Who Meddled more Putin or Trump? The Collusion Thread visits Venezuela

Just finished this Greenwald profile in the latest New Yorker. I think it’ll interest readers of and participants in this thread.

Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance

DaveSchmidt said:
Just finished this Greenwald profile in the latest New Yorker. I think it’ll interest readers of and participants in this thread.
Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1034075434512777217

Glenn Greenwald:

"Given that the @NewYorker writer, Ian Parker, clearly (and explicitly) disagrees with many of my views, I thought this profile was largely fair. Some quotes are out-of-context & distorted. Some facts are wrong. But overall, it's a good faith examination"

"some quotes"  "some facts"

Very helpful.

dave said:
"some quotes"  "some facts"

Very helpful.

Some facts:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Betsy Reed’s role at The Nation; she was the executive editor, not the editor. It also described the timing of Reality Winner’s arrest incorrectly; Winner was arrested shortly before the Intercept published its story, not shortly after.

Those appear to be all for now.

"Greenwald, who didn’t vote in 2016, and who sees Bernie Sanders as the best likely candidate for 2020, later told me that, compared with current conditions, a Clinton Presidency would have been 'better in some ways, and worse in other ways.' "

As a general rule, I don't think we need advice from the "there's no difference between Trump and Clinton" people, especially those who sat out the election.

There are a lot of people in the United States going through hell and fearing even worse, because of people who think like Glenn.

The old rule is a good rule.  If you decided not to vote, you can't complain afterwards.

paulsurovell said:

Prior to the leaked emails HFA and the DNC hired Christopher Steele to collude with Russian government officials to create the dirty dossier of unverified dirt on Donald Trump. Steele shared the dossier with numerous journalists, including David Corn and Michael Isikoff who ran stories using the dossier's disinformation.

 Wow.  Thanks for summing up your thesis here.  All throughout this thread there are posters showing that your conclusions are wrong.  You're picking a narrative based on distorting and disregarding facts.  

My comment from January 19 on this thread, about using that argument that Mr. Surovell summed up:

nohero said:
By the way, for "coming attractions" for this thread, Sean Hannity is always a useful source.  A sample from Wednesday-

Also, tonight, we have major breaking news. This is important tonight about the phony fake news Hillary Clinton bought and paid for Russian propaganda document and dossier. Sara Carter reporting that longtime Clinton aide adviser Sid Vicious Blumenthal apparently was interviewed by the FBI in 2016 about this fake news anti-Trump dossier.

And that's not all, according to The Washington Examiner's Byron York, congressional investigators are now working to determine whether or not the Obama State Department was involved in gathering and circulating fictitious and totally fake information that was found in that dossier. It's getting deeper every night.

And according to another new report, an FBI agent exchanged information about the bureau's Russia investigation with the former spy that was getting the phony Russian information, Christopher Steele. He's the guy that put the dossier together.

So, you have Steele being told by our FBI about their Russia investigation at the same time Steele is getting paid by Hillary Clinton to dig up phony Russian propaganda source dirt on Donald Trump. You can't make this up. 

A few New Yorker excerpts (not in order):

Greenwald and I talked about his definition of “evidence.” In the case of Russia, he seemed to use the word to mean “proof.”

.

He later said, “If there was evidence inside the U.S. government that genuinely proved collusion—an intercepted call, an e-mail—it would have been leaked by now.” (He seemed to be disregarding the discipline displayed by Mueller’s investigation.)

.

A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,” and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth, which I don’t believe is likely.”

.

He sought to clarify his position on Russian interference: “I’ve said that of course it’s possible that Russia and Putin might have hacked, because this is the kind of thing that Russia does to the U.S., and that the U.S. has done to Russia, and to everybody else in the world—and far worse—for decades.” He’d never insisted “on the narrative that Russia didn’t do it.” When James Risen, the former Times investigative reporter, who joined the Intercept last year, recently debated Greenwald on a podcast—a public airing of internal tensions—Greenwald bristled at the suggestion that he had ever considered the idea of Russian interference a hoax. “I never said anything like that,” he said, explaining that his demand for serious evidence was connected to the deceptions propagated before the Iraq War.

.

Greenwald told me that his role was “to evaluate convincing evidence and then report to my readers what it is that happened, based not on my beliefs but on the actual evidence.” Such a stance could never be “disproved.” Betsy Reed recalled Greenwald telling her that it’s never wrong to be skeptical. One could argue that overriding, sustained skepticism, in response to reports of bad acts, could indeed be a mistake, and wouldn’t be an ideal posture for, say, a 911 dispatcher.

.

Since then, as the accusation has been fleshed out and gained almost universal acceptance, Greenwald has chosen to highlight the commentary of people who sound deranged about Russian interference. His work has sought to create the impression that the pervasive voice of concern about the Trump-Russia story is found not in articles by national-security reporters, including those at the Intercept, or in congressional questioning of Erik Prince, or in Mueller’s indictments, but in jokes and unhinged theories—in a Twitter oddball like Louise Mensch suggesting that “Andrew Breitbart was murdered by Putin, just as the founder of RT was murdered by Putin,” or in Howard Dean asking if the Intercept is funded by Russia.

.

Greenwald’s other critiques of Trump-era reporting—of oversold scoops and neglected non-Trump stories, from Yemen to Catalonia—are valuable. But it’s not easy to see that the media has been disgraced by a handful of mistakes that were quickly corrected. To many people, Greenwald has looked ravenous and gleeful. He disputed this characterization. “The screwups have been quite numerous,” he told me. Errors are inevitable, he allowed, but “my problem with these mistakes is that they’re all in the same direction of exaggerating the Russian threat.” One could argue that Carlson and other Fox journalists may have made errors of threat-underestimation by, say, breezing past Trump-Russia revelations or failing to pursue investigations. But it might be fairer to say that, until we learn all there is to know about the Trump Administration’s involvement in the Russian scheme, the seriousness of any journalistic neglect is hard to measure. Either way, Greenwald surely can’t be confident that he’s witnessed a grievous imbalance in screwups.

DaveSchmidt said:
A few New Yorker excerpts (not in order):
...
A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,” and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth, which I don’t believe is likely.”
...

I guess Glenn has now been taken over or compromised by the Deep State.  Thank goodness Mr. Surovell is still out there to preach his truth to us.

"A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,” and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth, which I don’t believe is likely.”

I made this point to Nan days ago but she opted not to respond.

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:
Prior to the leaked emails HFA and the DNC hired Christopher Steele to collude with Russian government officials to create the dirty dossier of unverified dirt on Donald Trump. Steele shared the dossier with numerous journalists, including David Corn and Michael Isikoff who ran stories using the dossier's disinformation.

 Wow.  Thanks for summing up your thesis here.  All throughout this thread there are posters showing that your conclusions are wrong.  You're picking a narrative based on distorting and disregarding facts.  

 Show some of the posters that show my conclusions are wrong.

nohero said:

DaveSchmidt said:
A few New Yorker excerpts (not in order):
...
A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,” and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth, which I don’t believe is likely.”
...

I guess Glenn has now been taken over or compromised by the Deep State.  Thank goodness Mr. Surovell is still out there to preach his truth to us.
 

 So far the only view that Glenn has expressed himself about the Mueller indictment is that indictments are accusations, not evidence.

And it's not that far fetched to consider that the allegations in the indictment were fabricated out of whole cloth, not by Mueller's team, but by the intelligence services that likely provided the allegations in the indictment.

Scott Ritter's critique is relevant here:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/indictment-of-12-russians-under-the-shiny-wrapping-a-political-act/

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

DaveSchmidt said:
A few New Yorker excerpts (not in order):
...
A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,” and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth, which I don’t believe is likely.”
...

I guess Glenn has now been taken over or compromised by the Deep State.  Thank goodness Mr. Surovell is still out there to preach his truth to us.
 

 So far the only view that Glenn has expressed himself about the Mueller indictment is that indictments are accusations, not evidence.
And it's not that far fetched to consider that the allegations in the indictment were fabricated out of whole cloth, not by Mueller's team, but by the intelligence services that likely provided the allegations in the indictment.

Scott Ritter's critique is relevant here:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/indictment-of-12-russians-under-the-shiny-wrapping-a-political-act/

 All I know is what Mr. Greenwald is quoted as saying.  He's commented on the article and hasn't disputed the quote.  As you well know -

paulsurovell said:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1034075434512777217
Glenn Greenwald:
"Given that the @NewYorker writer, Ian Parker, clearly (and explicitly) disagrees with many of my views, I thought this profile was largely fair. Some quotes are out-of-context & distorted. Some facts are wrong. But overall, it's a good faith examination"

 Mr. Ritter's critique is relevant, in that it addresses the issue, but neither authoritative nor accurate.  An indictment means that the prosecutor has gathered enough evidence to show probably cause that a crime has been committed.  Mr. Ritter's comments misinterpret the significance of what that means.

And if you're going to tell me that you need the context of Mr. Greenwald's quote to interpret it, that would be ironic considering how much of the anti-investigation argument is based on statements and facts taken out of context.

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:
Prior to the leaked emails HFA and the DNC hired Christopher Steele to collude with Russian government officials to create the dirty dossier of unverified dirt on Donald Trump. Steele shared the dossier with numerous journalists, including David Corn and Michael Isikoff who ran stories using the dossier's disinformation.

 Wow.  Thanks for summing up your thesis here.  All throughout this thread there are posters showing that your conclusions are wrong.  You're picking a narrative based on distorting and disregarding facts.  

 Show some of the posters that show my conclusions are wrong.

 No, I'm not going to comb through all the pages of this thread, and go back to other threads, to show you posts that you've already seen, and ignored at the time.  It would be a waste of time.  

A good read which recounts the circumstances of Steele's work, which doesn't support the conspiracy theory you're adopting, is Jane Mayer's article about him in The New Yorker.  If you're going to tell us that Jane Mayer (author of, among other works, "The Dark Side") is a "deep state" tool, that would be laughable.  Some portions:

In the spring of 2016, Orbis Business Intelligence—a small investigative-research firm that Steele and a partner had founded, in 2009, after leaving M.I.6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service—had agreed to do opposition research on Trump’s murky relationship with Russia. Under the arrangement, Orbis was a subcontractor working for Fusion GPS, a private research firm in Washington. Fusion, in turn, had been contracted by a law firm, Perkins Coie, which represented both Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Several months after Steele signed the deal, he learned that, through this chain, his research was being jointly subsidized by the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. In all, Steele was paid a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars for his work.

Indeed, on January 18th, the staff of Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, produced a report purporting to show that the real conspiracy revolved around Hillary Clinton. “The truth,” Nunes said, is that Clinton “colluded with the Russians to get dirt on Trump, to feed it to the F.B.I. to open up an investigation into the other campaign.” Glenn Kessler, who writes the nonpartisan Fact Checker blog at the Washington Post, awarded Nunes’s statement four Pinocchios—his rating for an outright lie. “There is no evidence that Clinton was involved in Steele’s reports or worked with Russian entities to feed information to Steele,” Kessler wrote.

paulsurovell said:

 So far the only view that Glenn has expressed himself about the Mueller indictment is that indictments are accusations, not evidence.

The article uses the word evidence and Greenwald has clearly expressed that the profile is fair and representative of his views. You are wrong.

dave23 said:

paulsurovell said:

 So far the only view that Glenn has expressed himself about the Mueller indictment is that indictments are accusations, not evidence.

The article uses the word evidence and Greenwald has clearly expressed that the profile is fair and representative of his views. You are wrong.

More specifically, Ian Parker uses the word evidence, and chose to paraphrase Greenwald at the key moment. Why? And given that Greenwald himself expressed that “some quotes are out-of-context & distorted,” who’s to say this wasn’t one of those instances?

I’m sorry, this is 911. What was your emergency again?

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:
Prior to the leaked emails HFA and the DNC hired Christopher Steele to collude with Russian government officials to create the dirty dossier of unverified dirt on Donald Trump. Steele shared the dossier with numerous journalists, including David Corn and Michael Isikoff who ran stories using the dossier's disinformation.

 Wow.  Thanks for summing up your thesis here.  All throughout this thread there are posters showing that your conclusions are wrong.  You're picking a narrative based on distorting and disregarding facts.  

 Show some of the posters that show my conclusions are wrong.

 No, I'm not going to comb through all the pages of this thread, and go back to other threads, to show you posts that you've already seen, and ignored at the time.  It would be a waste of time.  

Once again you make an accusation that you can't back up. 

DaveSchmidt said:

I’m sorry, this is 911. What was your emergency again?

 I'm trapped in a maze of my own making.

Anybody see this? Starts at 8:52.

Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

dave23 said:
Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

But it was mentioned 14 times in the Steele dossier so he must have been there, right?

Davis also says that Cohen's testimony that Trump Sr. didn't know about the Trump Tower meeting was accurate.

Does anyone know if Ari, Chris, Rachel, Chris or Lawrence played this excerpt from their own network?

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

No, I'm not going to comb through all the pages of this thread, and go back to other threads, to show you posts that you've already seen, and ignored at the time.  It would be a waste of time.  

Once again you make an accusation that you can't back up.

 You edited my post, to take out the point of my argument, just so you could attack it.

If you have left everything in, you would have the Jane Mayer quotes which debunk the theory you love about Hillary hiring Steel to collude with Russian officials.  I find her more authoritative than the Devin Nunes and Hannity Trumpist talking points you rely on.

And for what it's worth, you can find the posts that you've already seen, if you just search for your own statements about the topic.  Here are a few responses to you.

Not to mention the irony that you write about someone who is not you: "Once again you make an accusation that you can't back up."  That sentence describes your entire oeuvre on this thread.

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:
Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

But it was mentioned 14 times in the Steele dossier so he must have been there, right?

Apparently you've again forgotten what the dossier was and was not.

Am I to take from your diversion that you don't agree with Greenwald anymore?

dave23 said:

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:
Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

But it was mentioned 14 times in the Steele dossier so he must have been there, right?

Apparently you've again forgotten what the dossier was and was not.
Am I to take from your diversion that you don't agree with Greenwald anymore?

 The 14 false references tells you what the dossier was and it tells you who Steele and Fusion GPS are.

No diversion on Greenwald. I addressed it. I generally agree with what Glenn says (not what others say he has said).

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:
Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

But it was mentioned 14 times in the Steele dossier so he must have been there, right?

Apparently you've again forgotten what the dossier was and was not.
Am I to take from your diversion that you don't agree with Greenwald anymore?

 The 14 false references tells you what the dossier was and it tells you who Steele and Fusion GPS are.
No diversion on Greenwald. I addressed it. I generally agree with what Glenn says (not what others say he has said).

Here is what Micha Lee says in The Intercept:

"ON FRIDAY, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as part of his investigation into interference with the 2016 presidential election, charged 12 Russian military intelligence officers with conducting “large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The indictment contains a surprising amount of technical information about alleged Russian cyberattacks against a range of U.S. political targets, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, members of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Illinois (probably) State Board of Elections, and an American election vendor, apparently VR Systems, and its government customers.

While the indictment only describes the U.S. government’s charges in this case, the specific technical evidence presented is compelling and paints by far the most detailed and plausible picture yet of what exactly occurred in 2016.

It also sheds light on what the U.S. government is capable of doing when it investigates cyberattacks, as well as how Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU, allegedly conducted the attacks — which it denies — and what operational security mistakes they made. Here are what I find to be the most compelling takeaways from the indictment." 

The rest of the article is here: 

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/18/mueller-indictment-russian-hackers/

eta - It's probably a safe bet that one of the people Greenwald talked to was Micha Lee: 

"A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,” and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth, which I don’t believe is likely.”

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:
Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

But it was mentioned 14 times in the Steele dossier so he must have been there, right?

Apparently you've again forgotten what the dossier was and was not.
Am I to take from your diversion that you don't agree with Greenwald anymore?

 The 14 false references tells you what the dossier was and it tells you who Steele and Fusion GPS are.

There weren't 14 mentions of Cohen's being in Prague. Fourteen is the number of times Cohen's name appears in the details of Steele's reports. The dossier contains 17 reports; Cohen is mentioned in four (and in one of those only peripherally).

An example: "Speaking in confidence to a longstanding compatriot friend in mid-October 2016, a Kremlin insider highlighted the importance of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael COHEN, in the ongoing secret liaison relationship between the New York tycoon's campaign and the Russian leadership. COHEN’s role had grown following the departure of Paul Manafort as campaign manager in August 2016. Prior to that Manafort had led for the Trump side."

That's two of the 14 right there.

DaveSchmidt said:

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:
Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

But it was mentioned 14 times in the Steele dossier so he must have been there, right?

Apparently you've again forgotten what the dossier was and was not.
Am I to take from your diversion that you don't agree with Greenwald anymore?

 The 14 false references tells you what the dossier was and it tells you who Steele and Fusion GPS are.

There weren't 14 mentions of Cohen's being in Prague. Fourteen is the number of times Cohen's name appears in the details of Steele's reports. The dossier contains 17 reports; Cohen is mentioned in four (and in one of those only peripherally).
An example: "Speaking in confidence to a longstanding compatriot friend in mid-October 2016, a Kremlin insider highlighted the importance of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael COHEN, in the ongoing secret liaison relationship between the New York tycoon's campaign and the Russian leadership. COHEN’s role had grown following the departure of Paul Manafort as campaign manager in August 2016. Prior to that Manafort had led for the Trump side."
That's two of the 14 right there.

Has this been verified?

Aside: Note the term "tycoon" referring to Trump re: Steele emails with Ohr.

cramer said:

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:

paulsurovell said:

dave23 said:
Admittedly one of your better efforts to change the subject. But sounds like his lawyer thinks he was never in Prague.

But it was mentioned 14 times in the Steele dossier so he must have been there, right?

Apparently you've again forgotten what the dossier was and was not.
Am I to take from your diversion that you don't agree with Greenwald anymore?

 The 14 false references tells you what the dossier was and it tells you who Steele and Fusion GPS are.
No diversion on Greenwald. I addressed it. I generally agree with what Glenn says (not what others say he has said).

Here is what Micha Lee says in The Intercept:
"ON FRIDAY, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as part of his investigation into interference with the 2016 presidential election, charged 12 Russian military intelligence officers with conducting “large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The indictment contains a surprising amount of technical information about alleged Russian cyberattacks against a range of U.S. political targets, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, members of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Illinois (probably) State Board of Elections, and an American election vendor, apparently VR Systems, and its government customers.
While the indictment only describes the U.S. government’s charges in this case, the specific technical evidence presented is compelling and paints by far the most detailed and plausible picture yet of what exactly occurred in 2016.
It also sheds light on what the U.S. government is capable of doing when it investigates cyberattacks, as well as how Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU, allegedly conducted the attacks — which it denies — and what operational security mistakes they made. Here are what I find to be the most compelling takeaways from the indictment." 
The rest of the article is here: 
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/18/mueller-indictment-russian-hackers/

eta - It's probably a safe bet that one of the people Greenwald talked to was Micha Lee: 
"A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,” and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth, which I don’t believe is likely.”
 

 Sounds like your "safe bets" that Thomas Drake resigned from VIPS and Bill Binney retracted his theory of DNC leaks, not hacks.

Paul - You're really not worth it. 

paulsurovell said:

 The 14 false references tells you what the dossier was and it tells you who Steele and Fusion GPS are.
No diversion on Greenwald. I addressed it. I generally agree with what Glenn says (not what others say he has said).

You agree with Greenwald's assessment that Mueller indictment was not a work of fiction?

So when the dossier says, "Kremlin insider reports Trump lawyer secret meeting with 3 Kremlin officials...," you are saying that there is no Kremlin insider?