So About This Russian Bounty Thing
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@george-k said in So About This Russian Bounty Thing:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-intel-walks-back-claim-russians-put-bounties-on-american-troops
"But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.
“The United States intelligence community assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019 and perhaps earlier,” a senior administration official said."
“This information puts a burden on the Russian government to explain its actions and take steps to address this disturbing pattern of behavior,” the official said, indicating that Biden is unprepared to walk the story back fully.
Significantly, the Biden team announced a raft of sanctions on Thursday. But those sanctions, targeting Russia’s sovereign debt market, are prompted only by Russia’s interference in the 2020 election and its alleged role in the SolarWinds cyber espionage. (In contrast, Biden administration officials said that their assessment attributing the breach of technology company SolarWinds to hackers from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service was “high confidence.”)
Putting on a tinfoil hat here, isn't it just possible that this type of disinformation was used to, ahem, affect an election?
Nah...
Yup another bit of vomit from the people who call other people liars. You can’t make this up.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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The WaPo fact checker (LOLGF):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/30/trumps-four-pinocchio-interview-russian-bounties/
onathan Swan, Axios: “It’s been widely reported that the U.S. has intelligence indicating that Russia paid bounties, or offered to pay bounties, to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers. You had a phone call with Vladimir Putin on July 23rd. Did you bring up this issue?”
President Trump: “No, that was a phone call to discuss other things, and frankly, that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.”
— Exchange on “Axios on HBO,” July 29, 2020
Trump: “It never reached my desk. You know why? Because they didn’t think it — intelligence — they didn’t think it was real.”
Swan: “It was in your written brief, though.”
Trump: “They didn’t think, they didn’t think it was worthy. I wouldn’t mind. If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it. It never reached my desk because — ”
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Swan: “Do you read your written brief?”
Trump: “I do. I read it a lot. I read a lot. They like to say I don’t read. I read a lot. I comprehend extraordinarily well, probably better than anybody you’ve interviewed in a long time.”
— “Axios on HBO” interview
Trump rarely gets fact-checked on camera, but here we have a good example of an interviewer pressing and prodding on a sensitive topic.
The president has been dismissive of U.S. intelligence reports that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (A “hoax” or “fake news,” Trump says.)
Follow-up questions in a one-on-one setting can expose the strength or weakness of a claim. When asked about reports that he was briefed on the intelligence, and why he didn’t raise the bounties in a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump started dissembling in response. -
Hillary got in on the action too. Would be fun to see the talking points memo that went out and how wide the Soviet style disinformation campaign was.
