Because I'm assuming that one of the parties to the conversation didn't just write a transcript of the conversation from memory and give it to someone else, to later be leaked.

I just happened to come across an interesting theory that is plausible(The Brits did it). From the Judge who has railed againt the unconstitutional NSA spying, so I don't think you can chalk this up to pure FOX news bullshit. In fact they took him off the air indefinitely for expressing his opinion. All of Comey's statements would still be truthful as well.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/03/16/andrew-napolitano-did-obama-spy-on-trump.html

Of course, just as I give little creedence to unsourced assertions that "The Russians did it" during the last administration, this will stay an interesting theory until the anonymous sources can deliver evidence.

I did nothing of the wort.

I posted what seems to be the author ( loosely used ) that started all this mess this weekend. All Mark did is pointed to 3 or 4 news articles. I was just documenting where this all started. No more no less. There press articles were all biased left and indicated that Obama is implicated. Why wold Left wing Obama fanboys new papers write such lies?

You and the other Leftest sifters voted this video off the site...Typical of your kind.. Can't listen to the other side... Oh Fuck no... Can't have fail and balance.

Then again this is about as much proof as the Democrats and main stream media has on any Trump / Russian collusion. Isn't it?

Granted NSA records everything. They even have Hillary's missing 33 thousand missing emails.

This does not give any government person the right to leak such data. That would be subversion.

You and the media have said that this Trump evidence/intelligence WAS gathered before Trump took office, lets see it. There are plenty of anti TRUMP on both sides for this to come out.


Government works so slowly there will never be proof. There are allies on both sides. Proof will never see the light of day.

Democrats just use false stories to keep Trump off balanced and hopes he falls. Trump just playing their game.

Nope, me neither.

Which is sort of the point. It's unheard of that all of these agencies came to the same conclusion on a specific matter. Some may take this as an indicator of how damning the evidence really is, others see this as an indicator that the "assessments" were made on hierarchical levels reserved for political appointees.

The absence of dissent supports the second point of view. No group of analysts in their right mind would create a report without also strongly pointing out contradictory facts, inconsistencies, and separating fact from interpretation. That's what Hersh is referring to. This is not an NIE, it's an opinion piece. This memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (wierd name) goes down the same route:

As you will have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing operation is no better than the “intelligence” evidence in 2002-2003 – expressed then with comparable flat-fact “certitude” – of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, an opinion piece might be sufficient if it came from credible institutions and had a moderatly important subject. But this is throwing serious accusations at a sovereign nation in times when diplomatic relations are stressed as it is. And that's not going into the credibility problem of many of these agencies, who have a very dubious track record on these issues.

Ian Welsh had a piece the other day on the CIA vs Trump, and his take on intelligence agencies is pretty close to what mine has been since I learned about the Stasi some 20 years ago:

The CIA and NSA are not the friend of any left-wing worth having: they are innately anti-democratic, anti-privacy, and anti-rights. Secret agencies are anathema to any open government. At an existential level, intelligence agencies are at best a double edged sword, and by their nature, they always wind up serving the interests of the few, against the interests of the people.

29 comments, most of them rather long and more-or-less well reasoned, yet none about the content.

I get if you don't trust RT. It's a propaganda outlet of a foreign government, after all. But RT is not Chemical Ali style of propaganda: it is solid, well-researched reporting on many topics, subtly slanted on others, and completely balls-to-the-wall denial of reality on others again.

You want to take that as a reason to ignore it entirely? Knock yourself out.

I won't. Which isn't saying much, because I prefer text over video.

Anyway, they regularly offer a valuably "Korrektiv" with regards to reporting in the mainstream media. Of course I would prefer if I could get that from a less-dubious outlet like, maybe, the Indepedant, or the NZZ, but I can't.

Let's talk about the content of this clip, shall we.

Hedges references the Prop-or-Not pieces run by the WaPo. Does anyone here disagree that those were a total and utter smear job? Painting Truthout, Truthdig, Counterpunch, Alternet, BlackAgendaReport, NakedCapitalism and others as stooges of the Kremlin is such an obvious attempt to discredit dissenting voices that it's, quite frankly, rather offensive. Yves Smith and Glen Ford as mouthpieces of the Kremlin... my ass cheeks.

On the other hand, quite a lot of journalists in the US seem to have embraced the Red Scare with open arms, seeing as it gives an excuse as to why their previous HRC lost against the orange-skinned buffoon. Kyle illustrated it nicely with Rachel Maddow.

Second point: they had James Clapper present the report. Seriously? The fucker was caught lying under oath during the initial stages of the NSA revelations. Wasn't the fuckface also in charge of the satellite reconnaisence prior to the Iraq war, who could have presented imagery that debunked the claims of WMD "factories", and decided not to? He is just as trustworthy as Chemical Ali, but less entertaining.

Third: half the report was about RT. Why? I thought it was meant to outline how they "hacked" the election? What does their propaganda outlet have to do with that? And the critique they presented... has anyone read the passage about the "alleged Wall Street greed"? They are having a laugh, and people take it seriously.

Fourth: it distracts from the aspects of HRC's loss they don't want to be a subject of public discussion: class issues. They offered nothing for the working class, who got a shoddy deal over the last decades, and tried to focus entirely on identity politics, completely denying even the existence of class issues. Which is also why it's now the "white, male worker" who is to blame. Nevermind that >50% of white, female workers also voted Trump. Nevermind that significant portions of non-white working class folks also voted Trump. Can't be. According to the narrative, these people are minorities first, working-class second, and identity politics always trumps class politics. Except it didn't.

All this rage at the "deplorables", the "less educated"... it just reeks massively of class bigotry. Those plebs decided to vote for someone other than our beloved Queen HRC? How dare they...

And finally, RT's own part of this segment, about the credibility of the intelligence community's claims. Any disagreement on this? Anyone? Anyone think the torturers at the CIA are trustworthy enough to take their word without hard evidence?

May I be the first to say to those older than me OR my same age (and younger even still)... If you do NOT understand computers, devices, the Constitution, history, politics (without the need for backstabbing), and being able to commit and fulfill an actual public office without taking bribes (though politicians like to use that money for their re-elections, and most certainly is never a bribe...NEVER...)...

If you don't understand at least some sort of bare minimum we should develop before people can actually run and ALSO take on civic duties. Trump seems to think computers are *magic* and are literally IMPOSSIBLE for ANYONE to know how they work. Remind me again how in the hell he got into office...?

Oh yeah, the same people that actually have this same issue voted him into office as well. This is why Snowden is charged with Espionage (how?), rather than a guy just following his Constitutional duty (which he was charged with twice over, in the Military and in the NSA...).

Good luck with your new version of "hope and change", based on ignorance, so bad that this ignorance believes it's impossible to overcome its own self-deceptions and deceptions created by others. The perfect "tools" for Russia to have in office (along with the perfect idiots to have in office, so Trump's cabinet picks can also break us too).

Here's a few articles on today's report from the nsa, doj, cia, and director of national intelligence directly tying Putin and the Russians to the hacks, but sadly I can't find the report itself.....

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-officials-putin-personally-involved-u-s-election-hack-n696146

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/12/14/putin-involved-election-hack/95453054/

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/will-congress-investigate-russian-interference-2016-campaign

...no smoking gun shown publicly yet, but by using the intelligence term "high confidence" they are certainly indicating they have one, or more than one.

There's more...coming soon to the interwebs, but jointly announced today by the CIA, DOJ, NSA, and the director of national intelligence. It's no longer innuendo and claims by people paid to make claims. We may never know most sources, because they are our spies and diplomats, but it seems they have evidentiary proof, not just likelihoods and claims.
Hide and watch. ;-)

Oops! Today they (the nsa, the director of national intelligence, the cia, and the doj, combined) released proof that not only did the Russians hack multiple American targets, but Putin was directly involved in choosing what to release and how, all in an effort to damage our election process and elect Trump as a way to weaken America and our ties with allies.
D'oh!

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSKCN1241YT

If your product allows for this, they will make you do it, and there's fuck all you can do about it. Score one more for OpenWhisperSystems, who designed Signal with this shit in mind.

NSA HAS ALL OF CLINTON'S DELETE?

I would like to know more about this DELETE.

What?!? Napolitano believes a completely crazy conspiracy theory with absolutely no evidence to back it up based on pure hyper biased conjecture, and is willing to 'report' it as a fact with faux news's backing?!?
This must be a day of the week that ends in "y".

Now, as to the theory.... that a patriotic NSA agent, angry at Clinton's possible lack of safeguards on her emails which might contain sensitive information, hacked in and stole those emails and made them all public, doing exponentially more damage than her actions did, and exactly the maximum damage he was angry she made at all possible....it's just totally bat shit insane and defies all logic....so of course Napolitano and faux viewers believe it.

related
http://videosift.com/video/NSA-Whistleblower-Everyone-in-US-under-digital-surveillance

It broke down along party lines with each party voting for its own measure and against the opposition's. To be honest all the proposals were shit and didn't deserve to be passed, so yea for democracy actually working. Passing knee jerk legislation in the wake of a tragedy is how we got the TSA, Guantanamo, and massive NSA data collection.

That is not the point. Government works a certain way and rarely is it in the favor of individual liberties. We knee jerked after 9/11 and created the Patriot Act, you know, the set of rules that gave us torture, drone strikes/raids into sovereign nations without their permission, and the NSA checking everything.

If you ban people from one of their constitutional rights because they end up on a government watchlist, then you have set a precedent for further banning. Then next we can torture people in lieu of the 5th amendment because they are on a watchlist (oh wait, we sorta already did that to a couple of us citizens in Guantanamo). The FBI fucked up and removed this guy from surveillance, even though he had ample terrorist cred. That shouldn't have happened, but should we lose our freedom because of their screw up?

"Can [They] be so insanely sheltered that they think her 'answers' help her?"

If you piece together all of her statements on a plethora of different topics, it is inescapably obvious that they (!) truly have no connection to anyone or anything outside their bubble. Surrounded by sycophants as the Clintons are, people have wondered, and justifiably so, whether she cares or even knows that she's lying on a regular basis. One might make the case that the entire concept of an objective "truth", connected to reality, has no meaning for them.

Additionally, she really does suck at campaigning. But that's not punishable by extended prison sentences, unlike, I don't know, sending Special Access Program (SAP) info through your own bloody email server.

Lastly, Joe mentions Powell (6:16 onwards). When Colin Powell was SoS, his office was connected to the internal system, but had no connection to the internet or the outside world in general. You can't get shit done that way, not in this day and age. That's why he had additional gear set up to at least send and receive emails. This was done separate from the internal network and, if I remember correctly, his entire staff was not only open about it every step of the way, they applied for and received special permissions before they touched anything.

Clinton didn't give a jar of cold piss about the rules that are meant to safeguard access to sensitive information. It was inconvenient to her, and since the rules and laws only apply to plebs, she and her posse set up their own system.

A whole lot of people have to adhere to tedious rules and procedures, with severe punishment looming just around the corner. One guy was in the press for receiving three years of prison after he placed a document on the wrong desk. So, if the FBI drags out the investigation or even buries it, you can bet your ass that a lot of people at different agencies are going to be fuming. And between the FBI, the NSA and CIA, a lot of people have access to the remaining emails from Clinton's server. That opens Clinton up to blackmail, a lot of it. Can't have a compromised president. Not to mention that someone's going to take the data and just drop it over at WikiLeaks or the Intercept.