You're forcing me to do what I didn't want to do...make an uber-long post
But, this isn't a simple, one-paragraph issue:
1. What he actually said was "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press", i.e. 'good press coverage', which is something that Trump has always focused on. Again, the only hacking that occurred was all
before his comments & no reported successful attempts occurred after them through the 2016 election. All 'releases' were from the same hack that occurred prior to Trump being the presumptive nominee.
You keep tying this one public comment as some proof of a grand conspiracy of Trump/Russia. But, the timelines don't add up. It was a stupid, mindless comment trying to stir up/refocus the issue on Hillary's server,
which hadn't been dismissed by the FBI yet. As
@Dirty Hairy Dawg pointed out above, it was about Hillary's subpoenaed emails.
Russian hacking attempts for the 2016 election cycle began in 2015, before Trump was the Republican nominee. According to
reports, an FBI agent contacted the DNC in September 2015 to notify them of hacking, possibly tied to Russia. The DNC acknowledged that the employee didn’t return the agent’s subsequent calls. Interestingly,
hackers were also attempting to enter the RNC’s systems.
Around this same time the DNC hired cybersecurity consultants from Good Harbor Security Risk Management, which provided a list of recommendations for improving DNC cybersecurity. The DNC
failed to take action on any of the consultants’ recommendations. Although Russian hackers were allegedly already in the DNC network at the time, Good Harbor did not discover any hackers in its review.
In December 2015, a firewall issue at the DNC allowed Sanders campaign to
access Clinton voter data. This led to a huge disagreement when his campaign lost its access to the data, leading to them
suing the DNC.
Subsequently, the DNC hired CrowdStrike in early 2016, which released their findings about the Sanders issue in April 2016,
with no mention of anything Russia.
But suddenly days later, CrowdStrike allegedly found evidence of Russian hackers in the DNC’s computers, after the hackers had accessed opposition research on Trump. CrowdStrike and the DNC did not publicly claim Russian hacking
until mid-June of 2016.
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks announced that he had Hillary documents. On June 14, the DNC released news of the hacking, blaming Russia.
At the DNC between April, when the Russian hacking was allegedly discovered, and June, when news of the hacking went public, CrowdStrike cleaned or replaced all of the DNC servers. So, direct confirmation of the DNC hack did not come from the FBI...
only from CrowdStrike.
According to Comey, the FBI made “multiple requests at different levels” to examine the DNC servers, but
the DNC refused. Ultimately, the FBI allowed CrowdStrike to report to the FBI what it found in the DNC servers. For something this important....it's beyond ridiculous that it was allowed to happen. Checking out the DNC servers, especially with an election and national security at stake, should be the FBI’s job.
Additionally, CrowdStrike had incentives that conflict with their assessment. They were being paid by the DNC, not taxpayers, it had a clear incentive to report whatever the DNC wanted it to report. The DNC had a political incentive to blame the hacking on Russia, which allowed Clinton falsely
claim that the documents were heavily doctored or even wholly manufactured, then attack Trump as a Putin stooge to instead of discussing the hacked documents.
More importantly, CrowdStrike had a monetary
incentive to find something big to get bigger and better contracts.
To quote Jeffrey Carr, a cybersecurity expert and Army War College lecturer: “The only things that pay in the cybersecurity world are claims of attribution. Which foreign government attacked you? If you are critical of the attack, you make zero money. CrowdStrike is the poster child for companies that operate like this.”
Remember the years-ago Sony hack, blamed on North Korea? CrowdStrike was
sure they were behind the hack, even though cybersecurity experts pointed out the evidence was thin and it was equally likely that the “hack” was
the work of an insider.
CrowdStrike has also
been wrong about Russian hacking in the past. They
reported in December 2016 that the same malware used in the DNC attack had infected Ukrainian devices and tracked and targeted Ukrainian units. This allowed CrowdStrike to upgrade their assessment of the DNC hack to a “high degree of certainty.”
But, there was a problem:
No such “hacking” took place, and it could even be argued that by making the Ukrainian military doubt its equipment, the CrowdStrike report aided Russian-backed rebels. CrowdStrike was criticized by the Ukrainian government and
cybersecurity experts as a
result.
After the election, the Obama administration conducted a review of Russian meddling released in December 2016.
Matt Taibbi (at Rolling Stone at that time) called the report “long on jargon and short on specifics.”
Dan Goodin at Ars Technica summed it up: “Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers’ ‘tradecraft and techniques’ and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups.”
The two pages that did cover the supposed Russian hack of the DNC, cybersecurity and intelligence experts widely said the report was underwhelming at best.
Robert Lee, former AF cyberwarfare officer and cybersecurity fellow, believes the report was
likely rushed.
A DNI report from January 2017 was widely held by experts to be
underwhelming at best.
As I verbosely covered above, Trump was 100 percent correct when he said there was lack of proof that Russia was behind the release of DNC emails and files to WikiLeaks, or the phishing of John Podesta’s email (which is exactly what he was asked about in Helsinki).
Was he supposed to challenge Putin right there? He certainly could have. But, similarly, why has Biden not challenged Xi for proven human rights violations, US intellectual property theft, etc. during face-to-face visits? Why did he sell a huge portion of our Strategic Oil Reserve
to China? (Maybe we should look into actual $ paid to the Biden family from Chinese gov't-related energy firms?)
What about the State Department under Hillary Clinton denying requests to sanction Russia in 2010, and weeks later Bill going to Moscow to deliver a $500,000 speech? Bloomberg was set to report on this timeline five years later as the Hillary campaign started, but her campaign intervened and prevented it from publishing the story.
Hillary opposed Russia sanctions in 2010 when he was paid to give a speech at a Russian bank connected to a fraud case.....after he gave the speech, Putin called him to say thanks!
From a memo released by WikiLeaks: "With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRC’s opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow," Jesse Lehrich, (member of Hillary's Communications team), said on May 21, 2015.
...but, no. The big issue here is Trump making a public statement about "lost" emails when answering a question about alleged Russian hacking. That's the big controversy here, fueling "All-Things Russia".
EDIT/ADD: What you're essentially arguing here is that Trump begged Russia to hack stuff/interfere...and the biggest, verifiable action they took after that was to....buy Facebook ads? Troll Facebook?
2. Where did I say that? You're also mixing several issues here. Bottom line: There were efforts by Russia to "help" both sides. It was not 100% "for Trump". As I addressed earlier, Putin wants chaos.
As recently discussed/revealed, the IC overwhelmingly believed Putin "wanted" Hillary. Yet, Brennan overrode that, called Trump a "threat", and directed IC & foreign assets to target members of Trump's team....setting off the entire Russian narrative, which Hillary ran with even
falsely accusing Trump of having a 'secret server' connected to a Russian bank.
When "helping" Trump caused chaos, that's what he did, in obvious and elementary ways (e.g. cheap Facebook ads) It drove (and still drives) the narrative. So, now to throw more chaos...he comes out in 'favor' of Biden. Putin is a lot of bad things, but stupid isn't one of them. He's playing us & our free press...some with clear political reasons to push narratives.
3. He was literally fired for not telling the campaign about it before being hired. As recently revealed, everyone else's "contact" was set up by IC/foreign governments in a sort of entrapment so that further (illegal) FISA warrants could be awarded, and political narratives pushed.
4. The same agencies that determined Russia preferred Hillary, but was ignored by Brennan? Some of those same intel officials that "determined" that Hunter's laptop was Russian interference? Were all their actions 100% for Trump?
No. Again, it's for chaos, for Putin's own personal, internal benefit: "...plenty that were pro-Trump, but in the early stages of the campaign, the ads were more focused on creating controversy and division than on supporting any one candidate. And that’s the idea—to reveal an America riven by different and irreconcilable points of view, to show modern democracy as a dysfunctional mess...they use our own bias for “objectivity” against us: They know American media will dutifully report Russian fictions."
No, it completely impacts it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but have you not claimed that Russia released them to dull the impact of that tape? That's difficult to justify since that tranche was a known release date vs. the tape being released with no prior warning. My argument is that it completely contradicts your assertion, unless Russia somehow foretold the future & forced Wikileaks to announce when it would be released, knowing that the tape would be released the same day. That doesn't follow basic logic.
