Secret CIA source claims Russia rigged 2016 election

This is interesting:

Privately, according to two sources, Trump attorneys suggested that a strategy for dealing with the issue could be for Trump to admit to having affairs with women and paying hush money to them for years. That way, he could assert that the payments to Daniels and McDougal were normal business—not campaign donations meant to influence the 2016 election. Trump, according to the sources, rejected this advice. “It was because of Melania,” one source said.

“This is back to being a one-man show, and everyone is on the outside looking in.”

It was never anything but this. Any perception that they had control was a delusion.

this is interesting - though I can see (per above discussion) that a whistle-blowing report could be made public regardless:

It’s if Republicans keep the House — and there’s no such subpoena — that the McKeever decision could take on added importance. At issue is a federal court rule that governs grand jury secrecy and lays out several exceptions permitting disclosures. There is no exemption in the rule that explicitly authorizes a report to the public or to Congress for potential use in impeachment proceedings.

The law used to appoint independent counsels in the 1980s and 1990s had a provision for such a report to Congress and was the mechanism used for the 1998 report that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

However, that law expired in 1999. Mueller was appointed under Justice Department regulations that are similar to the earlier statute, but there’s no provision in those rules that ensures secret grand jury testimony can be made public, as there was under the old independent counsel law.

“I pay off my mistresses all the time” is certainly an interesting defense, if not a good one.

Yeah, ten years after the fact and right before the election is a COMPLETE coincidence.

And this differs from before the defections how?

Wild speculation: Mueller wanted Manafort to plead to something that fingered the oligarchs and Manafort backed out because he likes to keep his internal organs on the inside.

Cue Manafort pardon in 3…2…1…

Remember earlier this month how breathlessly Politico and other news sites reported that teens at a hacker conference had easily penetrated state election sites?

Yeah, turns out that was complete bullshit.

Instead, students were working with look-alikes created for the event that had vulnerabilities they were coached to find. Organizers provided them with cheat sheets, and adults walked the students through the challenges they would encounter.

Josh Franklin, an elections expert formerly at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a speaker at Def Con, called the websites “fake.”

“When I learned that they were not using exact copies and pains hadn’t been taken to more properly replicate the underlying infrastructure, I was definitely saddened,” Franklin said.

Also worth noting is something that was missed in the reporting: no state election site TABULATES votes on a system connected to the internet. In other words, if you were in theory able to hack the Ohio state election site and changed vote counts and names – you’d be doing that on the surface reporting page, but not on the official record, and that discrepancy would show in the routine audits conducted precinct by precinct by the Secretary of State’s office, monitored by watchers from both parties.

Franklin and David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also pointed out that while state election websites report voting results, they do not actually tabulate votes. This information is kept separately and would not be affected if hackers got into sites that display vote totals.

“It would be lunacy to directly connect the election management system, of which the tabulation system is a part of, to the internet,” Franklin said.

Election hacking and voting interference are both serious issues. But poor reporting as was done in these stories does no one any favors.

Ooh dear. That’s unfortunate. I mean it’s good teens didn’t hack it, but this is not a good luck for the media where our president says twenty times a day how fake they are.

I bet he wanted to meet with his British counterpart, Mr. Bean.

So Trump announces today that McGahn will resign as White House Counsel. Pardon countdown advances.

And Giuliani is being paid to undermine the State Department

https://www.politico.eu/article/rudy-giuliani-trump-lawyer-paid-to-criticize-romanian-anti-corruption-drive-klaus-iohannis/

Pretty sure he called that fake news not more than a week or two ago.

Having to fire someone is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my professional life, and I cannot imagine doing such a thing in such a profoundly unprofessional and disrespectful way as Trump has now done multiple times.

He is bad at literally all aspects of existence as a professional. The idea that anyone ever touted his business acumen is mind blowing, as anyone with even the barest shred of experience or competence in business looks at stuff like this and knows it’s not something any real person would do.

First time I had to do it I had like a small emotional breakdown. I’ve had to do it a few times since and it’s never easy, I always feel like crap.

Trump is a monster.

I felt like shit for a week after just calling someone to tell them they didn’t get a job. I can’t even imagine what happens when I have to fire someone someday.

He’s not just a monster, he’s a coward.

It’s not like he does this and has no emotional connection. He doesn’t even do it personally. He does it via fucking twitter. He’s afraid to actually face people directly and have real confrontation. He’s a total coward in all things.