Putin Ordered ‘Influence Campaign’ Aimed at U.S. Election, Report Says

nytimes.com

9 points·aaronbrethorst··2 comments

Why is anybody in the government so unable to provide convincing evidence that the Russians were directly involved in hacking the DNC? This article's headline references the Russian state media preferential coverage in the Trump campaign and then, later on, repeats the intelligence community conclusion that Guccifer 2.0 is a GRU operative...

Don't we as democratic citizens deserve to have concrete evidence available to us that a foreign country influenced our election before we start banging the war drum? Can I really be expected to blindly trust the CIA/NSA/etc. on a topic of such vast importance?

>>Why is anybody in the government so unable to provide convincing evidence that the Russians were directly involved in hacking the DNC?

Russia has plausible deniability. US intelligence community simply doesn't find it very plausible.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the saying: if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

What we know for a fact so far:

-Trump has very strong business and personal ties to Russia

-The DNC has been directly targeted by actors with known ties to Russian leadership (but not a state actor, because Russia wants plausible deniability)

- Russian leadership is celebrating the fact that Trump won

- Donald Trump is STILL refusing to release his tax returns

- Donald Trump keeps disparaging the entire intelligence community for trying to delegitimize his election, despite having applauded Comey's smearing of Clinton two weeks before the election

Based on these, it's reasonable to conclude that something very fishy is going on.

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