Something-gate: Trump claims Obama bugged Trump Tower.

[Beet]

This is terrible. Trump should order Sessions to issue an indictment against Obama. The DNC needs some help with black turnout.

[Beet]

Jim Comey is trying to prove he isn't Trump's bitch:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

He knows it's false as far as the FBI goes and this will get out eventually. If it was something that he thought could be kept hidden he would never have made this statement.

[Beet]

You are 100% right, EnglishPete. The whole charade is folding quicker than Badger at a poker game.

So the counter theory is that the CIA used Umbrage to hack the DNC for Trump and pin it on the Russians? That theory is almost as insane as it being some 300 lb. kid in his mom's basement.

[Beet]

You are 100% right, EnglishPete. The whole charade is folding quicker than Badger at a poker game.

So the counter theory is that the CIA used Umbrage to hack the DNC for Trump and pin it on the Russians? That theory is almost as insane as it being some 300 lb. kid in his mom's basement.

The fact that the same CIA that ten years ago fabricated WMDs in Iraq apparently is now infallible is a sign of insanity. Isn't the definition of that word doing the same thing over and over again? They don't have WWIII on their minds but they'll fight it to protect the old system, which is being rejected across the entire western world at the moment.

I protested the war before it started, man. I've been against every insanity in the Western world in the past 15 years, from Iraq hysteria to Obama hysteria. Still waiting for sanity to return. A foreign power attacking American citizens should be where partisan politics stops in the name of it not happening again.

[Beet]

You are 100% right, EnglishPete. The whole charade is folding quicker than Badger at a poker game.

So the counter theory is that the CIA used Umbrage to hack the DNC for Trump and pin it on the Russians? That theory is almost as insane as it being some 300 lb. kid in his mom's basement.

No. I'm pointing out the possibility that the CIA (or some other party with access to 'Umbrage') used Umbrage to hack the DNC in order to pin in on the Russians. The 'big revelations' of the DNC hacks were that the DNC tried to fix the Primary for Hillary and did so in sneaky ways. Frankly that is just confirmation of what many people would suspect about how politics works. I don't think it was a huge shock to many people and I don't imagine that many voters, beyond a small proportion of politics nerds are going to get that animated for that long about the internal management of the Dem primary.

In other words the DNC leaks made no significant difference to the election result, and the people doing them would have had no reasonable expectation that they would make a significant difference.  People were expecting Trump to lose anyway. Its a bit more plausible to suggest the leaks were intended as pretext to ramp up anti-Russian propaganda, a pretext that caused slight embarrassment but which was still ultimately harmless.

The DNC hacks first incensed the Bernie wing of the party to the point where every speech between Nelson Rockefeller Cow Palace 1964, then in October the Podesta emails damaged Clinton every day which blunted the impact of the Access Hollywood tape. The cumulative impact clearly flipped the election to Trump. The CIA clearly wanted Clinton. If they were behind it, they would have hacked the RNC, then president Clinton could have used it as a pretext to get the Russians. This alternate story where the CIA got Trump elected, only to go to war with him makes no sense.

[Beet]

The Podesta e-mails were far more damaging. For one thing, they caught Clinton saying that she had a "private position and a public position", which, as one questioner pointed out, amounted to being two-faced. She fumbled the answer to the question, and Trump got in a joke about her being not "honest Abe." They also caught Donna Brazile giving debate questions to Clinton, resulting in the former's resignation from CNN. Progressives were incensed over this--I called a Clinton volunteer list (people who'd given up an entire day to help her), this was the week before the election, and one guy told me he wished the Republicans had run Cruz because then he'd be supporting Cruz! Neera Tanden, a Clinton policy guru, couldn't even go on TV after her e-mails were released, in what she called "the worst professional experience of my life."

This Ken Vogel article describes the impact of the Podesta e-mails on Clinton's relationship to the left:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

On the Fight for 15 and TPP:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

On the progressive reaction:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/wikileaks-hilary-clinton-progressives-230009

Imagine you're a jfern type, or even just a swing voter gauging Clinton's honesty on issues like the TPP, taking this in. And Trump mentioned wikileaks from his stump speeches. The impact was devastating. Had she not been running against Trump, such leaks would have caused her to lose in a Dukakis-style landslide, even without Comey.