New Insider Testimony on Russian Interference

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Interesting revelations from someone on the front lines of this scandal.

 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/05/global-politico-victoria-nuland-obama-216937

‘The Hairs Really Went Up on the Back of Our Necks’

Former top diplomat Victoria Nuland tells the story of how she pushed the Obama administration to do more to stop Russian hacking.

By SUSAN B. GLASSER February 05, 2018

........By the time the initial reports of the DNC hacking and other data points reached her early in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign season, Nuland was perhaps far more primed than others in the American government to take notice. But even then, even with Trump openly praising Putin and all the other indicators, she found it hard to believe what would ultimately come out.

“I think when we first rung the alarm bell inside the administration, in the spring of 2016, that we needed to better understand what the Russians were up to in our electoral system,” Nuland said. “I don’t think that anybody necessarily thought that they were going to try to put their finger on the scale for one candidate versus another, but simply that they were going to try to discredit the democratic process, and they were going to try to show that it was dirty and not as clean as we’d maintained, as a way of legitimizing their own less-than-perfect electoral system, and creating moral equivalency.”

Looking back now, with the benefit of a year’s worth of stunning disclosures, listening to Nuland’s account can’t help but give one the painful sense that she had been watching a slow-motion car crash – and basically powerless to do anything about it. Her “Spidey sense” was flashing, but, it turned out, it wasn’t enough.

The outlines of that story, of course, are already well known by now.

But in the midst of the escalating partisan furor over the investigation, they tend to be forgotten, glossed over, or even, in the case of President Trump himself, outright denied.

And indeed, even as Nuland and I were speaking on Friday, up on Capitol Hill Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, was putting out a document, based on classified information, that sought to call into question the origins of the FBI investigation into Trump’s alleged Russia ties. It was a highly partisan memo, and one whose main goal seems to be not shedding light on how and why Russia successfully targeted the 2016 U.S. elections – but on discrediting the American law-enforcement institutions looking into it.

Read the full article at: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/05/global-politico-victoria-nuland-obama-216937

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Quote

 

She had known since late 2015 that the Democratic National Committee’s email servers had been hacked; all these months later, the stolen DNC emails were being publicly released by websites known to be Russian conduits right on the eve of the Democratic convention,

and U.S. intelligence agencies would soon confirm the hack to be a Russian operation.

The Russians had eavesdropped on a phone call between Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and the audio they leaked of her decidedly undiplomatic language dropped like a bomb in the midst of her delicate efforts to cajole European counterparts into doing more with the Ukrainians. An F-bomb, to be more precise. “**** the EU,” Nuland had exclaimed in exasperation to her colleague.

Obama declined to fire her when the call became public, but the Russians did succeed in embarrassing Nuland, who was forced to make public and private amends for her salty language and the bruised feelings it left behind.

In our interview, she joked that the leaked call meant that she was “an early adapter as a victim of Russian tradecraft”—and said, more seriously, that she had learned a key lesson from the incident. “The gloves were coming off and the knives were coming out,” she said she realized, and Putin was now willing to “pull out Cold War-style dirty tricks,” even against a top U.S. official, for the first time arguably since the end of the actual Cold War.

In hindsight, the hacking of Nuland in 2014, just like similar leaks targeted at Russian opponents across Eastern Europe, had been no isolated, one-off event. It was part of a dramatic escalation by Putin, and one that the United States, bent for two decades on a strategy of trying to integrate Russia into the American-led international order, had failed to reckon with.

 

 

I quit reading at this point...There was NO reason to read any further.

Hey, whenever someone in Dc Screws up, JUST.BLAME.THE. RUSSIANS.

No one held a gun to this woman's head and made her screw her own career. She did that all by herself.