I really don't think Trump expected or wanted to win.
I'm fairly certain he didn't
want to win. Whether he
expected to win, however, is a tougher call considering his ego. He certainly behaved as if he expected to win right from the start.
What any of that has to do with whether or not there was a conspiracy, however, escapes me. Conspiracies aren't just axiomatically flawless, perfectly planned Hollywood capers after all.
If Putin had really expected a win, there would have been a three ring binder of appointments to be made as soon as the transition office opened.
That doesn't necessarily follow. Trump's "mission" would be exactly what has happened; to destroy America from the inside out. The
lack of (and/or delay of) various appointments would be the fastest way to make that happen.
Most innocuous enough to hide the real Dark Horse appts, none of these apparently random choices he's been making...
See above and consider the
Tillerson appointment process. As
Vox noted at the time:
A late addition to Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state, Tillerson got the nod over more prominent political figures like Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee for president, retired Gen. David Petraeus, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who publicly pulled himself from consideration once it became clear he wasn’t going to get the post.
Tillerson’s name emerged as Trump’s expected pick for secretary of state on Saturday, less than a day after the Washington Post reported that the CIA believes Russia’s hacking during the 2016 election was designed to help Trump win the White House, not simply to cause Americans to lose faith in the electoral process more generally. News of the CIA report rankled legislators on both sides of the aisle and caused some speculation that Tillerson’s name would be withdrawn because his ties to Russia are becoming an increasingly consequential political liability.
And as the
Times confirmed:
Mr. Trump has fanned speculation about his choice for secretary of state for weeks. In the end, he discarded not only Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney, but also an endlessly changing list that at times included Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee; David H. Petraeus, the former Army general and C.I.A. director; and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and presidential candidate in 2012.
One of the primary goals for Putin was (and still is) the removal of the sanctions placed upon him for the Ukraine (these are the ones Obama pushed through that killed the $500 Billion deal between Rosneft, Exxon and BP to extract Russia's then newly discovered oil deposits, which would have made Russia the single largest oil distributor in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia). One of Trump's first actions in office was to try to get those sanctions
modified, but because Putin's scheme had been discovered, that failed (in a nearly unanimous and completely unnecessary
vote by Congress, no less, which serves as one of the first and strongest pieces of evidence that everyone in Congress knew Trump had definitely conspired with Putin).
What does Tillerson do? Tries to convince Congress to allow Trump
"flexibility" to adjust sanctions:
Two people aren’t happy about the new sanctions against Russia: Vladimir Putin and Rex Tillerson.
On Thursday, the Russian leader dismissed new U.S. sanctions against his country passed the previous day by the Senate, suggesting that they were motivated by “domestic political problems in the U.S.,” rather than Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. However, the overwhelming show of bipartisan support for the amendment—it passed on a vote of 97-2—suggests that Putin may be protesting too much. (The full bill, which also contains new sanctions on Iran, passed the Senate, 98-2, on Thursday.)
Another person unhappy with the bill? Secretary of State Tillerson, who objected to a provision that will permit Congress to review, or even block, any unilateral changes Donald Trump might make to the sanctions. In a hearing before the House on Wednesday, Tillerson urged Congress to “ensure any legislation allows the president to have the flexibility to adjust sanctions to meet the needs of what is always an evolving diplomatic situation.”
Robbing Trump of this flexibility is, of course, the point. Tillerson attempted to reassure lawmakers that he agrees that “Russia must be held accountable,” but given how Trump cozied up to Putin on the campaign trail, and how quickly his administration has floated the removal of sanctions, it is refreshing that Congress is exerting its constitutional authority to serve as a check on the executive branch, one that has a troublesome track record when it comes to Russia.
Then what happens between Trump and Tillerson? Well, famously, Senator Warren had
called upon Tillerson to recuse himself from anything related to Exxon as part of Tillerson's nominating process, which he
in turn did, thus making him effectively useless to Putin/Trump right out of the gate.
And because of the political scrutiny--and perhaps a sign of Trump's testing of Putin's hold over him--attempts by Exxon to get waivers
fail as well.
So now Tillerson is just a Secretary of State and the relationship between Trump and Tillerson just steadily (and publicly) declines until Trump finally pushes him out.
Also, there would HAVE to have been more cover.
There was (that's precisely what the Trump Tower "meeting"--imo--serves, for one example), but you're also looking at with the benefit of hindsight and bizarrely assuming that a conspiracy necessarily must be (a) planned to the nth degree, (b) not be responsive to real-time events and (c) just axiomatically be executed flawlessly, or else it's somehow not a conspiracy.
It's like arguing that because the break-in at the Watergate was botched it is evidence that there was no conspiracy. Which, btw, is
almost exactly how Trumputin's conspiracy was first discovered.
Putin would definitely gotten his money's worth with a loss
How? Plus, he already knew it had the strong potential of working as he had used the same tactics in Russia (starting in 2008) and even spent
$70 Billion to create an information warfare unit within the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in 2013 (right around the time Trump was first "activated" during the ludicrous Miss Universe contest otherwise inexplicably held in Moscow):
Tensions between Russia and the Crimea reflected in a similar conflict in cyberspace. The decision of the Russian authorities launched a whole series of events in cyberspace: state cyber security forces, hacktivist groups and cybercriminals began to act against the "enemy".
Security experts believe that the task of the Russian military is to isolate the region. Perhaps it is for this purpose that the Russian Navy ships anchored in the port of Sevastopol: they have equipment on board to jam radio communications. In the area of Sevastopol, communications stations of the Ukrainian Navy have already suffered from sabotage. The Crimean peninsula suffers from numerous DOS attacks, and PJSC Ukrtelecom reported that “unidentified persons seized several communication centers in the Crimea” and that communication between the peninsula and the rest of Ukraine deteriorated as a result of “actions of unknown persons who physically damaged several fiber-optic backbone cables ".
The attacks happened on the network, on a number of websites. Two government websites in Crimea do not work, but it is not known who put them, hackers from abroad or the representatives of local authorities themselves.
Military experts have no doubt that this is the prelude to a decisive operation. In particular, Russia used the same strategy in 2008 when it isolated Georgia, taking control of government websites and interfering with the work of the Internet in this country, which did not have its own Internet traffic exchange point (IXP) and where almost 70% of the Internet -the traffic passed through the IHR of foreign states - including Russia.
It seems that Ukraine has only one Internet traffic exchange point in Crimea, so the Russian cyber security services managed to isolate a whole region without problems.
Iow, it wasn't his first cyber rodeo, so his expectations would likely have been high, but it's a ridiculous point to make regardless as "expectations" are purely subjective and irrelevant to whether or not people would nevertheless
attempt to act if the stakes are high enough and in this case the stakes literally could not be higher. The control over global oil distribution--and thereby global control period--still hangs in the balance.
That most certainly wouldn't happen if Trump had lost, so the notion that Putin would somehow have achieved equally satisfactory results for just
trying doesn't hold. Clinton and Putin had a very openly hostile opinion of each other--much more so than Putin and Obama--so it was a sure thing that with Clinton in the WH, Russia would be fucked.
It was also a sure thing (
in 2013) that Clinton would be running again in 2016 and that, judging from how well she did in 2008, she would be, at the very least, a strong contender (as indeed everyone thought and she proved correct in her popular vote tallies and subsequent registered voter polling).
Don't forget that Obama/Putin relations were in steady
decline in 2013 (and started much earlier than that;
as early as 2008/2009), long before the eventual sanctions in 2014.
The article states:
