Russian Political Hacking, Democrat Incompetence, White House Failure and the Electoral College

Rex Tillerson's confirmation may become page-2 news as the Russian "takeover" of America and its corollary, the "takeover" of the Electoral College, grab the attention of Washington and mainstream media. • • • THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE LONGSHOT AT DUMPING TRUMP. The 538 delegates to the Electoral College who will gather at governors’ offices and statehouses across America next Monday to make President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton official, are being bombarded by emails, letters and phone calls fro a small clique that wants to steal the election from Donald Trump. The Electoral College results aren’t expected to change much from election day, when Trump won 306 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232. Despite MSM coverage, social media chatter and announcements from a handful of electors who have gone public with their protest votes, it’s unlikely that electors will defect in significant numbers. • But, that is not preventing scattered groups of Progressive Democrats from using every means at their disposal -- lawsuits, petitions, and public and private pressure -- to try to convince 37 GOP electors to bolt from Trump and deprive him of the 270 votes needed for victory. TheHill quoted one GOP county chairman in North Carolina who is a Trump elector, who said he’s gotten correspondence from “everywhere from Maine to California” asking him to vote differently. “I just ignore them,” he added. So far, only a few Electoral College voters have publicly declared that they will not back the candidates that their states supported -- including just one of the 37 Trump voters that the Electoral College marauders need to make any impact on Monday -- and even if they achieve their aims, they would likely only succeed in sending the election to a Republican-majority House, which would certify Trump’s victory. Virtually all Republican electors contacted by TheHill said they will vote enthusiastically for Trump. A Florida elector, who raised money for Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, said : “I’m voting how the people of Florida have told me to vote. I don’t know anyone who isn’t. I appreciate people using First Amendment rights to reach out and try to convince me otherwise, but I’m obligated to support Trump because he won Florida. Also, I love the guy and want him to be President.” • These so-called "faithless electors" are rare but not unheard of in American history. Only 82 electors in history have voted against their state’s popular vote for personal reasons. And, 71 electors have changed their votes after the death of a candidate. No instance has ever changed the outcome of an election, according to data compiled by the nonprofit group FairVote. It’s been more than 100 years since a group of electors have banded together to choose a different candidate. • But, those very longshot odds don't seem to be stopping two Democrat House members, Representatives Jim Himes and David Cicilline, who are openly advocating for an Electoral College revolt. And, lawsuits are underway in California, Washington and Colorado challenging state laws that bind the delegates to vote for their party’s nominee. A federal judge dismissed the case in Colorado on Monday as a “political stunt,” although an appeal could be coming. Only one Republican elector, Chris Suprun of Texas, has publicly said he won’t vote for Trump, tellling TheHill that he’s “confident” he won’t be the only Republican to buck Trump. No others have made such an intention public. Democratic electors would have a better chance of blocking Trump if they joined 38 GOP electors to support a Republican alternative, like Ohio Governor John Kasich, but there is little appetite for that. Kasich himself rejected the idea of using him as a compromise candidate last week. One of this Blog's most faithful reader-commenters, ERSTWHILE, posted the right answer to these Electoral College marauders on Wednesday : "NO ONE SAW THIS HAPPENING ... Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, most recently a GOP contender for his party's nomination in the 2016 Presidential Election notified Ohio's Electoral College delegates that he was releasing them from voting for him on December 19th and asked them to vote for his nemesis Donald Trump. Kasich knows that continuing the fight would only lead to a very possible constitutional crisis and the Electoral College electing Hillary Clinton. Carrying these possible actions a step further we could have open rioting in the streets, and even moves for SECESSION of states starting with Texas, and ending who knows where. Never was John Kasich on my list of want-a-be candidates, but this show of fair play, of constitutional awareness, of doing the right thing for the country, has given me a different perspective on Governor Kasich." • • • THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING. Some of the Electoral College marauders are seizing on MSM reports about Russian interference in the election to demand intelligence briefings for all of those casting ballots, in the hope it could cause some GOP delegates to abandon Trump. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta publicly backed the intelligence briefings on Monday. And, high-profile liberal Progressives -- former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, academic Lawrence Lessig and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) -- are providing logistical support and helping the marauders coordinate behind the scenes. Lessig has offered legal help to faithless electors who come from states whose laws prohibit voting for anyone but the state's election winner. And, there is no need to comment on Robert Reich, the bulwark of anything that advances the Progressive movement and downgrades the United States into third world status. • The Washington Post said on Wednesday : "Incompetent people work inside every important organization in Washington. Often they don’t know who they are, but their colleagues do. As John F. Kennedy complained after a US spy plane strayed into Soviet airspace during the Cuban missile crisis, 'There’s always some son of a b**** who didn’t get the word.' The tick tock about how hackers broke into the Democratic National Committee and obtained John Podesta’s emails, on the front page of today’s New York Times, offers several cringe-worthy illustrations of the timeless truism that any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Several weak links, cumulatively, apparently allowed Vladimir Putin’s minions to successfully launch (and win) a cyberwar against the United States of America." Now, while rejecting the pro-Hillary Clinton position in the WP article, it is nevertheless interesting that it quoted what it called "five nuggets" from the NYT story by Eric Lipton, David Sanger and Scott Shane : (1) The DNC as a whole was woefully unprepared, but the hapless IT contractor was especially in over his head : “When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk. His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the DNC had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named ‘the Dukes,’ a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government. The FBI knew it well : The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff...Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the DNC who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for ‘the Dukes’ and conduct a cursory search of the DNC computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks -- in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real FBI agent and not an impostor. ‘I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,’ Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo...” (2) "Bafflingly, FBI agents did not travel to DNC headquarters (which is about a mile from their office!) when Tamene stopped returning their calls. 'Part of the problem was that Special Agent Hawkins did not show up in person at the DNC. Nor could he email anyone there, as that risked alerting the hackers that the FBI knew they were in the system. Mr. Tamene’s initial scan of the DNC system -- using his less-than-optimal tools and incomplete targeting information from the FBI -- found nothing. So when Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October, leaving voice mail messages for Mr. Tamene, urging him to call back, ‘I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report,’ Mr. Tamene explained in his memo....In November, Special Agent Hawkins called with more ominous news. A DNC computer was ‘calling home, where home meant Russia,’ Mr. Tamene’s memo says, referring to software sending information to Moscow....By March, Mr. Tamene and his team had met at least twice in person with the FBI and concluded that Agent Hawkins was really a federal employee.” (3) " Andrew Brown, the technology director at the DNC, said he knew Tamene was fielding calls from the FBI, but he said he was too distracted by the squabble over the Bernie Sanders campaign improperly accessing Hillary Clinton campaign data to pay much attention." (4) "Higher-ups were not notified until it was too late : Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then the DNC chair, and Amy Dacey, the committee’s chief executive, were not notified early on that the committee’s system had likely been compromised. 'The DNC executives and their lawyer had their first formal meeting with senior FBI officials in mid-June, nine months after the bureau’s first call to the tech-support contractor,' the story notes." (5) "Eventually the DNC replaced its computer system BUT chose not to give the DCCC a heads up : 'Though DNC officials had learned that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had been infected, too, they did not notify their sister organization, which was in the same building, because they were afraid that it would leak.'” The WP adds another tidbit from the NYT article -- a typo might have changed the course of history: A phishing email that originated from a hacking group tied to Russian intelligence arrived in John Podesta’s email box on March 19. “Given how many emails Mr. Podesta received through this personal email account, several aides also had access to it, and one of them noticed the warning email, sending it to a computer technician to make sure it was legitimate before anyone clicked on the ‘change password’ button. ‘This is a legitimate email,’ Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, replied to another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert....With another click, a decade of emails that Mr. Podesta maintained in his Gmail account -- a total of about 60,000 -- were unlocked for the Russian hackers. Mr. Delavan, in an interview, said that his bad advice was a result of a typo: He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them. He said he had meant to type that it was an ‘illegitimate’ email.” [This is not true because his email gave the advice to change the password asap and that was what the hackers wanted.] • • • IS THERE A COMPETENT IT DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE?? An examination by The NYT of the Russian operation -- with interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response -- reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack. First, the DNC’s slow action when informed of the hacking by the FBI meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost and the hacking was free during seven months to spread throughout the network and to other systems connected to the DNC by email before senior officials were told of the hacking. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the DNC, including Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later. This led to what experts say was a transfer of e-files to Guccifer-02 and Wikileaks, who used the files to undrcut the Clinton and Trump campaigns. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks meant there were less serious efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully means the Russians still have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks. • OBAMA'S TIMID REFUSAL TO ACT. The NYT list many earlier cyberattacks against the US. There was "Moonlight Maze," a Russian cyberattack on US military systems that spread from the Navy to the Department of Energy, the Air Force and NASA -- the files stolen, if printed and stacked, would be taller than the Washington Monument. There were the Chinese -- who stole the designs for the F-35 fighter jet; corporate secrets for rolling steel; the blueprints for gas pipelines that supply much of the US; and during the 2008 presidential election cycle, hacked into the Obama and McCain campaigns, stealing internal position papers and communications that they didn’t publish. Outside the US, there was the Russian 2007 political cyberattack on Estonia. Russian cyberattacks were used during Russia’s war with Georgia. In 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group began systematically targeting the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with some degree of success [stated in a soon-to-be published Carnegie Endowment paper]. The Russians crippled the State Department systems so thoroughly that they were occasionally shut down to eliminate the hackers. President Obama was briefed regularly on Russian and other US cyberattacks. But, despite all this cyberattack activity aimed at the US government, Obama made a decision not to name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions for fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the US needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria. And, when the DNC hacking was underway, the NYT says the President seemed reluctant to act overtly before Election Day. Instead, in September, Obama’s national security team turned to a crash effort to secure the nation’s voting machines and voter-registration rolls from hacking. Stronger possible counter cyber strikes, according to the NYT, included operations that would turn the tables on Putin, exposing his financial links to Russia’s oligarchs, and punching holes in the Russian internet to allow dissidents to get their message out. Pentagon officials apparently judged the measures too overt and made their own set of options. But in the end, none of those were formally presented to the President. Instead, Obama decided that he would deliver a warning to Putin in person at a Group of 20 summit meeting in China, the last time they would meet while Obama was still in office. When the two men met, Obama explicitly warned Putin of a strong American response if there was continued effort to influence the election or manipulate the vote, according to White House officials who were not present for the one-on-one meeting. Later that day, Obama made a rare reference to America’s own offensive cybercapacity, saying : “Frankly, both offensively and defensively, we have more capacity" -- an undoubted reference in part to the reported United States’ implants or taps in Russian computer and phone networks. [Read the full NYT article at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack- election-dnc.html]. • • • OBAMA TEAM ERRORS AND NATIONAL SECURITY. The long string of errors and bungling around the hacking of the DNC systems and related Democrat politicians is certainly something to be concerned about. If we believe the New York Times, despite its editorial position that the cyberattacks and leaks were a major cause in Clinton's loss, the Russians were at the heart of the hacks during the 2016 US election. And Russian phishing continues against US politicians and NGOs. The critically important message here is that that the DNC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee were pitifully incompetent. They did not detect and/or verify or deal with hacking -- even when warned by the FBI that it existed. And, these are the people who are now going to investigate the depth of Russian infiltration into US election IT systems. At the top of that pile of incompetence sit President Obama and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In November, Clapper told Congress he didn't have enough evidence about the charges of Russian hacking to formally accuse Russia. But, by December, his CIA said it had overwhelming IT evidence of exactly that. President Obama was silent about the election-related hacking until Trump won the election in November. Then, he decided that Russian interference was a "threat to our democracy." Now, everybody wants to investigate. • • • DEAR READERS, no wonder Donald Trump -- undoubtedly on the advice of Generals Flynn and Mattis and incoming CIA Director Pompeo -- says nobody knows what the truth is. It resembles Trump's charge that Moslem refugees should be prevented from entering the US "until we find out what the hell is going on." And, just to point out the pervasive incompetence in the Obama entourage, when Trump made his charge, the FBI warned it had no way to adequately vet refugees entering the US. To date nobody in the White House or the DNI group has refuted that FBI statement. Obama wants the special report he has ordered on the Russian hacking completed before he leaves the White House. I bet he does. If Trump and his national security team start digging around in the horribly incompetent Obama national security web that is blaming Russia for a Democrat election loss, the bodies will be stacked goal-post high. • And, at the end of every DNI or White House cyber or security botched job, Barack Obama always blames his Intelligence services. That is a joke -- and Mattis, Flynn and Pompeo know it only too well. Intel provides the information "on time and under budget." Obama and his less-than-stellar intelligence staff then misuse or ignore the information and go off down their own Progressive Yellow Brick Road to disaster. No matter what the goal of the NYT article on the DNC hacking was, its result is to show once again that Obama is not competent in national security matters and his staff is equally inept. The lesson that Trump seems to be learning -- despite the MSM's tirades about his "ignorance" -- is that his national security team is first rate and he should take their advice very seriously. Consider this -- Joy Behar of "The View" called on Trump to step down over his disagreement with the CIA assessment over Russia’s involvement : “He has to step down before the inauguration before they give him the nuclear codes. We are at risk when the President is fighting with the CIA,” she said to applause from her audience. And, talking about connections to Russia in members of Trump’s team, Behar asked: “Do we have to wait until the hammer and sickle is on the American flag before we stand up to this guy?” [The hammer and sickle has not been on the Russian flag since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.] GQ’s Keith Olbermann offered this summary : "We are at war with Russia, or perhaps more correctly we have lost a war with Russia without battle. We are no longer a sovereign nation, we are no longer a democracy, we are no longer a free people, we are the victims of a bloodless coup -- so far a bloodless coup.” Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker tweeted : "We are in an unprecedented situation: a President that 54% of voters opposed elected with the help of a Russian intelligence operation." • Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus -- but, no, Virginia, there is no Moscow-installed Manchurian Candidate getting ready to take over America. For once, the Washington Post got it right when it first reported on the CIA assessment last Friday -- there are internal disagreements over the analysis -- the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has not yet agreed with the CIA finding, and neither has the FBI. But, the much-quoted but still "secret" CIA report has fueled efforts to derail Trump in the Electoral College and call the entire election into question. Just how silly that position is can easily be seen in the recount effort by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in three states. The recount came to an end on Monday in Wisconsin, after weeks of legal wrangling, yielded only 131 changes -- AND the 131 recounted votes went Republican winner Donald Trump. A federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected Stein's request for a recount and an examination of that state's voting machines for evidence of hacking in the November 8 election won by Trump. • As another faithful Blog reader-commenter wrote on Wednesday : "Nothing friends, virtually nothing is beyond the Party of Obama - Clinton. Though they are in the game for different reasons, they are still in the game for either to win. The Electoral College vote can not come soon enough for me. Hillary, Obama, and the whole of the Democratic Party did not suffer the resounding defeat it did nationally, state wide, and locally to be expected to go quietly into the night and wait for the election of 2020. Their baskets are too full of underhanded, deceitful, dishonest, illegal moves yet used. Hillary will be far too old and legally exposed by 2020 to dream of being a factor in that election. And Obama has been soundly defeat and left with no LEGACY at all. His lies and illegal actions has left him as it is said about spies and undercover intelligent agents..."out in the cold." So with only the slimmest of an opportunity to resurrect their political lives, the Electoral College is their Custer's Last Stand." • Monday cannot arrive too soon.