Why Would Putin Want a Corrupt Bully Running the Free World — a Trump Kleptocracy?
Friday’s bombshell CIA announcement that Russian interference in the US election was specifically designed to elect Trump immediately set the Washington Post‘s comments section ablaze with the Russian troll army.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over another, to help Trump get elected,” said the senior US official briefed on the intelligence presentation made to US senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
The idea that the Kremlin attempted to sabotage the US elections using hacked and leaked emails seemed a bit out in left field.
Surely Russian Psy-Ops is So 50 Years Ago? Not Really... Remember
Russia Was Behind a Similar “Expose!” of Climate Scientists’ Emails in 2009
In 2009, Russia similarly hacked into and leaked selections from 13 years of casual email exchanges between climate scientists in an attempt to derail COP15 in a highly sophisticated and politically motivated operation guided by the Russian Secret Services.
Back then, just as with today’s supposed Clinton email scandal, the western media fell for, or manufactured outrage over, these supposed revelations, prompting independent reviews of the entire trove of emails by the EPA, the NSF, the University of East Anglia, and Penn State University.
All the investigations found no evidence of climate scientists fabricating science.
Nevertheless, Russia’s propagation of fabricated evidence of “hiding the decline” and so on in the data still reverberates through the denier industry and likely is behind uncertainty about the science among lo-info voters even today.
Similarly, despite the lack of actual evidence of any crime, a similar cloud of non-specified distrust now affects public opinion of a Democratic candidate.
Hacked and Leaked Emails with “Shocking Revelations” that “Raised Questions”
In October, 17 US intelligence agencies found evidence of hacks and email leaks tied to the Kremlin. The aim appeared to be sowing distrust in the DNC and Democratic Party.
“Such activity is not new to Moscow,” said Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, in a statement. the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.”
The question is why?
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