Did Russia Hack the Presidential Elections?

[Goosey 3,017]

The title says "Did Russia hack the presidential election?"

 

Nope! That's not even alleged. 

DNC != 'presidential election'

 

 

Furthermore, even if they did, it's still the DNC's fault. If there wasn't any dirt for the Russians to find, there wouldn't have been a problem. But there was dirt. A lot of dirt.

 

Russia is the new Snowden!

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

4 hours ago, 18 said:

SORRY, LONG 

 

i personally think that they did, and i back that up with the 17 US intelligence agencies who also say they did. julian assange and wikileaks have been arguing that their source was not russia, but i don't believe them for this chief reason: when they obtained hillary's hacked emails, they did not simply release them all at once as one would assume would be the fair thing to do.

i want to preface this by saying that at the time i thought wikileaks had done a lot of good and had a pretty positive opinion of them because i believe in exposing corruption and advocate government transparency. when the first emails were released, i thought it was unfortunate for liberals but still ultimately a good thing. but in fact, i would come to think that their methods of releasing the emails they obtained were very suspicious to me at the time, and in retrospect, malicious.

i say this because they didn't release the emails in bulk for everyone to see and analyze all at once. they released it in portions over a period of weeks, a few hundred emails every day. they dragged it out, prolonged it, all the way up to a few days before november 8th, and i think that kept the email scandal in the media for so long and subsequently the media coverage made it seem like hillary was worse than she actually is (she is for sure an imperfect candidate, but not to the dramatic extent many people think she is partly because of this drawn out email scandal). 

julian assange did an interview with fox news in the last couple of days saying that the source for the emails was not russia, but i think it's an attempt to salvage wikileaks' reputation since many people believe it was partly responsible for the election of donald trump (it was), who is 1000 times worse than hillary.

lastly, this russian thing isn't new. in fact the US intelligence agencies came out and said a short time after the first hacked email leaks back in february or march (i don't remember) that they believed russia was behind this. barack obama did not directly come out to make it an issue because he knew that it would be politicized as it is largely being treated now; he thought it best to go through US intelligence and wait until the election was over to then communicate this information directly himself and i believe that was the right choice. the blunder here is that the media didn't do what they should have done from the beginning, which was to recognize the danger of the paper trail, that it lead back to russia according to US intelligence, which subsequently means they are influencing the outcome of the election. instead they focused on other far less important things.

republicans have power now, and so even with this critical kind of information, they continue to politicize it, with many of them saying nothing about russia. but perhaps the severity of it can be seen in the fact that the republicans are not homogenous regarding this issue: top republicans like john mccain have voiced their real concerns about this and recognize that there is a serious problem with russia's malevolent activity. 

 

 

Thank you for your nuanced response   I bolded the best parts.

It was clear from the very beginning of this whole wikileaks-russia saga (and from Assange basically admitting it himself to Bill Maher   ) at the beginning of 2016 that their actions were not following any sort of previous creed or doctrine of transparency they claimed to believe in. Anyone who knows jack **** about how rhetoric, manipulation, and politicization work together to inform (or misinform) a base of people knows that Wikileaks had a very thinly veiled agenda this entire election. 

Let's not be Goosey and pretend to care solely about the semantics of this case  

It does not matter if Putin himself did not force the Russian Government itself to hack "the DNC" (read: "the presidential election"), the facts we've been hearing for months (that have come to a widely spread consensus amongst experts) are that the orders to do this almost undeniably must have come from someone with the power to execute this and that essentially puts it in the hands of only a few people. Governments make use of back-channels* and things of that sort all of the time, and their leaders are especially well versed in the art of plausible deniability  Just because there may never be a confession from Putin/Russia that "yes we did it!" doesn't mean it didn't happen, and the Obama administration knows that. (Hence my belief that the idea of sanctions was mostly a symbolic recognization of this act committed by Russia)

That there was information to be leaked in the first place is not the disputed part (though we can also call into question the lack of information available to the otherside which is likely to be equally as scandalous, if not more tbh  ), its the clear motivation behind doing so that we should focus on. 

[Eighteen 5,430]

6 minutes ago, ItsTommyBitch said:

(though we can also call into question the lack of information available to the otherside which is likely to be equally as scandalous, if not more tbh  ), its the clear motivation behind doing so that we should focus on. 

I forgot to mention it but this.