How the Russia inquiry began: Trump aide told Australian diplomat Russia had dirt on Clinton

Well that explains why Trump's first call to Turnbull (Austrailia's Prime Minister) was so bitchy and strange.

It seems Australia is better friends to the USA than the Republican party.

Interesting part from the NYT article:

Mr. Papadopoulos was trusted enough to edit the outline of Mr. Trump’s first major foreign policy speech on April 27, an address in which the candidate said it was possible to improve relations with Russia. Mr. Papadopoulos flagged the speech to his newfound Russia contacts, telling Mr. Timofeev that it should be taken as “the signal to meet.”

Link

So...speeches to the American public were dog whistle/coded messages to Russian contacts....wow, just...wow.

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

I'm sure there are other reasons for the investigation besides that, for example, European intelligence agencies noticed that something was amiss between Trump's associates and their communications with Russians. There could even be more intelligence that is still under wraps.

Thanks for letting me know how to strike out text.

originally posted by: darkbake
a reply to: TheScale

I absolutely believe that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections, and was responsible for hacking the DNC. I think Russian interference (without anything to do with Trump) is a real issue that has a factual base. The intelligence community is almost certain that Russia will attempt to interfere in the 2018 elections, too. Russia even attempted to hack into many election machines in 2016, and although they were not successful this time, they could be in 2018.

As far as Trump goes, I am not convinced he colluded with Russia. I do think that the intelligence community had enough intel to justify looking into the matter. I also think that Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Papadopoulos were doing shady things, maybe a few other people on Trump's team, and that could have caught the attention of the intelligence agencies.

yeah i agree they do, have, and as long as they are our rival they will continue to do so just as every nation attempts to do so around the world. i just dont understand how people have somehow come to the conclusion that this is something new. many have talked about the amount of money govt's like russia and china have been investing in cyber warfare for over a decade now. if they didnt have the infrastructure in place to defend against such attacks its due to a plethora of reasons none of which are good unless they have secretly been dumping billions into us cyber warfare defense in black budgets. seeing the amount of nsa, cia, etc virus and malware that has somehow been left out in the open leads me to believe the us is probly the world leader in regards to cyber warfare its just a secret. if thats the case it makes u wonder just how they didnt know what was going on during an election that was rife with fears over what was the status quo.

a reply to: TheScale

All right, that's a good post. This was the first time Russia experimented with electronic warfare against our election process to this extent. They attempted to hack 21 states' electronic voting systems and used Twitter (including bots and trolls) and Facebook (including advertisements and Facebook Page administrators) posing as Americans to bring false stories into the right-wing echo chamber. They also posed as liberals in a few cases, possibly to encourage libs to be more extreme, or maybe just to test what they could do.

It seems like something we should be looking into and solving, especially since 2016 would have been Russia testing what they could do for the first time, and in 2018, they will be building off what they have learned.