Russia Hacking Conspiracy

Donald+Trump+and+Vladimir+Putin+are+shown+to+be+hugging+in+this+photoshopped+picture.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are shown to be hugging in this photoshopped picture.

Yunior Vidal, Contributor

Russian attempts at hacking our elections happened, but there is no certainty of whether or not they were successful in their mission. The fact that there is no evidence besides the “anonymous” sources put forth by the media immediately discards this theory as a farce. But I can see why people would believe in this, Trump after all is not very well liked, I really don’t know why, he’s a great personality with a good sense of humor. Russians meddling in our politics has always been a thing, the Russians have been involved inside American politics ever since WWII. The largest scale of attempted influence from Russians in our politics happened online through a flurry of Russian trolls who tried to cause chaos on the American side of the internet. They created memes, articles, and many other methods to inflict controversy within our politics; propaganda to disrupt the democratic process which had next to no influence on the outcome of the election.

 

Lets not forget that the conspiracy was started because of motive. Hillary repeatedly alluded to Russian influence during her campaign speeches and presidential debates. After her concession, campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook revealed the conspiracy to the public “, [w]ithin 24 hours of her concession speech, [John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to create the case that the election wasn’t won fair and square. For a couple of hours, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and argument.” According to “Shattered:Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” a book written by  Amie Parnes, Jonathan Allen, and Allen Jonathan.

 

The conspiracy has been especially favored by the media. According to the Media Research Center, a conservative group that studies liberal bias in the media, since inauguration, the major TV news networks have devoted an astonishing 1,000 minutes out of a total 5,015 minutes towards the Trump administration coverage discussing speculation that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Moscow in hacking Clinton campaign emails,which means the Russia story alone has comprised almost one-fifth of all Trump news, in 2017.” The media only devoted 20 seconds of air time to the rediscovered scandal of Hillary and Russia collusion during 2009 under the Barack Obama Administration, although it may be that the collusion happened over 9 years ago, it has only been recently discovered that collusion may in fact have happened. That knowledge was simply not discovered back in 2009, hence not making it as relevant as it is now.

 

Now, let’s get into the actual hacking accusations, first being the the DNC hacking done by the Russians. House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif) , claimed that he “had 17 intelligences that knew that the DNC hacking was done by the Russians to help Trump. But, the Obama administration’s January 6 assessment reflected only three intelligence agencies – one of them being the NSA, which captures Russian signals with only a ‘moderate confidence’ in their conclusion.” The CIA and FBI, alerted the public that their judgement “might be wrong.” Said agencies reached their conclusion based on the forensic analysis of a private contractor that was hired by the DNC to examine its hacked e-mail server. “ We didn’t get direct access,” former FBI Director James Comey testified before congress.

 

Second, the idea that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague in August of 2016 to meet with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers to discuss “how to process deniable cash payments to [. . .] anti-Clinton hackers paid by both Trump team and Kremlin.” The accusations have been debunked and as well denied by Cohen; his passport showed no signs showing that he left or entered the US at the time. And Czech authorities found no evidence he visited Prague. University of Southern California officials also confirmed that Cohen was on campus visiting his son during that time.

 

And, the most famous, Russian interference in the election opened doors to taking the legitimacy of the 2016 election into question, thus making Trump’s presidency a “fraud.” The Obama intel assessment concluded that none of the Russian hacking targets was “involved in vote tallying.” Wisconsin and California , now deny initial government reports that their election systems were ever scanned(hacked) by Russian cyber actors. Obama himself said any intrusions did not compromise the election results: “[t]he election was not tarnished [. . . ] we have not seen evidence of machines being tampered with.” I believe people confuse the wikileak situation with the vote tallying situation, wikileaks simply exposed the votes that were initially going in, effectively showing the voting process. As of yet, the media fails over and over again to prove their agenda correct, Hillary lost because she had a horrible campaign with no clear message. Hillary did not lose because Trump worked with the Russians, that’s just a bowl of spaghett, and a mangled one indeed. Lets be honest, as much as I love Trump in his HILARITY, ha, he would have lost to almost anybody else that was not Hillary.