TrumPutin

Larry Lessig says that as many as twenty Republican electors could flip. Such a shift won't change the outcome, although it gets us roughly halfway there. I think he's wrong -- unless we learn something truly spectacular about the role played by Vladimir Putin, in which case all bets are off.

Nevertheless, I hope Lessig is right. Any elector who takes a stand against Trump will earn history's accolades.

Fifty-five electors demand an intelligence briefing on the Russia connection before they cast their votes. Alas, only one of those electors is a Republican.

If serious new revelations comes out, and if 40 electors turn faithless, and if those electors decide against casting a vote for Hillary (a good bet), the election goes to the House. What will they do?

I think that House Republicans would demand a Republican alternative. Kasich is the choice if you want a compromise candidate who would please Democrats and Republicans, but Pence is the choice for those Republicans who feel that the president should be someone who actually was on the ticket (albeit not on the top spot). I think that many Democrats would hold their noses and go for Pence if doing so could keep Trump out of the White House.

The case against Putin. Yesterday, we were flooded with new information about Putin's efforts on behalf of Trump. In case you missed them, here are two must-read pieces from the NYT:

The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
Democratic House Candidates Were Also Targets of Russian Hacking

From the first article:

There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, said at a postelection conference. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Here's the part that stings:

Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.

“We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.”

So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or broadcast what they found, known as “doxing” in the cyberworld.

It was a brazen change in tactics, moving the Russians from espionage to influence operations.

The first, most brazen bit of doxing was the revelation of that infamous intercepted call by Victoria Nuland. Remember? "Yats is our guy"? We were so angry at Nuland that we missed a larger issue: Russia had, in essence, declared cyberwar on the U.S.

What did Barack Obama do about it? Nothing. He took action against Chelsea Manning, but not against Russia.

Why did Obama let the Russians get away with it? The most charitable view is that Obama wanted Putin to sign off on a Syrian peace scenario in which Assad stepped down.

The President's strategy was misguided, to say the least.

Last year, the attacks became more aggressive. Russia hacked a major French television station, frying critical hardware. Around Christmas, it attacked part of the power grid in Ukraine, dropping a portion of the country into darkness, killing backup generators and taking control of generators. In retrospect, it was a warning shot.

Every so often Obama does something that reminds me of why I never liked him. His unwillingness to confront Moscow comes perilously close to culpability.

Marcy Wheeler. Readers of this blog know that I view Marcy Wheeler with a respect bordering on awe. Lately, alas, she has foolishly questioned the presumption that Russia is the guilty party in the cyber-espionage operation against the Democrats. In essence, she has granted credibility to Trump's childish denials.

You can hear her discuss that matter in this interview with Brad Friedman.

Over the weekend, Washington Post and New York Times each reported on unnamed sources alleging a "secret" "consensus" of U.S. intelligence agencies charging Russia tried to interfere with the Presidential election in order to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. National security journalist and author Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel.net offers a measure of skepticism about the explosive reports on those allegations, which she suggests could echo what proved to be blatantly misrepresented and cherry-picked intel by the George W. Bush Administration in their run-up to the Iraq War.

Basically, this is Trump's argument: If the Agency says something Donnie doesn't want to hear, one need merely point out that Iraq didn't have WMDs after all.

The trouble with that comparison (as Keith Olbermann points out in the embedded video) is that the CIA did not get the intel wrong. The Bush White House merely cherry-picked the intel that they liked.

Intelligence analysis always has been and always will be a game of probably versus maybe: I don't think that the analysts ever said that they had high confidence that Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Dubya elevated maybe over probably for his own purposes.

Nevertheless, Marcy focused on the "aluminum tube" analogy in her December 9 piece.

NYT now says the RNC hack was by GRU in the spring, so it is a fair question why the DNC things got leaked but RNC did not.

Also, Sanger and Shane say “largely documents” from Dems were leaked. That’s false. There were two streams of non-Wikileaks releases, Guccifer, which did leak all-Dem stuff, and DC Leaks, which leaked stuff that might be better qualified as Ukrainian related. The most publicized of documents from the latter were from Colin Powell, which didn’t help Trump at all.

The Powell material helped Trump a great deal, and not just because Powell said some ugly things about Hillary; he also accused Bill Clinton of having post-presidency affairs with "bimbos." Most news articles gave the impression that Powell based this statement on insider knowledge; in fact, Powell was simply parroting gossip published by that paragon of journalism, the New York Post.

Marcy goes into greater detail in this December 10 piece.

Finally, there is the real possibility that other people hacked the DNC, in addition to FSB and GRU. That possibility is heightened because a DNC staffer was hacked via what may have been another method, and because DNC emails show a lot of password changes off services for which DNC staffers had had their accounts exposed in other hacks.

Marcy then goes on to cast doubt on the identification of Gufficer 2 as a Russian cut-out. Frankly, I think she is being silly. The afore-quoted NYT story (which was, admittedly, published after December 10) solidifies the Guccifer case: Although Guccifer 2 claimed to be a Romanian crank engaged in a lonely battle with the "Illuminati," he turned out to have no knowledge of the Romanian language, and he used a Russian-language version of Mircosoft Word. (Guccifer also used the name Felix Edmundovich, a shout-out to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka.)

I should also add that the first Guccifer was, in all likelihood, a cut-out for Russia posing as an Illuminati-spotter.

Look, I could spend a lot of time arguing against Marcy on a point-by-point basis, but the game isn't worth the candle. I need merely offer these two points:

1. The dispute within the intelligence community has not been "Did or did not Russia hack the Democrats?" The dispute has been over motive. Did they do this in order to undermine confidence in the American election system or for the direct purpose of electing Donald Trump? Logic tells us that if the Obama administration were engaged in a grand anti-Russia frame job, there wouldn't be a dispute over motive.

2. This NYT piece contains a correction which clarifies that Paul Ryan staffer AshLee Strong "did not dispute that the materials had been stolen as part of an act of Russian espionage." Paul Ryan has clearance and has had access to classified material not available to Marcy Wheeler -- and he has no motive for going along with an Obama administration lie.

Is there any evidence that someone other than Russia was involved? Assange denies Russian involvement -- but at this point, I wouldn't trust Julian Assange if he said "Hi, my name is Julian Assange."

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray says that Assange got material from a DNC insider

Mr Murray said: "I know who leaked them. I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.

“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

Maybe I'm missing something, but to my eyes, this statement makes little sense. The second and third paragraphs undercut the claim made in paragraph 1.

Anyways, this is all weak tea. "Material"? How much material? What kind of material? I have no doubt that Roger Stone sought to plant someone within the DNC -- or to bribe someone, or to subvert someone -- but Murray's statement doesn't exactly answer all of our questions.

There are many, many other reasons for presuming that Russia is the source of our current woes. Keith Olbermann mentions a few "tells" in the embedded video at the top of this post.