Fogbow

Trump Server Mystery Produces Fresh Conflict
Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman
Thu, September 30, 2021, 8:22 PM

Then presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the campaign news conference where he directly appealed Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and make them public, in Doral, Fla., July 27, 2016. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)
Then presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the campaign news conference where he directly appealed Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and make them public, in Doral, Fla., July 27, 2016. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — The charge was narrow: John Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation, indicted a cybersecurity lawyer this month on a single count of lying to the FBI.

But Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe.

Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.

Emails obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues being investigated by federal authorities, provide a fuller and more complex account of how a group of cyberexperts discovered the odd internet data and developed their hypothesis about what could explain it.

At the same time, defense lawyers for the scientists say it is Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.

The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-server ... 53334.html

p0rtia wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 9:46 am I mean, Durham is literally doing in his report the thing he is accusing his targets of doing.

Maybenaut wrote: ↑Thu Sep 30, 2021 6:39 pm Doesn’t matter that he wasn’t in uniform. The DOD regulation draws a both a smudgy line and a fairly bright line: You can go to rallies in civilian clothes, but you cannot “participate” (whatever that means, presumably it’s more than merely attending, so, smudgy), and you definitely cannot “speak” (that’s pretty clear).

I’m of two minds about this (well, maybe a mind and a half). Military members should be permitted to attend partisan political rallies, and they shouldn’t be permitted to speak. But when a military member is put in the spot by a former president to come up and speak, should he be punished for that? Is the member supposed to embarrass the former president by declining?

Ordinarily I’d say no. Except that, and this is where he loses me, he either managed to let trump or his handlers know he was there, or he came by invitation. I mean, the likelihood that trump recognized him in the crowd is zero. So I wouldn’t be heartbroken if the Marines stomped on him a little for this.

Here’s the regulation. https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Docu ... 34410p.pdf

Kendra wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 11:11 am I think it was yesterday CNN had Andrew McCabe on to talk about this. I wish I'd paid closer attention and/or my memory was better

McCabe's take was kind of like instead of continuing with what he was supposed to be doing (investigating the FBI), this new tactic was more like he was looking out for the FBI.

Patagoniagirl wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 12:38 pm I got the feeling the issues was that this soldier perhaps was not the soldier who lifted the baby over the wall.

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Thu Sep 30, 2021 1:05 pm
Another questionable source.

Donald Trump's lawyers told a federal court today that Facebook's terms of service "do not apply to governmental entities, including Plaintiff, as the Forty Fifth President of the United States."
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... 0.77.0.pdf

Kendra wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 4:23 pm

Donald Trump's lawyers told a federal court today that Facebook's terms of service "do not apply to governmental entities, including Plaintiff, as the Forty Fifth President of the United States."
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... 0.77.0.pdf

much ado wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 4:46 pmHa. Ha. Ha. That's funny. Who does he hire for lawyers? Trump must have told them to argue that.

bob wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 7:05 pm

much ado wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 4:46 pmHa. Ha. Ha. That's funny. Who does he hire for lawyers? Trump must have told them to argue that.

There two signatures and six additional names at the end of his response.

Eight attorneys said, "this isn't so dumb that I'm quitting."

bob wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 7:05 pm

much ado wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 4:46 pmHa. Ha. Ha. That's funny. Who does he hire for lawyers? Trump must have told them to argue that.

There two signatures and six additional names at the end of his response.

Eight attorneys said, "this isn't so dumb that I'm quitting."

noblepa wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 12:30 pm

Maybenaut wrote: ↑Thu Sep 30, 2021 6:39 pm Doesn’t matter that he wasn’t in uniform. The DOD regulation draws a both a smudgy line and a fairly bright line: You can go to rallies in civilian clothes, but you cannot “participate” (whatever that means, presumably it’s more than merely attending, so, smudgy), and you definitely cannot “speak” (that’s pretty clear).

I’m of two minds about this (well, maybe a mind and a half). Military members should be permitted to attend partisan political rallies, and they shouldn’t be permitted to speak. But when a military member is put in the spot by a former president to come up and speak, should he be punished for that? Is the member supposed to embarrass the former president by declining?

Ordinarily I’d say no. Except that, and this is where he loses me, he either managed to let trump or his handlers know he was there, or he came by invitation. I mean, the likelihood that trump recognized him in the crowd is zero. So I wouldn’t be heartbroken if the Marines stomped on him a little for this.

Here’s the regulation. https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Docu ... 34410p.pdf

Agreed. At best, he made an error in judgement.

If he went let the Trump crowd know he was there, with the intent of participating, then he should be punished, but not too harshly. Maybe an official reprimand. Maybe just probation.

If he Trump invited him, he showed poor judgement in accepting the invitation. He should have know that Trump would call on him.

OTOH, he's a relatively low ranking enlisted man. While I believe that the UCMJ implicitly includes the adage that "ignorance excuses no crime", I'm not sure that he could realistically be expected to be fully aware of this regulation and its ramifications.

Gregg wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 2:10 am I can't recall who our military lawyer is, but tell me I'm wrong if I am, if maybe a little more unforgiving than the system is in real life.