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Monday, July 25, 2016

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The Clinton Campaign is now Trying to Red Bait Trump?

It appears that the Clinton campaign is now trying to claim that the DNC hacked emails are a campaign by the Russian FSB to benefit Donald Trump's campaign.

The idea of casting Trump as some sort of Manchurian Muscovite Candidate is completely nonsensical, and the claims in this article has claims from anonymous experts who present no concrete proof for their accusations:

An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyberspecialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?

Until Friday, that charge, with its eerie suggestion of a Kremlin conspiracy to aid Donald J. Trump, has been only whispered.

But the release on Friday of some 20,000 stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, many of them embarrassing to Democratic leaders, has intensified discussion of the role of Russian intelligence agencies in disrupting the 2016 campaign.
As an aside here, I would note that it's right for people to be shocked here, because the US never meddles in other nations elections. (And, as Sir William Schwenck Gilbert wrote, "Married men never flirt.")
The emails, released first by a supposed hacker and later by WikiLeaks, exposed the degree to which the Democratic apparatus favored Hillary Clinton over her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and triggered the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chairwoman, on the eve of the convention’s first day.

Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult. But researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers. Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.

On Sunday morning, the issue erupted, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump” citing “experts” but offering no other evidence. Mr. Mook also suggested that the Russians might have good reason to support Mr. Trump: The Republican nominee indicated in an interview with The New York Times last week that he might not back NATO nations if they came under attack from Russia — unless he was first convinced that the countries had made sufficient contributions to the Atlantic alliance.
The accusations are repulsive, and they reek of desperation, and they are every bit as offensive as Donald Trump's suggestion that Ted Cruz' dad was involved in the assassination of JFK.

This is not the image that the Clinton campaign wants to promulgate.

I would also note that if the folks at the DNC were doing their job properly the emails would have been rather anodyne.

This really is the equivalent of the unmasked villain at the end of a Scooby Doo episode saying, "I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for your meddling kids."

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