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I will admit it can be very difficult to get out of the echo chamber, be it on the right or the left. People like Louise Mensch going around shouting "impeachment is coming!" to anyone who will listen isn't helping.

But I think it's highly likely that Russia actively engaged in an influence campaign in the US election, and I think that's an opinion shared by many people with direct Russian foreign policy knowledge. It's a modus-operandi of the Russian intelligence apparatus (there's a great interview on NPR's Fresh Air last month with John Le Carré who talks about this).

> Now that's some interesting foreign influence worth talking about

Why? Bill Clinton's not in power, last time I checked? Whereas the founder of the Donald J. Tump Foundation, another charitable endeavor with even more suspicious looking finances, is. Almost the entire Wikipedia page for the foundation is taken up with "Legal & Ethical Controversies".

I think there's room for a reasoned debate of the effect and impact of Russian influence in this past election. Who knew about it? Was it small-scale, or a massive operation? Did it actually have any impact? Going "but look at the Clintons!" rather undermines the discussion.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Trump_Foundation

> Bill Clinton's not in power, last time I checked

And neither is his wife.

One does wonder though if the same standards of foreign nations interfering in a U.S. election would have applied to Hillary if she'd been elected.

If memory serves me correctly however, anyone mentioning such things before the election was told that the U.S. election can't be rigged/influenced and to suggest so was an attempt to undermine democracy.

Honestly, with the level of scrutiny Trump is receiving by the types of people who would be willing to edit Wikipedia pages and who are prominent in tech and the media in general, it's completely unsurprising to see such a large "Legal & Ethical Controversies" section. The left is drowning in their own data because criticizing Trump is such a cheap way to get clicks these days. It's what leads to so many duds in terms of scandals, like this Russia nonsense.

> People like Louise Mensch going around shouting "impeachment is coming!" to anyone who will listen isn't helping.

That's exactly my point. That overreaction is what's derailed it. There have been nothing but empty promises for "that's it, it is just around the corner, we have the smoking gun" and then digging deeper, there is not much to go on there.

> It's a modus-operandi of the Russian intelligence apparatus

I believe that. KGB has been doing that since it was formed. Technically they might not have been sophisticated but they were good at planting stories and spinning narratives. I remember the "US govt created AIDS to kill all the black people" fake news.

> Was it small-scale, or a massive operation?

The investigation has been going for a quite a while, I don't believe there is any evidence of meaningful interference at this point. Mostly it is about fatigue listening to empty promises. There is an opportunity cost here. The more effort is spend here, the less time, effort and attention is left for more important things.

But I also believe that any country out there with enough resources would trying to influence US officials. I gave an example of a Qatar handing out a $1M birthday gift to the husband of the US Secretary of State.

> Why? Bill Clinton's not in power, last time I checked?

His wife was in power. Who also later ran for President. Thought it was an interesting connection there.

> Almost the entire Wikipedia page for the foundation is taken up with "Legal & Ethical Controversies".

Exactly. Let's talk about that, there seems to be more there to go on than Russia.

> Going "but look at the Clintons!" rather undermines the discussion.

As I mentioned, that was more about the scale of what kind of evidence is expected given the allegation made, and the energy and time put into this topic. $100k worth of ads for Black Activism don't fall near that.

It is also interesting to me to observe how quickly liberals accept that the promotion of their own ideas is divisive - as long as someone else is to blame for it.

Promotion of any political issue is obviously going to be divisive. If everyone already agrees on something then it's not really a political issue.

I don't know. I feel like if people listen and be kind, they can have an influence on others. When you get defensive and militaristic about it, people just close up and get defensive themselves, and that's what causes division.

Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" can encompass up to 100 million very different people. Practically even if most people are understanding and kind (which honestly has been my experience) there still will be a huge minority that are militaristic assholes. I think there theoretically could be ideas that people care about but aren't divisive but I'm not sure that realistically it could happen

The fact of the matter is that Manafort met with Russian officials before the election. What was that meeting about do you think?

Manafort is almost assuredly dirty for something he's done, but it's hard to say if that meeting was related to his campaign work or some loose ends from his past.

It looks shady, I heard in the notes there was the word "donor" mentioned. First it was "donation" but it was corrected later as "donor".

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-opens-mom...

Then that meeting in the tower with Trump J., was also shady. Those are good to investigate and find out what's going on. But I wish media would back away and do something else instead of insinuating the smoking gun is right around the corner.

Because so far, I don't see that meeting or the Black activism ads influencing election results in a major away, and definitely not to the level of overturning them.

I think the Russians but also other countries try to influence US elections. US is world power and who runs for office here affects other countries. Yes, Putin in particular didn't like Clinton, since she criticized his election results (and rightly so, there were some out of whack results like 103% of voters voting for him from what I remember), so Russia probably tried harder. But to me from the beginning, focusing on Russia seemed like a PR campaign more than anything.

I gave an example with $1M gift to show the level of evidence, that would be good to see. Imagine we found a copy of a $100M check to the RNC which allowed them to canvass 10x the neighborhoods that the Democrats could or buy more air time or FB ads and so on. That would be more believable.

So question, despite the Russia madness appearing to be BS, it did, via machinations by the FBI, give us a Special Counsel which will in all likelihood destroy Trump based on his corrupt business practices unrelated to Russia.

I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. The winners won't be a real left party, they'll be mainstream Democrats (centrist-liberal establishment capitalists) assuming impeachment doesn't start a civil war. On the other hand, we'll be bereft an authoritarian racist that is diminishing this country each day he is in office as he dismantles social programs and blows up the climate.

> via machinations by the FBI, give us a Special Counsel which will in all likelihood destroy Trump based on his corrupt business practices unrelated to Russia.

I am all for shedding light and investigating things. We've had enough corruption, anything that leads to less corruption is good in my book.

> The winners won't be a real left party, they'll be mainstream Democrats (centrist-liberal establishment capitalists)

That's the deeper loss here. The opportunity cost talking about Russia and how many scoops of ice-cream Trump had. What happened to those people who voted for Bernie Sanders. He was mostly unknown before the election started and then mobilized a huge amount of followers even while the media was blacking him out. Sure most voted for Hillary but what happened to that energy and enthusiasm. I think we are missing out on creating a new party or at least unseating the old guard at the DNC.

Agree, I keep thinking back to Iraq and WMD's. Something all of our intelligence and even most of our allies all agreed was true.

We should be cautious of these narratives, especially when they can lead to hostility between nations.

We know some level of covert intervention is attempted all the time. Ironically, we are some of the leaders in doing this to other nations. If we put this microscope on all other nations I'm sure we would find incidents there as well.

I stopped buying the Russia narrative.

You don't have to buy any "narratives". It may be better to simply take stock of the chain of events of what actually happened.

In this case - was there, in fact, something like a high-level, coordinated effort on their part to conduct various covert social media shenanigans (as opposed to open campaigns, like buying ads) in the U.S., for whatever purpose? Maybe the effort was ultimately futile and wasteful (like the "Illegals Program" a few years back -- but the more important question - was there such an effort?

Available evidence increasingly indicates that, in fact, there was.

How much was spent on these adds, how many hundreds of millions? Oh just $100k.

No idea where you're pulling those numbers from. But the overall scope easily suggest a budget >> $100k.

Did the Chinese buy ads, the French?

Wide-scale social media trolling != "buying ads".

Without hypotheticals, here is Qatar giving a $1M birthday "gift" to Bill Clinton

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

> here is Qatar giving a $1M birthday "gift" to Bill Clinton:

It's worth noting that they gave the money to the Clinton Foundation[1], not to some nefarious personal account.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-foundation/c...

Sure but that's the example of the kind of influencing you'd expect to be proportional to the hype that media has been stirring up. Giving money to the "foundations" is how pay-to-play usually works at avoids a more direct route which is illegal.

One (or two?) CNN employees were caught on hidden cam entirely candidly admitting it was for ratings, orders from the top of CNN. Seems fairly consistent with reality, especially the longer it goes on.

Your post history indicates that you're not only Russian [1][2], but that you've also been dismissive of the "Russia narrative" since details first surfaced [3][4], and you have a very vibrant history of being vehemently anti-Clinton [5].

You're free to believe whatever you want, but please drop charade. You have a very obvious agenda and you're doing a disservice to the rest of HN with your bullshit implication that you "stopped buying the Russia narrative".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13797023

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793971

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973995

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200173

[5] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

Anyone else think it's particularly gross when people voyeuristically root through people's comments history to try to discredit them?

Not really.

Yes, definitely. I flagged the comment for that reason.

You can disagree with the original comment. You can downvote the initial comment. You can flag the initial comment. Hell, you could even engage and reply to the initial comment.

But I don't want to see the personal attack.

Gimme a break, just because someone is from Russia doesn't mean they should be immediately dismissed. In fact, one might say that their opinion might even be valuable if we weren't in the midst of a Red Scare. Loyalty to the Obama-Clinton block is what got us into this mess. Neither it nor Trumpism is going to get us out.

Ai yai yai, this sort of personal attack, crossing even into national smear, is totally out of line on HN and is easily a bannable offense. I won't ban you because you haven't made a habit of this, but if you do it again we will. I haven't been so shocked by something a HN user has done in a while.

In the meantime please re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post only civil, substantive comments from now on.

I'm disappointed to see that you're standing up for posting extremely biased political misinformation on HN and shutting down the one person attempting to provide source, context, and framing of the user's intent.

Please just go ahead and ban me. This is completely ridiculous and you're part of the goddamn problem.

> I'm disappointed to see that you're standing up for posting extremely biased political misinformation on HN and shutting down the one person attempting to provide source,

What was your source? My comment history? You didn't even dig enough to see that I am not Russian. So you're throwing allegations around. Yes I speak Russian and a few other languages and I lived in the ex-Soviet Union. Not sure you had to go back 340 days to see that. I mention that about every week here.

Why throw a fit that everyone else is not supporting your political candidate and doesn't share your opinions. Why not provide a counter argument which leads to discussion. You can see I responded to some comments which didn't start with "let's dig in your history". Sure, it's a bit flattering but as I mentioned in another comment, also kinda creepy.

Ah yes. Digging through the post history.

Oh wow you found my post from 340 ago. I am kind of flattered, but also kind of creeped out, also saddened a tiny bit. Mostly because you see shills and spies hiding in the bushes.

No I am not Russian, but yes I speak Russian. There is a puzzle for ya, dig deeper friend. I also speak 3 other languages (not including computer languages), not sure if that' s a good hint or not. You can also maybe find exactly where I live. Should I put a chair against my bedroom door, just in case, ...

> of being vehemently anti-Clinton [5].

Oh we have to like Clinton here on Hacker News, sorry didn't know about that.

> but that you've also been dismissive of the "Russia narrative"

It smelled bad from the very beginning and I think the more time passes the more it gets validated. Well, thanks for finding those links, now I can say "yap I was right". Comey's advice not to prosecute bit being extremely fishy, and that the whole Russia narrative was a mostly a PR campaign. Do I get armchair HN political analyst brownie points?

> You have a very obvious agenda and you're doing a disservice to the rest of HN with your bullshit implication that you "stopped buying the Russia narrative".

What's the agenda? Yeah I stopped buying the Russia narrative after I saw that Crowdstrike's report was the only evidence for it. I didn't just stopped buying today, I stopped buying since it came up. Yet every time I see news with grand promises I think "ah well maybe this is it, let's see what's there" and there nothing.