1, It's outrageous that an American political candidate would ask a foreign adversary nation to hack American accounts.
2. According to the indictment released Friday, Russian operatives targeted Clinton’s personal emails “for the first time” the same day. Coincidence? Collusion? Is the noose starting to tighten around Trump's neck?
WASHINGTON — It was one of the more outlandish statements
in a campaign replete with them: In a news conference in July 2016, Donald J.
Trump made a direct appeal to Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find
the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, referring to emails Mrs.
Clinton had deleted from the private account she had used when she was
secretary of state. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our
press.”
As it turns out, that same day, the Russians — whether they
had tuned in or not — made their first effort to break into the servers used by
Mrs. Clinton’s personal office, according to a sweeping 29-page indictment
unsealed Friday by the special counsel’s office that charged 12 Russians with election
hacking.
The indictment did not address the question of whether
the Russians’ actions were actually in response to Mr. Trump. It said nothing
at all about Mr. Trump’s request for help from Russia — a remark that had
unnerved American intelligence and law enforcement officials who were closely
monitoring Russia’s efforts to influence the election. [It did mention an unnamed Trump insider]
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But the indictment did offer some clues about what
happened, implying that the hacking had
occurred later on the day Mr. Trump issued his invitation. He made the
statement around 10:30 a.m. July 27 at his golf course in Doral, Fla. It was
late afternoon in Russia.
“For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the conspirators
attempted after-hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a
domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office,”
according to the indictment, referring to spearphishing, a common tactic used
to target email accounts. . .
At
the 2016 news conference, Mr. Trump made a series of statements on Russia and
raised questions about whether the Kremlin had actually been behind the earlier
hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee. Emails from the committee had been made public days
before, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, creating a
significant distraction as the party formally nominated Mrs. Clinton. . . .
“Mr. Trump also
signaled then that he would be open to recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea from
Ukraine. The Obama administration and the European Union had
considered the seizure illegal and imposed sanctions.
“We’ll
be looking at that,” Mr. Trump said when asked if he would recognize Crimea as
Russian land and lift sanctions that had been imposed after the annexation.
“Yeah, we’ll be looking.”
“Roger Stone appears to be the unnamed individual in a new
Russia
probe indictment made public Friday who
is described as having communicated with Guccifer 2.0 [A Russian hacker] in
2016.
Stone, a longtime associate of President Donald Trump and
political figure, agreed with the sentiment in a Friday night interview on
CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time."
"I think I probably am the person referred to,"
Stone said Friday evening.
From
numerous sources, esp.
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All it takes is one--count'em, one--email of classified info on one's personal computer for it to be a felony.
ReplyDeleteIntent doesn't matter. Job doesn't matter. Wealth doesn't matter. Hillary pretty much claimed "Oops" on the deal. Oopsies ain't mulligans.
If the FBI won't do an honest investigation, we might as well let the Russians have fun.
Art