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Old 12-13-2016, 03:07 PM
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whell whell is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by finnbow View Post
Both of those are statements are factual (unlike the Comet Ping Pong story tweeted by Flynn, BTW). The first statement says hackers aided Trump - (i.e., the actions they took aided Trump). True.

The second statement says the CIA believes that the hacking was was deliberately aimed at helping Trump (and not just mucking up the election in general) - also true. The CIA did make such an assessment.

What the CIA didn't say (because it's impossible to do so) is that they can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law that Russia's intent was to help Trump (the FBI standard as a law enforcement agency). They said their assessment led them to believe that Russia's intent was to help Trump (their standard as an intelligence agency).
No. You WANT it to be true, but it is false, and it therefore is fake news. Look at what the NYT article says:

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.


If we don't even know who the hackers actually are - other than they "have ties to Russian Intelligence" and they use methods common to groups that have worked with Russian intelligence, and we don't know who is directing them, how can we conclude "with high confidence" what their motive is? We can't. So, the CIA - whoever inside the CIA is leaking this crap to the NY Times - is inferring that since these unknown Russians hacked the RNC and the DNC, but didn't leak any RNC info, that they must have been "promoting" Trump. It states right in the NY Times article: One senior government official, who had been briefed on an F.B.I. investigation into the matter, said that while there were attempts to penetrate the Republican committee’s systems, they were not successful.

So, even through we know that attempts to penetrate the RNC's systems were attempted but not successful and thus the hackers were not successful at getting any emails, documents, whatever, we're asked to believe that the logical conclusion is a lack of info distributed from those systems by Wikileaks and others - who apparently never had it to start with - represents an effort to promote Trump? Its leaked BS from unnamed sources. BS = Fake News.

The second story from WaPo makes the same "case": that the disproportionate leaks gives the CIA high confidence that there was an effort under way to help Trump. More BS. BS = Fake news.

Quote:
Originally Posted by finnbow View Post
You're caught up in this silly semantic game that basically asserts that unless it can be proven in a court of law that Russia intended only to help Trump and not just generally muck up the election, any factual reporting on the assessment of the CIA is fake news.
Nope. Never said anything about "a court of law". I'm looking at the facts presented and stating that they don't add up. I'm also looking at reporting based on reports from un-named sources and questioning the conclusions being reported.
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