I should have known that when the evidence began to come to light, it would reveal a second-rate operation. The most prized witness here is dead but presumably he didn’t take his electronic records with him. The FBI is going to be very interested in talking to this John Szobocsan fellow. Very interested. It looks like he and the recently deceased Peter W. Smith were partners in DigaComm LLC, “a private equity and venture capital firm specializing in seed, start ups, emerging growth, mature, growth capital, industry consolidation, buyout, and early stage investments” that is no longer actively trading. And Mr. Szobocsan is up to his ears in Russian collusion. He made a big mistake when he decided to get on a call with Matt Tait, an “information security specialist for GCHQ” and talk about getting stolen documents from Russian hackers.
It is no overstatement to say that my conversations with Smith shocked me. Given the amount of media attention given at the time to the likely involvement of the Russian government in the DNC hack, it seemed mind-boggling for the Trump campaign—or for this offshoot of it—to be actively seeking those emails. To me this felt really wrong.
In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.
Trump obviously felt the same way. Of course, there’s a total absence of evidence that Clinton’s server was hacked at all. But we do pretty much know now that this “offshoot” of the Trump campaign was working with the Russians.
The story just didn’t make much sense—that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.
Suddenly, my story seemed important—and ominous.
Matt Tait has now spilled the beans. He’s made it clear that Peter W. Smith convincingly made the case that he was working in concert with the Trump campaign and was dialed into their operation at a very high level. This was evident from the keen insights he had about the internal operations and conflicts within the campaign, and also from his representations that he was working in concert with Michael Flynn and his son, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Sam Clovis. And, yes, there is documentary evidence that Smith made those representations.
The defense here will be that Smith was a rogue operator, but that defense will only stand up if there is no electronic trail to debunk it. All communications Smith had with principals in the campaign will now be subject to review.
A lot depends on what the investigators find.
And now we know why Trump wanted Comey to stop looking at Flynn, and why he fired Comey when he refused to comply.
Anyone with even a cursory look at Trump’s history and how he operates would know any defense of “acting alone” is bullshit. He doesn’t care about details, but you don’t do shit without his approval.
This isn’t exactly shocking news, people:
Occam’s Razor.
I disagree, to me it’s all VERY shocking. The willingness to sell out for what is, in the larger scheme of things, nickels and dimes is incredible to me.
Yes, congressmen and women have been selling themselves for nickels for many years…..but this was to a foreign power, and an obviously unfriendly one at that. And it’s ongoing….who trusts that Trump won’t sell American out when alone with Putin next month?
I’ve come to the conclusion it’s objectivism taken to its logical conclusion. Any Rand is a God to these people.
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To be clear: the utter shamelessness of the whole enterprise is shocking. It’s a brazen presentation of a Big Lie.
What’s not shocking is that there was almost certainly a conspiracy by Trump and his ideological helpmates to work with a foreign adversary to steal private information and selectively use that stolen information in propagandistic ways to manipulate the electorate.
Trump told everyone exactly what he wanted, in public. It’s time we believe our eyes and ears. It’s time we tie this evidence with what we know about Trump, that he will do literally anything to grasp power in order to abuse and humiliate the less powerful and enrich himself. This improbable conspiracy is completely in step with what we know about the man.
The investigations continue. We need to defend those investigations against their premature termination or sublimation. Talking about the dangerous immorality which is revealed by these discoveries will help ensure that the investigations are concluded and their discoveries are revealed. If we don’t pay attention and make noise about what has been revealed, it will be much easier for Trump and Congressional Republicans to shitcan the investigations.
And we can use the Russia revelations to undermine the GOP agenda. “Who in the world would fight and lie, lie, lie in attempts to take health insurance from tens of millions of Americans? Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation, that’s who. Who would mount a Presidential commission which intends to continue the current movement by Republicans to prevent millions and millions of Americans from voting? Putin and the Russians.”
The party of personal responsibility… always blaming their opponents when things go wrong.
The party of family values… merrily slashing away at programs that support families.
The party of morality and Christian values… electing and excusing a pussy-grabbing serial adulterer.
The party of fiscal responsibility… blowing up the budget, state and federal, whenever they get the chance.
The party of red white and blue patriotism… closing ranks behind a pack of fucking traitors.
it up.
The classic definition/example of “chutzpah” used to be the person who murders both parents, then throws him/herself on the mercy of the court as an orphan.
GOPers have been over-topping that one with far more extreme cases so routinely (like, daily) for so long now that they make that classic patricide look like . . . er . . . “childsplay”.
So many to get under oath, so little time.
The days must be very full for Mueller.
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Nicely put. Dems should use those 5 sentences verbatim over and over.
The GOP is the very definition of hypocrisy.
It takes very little to convince some people of false flag operations in Syria and Victoria Nuland conspiracies straight out of Sputnik but there’s definitely nothing to see here with the Russia story.
Have a look at Oui’s diaries today.
No, thanks; I’m in a good mood today and my blood pressure’s well in hand, plus I just ate supper.
With ‘recommends’ by a sock puppet account.
Of course the moral arbiters of what is moral, permissible, and worthy of discussion at the Pond are fine with that.
IOKIYAR.
Oui is mostly harmless. He’s an unwitting dupe who mostly serves as a conduit for disinformation. Easily ignored, which most commenters do.
Well,
Except there were, and are, hundreds of such ‘harmless’ individuals, all doing their best to disseminate alt right talking points. By constantly harping on ‘both sides do it, but Democrats are worse because argle bargle’ those thousands can discourage others from donating, volunteering, or even voting, or at least voting third party.
That would not be a bug to them, it’s a feature.
It’s not at all ‘harmless’ when you end up with Trump.
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With the names Bannon & Conway tossed into the mix the Mercers can’t be far behind. And it would make sense that if they are, Trump’s peculiar protection of Flynn may actually be protection of Mercers.
I’ve been feeling most sure of this for a long while. I don’t think it’s very many more steps. Smith to Mercer? Mercer to the IT guy in Texas?
“And now we know why Trump wanted Comey to stop looking at Flynn, and why he fired Comey when he refused to comply.”
I don’t. DT is far too interested in getting Flynn back into his administration for this one connection to be enough to explain the firing of Comey.
Flynn/Trump feels more like a bromance or some sick dependency that DT has. Flynn seems more like a security blanket for him.
Something else ugly is going on there.
Something ugly??? I wonder, did the russian hackers get paid by Putin to hack the DNC and then someone gave money to Assange to buy the stolen data? This mess always comes back to…follow the money. Money will be the proof of collision.
Several diarists at DailyKos are pointing out that Lisa Nelson is the CEO of ALEC.
“Lisa” and “Nelson” are both common names, so the ALEC Lisa Nelson and SmithGate Lisa Nelson could be different people … I can’t find definitive evidence.
Plenty of circumstantial evidence, including the fact that ALEC’s Lisa Nelson is a GOP apparatchik who worked for Newt Gingrich when he was House Speaker… and – gosh, who knew? – Peter Smith was one of Gingrich’s top fund-raisers.
One odd thing: I can’t find evidence online of a Lisa Nelson, “Trump campaign official”. What is that about?
Anyway, if indeed the ALEC CEO turns out to be SmithGate’s Lisa Nelson, Dawg only knows what Mueller will find when he starts pulling on the thread.
Nearly everyone in the GOP is connected to ALEC in one way or the other. And the Guardian reported a while back (2013, I think) that the Kochs helped fund ALEC. It would be interesting to know who else.
The trouble with that theory is that the Koch Brothers (who are behind ALEC) despise Donald Trump. They were not working for his campaign.
I don’t think this is nearly as compelling as you seem to think.
I didn’t provide links, but a quick online search with the obvious keywords turns up a link to Lisa Nelson in Jan or Feb 2017 gushing over this “ALEC Administration.”
Concur that the Kochs weren’t enthusiastic about Trump prior to Trump winning the GOP nod, but Pence is a Koch “made man”, and I’ve seen statements that Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos (among others) are ALEC spear-carriers.
I dare say that the Kochs – and corporate America more generally – is happy to run with a winner who is apparently eager to give them the store.
Besides, the Kochs are only one of ALEC’s backers. I didn’t paw through the ALEC dox the Guardian put online circa 2013, but taken at face value, the Guardian main article suggests that Koch donations were a relatively small part of ALEC’s funding.
The more significant question IMO is whether SmithGate’s Lisa Nelson is the CEO of ALEC.
It occurred to me this morning that – ALEC being a rather secretive astroturf organization – it would make perfect sense for Smith to describe the ALEC CEO as a campaign official – why call attention to ALEC’s participation?
And it’s a nit, but I question your use of “theory”. I’m theorizing nothing. SmithGate’s Lisa Nelson either is or is not ALEC’s CEO.
If she isn’t, then, uh, never mind.
But if she is, this is huge.
And I’d think the question would be easy to settle by looking at the papers of incorporation for Smith’s KLS Research (or whatever it’s called). Presumably the principals would have signed the papers.
They SAY they despise Trump.
Listen to the Charles Koch interview on Freakonomics, then get back to us. He says a lot of things.
I’m thinking it’s better not to listen to what they say but look at what they do. Their words might even be poison!
When it looked like Trump was a loser…they refused to support him. When Trump won, they made him their useful idiot.
Starting with the EPA, Trump is doing everything the Koch brothers could wish for.
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What Nalbar said.
Last week, the Kochs hosted a retreat where their collection of oligarchs openly threatened seated members of Congress to their faces to repeal the ACA and pass massively regressive tax cuts. The money spigot for their campaigns would be turned off if they didn’t obsequiously comply.
The Kochs are now in ravenous support for the Trump Administration, bigly.
Trump and his crew are a pretty unique threat to America. Not just policy wise, but he is attempting to reset our normal political processes.
But the real long term issue is republican leadership. Trump fits right in with them on domestic policy, but any other ‘mainstream’ candidate would have been fine with leadership. And they absolutely follow the Koch brothers.
So while Trump is a unique threat, even without him we would be right where we are now…with attempts at ACA repeal, with the destruction of the EPA, and with attempts at voter suppression. The Koch’s duchess not like Trump because his antics have the potential of hurting the above objectives.
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Regardless what else you were trying to express there . . .
. . . who knew the Kochs had a duchess????
So Smith reached out to Tait after the DNC leak, asking how to verify if emails that was allegedly Clinton’s were in fact Clinton’s. And the source may have been Russian intelligence.
But doesn’t that show that the Trump campaign lacked a connection to Russian intelligence, why else ask this third party to verify?
And since the campaign was ready and able to buy and publish these emails, but didn’t, what is this supposed to show? Did they back out, taking Tait’s warnings to heart? Did they buy the emails but developed ethical standards and decided not to publish? Or was there no emails and the campaign was scammed? But if it was a scam, is Russian intelligence the most likely culprit?
Maybe you think the hackers who work for Russia are honest intelligence officers, but they spend most of their time stealing people’s identities and credit card numbers.
Trump asked for these emails. Russian hackers got in touch, were told that Michael Flynn was the ultimate client, discussed it while being monitored, entered into negotiations and perhaps created forgeries, which then needed to be authenticated.
From the Trump campaign’s perspective, they needed to see if they were real which meant a guy who consults for GCHQ is a natural person to ask.
These were emails that, if they were real, had been hacked from the Secretary of State. Yet, they set up a company affiliated openly with the Trump campaign to obtain and exploit these emails. And they did in the face of a furor of genuinely purloined emails that were already being leaked by WikiLeaks.
When they couldn’t authenticate the Clinton server emails, they asked the hackers to just dump them on WikiLeaks, hoping they’d cause problems that couldn’t be traced back to them, especially if they turned out to be fake, which they surely were.
OK, I see you properly included “perhaps” with “created forgeries. Can you offer a link to your evidence that the people who got in touch were Russian hackers and not, say, Nigerian hackers? And they discussed it while being monitored? Or is that from accepting at face value Brennan’s tale that he “had evidence” that Putin was personally involved? I’m kind of skeptical of anything Brennan says, since he was one of the defenders of the use of torture.
Pay attention to bolding:
It’s consistent because Mr. Smith told people and the Wall Street Journal that he was working with Michael Flynn to get these Clinton server emails.
He freely admitted this and left evidence of it in documents. Plus there are witnesses who came forward to verify this.
Someone was talking to Russian hackers about these emails and getting them to Michael Flynn. It seems as if we have found that someone.
Maybe it was some 400 pound guy sitting on their bed?
Just like their US equivalent the Russian intelligence agencies may spend their days listening to phone calls between soldiers and their girlfriends. I don’t see how it matters.
As far as I know, the Clinton server emails that were deleted, hasn’t shown up except for possibly on Wiener’s laptop. Wiped with a cloth, gone from the world.
So where is the collusion if somebody who were possibly a Russian agent contacted the Trump campaign and the Trump campaign didn’t buy it? In particular if they never had the emails, because then this would seem to me like a scam attempt. If we assume this someone was a Russian agent, then the Russian government was trying to scam the Trump campaign. Not nice, but neither is it collusion.
I just had a look at the Counterpunch website. A search on the word “Russia” revealed that the most recent article there was dated May 12, 2017, and it leads with:
“There’s no proof that Russia hacked the US elections.
“There’s no proof that Russian officials or Russian agents colluded with members of the Trump campaign.
“There’s no proof that Russia provided material support of any kind for the Trump campaign or that Russian agents hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails or that Russian officials provided Wikileaks with emails that were intended to sabotage Hillary’s chances to win the election.”
You see the same motivations here, in the diaries.
If someone bought into the Clinton email ‘scandal’, and spent time disseminating alt right talking points on Clinton’s health, looks, and supposed perfidy on the Foundation,, it makes perfect sense to deny reality on Russian interference. After all, you would have just spent years living in a false dichotomy, so to now accept that much of it originated with Putin and those on his payroll would expose your intellectual short comings.
It would then be best to insist on a change of subject. To voter suppression, or health care, or anything but Russia. No evidence will ever be enough, because if it’s true, then you were a dupe or a fool.
It’s basic human nature to desire a change of subject, when the subject under discussion exposes that you helped a foreign power.
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Yes but this is a non-transitive assertion. Denying the reality of Russian interference does not suggest buying into the email ‘scandal’. In the absence of any evidence that Hillary’s server was ever hacked, I never believed that the FSA had her emails. That was just a story being passed around by Republican ratfkers. By the way, there’s no evidence that the DNC server was hacked, either, since the DNC destroyed the evidence after (?) Crowdstrike wrote their report. They wiped the disk so it would be astronomically expensive to try to recover the data, and might be impossible.
That’s interesting about the alt-right talking points, nalbar. There was indeed a bizarre amount of commentary here after Hillary Clinton’s stumble about how she obviously had this or that disease (always something that would disqualify her for the presidency).
Ad from Booman Trib, 11:14PM EDT:
Now you are all under suspicion!!!
Your TrumpHunt is only slightly less tenuous.
Again…Trump is some kind of monster. He needs to be stopped.
But not by this spooky spook spook bullshit. It will just result in more false news and thus a continuing downward spin for the political and social cultures of the U.S.
Good night…
AG
watch less porn, get fewer ads like that served to you.
How could Trump be a monster, AG? I mean, he’s a native son of New York City, which you, also a native son, frequently tell us is “real” (as in The Real America.) Well, the neighborhoods that you frequent are “real”, in any case. The ones that other commenters mention by definition are not. Gad, I remember that a few months ago, another commenter who also lives in NYC described his jogging route, and you excoriated him for his choices.