Readers Reflect on the State of Australian Politics

[gcode]

And to be honest, I have never believed that the election was stolen, but now, even though I still have seen no real proof, I can't help but wonder..

Trump "lost" the election by about 300K votes in 5 swing states
In AZ and GA the margins were under 20K votes.
Corrupt officials in blue city swing states, lost enough Trump votes and manufactured or "found" enough Biden voted to get it done.
I doubt I will live long enough to see the truth come out, but it will.

The real irony here is it is these same blue cities who are feeling the brunt on poppypants Bidens failed
agenda.

[Tim Johnson]

Nah. It won't.

I have no problem believing it happened, but I see ZERO chance of anyone important being held accountable for it.

If the repubs win heavily there could be a good chance of some people being held accountable during their next two years. Hillary more than likely won't be one of them.

[beej]

Wellll, to bring this back to talking about Australia...and the Vatican...

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/beccius-classified-tech-company-linked

Neustar, a technology and security company, has been named in pretrial motions filed by John Durham, the special counsel investigating the handling of a 2016 inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the U.S. general election. The company has also featured in the ongoing Vatican financial scandal and trial, with Cardinal Becciu facing questions over millions of dollars of "classified" payments he authorized to the company.

The cardinal has declined to elaborate on the Secretariat of State's need for classified services from a telecommunications security and intelligence firm.

The filing in U.S. court, updated on Friday last week, relates to a case Durham has brought against a cybersecurity lawyer affiliated with the Democratic Party, Michael Sussman.

According to the New York Times, Sussman told the CIA in 2017 about suspicious data activity from devices connected to networks at Trump Tower in Manhattan and the White House, and flagged potential links to Russia.

Sussman allegedly had access to the information via data from servers managed by Neustar and serving both locations. According to the New York Times, Sussman received the data from Rodney Joffe, a client of his, who was until Sept. 2021 the senior vice president and security chief technology officer at Neustar.

In court filings, Durham alleges that Joffe "exploited" Neustar's access to server data for the purposes of gleaning potentially damaging information on Donald Trump.

Durham has not alleged that Joffe or Neustar were paid for the information, but the alleged use of the data gleaned from sensitive servers linked to the White House has become the focus of considerable media attention and debate.

It also refocuses attention on the company's links to the Holy See, and to Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the former sostituto at the Secretariat of State currently on trial in Vatican City for abuse of office and a host of financial crimes.

Between 2016-17, the Secretariat of State sent wire transfers amounting to more than 2 million Australian dollars to Neustar's office in Melbourne. The Pillar has previously reported that Becciu personally authorized two of the payments in writing, and approved the other two.

The payments coincided with the investigation and prosecution of Cardinal George Pell by local police on charges of sexual abuse. Pell was initially convicted on the evidence of a single witness-accuser before being exonerated by Australia's High Court.

[Smit]

The link presented earlier was, I'm sure you'll agree, pretty sparse on info. Here is another link for those interested in checking it out. It's from the AP, which most people regard as unbiased reporting.


EXPLAINER: How the latest Trump-Russia filing generated buzz

[beej]

The link presented earlier was, I'm sure you'll agree, pretty sparse on info. Here is another link for those interested in checking it out. It's from the AP, which most people regard as unbiased reporting.


EXPLAINER: How the latest Trump-Russia filing generated buzz

he started his article with the classic "Republicans pounce" line. which, to borrow a line from democrats, "is a dog whistle" for liberals.  He's not unbiased.  But that aside, he seems to put more stock in the statements of the lawyers defending the tech company and Sussman, than he does the US attorney.

And then, there are discrepancies in the article. He says that the data used by the Tech company, was actually collected from the Obama administration rather than the trump administration.

The researchers were not "spying" on the Trump campaign in 2016 but were instead working at the request of federal officials to investigate Russian malware attacks that had targeted the U.S. government and the White House, said Jody Westby, a lawyer for one of the research scientists involved, David Dagon of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The U.S. was on high alert at the time after the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails by Russian operatives. The data at issue was from the time Obama, not Trump, was in the White House, according to Westby.

"They were simply doing ... research of Russian attacks against U.S. entities, including the federal government," Westby said, adding, "The motion is unfortunate because it offers a lot of confusing information that is not factually accurate."

How is it that this tech company took info to the CIA and FBI about Trump that it received during the Obama administration?  This company got access to the Whitehouse servers through a government contract, how did it get access to Trump Tower servers?  When did this company get the government contract for the Whitehouse servers? Dec 2016? if that's the case, this whole thing came from the top to spy on Trump, to retain access to what he was doing. If it got the contract in 2014 or 2015, then it seems legit.

I can't believe how uninquisitive an AP reporter can be!  It seems like an article "explainer" would include some of that info, but no. Republicans pounce!

[beej]

further explanations:
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html

According to court papers, Joffe cherry-picked data to create a "narrative" that Trump was secretly communicating with the Kremlin as part of the Clinton campaign's effort to make the GOP nominee look like he was compromised by Russia, a foreign adversary. Before the election, Joffe led a team of computer researchers vying for a major Pentagon contract to link Trump to Russian Alfa Bank through private DNS logs. He handed off their findings to Sussmann who fed the data to the FBI to drive an investigation and bad press against Trump.

"The data was highly manipulated," said Robert Graham of Atlanta-based Errata Security, an independent cyberforensics expert who examined the logs and debunked the link at the time. He suspects Joffe and his biased crew set out to invent a connection between Trump and Russia.

"A link between Trump and Alfa bank wasn't something they accidentally found, it was one of the many thousands of links they looked for," he added. "The purpose was to smear Trump."

Though Graham as a Clinton supporter shares Joffe's disdain for Trump, he said the suspicious server data were easily explained as innocent spam traffic. Graham noted that Trump didn't even have control over the domain in question: trump-email.com. It was created by a hotel marketing firm that inserted Trump's name in the domain.

"Hints of a Trump-Alfa connection have always been the dishonesty of those who collected the data," Graham said.
gatech.edu
Manos Antonakakis: Joffe's lead researcher said in an email that "the only thing that drives us is that we just don't like [Trump]."
gatech.edu

Even though Joffe encouraged Sussmann to present the server data to the FBI as possible evidence of foreign espionage, he privately confessed to his reseachers in an August 2016 email obtained by Durham that the host for the trump-email.com domain  "is a legitimate valid [marketing] company" – Boca Raton, Fla.-based Cendyn. "We can ignore it," Joffe said, "together with others that seem to be part of the marketing world." He urged his team to keep searching for data that would "give the base of a very useful narrative."
In previous statements, lawyers for Joffe and the researchers he recruited have said they had no political ax to grind but were monitoring Trump to track a credible national security threat related to Russia. But Joffe's lead researcher – Manos Antonakakis of the Georgia Institute of Technology – revealed in one email obtained by Durham that "the only thing that drives us is that we just don't like [Trump]." Other emails, released this week by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that Antonakakis believed even the most salacious – and debunked – rumors in the Clinton-commissioned Steele dossier.

[Smit]

"Republicans pounce"

Frankly I think this is an accurate observation. We see it over and over and it works every time. One partisan says it, another site repeats it, then it's all over the right wing internet going viral, if you will.

Then it turns into another nothing burger and Republicans rage about how it's been suppressed.

Just about everything out right now about Durham's paper is somebody's interpretation. I haven't read the paper submitted by Durham but many people are writing that it doesn't say what everybody is trying to convince people it says.

So we'll see how it all shakes out. Typically, from my experience, these "gotcha" articles peter out and go away. But who knows, maybe this time it will be different.   

[beej]

Frankly I think this is an accurate observation. We see it over and over and it works every time. One partisan says it, another site repeats it, then it's all over the right wing internet going viral, if you will.

Then it turns into another nothing burger and Republicans rage about how it's been suppressed.

could be, but his article could have been a deeper investigation into the story, rather than a story about Republicans reaction to the story.  Eric Tucker (ap reporter) is a dog that don't hunt, in my humble opinion. Wikileaks,(not a big fan but that doesn't change the facts) has emails from him to democrats asking them if he should suppress stories.  I wonder if they asked him to do that again, this time.

he wrote an article about the boxes of classified info at Maralago it was well written and informative. not a whiff of Democrats Pounce!  I wonder if he emailed Trump and asked if he should suppress the story?

[RobertELee]

Frankly I think this is an accurate observation. We see it over and over and it works every time. One partisan says it, another site repeats it, then it's all over the right wing internet going viral, if you will.

Then it turns into another nothing burger and Republicans rage about how it's been suppressed.

Just about everything out right now about Durham's paper is somebody's interpretation. I haven't read the paper submitted by Durham but many people are writing that it doesn't say what everybody is trying to convince people it says.

So we'll see how it all shakes out. Typically, from my experience, these "gotcha" articles peter out and go away. But who knows, maybe this time it will be different. 

"OMG Trump told us to inject bleach!!!!1!!1!1"

Sound familiar? Dipsmit....

[Smit]

could be, but his article could have been a deeper investigation into the story, rather than a story about Republicans reaction to the story.

At this point the story IS about the Republicans reaction to the story.

Anybody COULD write a deeper investigation into the story and hopefully they will in due time.

[ghuns]

...Anybody COULD write a deeper investigation into the story and hopefully they will in due time.

The problem is the media picks sides. With the vast majority leaning left, they will ignore stories that paint their 'team' in a bad light. Those on the right will jump into a story with both feet only if it has a chance to make the left look bad.

There are ZERO sources of unbiased reporting left.

[Smit]

The problem is the media picks sides. With the vast majority leaning left, they will ignore stories that paint their 'team' in a bad light. Those on the right will jump into a story with both feet only if it has a chance to make the left look bad.

There are ZERO sources of unbiased reporting left.

True enough but not all places are equal.

Many "news" outlets exist for the sole purpose of furthering an agenda. And many of those places don't have any problem putting out info that is either misleading or just plain false.

Sure, try to vet the information from the sources who respond to "news" stories, but I'd suggest trying to vet the sources who first put out the news story also because everybody has an agenda.

[crazy^millman]

Sure, try to vet the information from the sources who respond to "news" stories, but I'd suggest trying to vet the sources who first put out the news story also because everybody has an agenda.

Unlike you who only cares about getting the real truth out there with no agenda whatsoever.      

[Del.]

We need a media that will finally say what a wonderful job the Biden administration is doing. Thank God we have Don Lemon.