This isn't a scientific experiment. Proof can be circumstantial. There are never full facts anywhere, nor in a courtroom and not in spying.

If a crime is committed, you need to look at who had the motive, the means and the MO that was used in the crime.

I don't think anyone is going to do anything until Obama's investigation is over.

Doesn't stop us from looking at what's there and what level of credibility it has over the idiot Assange.

"I had tea with the person who did the hacking and he wasn't Russian." Hahaha. Good one.

The only way that they can mess about with the outcome of an election is if they hacked the actual voting machines.
If what they did was hack some emails and the information in those emails wasn't doctored, then it would be up to the American public to consider the content of them which wouldn't have been spun to them by anyone. It would be cold dry first hand info straight from the horse's mouth.

So what Clinton and Co. are really bothered about is that the public have had access to their private inner workings and true actions which may not accord with their public presentation. In other words the public were privy to the truth. And they don't like it. They think it's wrong for the public to have an informed decision based on truth.
By pursuing this to the extent that they are it demonstrates that this is exactly what they think. Bad for the public to know the truth, but good to cover the truth up and shroud it with political rhetoric. And they expect the public to be obediently complaint to their way of thinking.

In one of the emails it was revealed that they intended to conspire to make the public 'unaware and complaint'. But the problem was apparently that the public so far is unaware, but not exactly complaint, which was a problem they needed to address which wasn't a poll led solution (whatever that means). Seriously. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's actual evidence of a conspiracy using their own words.
There is a very interesting nugget in there which may be missed. And that is that at the time this email was written they knew full well that the public were already not on side, and of course this was before these emails had been released. Which begs the question how much affect did these emails really have on the public if within the emails themselves they were already talking about there being a problem that they weren't convincing the public anyway?

This is not a case where it should be seen that spying is a good thing, but it's a situation where it demonstrates that other things need to be addressed, reformed, and overhauled when it comes to transparency and honesty with the American public.
Because if in the emails there was nothing of interest there then they would have had little bearing on what the public think. They would have thought that there's nothing to see here so would move on. But if the content of the emails was verbatim then the American public had just cause to not support that party.

That's not true at all in law. You don't have to directly steal votes to influence an election, just as you don't have to forge a will to influence the writer of it.

It's delusional to think that politics will ever be transparent. That is such an overused word. It's also possible to be transparently evil and get away with it.

'If' the emails were verbatim? How about the experts who would be shocked if they were NOT altered?

Don't forget it wasn't the emails. It was the worse things to come, that never came.

So yeah in politics people manipulate. My mother was county chairwoman going to run for state. Things definitely happened in both parties. Fairness is not to point the finger to one, obscuring the real issues.

In law?

Everything influences the way the people think. The question is how can you quantify how much anything affects anything else?
We had public figures foreign to America stating why Trump was evil incarnate. The wave of foreign influence in support of Hillary Clinton was incredible. We have had first hand experience of that with the British media.

There were so many variables involved, as they would be with any election. Only this time it felt more extreme. So if Trump's critics are trying to somehow undermine the result based on something like this then Donald Trump would surely have had grounds to complain had he lost due to so many 'deplorable' tricks used against him, including the campaigning on foreign shores by so many who were cheerleading Hillary Clinton.

Everything which was humanly possible was thrown at Trump to derail his campaign. From foreign shores as well as on home soil. Questionable stuff in a legal sense too such as the sexual assault claims, which vanished into thin air. So for Clinton and co. to be making this complaint about a foreign influence affecting the result of the election is risible. They're crying over split milk because they lost and couldn't comprehend the possibility of losing. To be fair I couldn't comprehend it either.

I find all this to be very uncomfortable, because we're also seeing it after the result of Brexit too. People who can't accept the result of a vote and are getting dangerously very close to corrupting the spirit of democracy and trying to overturn it.
Clinton herself said that if Trump questioned the result of the vote it would be a very dangerous attack on democracy.
And here we are, she's doing the exact same thing she lambasted Trump for should he have lost.

LOL

My work here is done

and you said that they leaked dirt on the Democrats , but after repeatedly replying to me you still haven't produced any examples of what this 'dirt' was .

it's a common tactic you use - you make some claim then when asked for evidence you say we should go and find it , it's not up to me to produce evidence to back up your claims it's up to you

.

.

Yes, well that's what you'd call a conspiracy theory.
I know that you probably won't like to see it like that, but I don't see the term as necessarily derogatory.
You may be right though, conspiracy theories are sometimes true. The problem with them though is that until they have been proven then they are still a theory.

The evidence you're presenting to convince people with is several posts saying the MI6 say this, and expert says that, a news article says it's true, lots of consensus from other people which agree.
This isn't evidence. It's hearsay. It's conspiracy theory. It's about people's opinions rather than consisting of substantiated evidence or facts.

Having said that the theory is plausible though. Unless someone can convince me otherwise.
I think it's plausible that Russia may have hacked the emails. Was it to influence the result of the election? Well as I have said before lots of foreign entities have tried to influence the election in Clinton's favour. I don't see any criticism of that. Certainly not at the time when absolutely no one had a problem telling other people that Trump is literally Hitler. And as I have also said, how do you quantify something like this when so many different variable were already in play?
Can we accuse the American media of colluding with the Democratic party with the intention of securing a result for her, and could we accuse their journalistic practices of using what could be described as little more than embedded journalists who never asked challenging question of Hillary Clinton?

But yes, I can imagine that in one respect I can see how Russia may have benefited. And that would be that they may have dodged a bullet by Hillary Clinton not becoming president. As she was warmongering against them for months.
But apart from that I don't really see any other reason. It's not going to make a huge amount of difference to them in most other ways other than the world possibly being a little safer than if Clinton won.

But I think it's important to examine the premise from which the accusation is made and see if there are faults with it. For example, it assumes that Russia have been spying on America for the purposes of this election. What, like as if Russia have only just started spying on America. Like it's a precedent, and they're new to this? Like they probably don't spy all the time anyway? Like the KGB didn't even exist and they just decided to have a go at this spying thing?
No, if they did hack the emails, which I'm not saying they definitely did or didn't, it is a flawed premise from the start to assume that they haven't been trying to hack into secrets for years. There's a lot of speculation that Russia have only been trying to hack into secrets only for the purpose of this election and its result.
But realistically we'd have to accept that Russia are not exactly new to this spying game. Neither are the USA, who neither should we be surprised if it came to light that they have an equivalent counterintelligence program. Why wouldn't they? These two countries will have been trying to spy on each other for decades.

We are expected to take it on face value from them that Russia have been spying on America only for the purposes of this election and trying to hack into secrets this time only. Like they wouldn't do it at any other time. And that's only IF they are responsible.
No, I don't buy that. I think it would be more realistic to assume that if they did hack into the emails then it would be par for the course and they would always be trying to hack into servers with or without an election. If they did get hold of these emails I think that it was probably more opportunistic and in a wider sense where they would just try and get what they can, anything. Rather than it necessarily being about a plan to influence the election, as they wouldn't have been certain what information they'd get hold of until they'd already obtained it.
I think Clinton is such an egocentric power obsessed narcissist that she thinks everything is about her.

Thank god that you read different news sources then.

You say that Obama has been about avoiding conflict but a week after he won his Nobel Peace prize he commissioned the production of a whole lot more nuclear weapons, and he carried out a covert war using drone strikes. Obama is all about presentation, but he's as into war as his predecessor was, only he like to pretend that he's somehow different and presents a benign image to the public.

Did Bollywood actually say this?! Haha.

The cognitive dissonance is strong in him...

She said that cyber attacks should be considered just like any other attack and could be met with a military response.
I didn't think that I was overstating anything, I was just going by what she said herself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz_dZ2SlPgw

I was looking for some citations from some political pundits and experts to interpret what she was saying for me but I couldn't find any, so sorry about that.

She's been tubthumping for months now about Russia, and quite frankly it's terrifying.
Whatever you thought of Obama I think you should be thankful that this maniac didn't get into office.

I say that being skeptical about Trump, because although I'm relieved that he won rather than Clinton I'm not stupid. I'm not naive enough to think it's not possible that he will be absorbed into whatever machine functions in Washington. The President is only one aspect of government and I'm not fully aware of the forces that work behind the scenes. So whatever the intention was with Russia it doesn't necessarily mean that the same plan might not be going ahead anyway. It remains to be seen what happens with Trump.

The RNC got hacked did they? I wasn't aware of that.
What does that have to do with anything?

I don't think that way at all. I want to keep the form of national health care, have cleaner air, programs for the poor, not turn issues over to the states.

Did he involve us in WW? No certainly not. The 'other side' blamed him for being too accommodating. Been criticized for no boots on the ground

Defense spending is a way to avoid war. You have a la la land idea that the US is Switzerland. Just do nothing and people in the world will hold hands and sing.

That's exactly what I suggested in a previous post a short while ago before I read your post. That there is no evidence of intent even if Russia did hack the emails. That aspect is pure conjecture. And as I said, what is there to suggest that their hacking wasn't any different to what their intelligence agency may already do as standard practice anyway, and has always done, like other governments probably do? They don't know what they're going to find until they find it.

I gave a link to the evidence so you don't have to keep saying no evidence.

If you read the link above, it says the agency concurs with the CIA. Just that it was thought to compromise Hillary, not sure to push Trump. 16 other agencies think so.

We'd better close the thread then. Debate is over.

Maybe he thinks what the intelligence agencies found was solid.

The whole point of the thread is about the alleged spying being connected to the outcome of the presidential election.
If that isn't 'nailed down' then as far as anyone's concerned it's bullshit until proven otherwise.

All the democrats needed to do for a walkover was to pick a candidate without skeletons in their closet, then all the hacking in the world couldn't have influenced a thing. How it surfaced is largely irrelevant, that Clinton had such a dubious history is the fundamental problem.

Unless the entire system is so corrupt in the US that finding a 'clean' candidate was an impossibility, of course...

Clinton won the popular vote. The issue is that Democrats are grouped in the cities and Republicans are in the suburban and rural areas. Democrats need to tailor their message to uneducated rural voters.

If you break down the votes based on education / geography you get a pretty clear picture of what went wrong. Trump has a populist message that preyed on the grievances of poorly-educated whites.

Really give me the name of a candidate wiho's pure. Who lied less than Hillary.

Monday morning quarter backing.

So you don't think compromising Hillary and implying they had stuff on her they didn't produce yet, didn't affect the outcome of the election?

How is that?

Once again I'm not here to educate you about what was in the emails. Something you could easily google.

So you must think people aren't convicted on circumstantial evidence every day of the week.

Or you think we're talking about the scientific method. Or something.

Well that was rather my implied point, wasn't it? The whole system is corrupt already, so you really can't complain about other people trying to subvert it.



No idea what this means. Not a US forum, remember...

There's a difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy. Conspiracy theory is a derogatory term. It is used where the covert act goes against accepted understanding. In this case the accepted understanding is that Russia did hack the emails.

This isn't a court of law, so hearsay doesn't apply. This is about our takes on the news. I'd need someone in a responsible position to show that the Dems made this up, to believe it's not as the CIA said. Before the Iraq war there were many who did speak out.

The world being a little safer if Clinton won, isn't an advantage?

You're totally overlooking that Hillary was deliberately compromised. Not just personal emails but the suggestion by Assange that more was to come. That's hardly the usual spying.