President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Me neither. Wretched, despicable Trumpist who only tepidly backed away from her end-times religion. That, you know, is precisely the sort of belief system you want within a heartbeat of the nuclear football..

 

It doesn't have to be Russia. It doesn't have to be anybody. These are all sovereign countries. If they want assistance (which they sometimes do), then provide it. Otherwise, stay the hell away. Nobody needs to be policeman there. Nobody is entitled to be.

Russia doesn't have the money to meddle in Middle East affairs nearly as much as the US does. Nor do they have military bases stationed all over creation. They CAN'T fuck things up as much simply because they aren't able to.

 

Wait ...so the "America you want again" is the one where we destroyed people for "just the appearance of impropriety" based merely on "association"?

OK, Senator McCarthy, let's get those blacklists revved right back up for ya...

 

Here you go, YF. This is the best thumbnail explanation for "Why won't they hand over the server?" I've seen yet.


"First off, CrowdStrike, the company the DNC brought in to initially investigate and remediate the hack, actually shared images of the DNC servers with the FBI. For the purposes of an investigation of this type, images are much more useful than handing over metal and hardware, because they are bit-by-bit copies of a crime scene taken while the crime was going on. Live hard drive and memory snapshots of blinking, powered-on machines in a network reveal significantly more forensic data than some powered-off server removed from a network. It’s the difference between watching a house over time, carefully noting down who comes and goes and when and how, versus handing over a key to a lonely boarded-up building. By physically handing over a server to the FBI as Trump suggested, the DNC would in fact have destroyed evidence. (Besides, there wasn’t just one server, but 140.)

An advanced investigation of an advanced hacking operation requires significantly more than just access to servers. Investigators want access to the attack infrastructure—the equivalent to a chain of getaway cars of a team of burglars. And the latest indictments are rich with details that likely come from intercepting command-and-control boxes (in effect, bugging those getaway cars) and have nothing to do with physical access to the DNC’s servers.

With help from the broader intelligence community, the FBI was able to piece all these details together into the bigger picture of the GRU’s vast hacking effort. The complexity of high-tempo, high-volume hacking campaigns means that attackers can make myriad mistakes; Mueller’s latest indictments reveal just how successful American investigators have been at exploiting those repeated errors and uncovering more and more information about what Russia did.

The Russian spies, for example, reused a specific account for a virtual private network (a purportedly secure communication link) to register deceptive internet domains for the DNC hack, as well as to post stolen material online under the Guccifer 2.0 front. Cryptocurrency payments—the kind the Russians used to pay for registering the DCLeaks.com site and their VPN—were neither as anonymous nor as secure as the GRU thought they would be. Third-party platforms including Google, Twitter and the link-shortening service Bitly were convenient and reliable for Russian hackers, but they could also be subpoenaed. Mueller’s team did exactly that, reconstructing how, when and how frequently Russian intelligence officers communicated with WikiLeaks, which they used as an outlet for the stolen material. The Russians weren’t even particularly careful: WikiLeaks and the Russians officers, in a major cock-up, encrypted the hacked emails, but did not encrypt the details of their collaboration. And in using a Bitly account to automate the shortened links sent out to targets of their email-phishing scheme, the GRU left an investigative gold mine: a vast target list of more than 10,000 potential victims’ email addresses.

American spies could even watch the Russian spies trying, in vain, to cover their tracks, likely in real time. Indeed, the Russian officers made so many mistakes that it is almost surprising the GRU even tried to be stealthy. The U.S. intelligence community has stunning visibility into GRU hacking operations—not just against the DNC, but against the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DCCC and state election infrastructure. The notion that all this high-resolution visibility hinges on physical access to “the DNC server” defies logic or even a basic understanding of what is actually happening."

What Mueller Knows About the DNC Hack—And Trump Doesn’t

 

He’s ex-KGB. I don’t think there is any doubt he recorded the meeting.

 

Kelly will be next to go.

 

Friday at 5:15 pm. Give or take 90 minutes. And I hope he sings.

 

I thought he was just "misinformed"? It's hard to golf and be informed all in the same weekend.

 

I would not be surprised. That's been coming for some time.

During Trump's first year, the "The adults will keep him from running off the rails" argument had some validity. That's over. He's worn out or fired most such people, and the ones that are left can't stop him from running roughshod over anything they try to get him to do. Resigning in that first year could have been seen as abdicating your duty to the country, but things are now at a point where staying in the cabinet does more to validate Trump's appearance of normalcy than it does to rein him in.

Leaving now is better for your personal reputation, arguably better for the country, and won't do much damage. There are still going to be deputies and assistants familiar with the job left to help keep things running.

It's sad, but weakening the government may be a legitimate tactic in an attempt to slow the runaway train that is Trump.

 

Never forget: Nobody loves America more than NRA executives getting Russian cash to influence our elections.