Secret CIA source claims Russia rigged 2016 election

You can understand why they did what they did, right?

I mean, this ain’t ancient history here. You had Trump and his cronies openly question the election and voting process going in. Trump refusing to commit – in a debate – that he’d recognize the results of the election as legitimate. Hell, even after the election, you had Trump and friends inventing millions of illegal voters without any factual basis for that.

If these questions come out beforehand and Hillary wins (and as a reminder, she won the popular vote by 3 million votes, so this wasn’t a foolish expectation), she starts her term with this built-in cloud of legitimacy, foisted on her incoming administration by the previous president and member of her party.

If they knew Trump was going to win, they’d have spoken up. Without that information, it’s a roll of the dice.

It would still have been better. They knew they had to take the medicine. But they chose not to, because it would taste awful. There was already a very real possibility that the election was compromised at that point.

The analogy here is not wanting to talk to your kids about sex, because they might start having it. Instead, your teenage daughter gets pregnant.

The whole thing was full of decisions that look terrible in hindsight. For example, Comey releasing the memo to Congress about the Hillary email investigation was done because at the time, Comey didn’t want to seem like he was favoring either side. He just didn’t understand the political storm his memo would cause when it got out to the media.

That analogy doesn’t really work because it assumes that nothing was ever going to be done regarding the Russia hacks, and that simply wasn’t the case at all. It wasn’t a parent not wanting to talk, but rather a parent seeing the best time and waiting for it, and having a worst case scenario develop.

Had Clinton won, the nonstop drumbeat on the right about illegal voters and the need for even more draconian voter suppression methods would be drowning out any attempts to govern with a hostile congress.

There’s another element to this that folks are kind of forgetting.

We all knew that Russia was hacking shit prior to the election, and trying to get Trump elected.

I mean, some folks denied it… but those folks deny it even now. We freaking KNEW it was happening prior to November. There wasn’t anything that Obama was gonna be able to do to change folks’ perceptions of it.

It’s like the folks who smoke cigarettes for decades and then get cancer and say, “Why did we let the cigarette companies sell these to me!!!”

As someone who smoked for years, I can say with absolute certainty that fucking everyone who smokes cigarettes knows they are bad for you. LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE US KNOWS THIS. Education hasn’t been an issue in this regard for ages… it’s the social stigma of smoking which has eventually started breaking the habit of society.

The same thing happened with the Russia hacking crap. We all knew it was going on.

Maybe Trump did all that for show and he already knew the hacking was going on for his favor. He can act like he doesn’t believe in the election he knows is rig pretty easily enough. The man is a con artist.

But they (meaning the federal government) still have not told their children (the public) about any of this, have they? Pretty much everything we know is because of leaks at this point…at least up until Comey’s public testimony.

Absolutely it would but on the bright side maybe what we’re going through now will benefit the country in the long run if it means the Trump years will result in the GOP getting annihilated in '18 and '20. Wishful thinking on my part but we must get these clowns out of office and we must put laws on the books to prevent future Trumps from ever getting to close to the White House again.

Sessions’ testimony so far? A big bag of shit.

Nope. The FBI officially confirmed an ongoing investigation of Russian interference and collusion with members of the Trump campaign on March 20th, two and a half weeks before Comey was fired.

And hell, long before that the Obama Administration, on its way out said there was enough evidence of Russian attempts to meddle in the electoral process that they hit Russia with a new wave of sanctions. Back in December.

Heh, they are actually forcing Sessions to invoke executive privilege instead of just making shit up.

Sessions is stonewalling based on it being ‘inappropriate’ to comment. This… doesn’t seem to be going down well.

Wow, they just straight up said that Sessions is obstructing the congressional investigation.

And the result will be…? Nothing.

Sure would like to know what Admiral Rogers said last night

What was the context for mentioning Roger’s testimony in Closed session just now? It seemed to come out of nowhere.

Mr. Blunt just seems to be answering his own questions. Sessions doesn’t even need to be there.