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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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WASHINGTON — In the days before the 2016 election, Donald J. Trump expressed “great respect” for the “courage” of the F.B.I. and Justice Department for reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Sixteen months later, he has changed his mind.
The agencies have been “disgraceful” and “should be ashamed,” President Trump declared Friday. Under attack by the president, the deputy F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, was pushed out in recent days. Mr. Trump has hinted that he may fire the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein. And his aides fear that Christopher A. Wray, his F.B.I. director, may resign over the dispute with the bureau, although associates doubt it.
The war between the president and the nation’s law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times. With a special counsel investigating whether his campaign collaborated with Russia in 2016 and whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in 2017, the president has engaged in a scorched-earth assault on the pillars of the criminal justice system in a way that no other occupant of the White House has done.
Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page bragged that he was an adviser to the Kremlin in a letter obtained by TIME that raises new questions about the extent of Page’s contacts with the Russian government over the years.
The letter, dated Aug. 25, 2013, was sent by Page to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript he had submitted for publication, according to an editor who worked with Page.
“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” the letter reads.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Friday delivered a subtle but stinging rebuke to House Republicans over their move to release a classified memo alleging misconduct at the FBI, urging President Donald Trump and other Republicans to stop "manufacturing partisan sideshows" that benefit Russia.
The statement from McCain, who is away from Washington undergoing treatment for brain cancer, came minutes after Trump signed off on the release of the memo crafted by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. McCain directly connected his fellow Republicans' campaign to undercut the FBI with Russian President Vladimir Putin's meddling in the 2016 election.
"The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests — no party's, no president's, only Putin's," McCain said.
A longtime Russia hawk who helped shape a bipartisan package of sanctions against Moscow last year, McCain added that "Special Counsel [Robert] Mueller's investigation must proceed unimpeded."
The theme of high-level corruption, which runs throughout his work, lies at the heart of Dirty Money, a six-part series he has produced for Netflix.
The final film in the series focuses on Trump, who has been covered endlessly over the past couple of years. What more was there to add?
The essence of Trump’s appeal was that he’s a great businessman, so therefore he’ll be a great president. We thought, OK then, let’s take a focused look at what he was like as a businessman.
Not so great, it turns out…
He was an absolutely terrible businessman. Every business he touched withered and died and he would always leave someone else holding the bag. You look at the trail of slime he left behind and just shake your head and wonder.
Why do you think people are still buying into him?
It’s something I dealt with in my film about Scientology: some people just have the need to believe in Trump. They come to feel that he represents part of their character. No matter how much evidence you present to them about what a bad guy this is, they don’t want to hear it, because somehow an attack on Trump is an attack on them.
Can you imagine him staying the course?
Yes I can. A similar thing happened in Russia when Putin rose to power: everybody mocked him as some small apparatchik who wasn’t going to stand the test of time. But power has a way of solidifying.
Russian bots and their American allies gamed social media to put a flawed intelligence document atop the political agenda. That should alarm us.
On Tuesday morning — the day after the House Intelligence Committee voted along partisan lines to send Rep. Devin Nunes’ memo, alleging abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to President Trump for declassification — presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway was confronted with the idea that Russian trolls were promoting the #releasethememo hashtag online.
She was offended. Russian trolls, she told a television interviewer, “have nothing to do with releasing the memo — that was a vote of the intelligence committee.” But her assertion is incorrect. The vote marked the culmination of a targeted, 11-day information operation that was amplified by computational propaganda techniques and aimed to change both public perceptions and the behavior of American lawmakers.
And it worked. By the time the memo got to the president, its release was a forgone conclusion — even before he had read it.
This bears repeating: Computational propaganda — defined as “the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior” — has been used, successfully, to manipulate the perceptions of the American public and the actions of elected officials.
The analysis below, conducted by our team from the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier, shows that the #releasethememo campaign was fueled by, and likely originated from, computational propaganda. It is critical that we understand how this was done and what it means for the future of American democracy.
The great philosopher of liberalism noted where authoritarianism starts:
“The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human.” — Karl Popper, Chapter 10: The Open Society
Yet that is where we are, spurning truth for the doomed comfort of tribe.
“The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human.” — Karl Popper, Chapter 10: The Open Society
Yet that is where we are, spurning truth for the doomed comfort of tribe.
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