Hacker News Reader

Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

Listen, I know it's a big deal when the POTUS lies. But aren't we used to it by now? If Trump somehow manages not to be a criminal and a crook (which seems downright impossible), it will be highly unusual for the recent history of his office.

Now: other than bluster, what is there actually about this "Russia" probe? What exactly are we investigating? Whether Russia was involved in "fake news" stories? Whether Russia was involved in releasing emails from the DNC? Emails which revealed terrible, immature, anti-democratic conduct?

The "Russia hacked the election" narrative doesn't include, AFAIK, accusations that they stuffed ballot boxes or anything, right?

edit: If the house investigation is about the Steele dossier (ie, the alleged oil deal between Trump and Russia), then that's a different ballgame entirely and that's great. This article doesn't mention that; my understanding was that that had only been brought up on the Senate side. It seems that the House side is still just about the "election hacking" - I hope I'm wrong.

View on HN

I think the level of infighting in the US and Europe now is different from anything I've seen over the last couple of decades. The democratization of media is a net benefit but it helped bring about a world's worth of people seeking out news that matches their world view. It's made it very easy to spawn animus and make everything into an "us vs them" issue.

I think Russia is overtly and covertly involved in an effort to weaken western unions. And it seems like it's been a remarkably successful campaign.

> The democratization of media is a net benefit but it helped bring about [...]

We are living through the modern equivalent of when Guthenberg's technology allowed people to print their own bibles. You might remember how that one turned out: a huge religious schism, civil wars, large-scale terrorism, new laws enshrining religious discrimination which lasted for centuries...

I'm not saying this is what will happen; I think we've just underestimated the chaos the internet might have unleashed. It will certainly be worth it, in the long run; but at the moment it doesn't feel that great.

Very interesting comparison, thanks for sharing it. That paradigm-shift may indeed be one of the best analogs that we have to the current on-going changes in human communication.

There was a really good Hardcore History episode that told the story of one town that was an intense focal point of religious/cultural fervor and violence during that time period. The entire city was overtaken by multiple waves of extremely radical Anabaptists, and then was literally besieged by an army for multiple months as the guy in charge of the city tried to regain control. It was a spectacular story, with lots of juicy details. Dan Carlin does a great job of contextualizing and providing perspective, as usual.

P.S. I had to retype this comment as I accidentally deleted it while attempting to copy part of it... It's amazing (and frustrating) that Android chrome hasn't implemented text edit undo yet.

So the alternative is to keep a population held together with a narrative manufactured by the central state along side a brutal military police apparatus to manage compliance.

I think the real culprit is that the masters of the universe who crashed the economy have not been able to put humpty dumpty back together again. And only managed to make the upper 1% fabulously wealthy why the rest of the population has a sinking standard of living and lower long term wealth prospects.

Even tho its ugly what we have now its the best thing that could happen. If the states and regions reassert there rights and set there own policy independent of federal government the result is more power to the state citizens. And a smaller circle of corruption with more accountability.

And if the Russians are involved then they have complete control of both federal parties because the main source of friction comes directly out of the ideology of both parties that use division to try to segregate the electorate and practice scorched earth on the other side.

What are you talking about? The fake news are basically like the spam and phishing sites except they are state sponsored. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you have to bombarded by propaganda spread by russian bots. This is cyberwar. Sooner or later things will get quite nasty.

Are you sure its bots? The Russians could have very easily hacked your computer and planted a virus that tracks you and injects personalized propaganda based on there secret profile of you.

My take is that the "hacked the election" is mostly a right-wing framing.

What's much more interesting is evidence of collusion: money changing hands in undisclosed ways, policies changing dramatically after secret meetings, means of blackmail, etc. The first two wouldn't surprise me at all at this point.

The point being: if a foreign - hostile - state has substantial, non-disclosed power over US executive branch, that's a very big deal, and there's a number of laws meant to prevent exactly that sort of thing. The speculation is that at least one of these laws has been broken - that's much more damning than evidence of troll armies trying to sway votes.

You're being down-voted, in part, because you're asking a lot of questions that can easily be solved by web searches.

There's certainly plenty of stuff that's been written about supposed Trump-Russia links, much of it bizarre, contradictory, lacking in evidence, and even verifiably false but still widely believed anyway. Secret communications with Russia via a server in Trump Tower that looked remarkably like hotel junk emails from a server in a data center on the other side of the country from there, bizarre claims involving prostitutes paid to piss on hotel beds, liftings of sanctions and pro-Russian changes to the Republican platform that didn't happen (but few saw or cared about the debunkings)...

I've read a lot about this story; I'm not sure what I'm missing. If I'm a web search away, care to give me a LMGTFY?

Basically we're looking at Trump being connected to Russian mafia for all his financing as well as Putin bribing him with 19% stake in the Russian state oil company for removing sanctions, as well as assisting with his campaign by hacking into the Podesta emails, sorta like how there were Watergate DNC office burglars.

Did you want all this in writing from Trump and notarized that he did this? Because that's not how it works. His job is to say he didn't do this.

I thought the point of the investigation was to find out if Trump was complicit in Russia's involvement. IANAL but that seems very different from the mere thought of Russia going at it alone.

The investigation is about whether or not there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

There were certainly contacts with Russian agents. What isn't clear is who knew that the people they were dealing with were Russian agents, rather than Russian businesspeople.

Edit: And graft vs treason, which can be a hard call.

Uh, no. Aside from the fact that collusion between a foreign government and a presidential campaign would be extremely problematic that's not the major issue.

The major allegation on the table right now is that the Russian government offered Trump a sizeable share of Rosneft, the Russian national petrochemical corporation, in exchange for dropping the sanctions against Russia due to the conflict in Ukraine, and both parties followed through with the deal. The sanctions were relaxed by the Trump administration within the first month of coming into office while a stake in Rosneft has been sold to an anonymous buyer behind a cayman islands holding company.

That was one of the many dubious allegations doing the rounds, certainly. There were two major problems with it. Firstly, the supposed "dropping of sanctions" a month after Trump took power didn't actually happen. The thing people claimed was dropping the sanctions was actually a small technical change that merely allowed US exporters to pay fees required to export goods that the sanctions weren't intended to block: http://www.snopes.com/trump-sanctions-russias-intelligence-a...

Secondly, the claim that the Russian government offered Trump a share of Rosneft came from a really dodgy dossier. Supporters of the dossier touted the fact that it correctly predicted the percentage of Rosneft share sold as proof the source had inside knowledge, but it was in fact public knowledge that the Russian government wanted to sell that percent of Rosneft and had been reported in Bloomberg a few weeks before the supposed source mentioned it. So it's all too plausible that the source was merely combining public information with what the person paying them wanted to hear.

> The major allegation on the table right now is that the Russian government offered Trump a sizeable share of Rosneft

What? Where are you getting that from (that it's "the major allegation")? It was just one of many claims in the Steele Dossier.

IIRC, in the Steele dossier, that stake in Rosneft (~15% or something?) was offered to Trump and he turned it down. That stake continued to be shopped around and recently was bought by a joint venture between Qatar and others, and some of the buyers can't be identified.

TBH, I'm not really sure why Trump would need to relieve sanctions in order to get a stake in this, as it's clear they've been shopping it around for a while.

> TBH, I'm not really sure why Trump would need to relieve sanctions in order to get a stake in this, as it's clear they've been shopping it around for a while.

Well, it's probably cheaper.

If what you are saying is true, I'm wrong and that's great. I thought that the Steele dossier was only being discussed (let alone investigated) on the Senate side of the Hill; I hadn't heard about the House Intel committee taking it up. I understood that the House side was still just about the "election hacking."

Do you have a source?

The house side is a disaster right now. Nunes is the chair of the committee and his behaviour so far is very concerning. Specifically he went ot the white house to obtain information from staffers, then briefed Trump on it and went to the press before he went to his own committee. this from a man who was a part of Trumps team.

Edit: If you're downvoting because I'm wrong please correct me. If it's just because you don't like what I said then carry on I guess.

Wow. I hadn't seen that. That is so classic.

> What exactly are we investigating?

Collusion between Trump/team and Russia. It's one thing for Russia to mess with an election, it's a vastly different thing if the campaign coordinated with them to do it.

It strikes me as odd that Americans don't seem to mind that a President to some extent might be serving the interests of a foreign power above the interests of the his own citizens.

Who would have thought so many Americans would have a love affair with a KGB Agent that is responsible for murder and oppression and for his entire life worked to undermine America and has accomplished that to some extent with this Administration.

The current President is surrounded by a cult of personality. It makes it easier to see all of the news reports in the vein of "bitter mass media upset about election results" or "pandering to SJW/PC crowd."

Maybe it's just me but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of journalists are in some part motivated by their displeasure with the President's demeanor and public behavior. But that motivation doesn't mean they're dishonest, it just means that they will follow through on every lead in an investigation regarding POTUS corruption.

Keep in mind he only has a 35% approval rating, most American are bothered greatly by what's going on. He also lost the popular vote, so he won even though more people voted for someone else.

I think that the part you are missing is that the vast majority (like 65%) don't support or respect this President at all.

Of all the terrible things the government has done in the past 1 / 10 / 100 years, I don't think that a candidate coordinating with Russia about which fake news to publish is even worth mentioning.

If Congress has the guts to investigate the Steele dossier (which alleged Trump traded eased regulations for oil interests) then that's great. And if he is impeached on that basis, that's great too, although it leaves us with a probably worse Mike Pence. Better yet is if the entire government falls.

I'm not defending Trump or his conduct; I'm just saying this is a distraction.

Russia's goal is fragmenting the US. Just as the US did to the Soviet Union. Turnabout is fair play, no?

The confidence with which you express the goals that you're projecting on Russia here is scary. Not only do we have yet to find evidence that Russia did anything involving the election (although we certainly could during these investigations), you seem to have sussed out their goal in doing that which has not been proven, and a motive of revenge.

It's weird. Hearing people talk like this is weird, and reminds me of the run-up to Iraq, except that at least then there were claims to evidence.

I've been following this stuff for decades.

Have you read Igor Panarin's work? He and Putin are both "ex"-KGB.

But hey, it's just a hypothesis. Let's see what evidence comes out.

Edit: http://perezhilton.com/2016-12-29-russia-donald-trump-electi...

Treason is not a distraction, it's as serious as a crime gets.

Treason? You come to Hacker News to imply that the President of the United States has committed Treason. What proof do you have? This is pure slander.

Sorry your preferred candidate lost the election. Next time don't let violent, intolerant, elitist, smug liberals and celebrities take over your political party. Democrats used to be about Unions and the working family. Appears that era is over.

As noted in previous comments... There is a reason the Rust Belt voted for Trump, and it has nothing to do with Russia.

I implied no such thing, read what I wrote 50 times if you must until you see that I merely said treason is a serious crime, not a distraction. I didn't not imply he was guilty, we don't know that one way or the other; hence the investigation.

You really need to learn to have a discussion with someone, without blaming them for all of the perceived faults of the democrats. You don't know my political party, nor my preferred candidate, you're just assuming everything as if everyone who doesn't like Trump is the same.

> There is a reason the Rust Belt voted for Trump, and it has nothing to do with Russia.

No one thinks it does; the Rust Belt is just gullible and fell for a con man promising them things that cannot occur, those jobs cannot come back, they no longer exist. They heard what they wanted to hear because they're unable to hear the truth.

Indeed. Not all Americans, but enough.

And hey, even W liked Putin. He's a regular sort of manly man. Like the current President seems to idealize, in his own cokehead yuppie way.

Did Obama coordinate with "Remainers" when he tried to influence Brexit voters with his "back of the queue" speech?

Such a deflection of the topic is unworthy of hacker news. Trump is the president, discussion about Trump's negatives are not an excuse to deflect with "what about Obama", he is not the topic. Giving a speech is in no way comparable to the topic at hand anyway.

It sets a precedent that the left does want to acknowledge. There was likely collusion between Obama and "Remainers". Obama made a speech with a threat that was intended to directly influence a vote in a foreign country. Where was the outrage from the Democrats and media when this was done?

Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell has stated that he has seen no evidence of collusions between Trump and the Kremlin. "On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all," Morell said.[156]

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence under President Obama, said there was no evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives as of January 2017 when the intelligence community issued its report on the subject.[157]

You're again trying to fly off on a diversion of the topic, I'm not playing. This is not a discussion about Obama, period. Nor are public speeches that influence foreign countries remotely comparable to collusion to affect "our" elections. Your continual citing of only the evidence that supports your politics is nothing more than partisan deflection, you are not engaging in honest debate.

It's like you don't even read the links you post

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

There's plenty right there in your own source that warrants investigation into Trump simply from the already proved contacts that have occurred between the Russians and Trump's associates. That they have not found direct evidence of Trump's involvement yet is not a reason to stop an investigation who's purpose is simply to find out what did actually happen.

I'm happy this is an ongoing investigation. I hope the Democrats keep pushing it. I suspect they will continue to find nothing and the public will become more and more aware of the hypocrisy on the left.

This also keeps the Democrats from addressing real issues in their party. They ran a bad campaign. Instead of owning it and finding ways to address issues with American voters, they have found a scapegoat in Russia. Good Job!

You cant' seem to get over the incorrect idea that the dems are just being sore losers; that's childish and not at all what is occurring.

What is childish is implying the President of the United States committed treason with nothing to back it up.

Time will tell, but at least some Democrats are starting to address the real issue, and not placing all the blame on the boogeyman (Russia):

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/30/politics/joe-biden-donald-trum...

"What is childish is implying the President of the United States committed treason with nothing to back it up."

A bit like throwing wild unfounded accusations of blaming your predecessor of "tapping" your wires and when that doesn't fly try to redefine the meaning of words.

Or from the moment that the media writes something you don't like call them "fake" or threaten them with stronger libel laws.

Or when you are getting under fire blame somebody else or cry "this is unfair, look what the other one did".

The only time in my life that I personally witnessed this kind of behavior was when I was in Kindergarten. And I'm not trying to make a joke, I'm very serious about this.

I don't think your POTUS is the physical representation of well-considered mature views or standing, not by a long shot. I was always raised under the impression that all old people had a lot of wisdom in them, but there is one 70 years old one that changed my views on that dramatically.

It's never about the topic at hand but there always seem to be some deflection to things or persons which (honestly) doesn't matter anymore. And what I find particularly strange is that it can be perfectly be the case that there is no "treason", it's the weird behavior shown (and sorry a bit dishonesty) that makes it so damn compelling to believe it.

I haven't implied that, you're simply reading what I'm saying via partisan eyes. I merely stated treason is a serious crime.

And no, Clinton's campaign is not the real issue. She lost, that's over, no one is questing that. The issue is whether Trump and team were involved or not with the Russian interference with the election. No amount of deflecting back to Clinton will change the issue.

If "messed with" the election just means misleading propaganda, then is it really an issue if they coordinated with them? How is it any different than hiring a PR firm based in another country?

For a US politician to hire a foreign intelligence agency is arguably an issue. Some might call it treason.

> then is it really an issue if they coordinated with them

Yes, it is.

> How is it any different than hiring a PR firm based in another country?

One is treason, one is not.

forgive me if i'm being uncharitable, but it comes across as if you're being willfully obtuse.

"messed with" means hacking and possible criminal coordination between a campaign and russian officials. if it came out that the clinton campaign had coordinated with [insert historic rival] intelligence, people would be calling for executions.

> if it came out that the clinton campaign had coordinated with [insert historic rival] intelligence, people would be calling for executions.

...not sure which Clinton you mean here, but if you meant Bill, it's quite likely that he did indeed coordinate with Saudi Intelligence in a reasonably similar fashion.

...and so did the man he defeated, George H.W. Bush.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/23/world/clinton-and-his-ties...

"having close ties" is not "illegally coordinating an election campaign", and saudi is not a rival of the united states -- it's been among its strongest allies since fdr. but that's neither here nor there and i'm not interested in defending either of the clintons. you're trying to dodge the issue when it's spelled out. you're arguing in bad faith.

There's the possibility that the entire basis of the Republican resurgence -- with its roots in the alt-right, conspiracy theories, the Tea Party, gold bugs, etc -- has been a Russian operation with the goal of destabilizing the US. Consider the role of RT, for example. And it's not like it hasn't happened before. Russia played a major role in shaping the anti-war movement in the 60s.

No power on Earth is that competent. And the Tea Party was very clearly a reaction to Obama getting elected, and egged on by the Republican establishment.

Well, the US certainly has been. In Viet Nam. In Chile. In Iran. In the Soviet Union. Just about everywhere, really.

The Tea Party goes back before Obama. It grew out of the RJR-funded fight against smoking restrictions.

Great use of scare quotes!

Yes, was russia involved in fake news.

Yes, did Russia hackthe DNC.

More importantly. Who knew what, and when. Members of Trumps team had contact with Russia. Flynn already resigned over this. Sessions has had to recuse himself because of this. Nunes has engaged in questionable behaviour over this. Manafort had some sort of business relationship with a powerful Russian close to Putin.

There is a dossier from a "credible" source that indicates the Russians have dirt on Trump.

realistically, the question seems to be if Trump (or his team) encouraged Russian influence in the election in exchange for reducing sanctions or other favours.

That is a big deal.

> If Trump somehow manages not to be a criminal and a crook (which seems downright impossible)

The vast surveillance apparatus of the deep state have crawled everything they have on Donald Trump and all they could come up with was some locker room banter from 11 years ago. The man is straight as an arrow and has been for decades.

> Now: other than bluster, what is there actually about this "Russia" probe? What exactly are we investigating? Whether Russia was involved in "fake news" stories? Whether Russia was involved in releasing emails from the DNC? Emails which revealed terrible, immature, anti-democratic conduct? The "Russia hacked the election" narrative doesn't include, AFAIK, accusations that they stuffed ballot boxes or anything, right?

Stop asking questions. RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION! That's all you need to know. Quite how they subverted the voting apparatus of nearly 3000 counties is not a question you need to ask right now.

I expect you're receiving downvotes (not from me) because you're introducing a strawman argument.

The issue under investigation is if there was collusion between members of Trump's campaign and foreign operatives to, e.g. time releases or coordinate messaging, not attack the voting apparatus. The fact that the national security advisor lied to the VP about discussions with Russia (for which he was fired) and now will only testify under oath with immunity suggest that there indeed may be something worth investigating there.

> I expect you're receiving downvotes (not from me) because you're introducing a strawman argument.

I didn't introduce it - the parent did. I'm being downvoted because this is a left-leaning board. Shrug.

> The fact that the national security advisor lied to the VP about discussions with Russia (for which he was fired) and now will only testify under oath with immunity suggest that there indeed may be something worth investigating there.

He resigned but yes, he should be investigated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com