The Robert Mueller Investigation

[Captainant 28390]

50 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

(Note: I would do a 180 on this point if coordination along the lines of what I outlined up post, in terms of coordinated content development and targeting was demonstrated).

So sharing of internal polling data and coordinating on messaging as outlined in the DOJ and SIC reports doesn't meet that bar for you? 

And also, your continued distortion of my opinion on the DNS issue is very on-brand for you. Keep up the good work carrying Russia's water. Find some more folks paid by Russian state media to source, they never lie!

[Anastasis 23699]

Still not even more than a glimpse of honesty or self-reflection from you. 

[Captainant 28390]

8 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Still not even more than a glimpse of honesty or self-reflection from you. 

[TwiceHorn 31987]

9 hours ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

Re-reading this thread, amongst the "wish casting" refs

 

If there is an absolute, hermetically sealed, steel trap firewall to criminal liability,

As determined by your "company"

then fuck you if you don't wanna go wading into the last resort deep end of political spectacle.

I like and respect you, but you're virtually diagraming the swamp. 

The "commission" or remit of the Special Prosecutor was not to "get Trump," who couldn't be prosecuted.  It was more far ranging than that, although perhaps not as far-ranging as people hoped it would be in certain respects.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/967231/download

I disagree that Mueller deliberately waded into a political quagmire and then refused to play politics, or at least resisted it.

I would concede that the prelude to the investigation was over-politicized, as was the aftermath.  But I am relatively certain that Mueller felt that he could do the job "dispassionately" and professionally and find what needed to be found, and do the job without unnecessarily politicizing it.  And I think he felt it his duty to do so, that is, depoliticize it as much as possible.  Now, I suppose you could also criticize him for being naive to believe that he could depoliticize it, but I don't think you can fault him for trying.

Long story short, I think Mueller gets too much criticism. And much of it unfair.  In a lot of ways, being appointed a Special Counsel is a lose-lose proposition.  Some vociferous group is always going to be aggrieved by it. And, unlike most prosecutions, it is extremely public in nature.

In this case, you had the targets of the investigation who were screaming witch hunt, and the proponents of the investigation who had unrealistic expectations.

The other thing about it is that "Russian interference" was going to be hard to prove, because as could be predicted, and, as I think we now know, the effort to interfere was diffuse and took place mostly outside the territorial US, which makes it devilishly hard to even investigate, much less prove.  And even more difficult to secure convictions.  But he hung up some of the domestic instigators and some of the Russians as well, to the extent possible.

 

[JimmyJames 12271]

I just want to know how Carter Page is getting along now. 

[jimmyjazz 46977]

2 minutes ago, Bravo said:

So can we all just move along now from the big lie Trump Russia collusion and see it for what it was? A huge espionage campaign paid for by Hillary? 

Uh, no?  I mean, unless the truth doesn't matter.

[TwiceHorn 31987]

2 minutes ago, Bravo said:

So can we all just move along now from the big lie Trump Russia collusion and see it for what it was? A huge espionage campaign paid for by Hillary? 

Except that's bullshit.  

The Russians interfered in multiple ways.  

The Trump campaign was at least willing to benefit from that interference, wherever it could, if it didn't outright collude.

Similarly, the Clinton campaign made an effort to expose it, if overstating the case.

It wasn't all one way or the other.

[JimmyJames 12271]

Oh look. Bravo said something ridiculously stupid again. 

[Captainant 28390]

The trump campaign chair was giving internal polling data to russian intelligence cutouts. The GOP led senate found that trump coordinated messaging with moscow. Read the report and the included evidence.

Or you can continue to play useful idiot like annie and GRU and echo the trump line of "no collision! No puppet! You're the puppet!" Won't fucking matter in 10-15 years when the wheels come off our democracy anyways. 

[Red Five 41596]

13 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Uh, no?  I mean, unless the truth doesn't matter.

You may be on to something here Jimmy.

[Cement 314]

Every time Mueller took a shit it was headline news for 2 years.

But actual criminal behavior now uncovered?  Barely a peep because it was done by the "good guys."

 

Edited February 13, 2022 by Cement

[Johnny Sack 8397]

7 minutes ago, Cement said:

Every time Mueller took a shit it was headline news for 2 years.

But actual criminal behavior now uncovered?  Barely a peep because it was done by the "good guys."

 

You are asking for these freakshows to be self-critical and honest.  You’ve come to the wrong place. 

[JimmyJames 12271]

7 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

You are asking for these freakshows to be self-critical and honest.  You’ve come to the wrong place. 

Says one of the biggest liars on the board. 

[hobbes2702 13351]

7 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

You are asking for these freakshows to be self-critical and honest.  You’ve come to the wrong place. 

Did the Trump campaign coordinate messaging or share polling data with Russian Assets? What word would you use to describe that sort of behavior? Since you want honesty let’s see you express some.

[JimmyJames 12271]

8 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

You are asking for these freakshows to be self-critical and honest.  You’ve come to the wrong place. 

Tell us again about how you were born a poor black kid in the projects who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, didn’t inherit a dime, and now gives his salary away to Haitian orphans.

[Longhorn_Fan68 34079]

omg fucking arrest Hillary already if she's so fucking guilty. bill too. who gives a motherfucking shit????!!!!! wrong is wrong and criminal is criminal. it doesn't come with a fucking label or a side. I want all people who betrayed the public's trust and committed actual crimes to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. i don't give one solitary fuck what "side" they're on. so if she's as guilty as claimed, then cuff her now. if not, stfu and focus on the people we should actually be worried about

Edited February 13, 2022 by Longhorn_Fan68

[Anastasis 23699]

DNC really got their moneys worth out of both the Alfa conspiracy and the steele dossier. What’s funny to me is that the people involved in both promoting and uncritically accepting that series of shit have now positioned themselves as the gatekeepers and source of truth for identifying disinformation operations. It’s really fucking fascinating how deeply deluded our media and political establishments are. 

Edited February 13, 2022 by Anastasis

[Satchel 6982]

59 minutes ago, Bravo said:

Leslie Stahl and CBS owe Trump an apology. I won't hold my breath. 

Why should Leslie apologize to that lying goof?

 

[Captainant 28390]

34 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

DNC really got their moneys worth out of both the Alfa conspiracy and the steele dossier. What’s funny to me is that the people involved in both promoting and uncritically accepting that series of shit have now positioned themselves as the gatekeepers and source of truth for identifying disinformation operations. It’s really fucking fascinating how deeply deluded our media and political establishments are. 

It would really be nice if you didn't habitually misrepresent what I said about the whole DNS thing, but intellectual honesty has always been a growth area for you. Here's a pretty comprehensive post I had on the topic in this thread:

On 5/15/2019 at 12:09 PM, Captainant said:

Meant to reply to this yesterday, but outage happened. Here's some examples and data that I'm basing my argument on from the NewYorker article:

 

The bolded part is EXTREMELY unlikely, and would be almost certainly be legally actionable if not done with the hardware/system owner's consent. It is not a standard or even edge-case practice to allow third parties to use a customer's infrastructure, and it's not remotely normal to be that lackadaisical with network security unless you're pants-on-head retarded and don't give a flying fuck about data integrity/security.

This isn't necessarily an explanation directly from the trump campaign, but they've used a similar argument to attempt to debunk claims of malfeasance. This (for lack of a better term) lab work is hard data to support the argument that this so-called marketing server wasn't really marketing but rather communicating with a narrow group. Why lie about the purpose for the server?

This is a good example of the explanation given by Alfa requiring an incredible coincidence to occur to be possible. I'm not inclined to believe that something only if a series of very unlikely things had to occur, and you can't show or reproduce that those things occurred. It's far more likely that there was a second channel of communication happening that was driving this behavior, rather than a non reproducible bug.

This is an additional datapoint to bolster the speculation that a second communication channel was being utilized, as the information of the new DNS name was not publicly available via a PTR record. Computers don't just magically know what to query to find a domain, that's not how things work. The most likely way for the alfa server to know where to look is that someone from the trump world told someone in the alfa world what the new domain was. We do not know of any other way that information would just magically appear in alfa's servers.

 

So, all of that to say - I'm not arguing that this is proof of trump and alfa backchanneling, but I am arguing that their explanations and justifications don't make sense in context. That is a good reason to apply more scrutiny to this behavior, especially considering the potential ramifications of such covert behavior with respect to coordination with a hostile foreign power.

You are distorting my argument of "trumpco has changed their explanation several times and none of them made sense". We've had this discussion several times. You continually lie about what I've said. 

And as an aside - tracking DNS queries isn't some malevolent behavior. In December when the log4j vulnerability became known, it was my responsibility to dig through my customers DNS queries to identify if any hosts had looked up known CnC domains, and determine why they were looked up. We found several hits, linked them to specific network interfaces in use or previously used, and passed than info along to the relevant incident response teams for further analysis and RCA. Some hosts were compromised, some were false positives, and some were active testing that was intentionally checking if those hosts were able to hit known bad domains.

In each of those cases, we found a strong and consistent explanation for the behavior. It's just technical analysis. 

Just because youre an expert at optimizing the profitability of a healthcare transaction doesn't mean youre an expert at analyzing network protocols. 

[Biff Tannen 46061]

1 hour ago, Bravo said:

Leslie Stahl and CBS owe Trump an apology. I won't hold my breath. 

 

[Anastasis 23699]

4 minutes ago, Captainant said:

It would really be nice if you didn't habitually misrepresent what I said about the whole DNS thing, but intellectual honesty has always been a growth area for you. Here's a pretty comprehensive post I had on the topic in this thread:

You are distorting my argument of "trumpco has changed their explanation several times and none of them made sense". We've had this discussion several times. You continually lie about what I've said. 

And as an aside - tracking DNS queries isn't some malevolent behavior. In December when the log4j vulnerability became known, it was my responsibility to dig through my customers DNS queries to identify if any hosts had looked up known CnC domains, and determine why they were looked up. We found several hits, linked them to specific network interfaces in use or previously used, and passed than info along to the relevant incident response teams for further analysis and RCA. Some hosts were compromised, some were false positives, and some were active testing that was intentionally checking if those hosts were able to hit known bad domains.

In each of those cases, we found a strong and consistent explanation for the behavior. It's just technical analysis. 

Just because youre an expert at optimizing the profitability of a healthcare transaction doesn't mean youre an expert at analyzing network protocols. 

Not sure what any of that has to do with what you quoted. But I hope that you feel better.
 

The whole story was a DNC disinformation operation. People with expertise in the area called it out pretty quickly as rubbish. Both pretty well regarded security experts and posters here. But we did like three or four cycles over it here. I will grant that you hedged a bit more than some of the others.

I think it’s hilarious that you scan DNS logs as part of your job, yet you considered the DNS logs “strong evidence” of malfeasance with this whole Alfa thing. Toss up between useful idiot and lack of understanding one’s own bounds of competence. 

[Captainant 28390]

17 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

I think it’s hilarious that you scan DNS logs as part of your job, yet you considered the DNS logs “strong evidence” of malfeasance with this whole Alfa thing. Toss up between useful idiot and lack of understanding one’s own bounds of competence

DNS logs weren't strong evidence of malfeasance alone. The fact that trump and alfa changed their explanation several times along with each party giving conflicting explanations was what I called strong evidence of malfeasance.

DNS logs are a tool for analysis. Another useful data point. It's an indicator of where your systems are communicating. Had one of my customers IR teams changed their explanation multiple times without additional evidence or analysis, I'd be calling up their CISO to let them know that something was fucky.

I'd feel better if you didn't continually misrepresent and lie to the rest of the board about my position on this matter. Again, you've got room for growth in intellectual honesty. 

[Anastasis 23699]

I am sincerely sorry that you fell for a DNC disinformation operation and feel bad about it. 

[Captainant 28390]

I don't hold your intellectual dishonesty against you either, for what it's worth. I figure it's the only way someone with a soul could cash checks that are the fruit of inflated medical pricing and profiteering.

But man your ability to give a reasonable face to the trumpian talking points is really outstanding - you should have gone into politics instead of healthcare consulting.

[jimmyjazz 46977]

If y'all haven't figured out by now that @Anastasis is fucking with you on this, I don't know what to say.  I mean, his menstrual cycle is roughly 3 months, and it's just lather, rinse, and repeat, over and over again.  He won't acknowledge any counterarguments because he does not argue in good faith.  Drop it.

[TwiceHorn 31987]

3 hours ago, Bravo said:

That's the spin you're going with? She was just making an effort to expose it? WTF? 

Oppo research is dirty fucking business.  I don't condone it.

I'm not a HIllary fan, at all.  But there's plenty of evidence that the Trump campaign accepted, if not outright solicited, Russian assistance.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-senate-findings-fact-idUSKCN25E2OY

The Steele Dossier itself was bullshit, no question, or mostly so.  Nevertheless, there was a kernel of truth to it.

 

Edited February 13, 2022 by TwiceHorn

[TwiceHorn 31987]

2 hours ago, Bravo said:

Leslie Stahl and CBS owe Trump an apology. I won't hold my breath. 

 

Trump owes the US an apology.  For being a titty baby cunt that tried and is trying to destroy the country.

[TwiceHorn 31987]

1 hour ago, Captainant said:

It would really be nice if you didn't habitually misrepresent what I said about the whole DNS thing, but intellectual honesty has always been a growth area for you. Here's a pretty comprehensive post I had on the topic in this thread:

You are distorting my argument of "trumpco has changed their explanation several times and none of them made sense". We've had this discussion several times. You continually lie about what I've said. 

And as an aside - tracking DNS queries isn't some malevolent behavior. In December when the log4j vulnerability became known, it was my responsibility to dig through my customers DNS queries to identify if any hosts had looked up known CnC domains, and determine why they were looked up. We found several hits, linked them to specific network interfaces in use or previously used, and passed than info along to the relevant incident response teams for further analysis and RCA. Some hosts were compromised, some were false positives, and some were active testing that was intentionally checking if those hosts were able to hit known bad domains.

In each of those cases, we found a strong and consistent explanation for the behavior. It's just technical analysis. 

Just because youre an expert at optimizing the profitability of a healthcare transaction doesn't mean youre an expert at analyzing network protocols. 

Yeah, I have a bit of trouble calling looking at DNS data "spying."  I mean, I guess it's spying if watch and see who comes and goes from a house, which is about the same thing, if far less laborious.

What is more troubling is that they apparently mischaracterized the number of "Russian sites" hit by Trump affiliated IPs relative to the number of Russian hits from non-Trump IPs.

In any event, this latest foofaraw over Durham is far from proven.  I assume he has evidence to back up his allegations, but it's not of record anywhere yet.  So we shall see.

Edited February 13, 2022 by TwiceHorn

[Anastasis 23699]

28 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

he does not argue in good faith.

This is rich coming from you on this thread. 

[wildcat09 29558]

1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

The whole story was a DNC disinformation operation.

Stop lying. 

 

[TwiceHorn 31987]

1 minute ago, Bravo said:

My God, the Russian spy created dossier you guys are still giving validity too. Just admit what it is. The ends justify the means. The left hated Trump so much none of this disinformation matters. 

The kernel of truth being that Russians were fucking with our elections and doing to to favor Trump.

[Anastasis 23699]

5 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Stop lying.

You are gonna argue the alfa bank conspiracy story was not a disinformation operation run by DNC operatives?

LOL, go for it wildcat.  

[Longhorn_Fan68 34079]

oh man, the nu-uh, no we didn't, you did! defense. you can't come back from that one, @TwiceHorn

[Anastasis 23699]

 

10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

The kernel of truth being that Russians were fucking with our elections and doing to to favor Trump.

Putin sure did hate him some HRC, that's for sure. Long history there back to Bill and Yeltsin. 

Edited February 13, 2022 by Anastasis

[Captainant 28390]

It really is something how all the liars and trumpists and rittenhouse meme posters all jumped back into this thread with the exact same talking points all at the same time.

Devin Nunes and Mark Meadows truly are the most reliable arbiters of truth with respect to trump and russia.

[TwiceHorn 31987]

2 minutes ago, Bravo said:

Russia was meddling in our elections in favor of Trump.

That is hardly disputed nowadays.

Do your research: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-select-committee-intelligence-united-states-senate-russian-active-measures

The Russians were trying to undermine confidence in the voting system in the US, among other things. 

Kind of like some other fucker we know.

[TwiceHorn 31987]

4 minutes ago, Bravo said:

Hillary and DNC hack into Trump campaign. 

 

Zero evidence of this. 

[Anastasis 23699]

@TwiceHorn, curious if you have you been reading any of the filings from the Sussman or Danchenko proceedings?  Would be interested in your take if you have.  If not, probably not worth wading in to. 

[jimmyjazz 46977]

32 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

This is rich coming from you on this thread. 

LMAO.  Point to one instance in which I did not argue in good faith.  It is literally your stock in trade.

[Satchel 6982]

Donald J. Trump and his backers say revelations about the Steele dossier show the Russia investigation was a “hoax.” That is not what the facts indicate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/us/trump-russia-investigation-dossier.html

 

Did the F.B.I. open the investigation because of the dossier?

No. Mr. Trump and his allies have insinuated that the F.B.I. based the Russia investigation on the dossier. But when counterintelligence agents launched the effort on July 30, 2016, they did not yet know about the dossier. An inspector general report established that Mr. Steele’s reports reached that counterintelligence team on Sept. 19, 2016.

The basis for the investigation was instead that WikiLeaks had disrupted the Democratic National Convention by releasing Democratic emails believed to have been stolen by Russian hackers, and that an Australian diplomat said a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser had bragged to him about apparent outreach from Russia involving an offer to help the campaign by anonymously releasing information damaging to Mrs. Clinton.

Did investigators rely on the dossier for their findings?

No. The Mueller report does not present claims from the dossier as evidence, and many of the issues focused on by investigators did not come up in the dossier.

The dossier makes no mention, for example, of a July 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russians and senior campaign officials including Donald Trump Jr., who eagerly accepted the request for a meeting after being told they were bringing dirt on Mrs. Clinton.

Nor does the dossier mention that in August 2016, Konstantin V. Kilimnik — described in the 2019 Mueller report as having “ties to Russian intelligence” and in a partly declassified, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2020 as a “Russian intelligence officer” with possible ties to Russia’s election interference operations — flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

Investigators established that the two had discussed whether Mr. Trump, if elected, would bless a peace plan effectively allowing Russia to control eastern Ukraine, and that Mr. Manafort had shared internal polling data and campaign strategy information with Mr. Kilimnik, which the Treasury Department later said he passed on to a Russian spy agency. (The government has not declassified evidence for its escalating accusations about Mr. Kilimnik.)

The Senate report said Mr. Manafort’s “willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services” represented a “grave counterintelligence threat.”

[Longhorn_Fan68 34079]

oh shit, you mean tfg was a fucking liar about literally everything? no wai!

[Anastasis 23699]

6 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

LMAO.  Point to one instance in which I did not argue in good faith.  It is literally your stock in trade.

 

[jimmyjazz 46977]

Wow, you really got me there.  Good lord, you live in an alternate universe.

What I wrote there is the truth:  you a terrible communicator, and more than that, you WANT to be a terrible communicator.  You think you can baffle people with bull, and get them to think you're the smartest guy in the room.  Dude, you're not the smartest guy on this page.

[Anastasis 23699]

1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

Wow, you really got me there.  Good lord, you live in an alternate universe.

What I wrote there is the truth:  you a terrible communicator, and more than that, you WANT to be a terrible communicator.  You think you can baffle people with bull, and get them to think you're the smartest guy in the room.  Dude, you're not the smartest guy on this page.

I thought that the first one was a pretty good example of your low integrity posting on this thread. 

[TwiceHorn 31987]

39 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

@TwiceHorn, curious if you have you been reading any of the filings from the Sussman or Danchenko proceedings?  Would be interested in your take if you have.  If not, probably not worth wading in to. 

No, I really haven't.

I'm not even sure why I'm in here relitigating all this crap.  Except that hysterical nonsense from the most recent Durham filing.

[Captainant 28390]

1 minute ago, TwiceHorn said:

I'm not even sure why I'm in here relitigating all this crap.  Except that hysterical nonsense from the most recent Durham filing.

If the last five years are any guide, there must be some news coming down the pike and the redhats and their useful idiots want to consume all the oxygen so the real story doesn't get legs. 

[jimmyjazz 46977]

5 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

I thought that the first one was a pretty good example of your low integrity posting on this thread. 

[Anastasis 23699]

4 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

No, I really haven't.

I'm not even sure why I'm in here relitigating all this crap.  Except that hysterical nonsense from the most recent Durham filing.

The Sussman and Dashenko stuff has been playing out for a while, without much discussion or bumping of this thread.

Not much interest on this board when the focus is on the DNC lawyers peddling nonsense, and the primary source for the Steele dossier. Funny that, huh?

 

Edited February 13, 2022 by Anastasis

[Anastasis 23699]

Just now, jimmyjazz said:

I mean, I know that it requires you to read a few pages to pull the post together, and nobody really expects much effort from you.

Still love your chile recipe though man and other contributions. We just talking this thread. 

[Harrison Bergeron 1798]

3 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

The Sussman and Dashenko stuff has been playing out for a while, without much discussion or bumping of this thread.

Not much interest on this board when the focus is on the DNC lawyers peddling nonsense, and the primary source for the Steele dossier. Funny that, huh?

 

Because every accusation is a confession:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.235638/gov.uscourts.dcd.235638.35.0_1.pdf