Um... could this be "it"?

[Joseph Tracy]

It does put teeth in the earlier accusations of Russian efforts to smear Hillary, but it strikes me as weak and not likely to go anywhere since the accused are Russians and are highly unikely to go to trial.  Mueller also has given a preliminary if not final statement of no collusion, no treasonous relationship between Trump election team and Russia. Indicting people you can’t bring to trial is not so impressive. Also these Russians don’t seem to have done much but post fake news on the web, an act which is so common as to be meaningless. The hacked emails could just as easily been done by someone else and they exposed real misdeeds by the DNC.  
  Whether there are different routes by which Mueller can expose Trump’s business relations to Russian Oligarchs is open to question. Unfotunately there may be limits on the scope of his investigation that prevent him from going into Trump’s business dealings especially with no indication of electoral collusion.  One obvious hypocrisy problem with the 13 indictments is that the US interfered in far more direct and questionable ways in Russian politics to get Yeltsin in power. Also 

James Risen is working now for the Intercept and recently posted 2 stories about Russia. The first is about CIA/NSA cyber weapons that went missing and seem to be in the hands of the Russians via a group called the Shadow Brokers. If that ain’t werd enough, Risen says US intel offered to buy them , mainly because the US agencies don’t know how much was taken and want to know the extent of the damage. The Russians wanted to throw in damaging info on Trump but the agencies which had sent money to Germany then backed off, possibly to avoid the political repercussions  of processing Trump info with CIA head Pompeo, a  Trump loyalist. 

Now it turns out some of the files in question have been sent to the NYT( Trump files  or cyber spy files is not clear). If they are Trump files and there is some way of the NYT confirming the validity of any of the information this may be the next big story. 

So why would Russia now try to get Trump in trouble? Disinformation? Regrets about Trump? Restore friendlier relations?  

The other Risen story  came out the day before the Mueller announcement and makes it clear Risen thinks the evidence that Russia hacked the DNC files is very conclusive. It seemed like very strong evidence to me to me despite my skepticism about one part where the Russian operative in charge of the operation may be a US double agent and the fact that the DNC servers were never examined by the FBI. Holy shit it just keeps getting weirder. 

 

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l