There is enough evidence to substantiate beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia deliberately interfered with the 2016 presidential election. It is hard to determine the degree with which that interference influenced voters.
When all the stories first started coming out about U.S. torture around 2005 the first stage was denial by supporters of Bush. The number of intelligence officials, the number of investigative reports, etc. is such that someone denying Russian influence is being willfully naive. The question isn’t if they did influence the election it’s just how much the influence really was. It is beyond question that the Russians were involved in shenanigans. The U.S. has regularly unduly influenced elections in other countries so I don’t begrudge the Russians for what they did. I do begrudge those of our leaders who don’t care.
Are you just not paying attention to the Mueller investigation? There's like five guilty pleas by now. Is that just a nothing burger? Seriously, what do you think that's all about?
If you want a timeline of events you can go here[0] or here[1], but something tells me you won't accept these...
The timeline contains confirmed events which are in fact evidence. They're not accusations; the point of the timeline is that these are things we know happened.
Crossing into personal nastiness will get you banned here regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.
All: Please keep garden-variety partisan flamewars far away from this site, too.
"From in or around 2014 to the present, Defendants knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury) to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016."
"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments."
People can say anything. Anything proven in the court? To me all this sounds like partisan activities against the President. I skimmed both documents, but couldn't find any proven fact. Only allegations. Did I miss something?
Also the DNI report is too generic. They literally have screenshots of Russian news channels. This is bordering on cold war era style propaganda.
PS: thank you for taking the time and effort to have a conversation. I haven't seen anything convincing me that Russia meaningfully interfered in the election. And I'm wary to jump to conclusions since there are a lot of people who seem to be hell bent on undercutting the President using any means.
I provided those two documents because they currently bookend official public activity on the subject.
The indictment I provided is from the investigation headed by Robert Mueller, special counsel, former FBI director, and Republican. Dismissing it as "partisan activities" suggests either that you are extremely uninformed on this subject (in which case you should do your own research) or that you've already decided in advance to dismiss the results of a nonpartisan investigation.
Even the highly contested House Intelligence Committee report acknowledges that there was Russian interference in the election (they simply claim that there is no proof the Trump campaign was involved). There is a bipartisan consensus on this subject.
Also, I’m not alone in this, notable journalists such as Glenn Greenwald are also asking for evidence.