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[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/fIQsKY8CSps[/YOUTUBE]
Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, you can’t be this dense.
Only those who drink the Kool-Aid and wear the aluminum hats can really understand it.
The inescapable conclusion is that while Trump did not actively collaborate with the Russians,
That has never been established. Quite the contrary in fact. Mueller's conclusion was inescapable; they could not exonerate Trump.
Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, you can’t be this dense.
[T]he effect of the social message on real-world validated vote behaviour and polling-place search was more focused. The results suggest that close friends generated an additional 282,000 validated votes (11.8%, null 95% CI –1.3% to 1.2%) and an additional 74,000 polling-place searches (10.1%, null 95% CI –0.1% to 0.1%), but there is no evidence that ordinary friends had any effect on either of these two behaviours. In other words, close friendships accounted for all of the significant contagion of these behaviours, in spite of the fact that they make up only 7% of all friendships on Facebook.
To put these results in context, it is important to note that turnout has been steadily increasing in recent US midterm elections, from 36.3% of the voting age population in 2002 to 37.2% in 2006, and to 37.8% in 2010. Our results suggest that the Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. That represents about 0.14% of the voting age population of about 236 million in 2010.
However, this estimate does not include the effect of the treatment on Facebook users who were registered to vote but who we could not match because of nicknames, typographical errors, and so on. It would be complex to estimate the number of users on Facebook who are in the voter record but unmatchable, and it is not clear whether treatment effects would be of the same magnitude for these individuals, so we restrict our estimate to the matched group that we were able to sample and observe. This means it is possible that more of the 0.60% growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook.
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Online mobilization works because it primarily spreads through strong-tie networks that probably exist offline but have an online representation. In fact, it is plausible that unobserved face-to-face interactions account for at least some of the social influence that we observed in this experiment. More broadly, the results suggest that online messages might influence a variety of offline behaviours, and this has implications for our understanding of the role of online social media in society.
The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) began an investigation into the IRA’s social media activities following the 2016 election around the same time that investigative journalists and third-party researchers became aware that IRA’s campaign had touched all major platforms in the social network ecosystem. In March 2018, some of the social platform companies misused by the IRA (Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet) provided the SSCI with data related to IRA influence operations. Facebook’s data submission includes Facebook Page posts and Instagram account content. Alphabet’s data submission includes Google AdWords and YouTube video and channel data. The data set reveals that Alphabet’s subsidiaries YouTube, G+, Gmail, and Google Voice were each leveraged to support the creation and validation of false personas.
Evidence provided by these companies to SSCI ties the IRA operation to widespread activity on other popular social platforms including Vine, Gab, Meetup, VKontakte, and LiveJournal. Several complete websites were created to host original written content, and to provide source material for related social accounts and personas. The breadth of the attack included games, browser extensions, and music apps created by the IRA and pushed to targeted groups, including US teenagers. The popular game Pokémon Go was incorporated into the operation, illustrating the fluid, evolving, and innovative tactical approach the IRA leveraged to interfere in US politics and culture.
Several platforms that confirmed the presence of IRA interference operations (Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Medium) were not part of the formal SSCI investigation or data requests, and that content was not included in the SSCI data set. They have cooperated with law enforcement, and their information has been incorporated into a parallel Department of Justice investigation; the Mueller indictment of Russian nationals, Netyksho et al, dated 07/13/18, specifically references Tumblr-based interference operations. In the interest of thorough analysis, New Knowledge took initiative to also analyze relevant data from Reddit, Tumblr, and Pinterest in addition to the data set provided by SSCI.
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Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony.
There were 187 million engagements on Instagram. Facebook estimated that this was across 20 million affected users. There were 76.5 million engagements on Facebook; Facebook estimated that the Facebook operation reached 126 million people. It is possible that the 20 million is not accounting for impact from regrams, which may be difficult to track because Instagram does not have a native sharing feature.
NADLER: Director Mueller, the president has repeatedly claimed your report found there was no obstruction and completely and totally exonerated him. That is not what your report said, is it?
MUELLER: Correct, not what the report said.
NADLER: You wrote, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are not able to reach that judgment.” Does that say there was no obstruction?
MUELLER: No.
...
NADLER: Your investigation found “multiple acts by the present that were capable of asserting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian interference and obstruction investigations.” Is that correct?
MUELLER: Correct.
NADLER: Can you explain what that finding means so the American people can understand?
MUELLER: The finding indicates that the president was not exonerated for the act he allegedly committed.
NADLER: In fact, you were talking about incidents in which the president sought to use this official power outside of usual channels to exert undue influence over your investigations. Is that right?
MUELLER: Correct.
Encouraged Russia to hack Clinton: The denials of Russia’s involvement from Trump’s top advisers could well have been read by Moscow’s operators as a green light from the Trump campaign. But Trump made it explicit at a press conference on July 27, while the Democratic convention was still underway in Philadelphia. He repeated his campaign’s denial—”Nobody knows who it is”—and then went further: “I will tell you this—Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand [Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you’ll probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” Trump was essentially encouraging another government to hack his political rival. He was openly requesting foreign intervention in the US election. And within five hours of Trump’s statement, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, Russian government hackers did try to break into email accounts associated with Clinton and her personal office. This shows the Russians were paying attention to what Trump was saying.
Made secret contact with the Kremlin: Throughout the summer of 2016, the Trump campaign tried to set up a secret connection with Putin’s government. The campaign did this after cybersecurity experts had identified Russia as the culprit in the DNC hacking and after news reports had noted that US intelligence agencies had reached the same conclusion. A little-noticed portion of the statement of offense in Muller’s case against George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, lays this out. (Papadopoulos’ April 2016 conversation with a suspected Russian asset who said Moscow possessed Clinton’s emails later triggered the FBI’s Russia investigation.) The legal filing notes that Papadopoulos “from mid-June through mid-August 2016…pursued an ‘off the record’ meeting between one or more Campaign representatives and ‘members of president putin’s office'” and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Papadopoulos’ effort, according to the document, was no rogue action; other campaign officials knew about it, and one even encouraged him to travel to Russia to meet with Russian officials to make this contact “if it is feasible.” (Papadopoulos did not take such a trip.) The Trump campaign was attempting to establish a backdoor channel with Putin, even as Putin was attacking the 2016 election. This overture was probably seen by the Kremlin as yet another sign that the Trump campaign accepted—and welcomed—Moscow’s intervention in the US election. (Also, in early August, Manafort met with a former business associate who was a suspected Russian intelligence asset, and Manafort shared internal campaign polling data with him and discussed a pro-Putin peace plan for Ukraine. This, too, could have been seen by Moscow as a signal that the Trump campaign was willing to play ball with Russia, as Russia was trying to subvert the election.)
Embraced Moscow disinformation: In mid-August, Trump, as the Republican nominee, received a briefing from the US intelligence community that included the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia was behind the DNC hack. Nevertheless, in the following weeks, Trump repeatedly denied Russia was the perp. During his first debate with Clinton, Trump declared, “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC… I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don’t know who broke into DNC.” At the second debate—days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security released a statement saying that “the Russian Government directed” the hacks of the DNC and other Democratic targets—Trump, referring to Clinton, exclaimed, “She doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking.” (He added, “I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia. I don’t deal there. I have no businesses there.” Trump neglected to mention that earlier in the year he had tried to develop a massive tower project in Moscow and his company had sought help for the project from Putin’s office.) With these remarks, Trump was parroting Putin’s false claims. Such comments likely emboldened Russia. (Looking to stay in sync with Trump and his comments, Republican congressional leaders, most notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, avoided joining with the Obama administration to forcefully oppose Putin’s intervention in the election.) And after WikiLeaks in October 2016, as part of the Russian scheme to help Trump, began its daily release of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta by Russian hackers, Trump repeatedly proclaimed he loved WikiLeaks—embracing this foreign intervention in the election.
Again and again during the 2016 campaign, Trump and his aides denied Russia was intervening in the election, but they also praised this interference and sought to secretly hook up with the foreign adversary that was waging information warfare against the United States. (The recent trial of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone showed that Trump and his advisers sought to use Stone as contact with WikiLeaks.) This part of the Trump-Russia affair has never received the attention it warrants, in part because much of the scandal came to be defined by the question of whether Trump directly colluded with Moscow. But he didn’t have to in order for the Russians to mount the operation that succeeded in helping Trump become president.
On page 140 of the Mueller Report, investigators described the following scene from August 2, 2016:
…Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the state of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s plan to win the election. That briefing encompassed the Campaign’s messaging and its internal polling data. According to [deputy campaign chairman Rick] Gates, it also included discussion of “battleground” states, which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.
As we all know, those three states, minus Minnesota which Trump barely lost, were the clinchers for Trump. Neither Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush nor Bob Dole won any of those states in previous elections, yet we’re expected to believe Trump, of all people, accomplished what no other Republican has been able to do since 1988? Additionally, Trump won the entire trifecta by less than one percent of the popular vote — a 10,000-vote margin in Michigan, 22,000 votes in Wisconsin and about 44,000 in Pennsylvania. Around 51,000 previous Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Trump in Wisconsin, around 47,000 Sanders voters went for Trump in Michigan, and a whopping 116,000 more in Pennsylvania. In every case, we’re talking about election-altering margins, especially when we add the tens of thousands of votes for Green Party nominee Jill Stein in those states.
Another Mueller finding, indicating that this sharing Campaign Targeting Data was not a spurious one-time, accidental act … [pg 129]
Manafort had connections to Russia through his prior work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and later through his work for a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine. Manafort stayed in touch with these contacts during the campaign period through Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort employee who previously ran Manafort's office in Kiev and who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort instructed Rick Gates, his deputy on the Campaign and a longtime employee, [839] to provide Kilimnik with updates on the Trump Campaign-including internal polling data, although Manafort claims not to recall that specific instruction. Manafort expected Kilimnik to share that information with others in Ukraine and with Deripaska. Gates periodically sent such polling data to Kilimnik during the campaign.
Joel Benenson, the Clinton pollster, was stunned when he learned, from the July indictment, that the Russians had stolen his campaign’s internal modelling. “I saw it and said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” he told me. Among the proprietary information that the Russian hackers could have obtained, he said, was campaign data showing that, late in the summer of 2016, in battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, an unusually high proportion of residents whose demographic and voting profiles identified them as likely Democrats were “Hillary defectors”: people so unhappy with Clinton that they were considering voting for a third-party candidate. The Clinton campaign had a plan for winning back these voters. Benenson explained that any Clinton opponent who stole this data would surely have realized that the best way to counter the plan was to bombard those voters with negative information about Clinton. “All they need to do is keep that person where they are,” he said, which is far easier than persuading a voter to switch candidates. Many critics have accused Clinton of taking Michigan and Wisconsin for granted and spending virtually no time there. But Benenson said that, if a covert social-media campaign targeting “Hillary defectors” was indeed launched in battleground states, it might well have changed the outcome of the election.
Benenson said, “We lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin—three states of our Blue Wall—by about eighty thousand votes. Six hundred and sixty thousand votes were cast in those three states for third-party candidates. Winning those three states would have got us to two hundred and seventy-eight electoral votes.” In other words, if only twelve per cent of those third-party voters were persuaded by Russian propaganda—based on hacked Clinton-campaign analytics—not to vote for Clinton, then Jamieson’s theory could be valid.
Benenson said that, when he first learned about the theft, he “called another consultant on the campaign and said, ‘This is unreal.’ ” The consultant reminded him that, in focus groups with undecided voters in the fall of 2016, “we’d hear these things like ‘I really hate Trump, but Hillary’s going to murder all these people’—all sorts of crazy stuff.” Benenson admitted that many Americans had long disliked the Clintons, and had for years spread exaggerated rumors of their alleged misdeeds and deceptions. But he wonders if some of those conspiracy-minded voters hadn’t been unknowingly influenced by Russian propagandists who were marshalling the Clinton campaign’s own analytics.
The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.
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The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document:
Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.
The Soviet Union and now Russia has been doing this for years. Why anyone would think it just started in 2016 is bizarre.
The Soviet Union and now Russia has been doing this for years. Why anyone would think it just started in 2016 is bizarre.
Russia's "Internet Research Agency" was created in mid 2013.
Sure. But that didn’t stop the Soviet Union from engaging in misinformation campaigns and spreading civil strife in the US. There’s a long history of this.
Good grief. All this time (three years or so) and money spent because someone in Russia ran a few Facebook ads ? Where is the evidence that any of this had a tangible impact on the outcome of the election ? What is the purpose of these reports ?
I mean, dude's son admitted to meeting with Russians to get dirt on the political opposition. I just have no idea how little shame someone must be capable of feeling to earnestly claim that the Rs on the Senate Intel Committee are in on the fix too. Or have you repeated the mantra enough to have become true believers?
https://intelligence.house.gov/russiainvestigation/
Adam Schiff has released the full declassified transcripts related to the Russia probe.
These transcripts should have been released long before now, but the White House held up their release to the public by refusing to allow the Intelligence Community to make redactions on the basis of classified information, rather than White House political interests. Only now, and during a deadly pandemic, has the President released his hold on this damning information and evidence.
https://intelligence.house.gov/russiainvestigation/
Adam Schiff has released the full declassified transcripts related to the Russia probe.
My main concern is this section:
These transcripts should have been released long before now, but the White House held up their release to the public by refusing to allow the Intelligence Community to make redactions on the basis of classified information, rather than White House political interests. Only now, and during a deadly pandemic, has the President released his hold on this damning information and evidence.
He’s wrong. The actual reason Trump has done this is because he knows Barr has been working non-stop on subverting it all with a massive trove of lies, half-truths and strawmen, of which the recent Michael Flynn bombshell is just the opening salvo.
Get ready for a shitstorm of lies all aimed at systematically destroying Mueller and the FBI—and by extension the entire Democrat “witch hunt” hoaxsters—and the release of a Mueller report of their own full of fake “evidence” that will somehow bring Hillary Clinton back into the spotlight, so that the 2020 election becomes all about Trump vs. Clinton and they can all chant “lock her up” all over again.
They’re going to try to reset the same conditions and grind Biden up into the mix as a secondary concern, because they know they can’t go head to head with him.
My main concern is this section:
He’s wrong. The actual reason Trump has done this is because he knows Barr has been working non-stop on subverting it all with a massive trove of lies, half-truths and strawmen, of which the recent Michael Flynn bombshell is just the opening salvo.
Get ready for a shitstorm of lies all aimed at systematically destroying Mueller and the FBI—and by extension the entire Democrat “witch hunt” hoaxsters—and the release of a Mueller report of their own full of fake “evidence” that will somehow bring Hillary Clinton back into the spotlight, so that the 2020 election becomes all about Trump vs. Clinton and they can all chant “lock her up” all over again.
They’re going to try to reset the same conditions and grind Biden up into the mix as a secondary concern, because they know they can’t go head to head with him.
Koy, could you review those transcripts and let us know of all the direct evidence of Russia collusion you find?
Thanks!
Newly released transcripts of interviews from the House Intelligence Committee’s long-running Russia investigation reveal top Obama officials acknowledged that they knew of no “empirical evidence” of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, despite their concerns and suspicions.
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch also said that she did "not recall that being briefed up to me."
"I can't say that it existed or not," Lynch said, referring to evidence of collusion, conspiracy or coordination.
Oh, never mind.
House intel transcripts show top Obama officials had no 'empirical evidence' of Trump-Russia collusion
Newly released transcripts of interviews from the House Intelligence Committee’s long-running Russia investigation reveal top Obama officials acknowledged that they knew of no “empirical evidence” of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, despite their concerns and suspicions.
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch also said that she did "not recall that being briefed up to me."
"I can't say that it existed or not," Lynch said, referring to evidence of collusion, conspiracy or coordination.
What a shit show. Imagine the person who fell for the Russia collusion hoax over these years. That person must feel really stupid.
In other words, no smoking guns.
Oh, never mind.
House intel transcripts show top Obama officials had no 'empirical evidence' of Trump-Russia collusion
What a shit show. Imagine the person who fell for the Russia collusion hoax over these years. That person must feel really stupid.
In other words, no smoking guns.
Oh, never mind.
House intel transcripts show top Obama officials had no 'empirical evidence' of Trump-Russia collusion
What a shit show. Imagine the person who fell for the Russia collusion hoax over these years. That person must feel really stupid.
In other words, no smoking guns.
And, apparently, no smoke either.