US Officially Blames Russia

Minoosh said:
With luck there actually is a videotape, and Trump is more than fair game.
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Certainly the belief that there are tapes is widespread and longstanding

And the former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by "the head of an East European intelligence agency".

Later, I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file - they would not speak to me directly. I got a message back that there was "more than one tape", "audio and video", on "more than one date", in "more than one place" - in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and also in St Petersburg - and that the material was "of a sexual nature".

The claims of Russian kompromat on Mr Trump were "credible", the CIA believed.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38589427?intlink_from_url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/78080d81-2849-497e-bc3a-bf364626456b/donald-trump&link_location=live-reporting-story
 
Distracted1 said:
And the more they are pushed without verification, the less authentic will all other claims that paint Trump in a negative light seem.

I think it is a strategy. Trumps team knows well enough that such an allegation is too juicy to be ignored by the media (they will make certain of that). This forces the media into making itself seem extremely biased whenever it reports on an allegation against Trump.
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I've seen no evidence bar one short period when they didn't let Trump near his Twitter account that his team has ever had anything even remotely like a media strategy.
 
Aber said:
Certainly the belief that there are tapes is widespread and longstanding...
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From Aber's link: BBC: Trump 'compromising' claims: How and why did we get here?

Pro:
Then during the general election, it was funded by an anonymous Democratic Party supporter. But these are not political hacks - their usual line of work is country analysis and commercial risk assessment, similar to the former MI6 agent's consultancy. He, apparently, gave his dossier to the FBI against the firm's advice....

They told him that Mr Trump had been filmed with a group of prostitutes in the presidential suite of Moscow's Ritz-Carlton hotel. I know this because the Washington political research company that commissioned his report showed it to me during the final week of the election campaign.
The BBC decided not to use it then, for the very good reason that without seeing the tape - if it exists - we could not know if the claims were true. The detail of the allegations were certainly lurid. The entire series of reports has now been posted by BuzzFeed....

And the former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by "the head of an East European intelligence agency"....

I got a message back that there was "more than one tape", "audio and video", on "more than one date", in "more than one place" - in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and also in St Petersburg - and that the material was "of a sexual nature"....
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Con:
The specialist went on to tell me that FSB officers are prone to boasting about having tapes on public figures, and to be careful of any statements they might make.
A former CIA officer told me he had spoken by phone to a serving FSB officer who talked about the tapes. He concluded: "It's hokey as hell."
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It's a thorough article.
 
caveman1917 said:
Yeah, I was using your post more as a springboard anyway.



I did something similar with Alex Jones' fish people earlier. I found that one somewhat better since it fit all their requirements, given that there does exist a subcultural group which calls themselves "skeptics" and declares Alex Jones to be an "appropriate" authority. But they're not even consistent about their own rules, given that that just gets you a claim of "anti-intellectualism". Someone should give them a mirror :)



You think they're desperate and panicked? To me it seems more like the usual combination of incompetence and seeing what they want to see. To say they're desperate and panicked would be to relegate this case to a "special status" even though, to me, it seems no worse than usual. I mean, they weren't desperate and panicking when making those claims about Iraqi WMD's, Libya's soldiers being given viagra to rape people, Crimea's referendum being faked, etc etc etc.
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Blanket statements rock!

Get those endorphins up?
 
caveman1917 said:
You think they're desperate and panicked? To me it seems more like the usual combination of incompetence and seeing what they want to see. To say they're desperate and panicked would be to relegate this case to a "special status" even though, to me, it seems no worse than usual. I mean, they weren't desperate and panicking when making those claims about Iraqi WMD's, Libya's soldiers being given viagra to rape people, Crimea's referendum being faked, etc etc etc.
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Oh yes, I do think that. Your examples are about ongoing campaigns for illegal wars of aggression or to cover up backlash of illegal regime change, within a presidency. Now we have them creating yuuge amounts of noise, literally flinging all the poo and piss they can find against The Wall™, while they are practically already fired and all their criminal campaigns have royally failed, not least because of Putin. This is not business as usual.
 
Trump and everyone who thinks getting friendly with Putin is a good idea should take a lesson from the last US president who tried this:

George Bush jr.

Just like Trump for a while he had a real bromance going with Vlad, going as far as to say that he "got a sense of his soul".

And he was played for suckers, giving Russia more and more concessions for nothing in return.
Have Conservatives learned nothing?
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Trump and everyone who thinks getting friendly with Putin is a good idea should take a lesson from the last US president who tried this:

George Bush jr.

Just like Trump for a while he had a real bromance going with Vlad, going as far as to say that he "got a sense of his soul".

And he was played for suckers, giving Russia more and more concessions for nothing in return.
Have Conservatives learned nothing?
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Staying ignorant and trying the same ideas over and over again is conservative.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Huge doubts. There is no evidence of collusion.
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LOL, this is more evidence, but seriously, if you think this is one of those "great deals" the Deal Artist promised, what do you think we would get out of it? Nuclear arms reductions instead of another arms race would benefit both sides, so why should we have to give up anything to make that deal, least of all the sanctions? And what about all the reasons those sanctions are there? What do we get out of this "great deal" that's worth anything near what Putin would get out of it?

Nope, somebody must be getting something out of the deal that the Grifter in Chief isn't telling us about. And surely, even he must realize how incredibly bad this looks, especially in view of the current situation, so he must have some really compelling reason for proposing it anyway. He continues to treat the American public like a bunch of idiots, and as his supporters are proud of saying, it's working.
 
Armitage72 said:
Why does this sound familiar? I seem to recall a similar agreement with another country that Republicans thought was the worst deal in the history of the world. Which country was it? I'm sure it was somewhere significant.
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Not really similar at all; that deal was to prevent Iran from continuing to develop nuclear weapons in a region that's already highly unstable. Russia already has about as many nukes as we do and would still have at least that many, and that's a M.A.D. situation we've already had to deal with for 70 years.
 
WilliamSeger said:
LOL, this is more evidence, but seriously, if you think this is one of those "great deals" the Deal Artist promised, what do you think we would get out of it? Nuclear arms reductions instead of another arms race would benefit both sides, so why should we have to give up anything to make that deal, least of all the sanctions? And what about all the reasons those sanctions are there? What do we get out of this "great deal" that's worth anything near what Putin would get out of it?

Nope, somebody must be getting something out of the deal that the Grifter in Chief isn't telling us about. And surely, even he must realize how incredibly bad this looks, especially in view of the current situation, so he must have some really compelling reason for proposing it anyway. He continues to treat the American public like a bunch of idiots, and as his supporters are proud of saying, it's working.
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This is all speculation not based on much evidence. I don't think into these statements because there is a paucity of evidence and I am a skeptic.
 
An interesting development about the credibility of ex-MI6 Christopher Steele's "Trump Dossier":

Christo Grozev said:
When Buzzfeed.com leaked ex-MI6 spook’s Trump Dossier last this past Wednesday, most critical thinkers’ initial reaction was wide-eyed skepticism. The combination of alphabetized sources, the improbable breadth of alleged access to top-secret information, and over-explicit details from the (not as improbable – more on this in a future post) alleged fetishes of a President-Elect, beggared belief.
[...]
My initial reaction was similarly dismissive. However, after playing devil’s advocate – and testing certain assumptions about how the dossier may have been compiled – I have shifted my position. [...]

(B)ecause of the concentration of the most sensitive information at the top of the power pyramid, any potential source in the vicinity of the top would have access to not one, but to a variety of information vectors, that all lead to the very peak.

One such hypothetical source, who would have been well-placed at the crossroads of several of the information vectors drawn upon in Steele’s dossier, died in unusual circumstances on December 26 2016: a point in time when the dossier had been so broadly diffused in DC, London and Rome, that we may assume with near-absolute certainty it had landed on Putin’s desk [bold's in the source].
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To read more about: Tower of Cards (part 1)
 
BobTheCoward said:
Interesting that the same article can say died under unusual circumstances, not say there is enough evidence for homicide, but still imply it is a homicide.
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And interesting that the same article don't fail to mention that Russian official media can be... puzzling, to say the least, in their reporting:

Christo Grozev said:
At 14:23 Moscow time, one of Russia’s most subservient news outlet with a first-at-the crime-scene reputation – Life.ru, ran the sensationalist headline: “Sechin’s Chief of Staff Killed in Downtown Moscow”. I caught a glimpse of this headline in real-time, as I have a browser alert for breaking news from Life.ru. I remember being particularly startled by the headline, as only a week earlier, a Russian mid-level diplomat had been found shot in the head, with two bullets, in his Moscow apartment. The working hypothesis of the investigation was reported to be “accidental homicide or suicide”. Did I mention the two bullets?
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Erovinkin, 61, was a KGB/FSB general, who had been head of the Department for Protection of State Secrets at the Kremlin under Yeltsin, and later under the early Putin. In 2008, Putin (then a fresh Prime Minister) appointed him Chief of Staff of his deputy PM Igor Sechin. When Sechin was promoted to President of the state-owned oil giant Rosneft in 2012, Erovinkin followed him into the ominous-sounding, if fuzzily-defined position of “Chief of Special Supervision of the President’s Apparatus.”
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It might also happen that an FSB General dies, and the death is first honestly misreported as a murder, and then quietly re-reported as a heart failure by a media outlet with a long history of reporting-as-requested. Put all of these in a mix, though, and it becomes statistically hairy.
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