So, Trump didn't do it. No playing footsie with the Russians. The Trump campaigners, despite all their convictions and sentences, were clean, spotless.
There's a young guy, Vancouver Island born and bred, who thinks that's bullshit.
He's Chris Wylie of Victoria, the bright light who blew the whistle on Robert Mercer's Cambridge Analytica and the Trump guy, Steve Bannon, who ran it as it worked to rig the Brexit referendum and might - just might, possibly, perhaps - have worked, with the Russians, to tip the scales in the 2016 elections.
Few people are more versed on Russian espionage than Christopher Wylie, who worked for Cambridge Analytica. And Wylie has found reason to find fault with Barr’s apparent exoneration of Trump and his staff.
Wylie tweeted late last night, “Whatever this report says, here’s what I know: when I was at Cambridge Analytica, the company hired known Russian agents, had data researchers in St Petersburg, tested US voter opinion on Putin’s leadership, and hired hackers from Russia – all while Bannon was in charge.”
As the former Director of Research for Cambridge Analytica, Wylie became intimately aware of how mined information could be used to impact elections. Wylie became a whistleblower in March of 2018, explaining to The Guardian how Steve Bannon and others utilized his firm’s services.
He told Carole Cadwalladr, “I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool.” The company had mined Facebook to create over 230 million profiles of the American electorate. Wylie also spoke of relationships with Republican mega-donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer.Wylie's information is certainly not conclusive. That said, when he addresses the 2016 vote manipulation operation - owned by a far right billionaire and run by, entirely coincidentally, Steve Bannon and you take that in conjunction with the infamous "Steele Dossier" of which 1) several issues have since been confirmed and 2) none has to date been disproven. That comes down to a good many, "yes, that's true," and a few "not yet proven." And then, look at those Mueller has indicted and convicted and virtually all of them were nabbed for concealing (lying) about something to do with Russia. That's public record. Wylie's claims rest atop all of that.
I read this the other day myself. How did St Bob von Mueller miss something so obvious? He and his team dug deep into every corner, you assured us. They were the pros from Dover. Now apparently he's whimsically incompetent for not noticing dastardly Russians under every bed and failing to find Trump campaign collusion with them, when simply EVERYONE knows it's true. That's what happens when the corporate neocon press led progressives down the neocon path and they bought it. No other point-of-view was allowed because it was prejudged to be wrong.
ReplyDeleteIn your next post you daydream that something about Barr's summary isn't sitting well with Bob whose rep declined comment, purely on the basis of SFA from the link you provided. I get it. You're highly disappointed. Does that justify writing fiction?
Jesus, get over the butt hurt and innuendo now coming out to second guess Mueller's report. So he disappointed you in not nailing Trump and that master of evil incarnate, Vlad the Impaler.
A bit more wide-ranging reading than being glued to the NYT would have let you down early. The best comment I've read is from an extremely intelligent American who's not a professional political commentator but runs a car blog I frequent:
"Like it or loathe it, the “Mueller investigation” has to be considered a complete and total success.
No, The Man From B.C.C.I. didn’t “get Trump” — but did anybody besides Rachel Maddow really think that “the Russians” had a significant hand in the 2016 election? Even if they’d seriously and illegally tried to game the outcome, with Trump’s encouragement and/or participation, what chance did a bunch of ex-KGB goons with Facebook accounts have against a weaponized Google, not to mention the super-wealthy who put millions upon millions of dollars in play on both sides of the political divide? Nor does the report appear to provide any ready-made basis to impeach the President, the way that Ken Starr’s work did with Bill Clinton — but again, what were the chances that a man with forty years’ worth of experience dodging politically-motivated prosecution in New York City would be an easy target for the man who appears to have been easily manipulated by both George Bush and the Boston Mafia?
From my outsider’s perspective, however, the Mueller investigation wasn’t about keeping Russia out of our elections. It was about making it perfectly clear that any future President who hails from outside the “Swamp” or the “Deep State” will be hounded into madness and bankruptcy by that so-called Deep State. This has little to do with party loyalty; one can easily imagine Tulsi Gabbard or Rand Paul being on the receiving end of a similar battering-via-prosecution after winning an election. Even if our potential maverick politicians are not discouraged by this prospect, surely they’ll have a hard time filling their staffs prior to those elections. You’d have to be a certified moron not to notice the fact that Jeffrey Epstein did thirteen months for raping dozens of underaged girls but Paul Manafort is almost certainly going to die in prison. When it comes to selective prosecution, there really is such a thing as being on the right side of history."
BM
It was J. Comey, a faithful operative of the "Deep State" who pulled the rug from under Hillary and cemented Trump's electoral victory.
ReplyDeleteMy take is that Trumps seeks lifeline support of Bibi and Vlad to avoid being sucked into the "swamp."