8/18/2020:
It was Vladimir Putin who ordered hacks to damage then-candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded Tuesday.
Under Putin's command, Russian hackers broke into computer networks and accounts related to the Democratic Party and made several moves to combat Clinton's campaign. The report stated that the Russians intended to undermine the U.S. democratic process.
In a conclusion that some of us would have expected only on Saturday Night Live, Republicans of the bipartisan committee found that even though:
—Trump operative Paul Manafort was a "grave counterintelligence threat" busily sharing Democratic polling and campaign intelligence with Russian intelligence agents and employees of a Russian oligarch, and
--Manafort created "opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over...the Trump Campaign," and
--Trump associate Roger Stone orchestrated the timing of a Wikileaks release of emails potentially damaging to Clinton's campaign, and
--Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen had several meetings in 2015 and 2016 in Moscow about Trump's business interests, primarily in building a Trump Tower there, and later lied to Congress, and
--Donald Trump, Jr. actively sought information damaging to Hillary's campaign during a 2016 meeting over Trump Tower Moscow
...that there was still no evidence that President Trump actually COLLUDED with Moscow. Robert Mueller's 2017 report came to that conclusion as well.
The word "evidence" apparently means "proof" in lawyerland. Smoke is evidence of fire, but because in rare instances it could also be evidence of tear gas, one can't draw conclusions.
Democratic senators who have been part of the three-year-long committee probe, including Kamala Harris, disagreed that there was no collusion in an annex to the report.
What now? One hopes that Trump supporters will pay closer attention to the long, long history of Trump's transcontinental brotherhood with Vladimir Putin & Co.
TheHill.com offers a fuller account of the report.
Do you think that collusion took place? What can be done with the information now that Trump has been impeached but remained in office? Will this Senate report affect the Election in any way?
"Vladimir Putin - Caricature" by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY 2.0
https://thehill.com/policy/
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