If this far-reaching hack succeed, it might be the end of Democracy as we know it:
Now the elected official has a vested-interest not to deter foreign hacking and the vicious cycle might go on.
People always have incentives to commit crimes. That's why police and prosecutors have to make good on threats to ensure their "best interests" line up with everyone else.
> It also landed hours after Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, personally stepped forward to block consideration of a package of election security bills.
The Republicans are rejecting election security bills precisely because Russia has intervened to their benefit, and will probably continue to do so. President Trump has also openly asked for interference from Russia, if memory serves.
These attacks are acts of war and we need to start treating them as such. That won't happen as long as those attacks benefit those in power.
The problem is that if/when the Democrats win, the Republicans will use the same tactics and delegitimize those election results. We are effectively living in two forked realities with no way to rejoin them.
In some other countries, foreign election monitors are routinely invited to monitor elections. They aren't all-seeing or all-knowing, but they can at least highlight irregularities in the voting process.
What type of issue would you expect these monitors to prevent or uncover?
Election monitors make sense in third-world countries, where elections are administrated by corrupt government officials and literal ballot-box-stuffing is a possibility. But in the US, civilian volunteers with known party affiliations administer elections, and many states cast ballots electronically.
If you’re really concerned about the integrity of our elections at a ballot-box level, the best thing you could do would be to volunteer to administer elections in your local precinct.
It's an extra check on the whole system with a known cost. People could voluntarily go on exchange trips to other countries when they have their elections. If foreign election monitors state that some places didn't have enough ballot boxes, then it will be more difficult to ignore that sort of problem as business as usual.
They're no different than what lobbyists do. Just that the beneficiary is another country instead of a corporation. The oval office (and Congress) are for sale. They have been this whole time. Hillary Clinton amassed $1.4 bn in campaign funds. That kind of money doesn't come from everyday working class people.
As an American citizen, I see nothing worse about Russia buying a candidate than any corporate lobby. Either way my vote doesn't matter, my voice doesn't count, and the only thing politicians will do in our name is throw us a bone now and then with "win-win" legislation like banning robocalls. Anything else immediately becomes a "partisan issue" subject to whatever lobby paid them the most to do (and will cost them reelection if they vote otherwise). Meanwhile my health insurance is still going up 10% per year, a college degree means a lifetime of indentured servitude, and corporations are getting away with whatever they want. Please, any country: hack us. I don't fucking care.
There is no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines. The committee found no evidence that voter data in the Illinois voter database was deleted or changed.
The report do not say that Russia intervened in regard to voting machines or the Illinois voter database. The report simply state that Russia were in a position to do so.
A few years ago there were a bunch of leaks from inside NSA by Snowden. One of of the leaks documented how NSA had hacked into core telecom routers of a country in the middle of a civil war. NSA was very much in the position to intervene for either side.
The US would be in quite many wars if everything NSA did should be seen as acts of war and treated as such. They even hacked the UN.
Americans have been hacking other countries' elections for decades. But now it has happened to America, it will cause the collapse of democracy. What, really?
This has been my problem with the Russia story. We never get enough detail to make our own judgement of the severity of this. The media and the Democrats lump everything together under the umbrella of “Russia hacked our election/democracy”. Aside from the nonsensical nature of that statement, it has been a catch-all term for everything from Facebook ads to hacking some state commission’s Wordpress site that contained no secure data.... to possibly real hacks of important systems which are still classified. I really don’t care about the former but the later would be a big deal.
Lets ignore the nomenclature for a minute. Russians used American social media to manipulate public opinion to help implement a Russian sympathizing Administration. Ignore the verbiage. Start with that.
That sounds like a great thing to raise as an issue in an election. Lots of voters might care about that. However, we have a First Amendment, so it's not against the law for anyone to talk to anyone else. That's the case whether it's some weird social media thing like those pictures of Bernie with big muscles or an actual true fact like that the DNC staff sent emails to each other discussing how they had screwed over Bernie. That is strictly legal, whether it is done by Russians or by the Citizens United dudes or by the actual Wikipedia source.
The first amendment does not protect the right of foreign nations to dispense propaganda. Indeed there are in fact provisions prohibiting foreign nations involving themselves in the election process in the US constitution.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I don't see the words "foreign nations" in there anywhere? Why are you posting this falsehood under a new account?
The first amendment protects Russians, in Russia, who want to post misinformation on Facebook for the purpose of damaging our democracy? Are you hearing yourself?
And your whataboutism with Democrats is completely irrelevant. Liberals are not unAmerican or unpatriotic. Liberals are not the enemy and neither is the press.
You are now defending a foreign nation's act of war against the United States presumably because they support the same administrative agenda that you do.
If the Bill of Rights protected foreign nationals, then the same document would give immigrants the rights they come knocking on our door for. If the Bill of Rights applied to Russia what is the GOPs beef with Hondurans?
And there's another problem. You said... "or an actual true fact like...". It is a TRUE FACT that Russia meddled in our elections. The military agrees. The UN agrees. Even the Senate which is Republican controlled put out a report citing "extensive" Russian interference. Everyone agrees. Drop the QAnon/InfoWars shit. It's not news.
Haha Qanon. That was hilarious the first time I heard this "talking point". I've never read nor heard a single thing produced by "Infowars". I get my news from actual journalists [0]. You might try that...
I'm talking about right and wrong actions. You've responded by talking about right and wrong groups of people. That is a child's way of thinking. Maybe you've watched too many superhero movies?
Personal attacks will get you banned here. We've had to warn you many times about breaking the site guidelines. That's dismaying, and if you keep doing it we'll have little choice but to ban you. So would you please review them and follow them when posting here?
I realize it's not easy, but we need you to be scrupulous about it and contribute to preserving this community rather than wrecking it.
Please don't use HN for flamewar like this. Pretty much everywhere else on the internet is for that. We're explicitly trying to avoid it here, and we ban accounts that won't stop doing it.
That’s not good. But as with all things in life, you have to treat it proportionally to the impact as well as weigh it against other issues. Russian nationals (who, as of last week, Mueller was unable to convince a judge were tied to the Kremlin) buying Facebook ads to post memes of Jesus arm wrestling Satan is pretty damn low on my give-a-shit list.
All sorts of foreign nationals participate in our elections. They volunteer on campaigns. They appear as pundits on our news shows. Clinton’s campaign contracted with a foreigner (Steele) to dig up dirt.
The threat posed by China to the United States is 100x greater than Russia. Casting Russia as our greatest enemy rather than trying to find areas of mutual interest is a huge foreign policy misstep by the left in America.
The actual report is available on the Senate's website[1]. It is written for a non-technical audience so the specifics are sparse and it is heavily redacted in certain sections, but there are some details. For example, "SQL Injection" is mentioned 8 times and it appears those injection attacks were noticed in three states with one successful attack and two failures.
I don't understand Mitch McConnell's reluctance to passing an election security measure, I would've that assumed that a voter suppression strategy that utilized the new law would be finalized by now.
You would have to know more about the proposals he blocked to have an informed opinion. This is such a surface level strife of McConnell that it’s close to “why won’t he think of the children?” The article should have linked to a previous story specifically about that proposed legislation.
> Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) also asked for consent to pass legislation that would require candidates, campaign officials and their family members to notify the FBI of assistance offers from foreign governments.
100% chance it wasn't the only thing in that bill. It also opens up any candidate, democratic or republican, to FISA surveillance down the line, which is something that I can guarantee will be abused at some point. In fact it already _was_ abused against Trump. FISA warrants to spy on his campaign were obtained by misleading the FISA court with what we now know was fake evidence. There's also a strong possibility that McConell wants voter ID, which is something the Democrats are strangely reluctant to introduce even though it's quite a popular thing to require: Mexico, for instance, does have voter ID.
I'm hypothesizing here, I haven't read the bill, but then neither have you, so you're "making up your own mind" based on a shallow regurgitation of democrat talking points and without any critical thinking.
Would the Clinton campaign have to report its (indirect) $1.02M payment for the Steele (who, let's not forget, is a foreign agent) "dossier" under this law? If not, it's not worth the paper it's written on.
I'm not a lawyer but upon cursory reading it looks like it would not, unless you were solicited by a foreign agent in the first place. If you go out and have your PAC hire Perkins Coie to pay for kompromat without explicit solicitation, it'd seem you don't have to report it.
Then there's a question of what happens after you report. Is your campaign then put under counterintelligence surveillance? How difficult is it to direct a foreign agent to solicit a payment from e.g. a dem campaign to lawfully trigger this? This is something that doesn't even have to be done by a campaign, some idiot from 4-chan could do it.
I am not sure tbh, I don't know enough about the situation you speak of. The text of the amendment is pretty straightforward though, I would give it a read and it should be pretty clear what situations it would apply to!
Section 2 Reporting to the FEC b) Reporting meetings with foreign governments or their agents doesn't specify who had to have initiated the meeting, only that a meeting took place.
>In fact it already _was_ abused against Trump. FISA warrants to spy on his campaign were obtained by misleading the FISA court with what we now know was fake evidence.
Source? Carter Page had a FISA warrant against him after he left the Trump campaign. And none of it was based on fake evidence. Sounds like you're just regurgitating Republican and Fox News talking points without any critical thinking.
>There's also a strong possibility that McConell wants voter ID, which is something the Democrats are strangely reluctant to introduce even though it's quite a popular thing to require
Republicans are strangely against giving voting IDs or state IDs for free to low income people. They also restrict early voting to make poor people choose between losing pay and voting, and are also against making election day a national holiday. They are also on record stating that the voter ID laws will help them win.
Must I do all your research for you or are you capable of using Google? Just search for "misled fisa court". Quote from The Hill, which is among the top links:
"We know the FBI falsely told the court in the first application warrant that it knew of no derogatory information about the dossier author, Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence operative who worked simultaneously as an FBI source and a Clinton campaign opposition researcher. In fact, a senior Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr warned the FBI that Steele was desperate to stop Trump from becoming president, and other evidence showed Steele had been leaking to the media in violation of FBI rules — all derogatory evidence weighing against Steele’s credibility.
Further, we’ve learned from congressional testimony of other FBI officials that the dossier’s contents had not been corroborated by the FBI when it was used in the FISA application — even though the Woods Procedures mentioned above required that only corroborated evidence be used in support of a warrant request.
And, finally, we know from sources that the FBI had other evidence suggesting the innocence of two Trump campaign aides it targeted — Page and George Papadopoulos — that wasn’t provided to the court."
End quote. The net result is, two of Trump campaign aides were under clandestine counterintelligence surveillance based on fabricated information that the Clinton campaign paid $1.02M for to a foreign agent.
The FBI has been filing inaccurate FISA warrants for nearly two decades (the article on the Hill refers to incidents dating back to 2002/2003). Not really surprising in the post-9/11 era, where procedural abuses and law-enforcement power creep are tolerated if the justification is to "catch terrorists".
I didn't read anything suggesting that the FBI abused FISA warrants specifically against Trump people.
Knowingly? Against presidential campaigns? While setting up "insurance policy" in case he gets elected? The "Russian collusion" hoax was invented the day after Clinton lost. It has served democrats well, but it's now time to retire those talking points and come up with some new ones.
This is the same FBI that dealt a devastating blow to Clinton's campaign with the re-opening (and later re-closing, again with no charges) of the emails investigation shortly before the election.
Are you really suggesting that right after the election they "turned around" and started undermining the Trump presidency? What kind of sense does it make?
That "devastating blow" was an undesired side effect.
By reopening the investigation, the FBI was able to seize control of Anthony Weiner's laptop, which was being held by the NYPD.
Had info about that been released, as it was going to be, it would have been immediately devastating. Reopening the investigation must have seemed less harmful to Clinton.
The problem was not the re-opening of the investigation (which the FBI could've done without informing or asking anyone), it was the fact that Comey decided on his own to inform the public (via congress, and against established department policy) that the investigation was being re-opened.
Weiner laptop was seized because of the underage sexting, what makes you think that this information would have been immediately devastating for Clinton? Weiner's sexcapades were well known before that, it was just another chapter in that saga.
Sorry but what you are implying just does not make any logical sense.
The laptop was seized due to his sexcapades, then discovered to have much more interesting data.
Anthony Weiner's wife is Huma Abedin. She was deputy chief of staff to Clinton. Somehow, his laptop had come to contain lots of classified emails to/from Clinton. It is simply not believable that those emails were adequately studied in the available time. This has even been admitted in responses to FOIA requests, with the government claiming in court that more time is needed.
> The laptop was seized due to his sexcapades, then discovered to have much more interesting data.
> Anthony Weiner's wife is Huma Abedin. She was deputy chief of staff to Clinton. Somehow, his laptop had come to contain lots of classified emails to/from Clinton.
I am aware of the facts (and Abedin "was" his wife). The FBI eventually established that the "new" emails were either personal or duplicate of already known emails.
You seem to be implying (correct me if I am wrong) that:
- Abedin was using Weiner's laptop to write the most "damaging" and "interesting" emails to Clinton,
- somehow, the emails sent to/from Weiner's laptop escaped months of extensive investigations by the FBI,
- somehow, the emails got erased from everywhere else apart from from Weiner's laptop and could be found only there (that's not how email works),
- somehow, in their criminal conspiracy, Clinton/Abedin forgot that Abedin had 650'000 (according to official reports) emails from the Clinton campaign on her husband's laptop - they erased all the damaging information from everywhere else but somehow forgot Wiener's computer (which she must have used extensively to accumulate that number of messages),
- 10 days of "around the clock" work by FBI agents couldn't have possibly established that most of 650k message where either "personal or duplicative" in nature[0].
Sorry, but that's just way too much mental gymnastic for my taste.
Again, the idea that Comey's public re-opening of the official investigation was somehow less damaging, from the point of view of public perception, than unsupported and unsubstantiated leaks from NYPD just does not hold water.
We've had to ask you repeatedly to stop breaking the site guidelines. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended?
>Republicans are strangely against giving voting IDs or state IDs for free to low income people. They also restrict early voting to make poor people choose between losing pay and voting, and are also against making election day a national holiday. They are also on record stating that the voter ID laws will help them win.
In the United States, we have 50 sovereign states that are responsible for election systems/laws. Distributing power was a key feature in the founding of the USA, and shitting on the design in order meet a goal (I personally happen to appreciate) does not justify the means.
Mis-characterizing your opponent's argument is not helpful.
I seem to recall the voter ID laws that Democrats at the state level worked so hard to kill did include free ID provisions for low income and disadvantaged. Republicans certainly aren't against it.
There's a reason Democrats don't like voter ID laws:
Dead voters (who magically cast ballots) and social strong-arming and vote-buying like Tammany Hall (over two different periods in New York's history) all tend to vote Democrat.
Which would make it trivial to set up a candidate so that he/she could be investigated (“legally”!) by the FBI under the guise of “protecting democracy”. I’m old enough to remember when Democrats didn’t want to empower the FBI/CIA/etc any further for fear of a police state.
I might be in the minority on this issue, but I personally think it is reasonable for a political candidate to be investigated prior to running for office once they publicly announce that they are running. Tax returns, felonies, misdemeanors, credit reports, the whole kit and kaboodle. There are professions where interview candidates already go through varying levels of background checks, and I've gone through a few myself. Running for political office is very much a personal choice, and obtaining that office unlocks varying amounts of power and control over the lives of fellow citizens. If the candidate runs through that investigative gauntlet and comes out clean, then the corresponding voters have a much better idea of who is on the election night ticket.
Because Mitch McConnell is not interested in democracy, he is interested in power. As long as his team is winning, he'll do everything to keep it that way.
"The heavily redacted, 67-page report found no evidence that Russia was able to alter vote counts in 2016, when Russia carried out what Mueller’s final report called a “sweeping and systematic” hacking and disinformation campaign."
Isn't the whole point of the disinformation campaign to make people vote a certain way? With this in mind, altering votes _directly_ by hacking voting machines isn't necessarily the problem people are worried about. It's indirectly changing votes due to the foreign assistance/misinformation, which is illegal under our system. I think it's a reasonable concern and we shouldn't ignore it, just because votes weren't changed directly by hacking. A law that requires campaigns to disclose to authorities if they receive illegal offers of assistance is sensible IMHO.
The title of the article seems taylor-made to suggest that Russia hacked voting machines. That’s what prompted the top level response. The headline is misleading.
Nobody suggested that Russian disinformation is unimportant.
NYT yesterday:
"Mueller Hearings Present Make-or-Break Moment"
NYT today: TFA. We wondered what they were going to do in response to the dud that the hearings turned out to be. That confused old man learned more about his report than we did! MFW it seems possible they might actually talk about real problems rather than fairy tales...
People of good faith have been warning of the flaws in election infrastructure since long before Obama made his "of course the elections can't be rigged" comments [0]. There are lots of flaws with voting machines: closed source, no tangible verifiable records, confusing for voters, etc. There are lots of flaws with voting in general: voters removed for specious reasons, greater inconvenience for poor voters, one-party-two-heads, etc.
Actually now that I hear it again, what Obama had to say makes a lot of sense to me... how do the anonymous-yet-somehow-official sources account for this? Sure, someone could cheat in a small number of precincts, but if they try to affect a national election using a small number of precincts they're definitely going to inspire recounts. It's too bad that Congress won't pass Tulsi's bill that would require recountable paper records...
65 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread> It also landed hours after Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, personally stepped forward to block consideration of a package of election security bills.
The Republicans are rejecting election security bills precisely because Russia has intervened to their benefit, and will probably continue to do so. President Trump has also openly asked for interference from Russia, if memory serves.
These attacks are acts of war and we need to start treating them as such. That won't happen as long as those attacks benefit those in power.
Unfortunately violence might be necessary if fair elections can’t be guaranteed.
Election monitors make sense in third-world countries, where elections are administrated by corrupt government officials and literal ballot-box-stuffing is a possibility. But in the US, civilian volunteers with known party affiliations administer elections, and many states cast ballots electronically.
If you’re really concerned about the integrity of our elections at a ballot-box level, the best thing you could do would be to volunteer to administer elections in your local precinct.
They're no different than what lobbyists do. Just that the beneficiary is another country instead of a corporation. The oval office (and Congress) are for sale. They have been this whole time. Hillary Clinton amassed $1.4 bn in campaign funds. That kind of money doesn't come from everyday working class people.
As an American citizen, I see nothing worse about Russia buying a candidate than any corporate lobby. Either way my vote doesn't matter, my voice doesn't count, and the only thing politicians will do in our name is throw us a bone now and then with "win-win" legislation like banning robocalls. Anything else immediately becomes a "partisan issue" subject to whatever lobby paid them the most to do (and will cost them reelection if they vote otherwise). Meanwhile my health insurance is still going up 10% per year, a college degree means a lifetime of indentured servitude, and corporations are getting away with whatever they want. Please, any country: hack us. I don't fucking care.
The report do not say that Russia intervened in regard to voting machines or the Illinois voter database. The report simply state that Russia were in a position to do so.
A few years ago there were a bunch of leaks from inside NSA by Snowden. One of of the leaks documented how NSA had hacked into core telecom routers of a country in the middle of a civil war. NSA was very much in the position to intervene for either side.
The US would be in quite many wars if everything NSA did should be seen as acts of war and treated as such. They even hacked the UN.
"We're Supposed to Believe the Russians Hacked Into Voting Systems But Did Nothing Once They Got There?"
Was this just a portscan and someone logging into an unsecured database? Did they use a zero day or was a system unpatched with a known vulnerability?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I don't see the words "foreign nations" in there anywhere? Why are you posting this falsehood under a new account?
And your whataboutism with Democrats is completely irrelevant. Liberals are not unAmerican or unpatriotic. Liberals are not the enemy and neither is the press.
You are now defending a foreign nation's act of war against the United States presumably because they support the same administrative agenda that you do.
If the Bill of Rights protected foreign nationals, then the same document would give immigrants the rights they come knocking on our door for. If the Bill of Rights applied to Russia what is the GOPs beef with Hondurans?
And there's another problem. You said... "or an actual true fact like...". It is a TRUE FACT that Russia meddled in our elections. The military agrees. The UN agrees. Even the Senate which is Republican controlled put out a report citing "extensive" Russian interference. Everyone agrees. Drop the QAnon/InfoWars shit. It's not news.
I'm talking about right and wrong actions. You've responded by talking about right and wrong groups of people. That is a child's way of thinking. Maybe you've watched too many superhero movies?
[0] https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/05/...
I realize it's not easy, but we need you to be scrupulous about it and contribute to preserving this community rather than wrecking it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
All sorts of foreign nationals participate in our elections. They volunteer on campaigns. They appear as pundits on our news shows. Clinton’s campaign contracted with a foreigner (Steele) to dig up dirt.
The threat posed by China to the United States is 100x greater than Russia. Casting Russia as our greatest enemy rather than trying to find areas of mutual interest is a huge foreign policy misstep by the left in America.
[1] - https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
> McConnell also objected to that bill.
Make up your own mind.
I'm hypothesizing here, I haven't read the bill, but then neither have you, so you're "making up your own mind" based on a shallow regurgitation of democrat talking points and without any critical thinking.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s1247/text
It sounds reasonable to me.
I'm not a lawyer but upon cursory reading it looks like it would not, unless you were solicited by a foreign agent in the first place. If you go out and have your PAC hire Perkins Coie to pay for kompromat without explicit solicitation, it'd seem you don't have to report it.
Then there's a question of what happens after you report. Is your campaign then put under counterintelligence surveillance? How difficult is it to direct a foreign agent to solicit a payment from e.g. a dem campaign to lawfully trigger this? This is something that doesn't even have to be done by a campaign, some idiot from 4-chan could do it.
Source? Carter Page had a FISA warrant against him after he left the Trump campaign. And none of it was based on fake evidence. Sounds like you're just regurgitating Republican and Fox News talking points without any critical thinking.
>There's also a strong possibility that McConell wants voter ID, which is something the Democrats are strangely reluctant to introduce even though it's quite a popular thing to require
Republicans are strangely against giving voting IDs or state IDs for free to low income people. They also restrict early voting to make poor people choose between losing pay and voting, and are also against making election day a national holiday. They are also on record stating that the voter ID laws will help them win.
"We know the FBI falsely told the court in the first application warrant that it knew of no derogatory information about the dossier author, Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence operative who worked simultaneously as an FBI source and a Clinton campaign opposition researcher. In fact, a senior Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr warned the FBI that Steele was desperate to stop Trump from becoming president, and other evidence showed Steele had been leaking to the media in violation of FBI rules — all derogatory evidence weighing against Steele’s credibility.
Further, we’ve learned from congressional testimony of other FBI officials that the dossier’s contents had not been corroborated by the FBI when it was used in the FISA application — even though the Woods Procedures mentioned above required that only corroborated evidence be used in support of a warrant request.
And, finally, we know from sources that the FBI had other evidence suggesting the innocence of two Trump campaign aides it targeted — Page and George Papadopoulos — that wasn’t provided to the court."
End quote. The net result is, two of Trump campaign aides were under clandestine counterintelligence surveillance based on fabricated information that the Clinton campaign paid $1.02M for to a foreign agent.
I didn't read anything suggesting that the FBI abused FISA warrants specifically against Trump people.
How many times does one have to repeat before its clear to you Trump campaign wasn't spied on?
Carter Page left the Trump Campaign by the time there was a FISA warrant against him.
The Trump campaign was not spied on.
Are you really suggesting that right after the election they "turned around" and started undermining the Trump presidency? What kind of sense does it make?
By reopening the investigation, the FBI was able to seize control of Anthony Weiner's laptop, which was being held by the NYPD.
Had info about that been released, as it was going to be, it would have been immediately devastating. Reopening the investigation must have seemed less harmful to Clinton.
The problem was not the re-opening of the investigation (which the FBI could've done without informing or asking anyone), it was the fact that Comey decided on his own to inform the public (via congress, and against established department policy) that the investigation was being re-opened.
Weiner laptop was seized because of the underage sexting, what makes you think that this information would have been immediately devastating for Clinton? Weiner's sexcapades were well known before that, it was just another chapter in that saga.
Sorry but what you are implying just does not make any logical sense.
Anthony Weiner's wife is Huma Abedin. She was deputy chief of staff to Clinton. Somehow, his laptop had come to contain lots of classified emails to/from Clinton. It is simply not believable that those emails were adequately studied in the available time. This has even been admitted in responses to FOIA requests, with the government claiming in court that more time is needed.
I am aware of the facts (and Abedin "was" his wife). The FBI eventually established that the "new" emails were either personal or duplicate of already known emails.
You seem to be implying (correct me if I am wrong) that:
- Abedin was using Weiner's laptop to write the most "damaging" and "interesting" emails to Clinton,
- somehow, the emails sent to/from Weiner's laptop escaped months of extensive investigations by the FBI,
- somehow, the emails got erased from everywhere else apart from from Weiner's laptop and could be found only there (that's not how email works),
- somehow, in their criminal conspiracy, Clinton/Abedin forgot that Abedin had 650'000 (according to official reports) emails from the Clinton campaign on her husband's laptop - they erased all the damaging information from everywhere else but somehow forgot Wiener's computer (which she must have used extensively to accumulate that number of messages),
- 10 days of "around the clock" work by FBI agents couldn't have possibly established that most of 650k message where either "personal or duplicative" in nature[0].
Sorry, but that's just way too much mental gymnastic for my taste.
Again, the idea that Comey's public re-opening of the official investigation was somehow less damaging, from the point of view of public perception, than unsupported and unsubstantiated leaks from NYPD just does not hold water.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-director-comey-s...
In the United States, we have 50 sovereign states that are responsible for election systems/laws. Distributing power was a key feature in the founding of the USA, and shitting on the design in order meet a goal (I personally happen to appreciate) does not justify the means.
Mis-characterizing your opponent's argument is not helpful.
There's a reason Democrats don't like voter ID laws:
https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/tammany-h...
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...
Dead voters (who magically cast ballots) and social strong-arming and vote-buying like Tammany Hall (over two different periods in New York's history) all tend to vote Democrat.
"The heavily redacted, 67-page report found no evidence that Russia was able to alter vote counts in 2016, when Russia carried out what Mueller’s final report called a “sweeping and systematic” hacking and disinformation campaign."
Nobody suggested that Russian disinformation is unimportant.
NYT today: TFA. We wondered what they were going to do in response to the dud that the hearings turned out to be. That confused old man learned more about his report than we did! MFW it seems possible they might actually talk about real problems rather than fairy tales...
People of good faith have been warning of the flaws in election infrastructure since long before Obama made his "of course the elections can't be rigged" comments [0]. There are lots of flaws with voting machines: closed source, no tangible verifiable records, confusing for voters, etc. There are lots of flaws with voting in general: voters removed for specious reasons, greater inconvenience for poor voters, one-party-two-heads, etc.
Actually now that I hear it again, what Obama had to say makes a lot of sense to me... how do the anonymous-yet-somehow-official sources account for this? Sure, someone could cheat in a small number of precincts, but if they try to affect a national election using a small number of precincts they're definitely going to inspire recounts. It's too bad that Congress won't pass Tulsi's bill that would require recountable paper records...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcjaO2953os