What we need is someone to put together the whole “Grand Conspiracy” for us, like Sean Hannity would…if he were a liberal. Something over-arching, ridiculous and yet plausible. The only person we know for sure is working on connecting the dots, is Robert Mueller and unfortunately he’s not going to show his work any time soon. Rachel Maddow does a good job in collecting (not connecting) the “dots” but her job never was to attempt to connect them into a seamless if irrational “Grand Conspiracy.”
We need to have working theories though, and we need them now because:
- Trump’s apparent obstruction is heating up and we need to know why.
- The midterm elections are approaching and we’ve done zero to ensure their safety.
We assume there is something of value being exchanged between Trump (and associates) and the Kremlin. Problem is, we don’t truly know where and when the deal originates. We assume there must be something hinged upon financing/financial deals earlier in the 2000’s, but we can’t point to anything in particular. We assume there is some compromising information generated by the Russians that they dangle over Trump and maybe that peepee tape does exist or something similar. I’ve maintained all along, I believe the Russians have something in the bag and we won’t know about it unless it appears Trump will be impeached before the midterms, or more likely they will release something through third parties for the 2020 election to throw it into complete chaos, unless Trump is still a useful stooge. There’s no real reason to believe that, the only reason it exists in my mind is because there has to be something.
Something of value is being exchanged.
In this necessary assumption, even if we don’t know what is it’s origination, we can start to tally what proceeded to be exchanged.
for Russia: Changing the Republican platform to go soft on the Russians at the Republican convention.
for Trump: release DNC emails through WikiLeaks.
for Trump: active Russian interference in social media to tarnish the Clinton Campaign.
for Russia: ceding involvement in Syria entirely to the Russian sphere of influence.
for Russia: promised return of their US compounds in exchange for nothing.
for Russia: purposefully not imposing new US sanctions.
I’m sure I’m missing some points, but it’s clear something is being exchanged. The real question is, ultimately what is the purpose? Where is this going?
For Trump himself, it’s not difficult to deduce he wants ultimate power to do as he pleases and any means to that end is acceptable. Any means. Total power isn’t going to happen in a two year time frame. Trump wouldn’t be able to imagine how long it takes, but certainly he knows that two years is not enough. Clearly he needs to get past a midterm and a re-election. For Trump, there is also the need to protect against the release of the “original sin” regarding Russia. I wish we knew what this was. Maybe Mueller has pinpointed where this all starts…God I hope so.
I think it is at this point, that the Kremlin’s ultimate desire and Trump’s narcissism intersect. Control over the electorate. Control over manipulating the national narrative and if necessary, manipulating election results.
Russian attempts to actually hack our election systems were purely exploratory in the 2016 election. They just wanted to see what the separate systems looked like and in what ways it may be possible to hack them in the future. To this point, nothing has been done with our physical systems to safeguard them for the 2018 midterms, so we’re flying into the midterms blind.
Outside of physical election systems, there certainly had been an attempt to collect and mine data on the electorate both in the 2016 election through Cambridge Analytica and directly afterwards from the Trump administration in their Election Integrity Commission. Also to this end, it is worth noting Trump’s hiring of Thomas Brunell to manipulate federal census data for 2020.
“The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has requested that a data analytics company called Cambridge Analytica turn over internal documents as part of its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.”
Jared Kushner is responsible for bringing Cambridge Analytica in to the Trump campaign and Steve Bannon is a former VP of that company as well.
What, if any of the newly mined information has been shared by the Trump administration with the Russians, we don’t know. It is super creepy that some of the meetings between the Trump administration and the Russians, secret or otherwise, we wouldn’t even know about, except for the Russian’s state run media reports on the fact of their occurrence.
How many meetings have there been that we don’t know about? What is also super creepy is the number of Russian connected folks that ended up in the Trump administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials
If we go back to the selection process for members of the forthcoming Trump administration, the transition team was comprised of corporate insiders and lobbying firms. 53 of the 75 original transition team members would have had ulterior motives for their selections. Seriously, studying this list of people could generate a big ol’ tome of questionable involvement. It certainly wasn’t a sign of “draining the swamp,” quite the contrary. what we ended up with in the administration, was a ragtag gaggle of idiots, ideologues, and those with Russian connections.
I want to look at just one influential member of the executive transition team whom certainly would have ulterior motives for any of his candidates to serve in the executive branch of the federal government: Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel was in the final executive transition team of 20 people.
“Trump’s team contacted Nunes the day after the election and soon after announced his appointment to the executive committee, along with three of Trump’s adult children, five other House Republicans and California entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, among others.”
His is a complicated story of involvement with the US federal government. Let’s just try to summarize it with this:
“Donald Trump has inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. But the outlook is even worse considering Trump’s vast preference for private sector expertise and new strategic friendship with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whose controversial (and opaque) company Palantir has long sought to sell governments an unmatched power to sift and exploit information of any kind.”
Thiel’s company Palantir is pretty damned secretive, as you would expect it to be considering what it sells. It’s kinda frightening what they have managed to create, one component of which is XKEYSCORE.
“According to Snowden documents published by The Guardian in 2013, XKEYSCORE is by the NSA’s own admission its “widest reaching” program, capturing “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” A subsequent report by The Intercept showed that XKEYSCORE’s “collected communications not only include emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.” For the NSA and its global partners, XKEYSCORE makes all of this as searchable as a hotel reservation site.”
Now, there’s no reason to assume Thiel’s company in and of itself would double deal with US interests, but there is every reason to believe that Trump might have some ideas about it’s usage. Thiel wants money; Trump want’s unbridled power.
What I’m concluding, is that by design, Trump’s interests and Russian interests intersect with control of the electorate and election process. We know the Russians want to interfere with the US election process. What we’re missing is: this isn’t short term. Their plans extend well beyond the life-cycle of their convenient arrangement with the useful idiot Trump.
Trump likewise is interested in taking whatever steps are necessary to consolidate his power, including manipulation of data to ensure his re-election and control the National narrative so that he may be appropriately adored. He has tools in place to do just that.
What we do not know yet, is the original sin.
PS: E A G L E S!!! GOOOOOO EAGLES! Woooooooo hooooooooooo!!!
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