It's a tough spot, I feel pretty bad about it

Mark Hemingway offers some campaign advice:
It’s conceivable, per Nate Silver, that the Comey letter in late October gave Trump momentum and possibly swung the election. But my response, like most Americans, is “So what?” If you’re worried about an FBI investigation influencing a presidential election DON’T NOMINATE A CANDIDATE UNDER FBI INVESTIGATION. And you really, really, don’t want to nominate a candidate under investigation whose top aide’s husband is also being investigated by the FBI for child pornography who is also allegedly in possession of emails relevant to the candidate’s FBI investigation that he’s keeping on the same computer as his grody sex pics.
Seriously, stop and read those two previous sentences again, and think about why any normal person would be in any way sympathetic to this predicament.

8 comments:

Grim said...

You know who else was under FBI investigation? Russian hackers.

It's a neat little club of all the reasons Hillary lost.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

A great version of "If you didn't want to go to Chicago, why did you get on the train?"

Texan99 said...

The NYT article explaining how the Russians threw the election is beyond parody. My favorite line: "Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C." I also enjoyed the part where the administration worried that the effect of the Wikileaks would be to encourage Trump, after he lost, to demand a recount and try to delegitimize Clinton as the winner of a rigged election. Man, those Russians are brilliant. Obviously Clinton would have been no match for them.

Cassandra said...

Meanwhile, this morning, there's this snortworthy gem:

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A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

,,,U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly told members of Congress during classified briefings that they believe Russians passed the documents on to Wikileaks as part of an influence operation to swing the election in favor of Donald Trump.

But Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorized access to the information.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' Murray said. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

He said the leakers were motivated by 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.'

Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

…Murray said he was speaking out due to claims from intelligence officials that Wikileaks was given the documents by Russian hackers as part of an effort to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.

'I don't understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn't true,' he said. 'Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.'

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No doubt, the NYTimes will be flogging this "startling" development in short order :p

Grim said...

It's difficult to tell the difference between this sort of "information warfare by stealing and releasing true information about your corrupt actions" and "good journalism."

Cassandra said...

Heh... :)

FWIW, I have no love for Wikileaks either. But you have to admit that this version of events makes just as much sense as the notion that the Russians (let alone Putin himself) were directing the whole deal.

If we're going to speculate wildly based on (from what I can see) not much evidence - and that little is circumstantial - there are other scenarios we should be considering too.

Cassandra said...

FWIW, my prevailing theory is that Trump is an (illegal) alien sent from Planet Twitter to abduct and impregnate Harry Reid.

That's my story, and I'm-a stickin' to it.

Cassandra said...

is that *he's* an illegal alien...

*sigh*