Quote (IceMage @ Nov 24 2019 11:08am)
I don't consider it election interference for politicians to speak out against a candidate who hinted at endorsing Russia's annexation of their own land. Anti-corruption activists and some Ukrainian officials exposing Paul Manafort, a guy who was known to be corrupt years before he joined the Trump campaign, and helped the Ukrainian president survive as a corrupt actor, isn't a great example of election interference either.
But hey, let's just ignore the fact that the only "election interference" Trump brought up in the Zelensky phone call was a Crowdstrike DNC server conspiracy. To my knowledge you haven't defended that theory here.
Goom, were British officials interfering in the 2012 election?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/26/mitt-romney-olympics-blunderSo its not interference when they have a
motive? You can try to explain the reasons for their actions or even try to validate them, but it still remains intentional foreign interference in an election- one actually put into effect, not attempted or proposed. Its not like it was official actions conducted through official channels for apolitical reasons, the black ledger was given to the
DNC, who released it to the media. If we're going to play as moral relativists and say its okay when the chickens come home to roost, then by the same logic its Hillary's fault for poking Vladimir Putin in the eye in 2011 and setting his revenge in motion.
But yes as far as I know, the Crowdstrike stuff is based on a bunch of technologically illiterate nonsense. There's perhaps a reasonable gripe and question of coverup in that the FBI was never given access to the servers, relying instead of Crowdstrike's analysis- but there's no magical hidden servers or Ukrainian involvement beyond playing 5 degrees of kevin bacon with people related to crowdstrike. The most rational explanation is that Hillary made sure the FBI didn't get direct access to her server for the same reason it was such a catastrophe when they got access to Weiner's laptop, because once they had the evidence someone would notice unrelated classified emails on it and add more fuel to her emailgate fire. That's not mutually exclusive with Russians spearphishing the emails and evidence of it being selectively released by crowdstrike.
Still, its obviously irresponsible and dishonest for the media and witnesses at these impeachment hearings to keep insisting that there was no Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. We already know all about the black ledger plot, they all wrote articles 2 years ago about how Ukraine ran an operation and it succeeded, got Trump a black eye, got Manafort fired, set off his investigation and eventually got him convicted. There are still open questions about it- I see conflicting accounts that still suggest the black ledger actually
was a fabrication and included fake transactions that manafort never made, and that could potentially mean fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree depending on how they secured their warrants. They never used the ledger at trial afaik, supposedly because they knew it was bogus. But you'd think his lawyers would have used that if there was any meat to it.