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Saturday, July 14, 2018

READ IT AND WEEP

I have just read the entire 29 page indictment handed down by the Grand Jury against a group of Russian military intelligence officers.   You can read it here.  I urge you to do so as well.  It is quite remarkable.  Mueller and his team seem to know a good bit about each of these Russians:  their names, their cover names, their ranks, the precise addresses of their offices, the time to the minute when they logged on, began to hack, planted malware, tried to erase evidences of their hacking, and on and on.  For all I know, Mueller knows what they have for breakfast.  I wouldn’t be surprised.

Do I believe what the indictment says?  Yes I do.  I also believe a man walked on the moon, that vaccinations can protect children from infectious diseases, and that the sun rises in the east. Could I be wrong about all of these beliefs?  Of course.  I have read Descartes’ Meditations I and II.  I know the difference between logical certainty and well established fact.  Do I understand the difference between an indictment and a conviction? Yes, in fact I know that too. 

Do I think there will, before too many months have gone by, indictments of Americans who conspired with the Russians?  I do, actually.  Is this speculation on my part?  Of course.  We shall have to wait and see.

3 comments:

David Palmeter said...

The earliest date that the indictment mentions is March 2016, but that was when they were up and running. Clearly there had to be a lot of organizational work done before that. This suggests that the Russian effort was basically anti-Clinton and would have been pro any opponent of Clinton. The question remains to what extent, if any,Trump or the Trump campaign took advantage of this and cooperated with them. Trump might just have been icing on the cake for Putin.

Jerry Fresia said...

The twitter-sphere has been bubbling with increased emotion:

Jeffrey Toobin: "Today is a significant moment. We've only had 45 presidents. We now we know, one of them was elected with the explicit and intentional help of a foreign power, in violation of American law, with the open support of the candidate who benefited from the crimes."

Doug Henwood reacts to Toobin thusly: "You people sound like right-wing loons during the Cold War."


Andrea Mitchell: "The nation's top spy DNI Dan Coats warns that Russia is the worst foreign power threatening U.S. with cyber-attacks and that warning lights are "blinking red" as terror threats were before 9/11."

Glenn Greenwald's response to Mitchell: "So if we're now basically in a threat state as grave as right before 9/11, with the threat level "blinking red" like it was then, is some tightening up of cyber-defenses sufficient? Or do we need to give still more surveillance powers, buy more weapons, maybe a new Patriot Act?"


Anonymous said...


A different viewpoint from Consortium News:


https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/14/clinging-to-collusion-why-evidence-will-probably-never-be-produced-in-the-indictments-of-russian-agents/