Tag: Sabotage

Like those defenses, Stone’s claims will be evaluated in the light of the still emerging but increasingly troubling facts of the campaign and its associates’ active connivance with the Russian cyber attack on the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. Most famously, Stone predicted in August of 2016 that something momentous involving Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta—his “time in the barrel”—was about to break, two months before Wikileaks distributed hacked emails of Podesta’s. The statement of offense reveals an email Stone sent to Corsi in July 2016 with the request or instruction that Corsi, “Get to [Assange] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails.”. On Stone’s account, whatever he did to find about this material, such as having Corsi “get the pending emails,” is just what a dirty trickster and master of hardball politics would do if properly schooled in the rule that “to win you must do everything.” Stone’s legal defense fund is currently appealing for donations to protect Stone from Mueller’s supposed attempts to “criminalize normal political activities.” The investigation of Stone’s activities will not, of course, be the first time that practitioners of dirty tricks encounter the legal limits of their“normal” activities. He was indicted for violating a provision of the 1971 federal campaign finance law that required that campaign literature distributed “in connection with a candidate’s campaign” but without the candidate’s authorization carry a notice to that effect, making clear that the named candidate was “not responsible” for its content. The violation of this transparency requirement was enough to support a prosecution, but Congress later concluded that it needed to enact a more detailed prohibition of acts of political “sabotage.” The counterfeiting of campaign literature for which Segretti went to jail was just a means to the larger end of disrupting an opposing campaign. The Russian government’s theft of emails belonging to the Democratic Party and senior Clinton associates, and the distribution of these materials via WikiLeaks, were intended to wreak havoc on the Democratic presidential campaign. He remained in contact with the candidate and active in support of the Trump campaign. Should it turn out that they were encouraging and supporting a foreign government and its agents in any phase of the plan to acquire and disseminate stolen emails, they run headlong into the law barring foreign nationals from providing “anything of value” to an American political candidate. Stone, an admirer of Richard Nixon who has the former president’s image tattooed on his back, would like to have Nixonian “dirty tricks” accepted as good, old-fashioned political "hardball."

President Donald Trump repeatedly claims that no votes were affected — even on occasions when he acknowledges Russian meddling at all. Trump beat Clinton.” Meddling & collusion are NOT the same thing. Russia did meddle in 2016 election & are trying it again. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2018 It’s hard to prove that Russia’s use of phony trolls and social media and its theft of email messages from prominent Democrats is what elected Trump. But Pompeo was factually wrong about one thing: The intelligence community reached no conclusion about what did propel Trump to victory, at least not in public. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper now says the evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin swung the election to Trump “is staggering.” Noting that fewer than 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin decided the contest, he wrote in a book released in May, “I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by the massive effort by the Russians.” Most Republicans dismiss Clapper as a Trump-hating supporter of his former boss, ex-President Barack Obama. “The use that the mainstream and conservative media made of the Russian hacking of the Democrats’ emails altered the news and debate agendas in ways that past election research would suggest were significant enough to change the outcome.” The book is “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, What We Don’t, Can’t and Do Know.” Jamieson is a professor and former dean at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Contrary to the claims of most Republicans, there’s already a serious circumstantial case for the strong impact of Russian interference. Beyond the effect on voters, the relentless drumbeat of articles about email leaks also forced the Clinton campaign to spend time reacting and making strategic adjustments. Later, after the election, the Times reported on links between Trump and Russians during the campaign, and the American intelligence agencies concluded in a public report that the purpose was to help Trump.