 13489, signed on Obama’s second day in office, governing executive privilege; via Media Matters, a post from the National Archives called the 2014 bill “the first significant changes” to the original 1950 legislation. 

The Times article intimated that Clinton was in violation of pre-2014 regulations governing electronic communications. “Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department,” Schmidt wrote. “Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.” 

“At the time Clinton was Secretary, the Federal Records Act didn’t require federal employees to use government accounts, only to preserve records of their communications,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote. “This, Clinton seems to have done.”

In my earlier post about this situation somebody accused me of being a hypocrite since I was so hard on Sarah Palin over HER private e-mail use. 

However if you read my post you will see that I did not defend Hillary, I simply postulated the possibility that she might have laid a trap for the Right Wing with this, and suggested that the White House obviously knew of this private e-mail and did not insist she change to the government e-mail.

Actually I think using the private account was a stupid idea, an opinion that is borne out by the fact that it was hacked. (By the way I feel we should remind everybody that Sarah Palin's e-mail account was not hacked, David Kernell gained access by guessing her security password. Big difference.)

Having said that the real story is whether this private account was illegal, it wasn't, and whether it hurts Hillary politically, and we're not sure yet.

So to be personal for a moment, does this make it less unlikely I will support Hillary in 2016, no it does not. Considering the alternative, how could it?

Apparently the White House has no doubt who was behind the Sony hack as President announces new sanctions against North Korea.

I'm coming for you Kim Jong Un. I'm coming for you.

Courtesy of HuffPo:  

Today, the President issued an Executive Order (E.O.) authorizing additional sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. This E.O. is a response to the Government of North Korea’s ongoing provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions and policies, particularly its destructive and coercive cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. 

The E.O. authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to impose sanctions on individuals and entities associated with the Government of North Korea. We take seriously North Korea’s attack that aimed to create destructive financial effects on a U.S. company and to threaten artists and other individuals with the goal of restricting their right to free expression. 

As the President has said, our response to North Korea's attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment will be proportional, and will take place at a time and in a manner of our choosing. Today's actions are the first aspect of our response.

Okay well that's that then. 

At this point I guess it really does not matter if others doubt that North Korea was behind the hack, they are the ones getting knee capped over it.

Damn that Seth Rogen is such a trouble maker.

The brilliance of HBO's The Newsroom. "Sloan explains pictures."

Now if you are confused by that clip, Sloan, played by Olivia Munn, has just learned that intimate pictures that she took with her boyfriend have now found their way to the internet after she broke up with him.

What many viewers may not have known is that in this case art reflected life. Olivia Munn's life.

Last year intimate pictures of Munn were also distributed all over the internet. Only in her case they were not from a disgruntled ex-boyfriend, but the result of her phone being hacked, along with Christian Hendricks, Scarlett Johansson and others.

The pictures were scrawled with very explicit notes to her boyfriend and were very intimate, and undoubtedly she was horribly embarrassed to have them showing up in teenage inbox's all over the world. (Munn was a host of the video game program G4 and the subject of numerous teenage masturbatory fantasies.)

When the pictures came out she, just like her Newsroom character, also tried to play them off as fake at first. But that only made the internet detectives snoop harder, and eventually there was no question.

Now Munn only addressed the photos once that I know of, but after awhile people stopped asking her about it and she went on with her life.

Which brings me to the brilliance of Aaron Sorkin and the incredible courage of Olivia Munn.

Last night Munn's character Sloan went through all of the emotions, anger, frustration, shame, that she MUST have felt when those pictures of her came out last year. She got the chance to let the viewers see up close how painful it must be to have your privacy so callously invaded, and to have your personal sex life shared, judged, and mocked by people who have no right to even know about it.

Munn MUST have known that by revisiting the issue viewers would flock to the internet to once again find her pictures and gawk at them all over again. But she did it anyway.

But at least this time it was HER choice. SHE was in charge.

And what's more, in the show her character got to exact revenge on the person who victimized her. Something that she was never able to do in the real world.

I have long been a fan of Olivia Munn who I think is not only beautiful, but extremely talented. But now I more than admire her, I am in awe of her.

Now that you have read this, play that clip up top again, and you will be in awe as well. 

Damn this show is good.