If Watergate Break-In of DNC Was A Crime, What About Trump/Russia Hacks?
In Watergate, you had burglers with connections to Nixon's campaign wiretapping and stealing documents from the DNC. With Trump, you have the Russians hacking the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign, releasing the documents to wikileaks, with wikileaks making the documents public at strategic times with the Trump campaign often seeming to know ahead of time about the content of the leaks. For example, Mike Pence charging that Hillary secretly supports single payer a few days before e-mailed transcripts of Hillary supporting single payer are made public.
Here is a summary of the events behind the Watergate scandal:
http://www.history.com/topics/watergate
The origins of the Watergate break-in lay in the hostile politics of the 1960s. By 1972, when Republican President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) was running for reelection, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and deeply divided internally. In such a harsh political climate, a forceful presidential campaign seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. In May 1972, as evidence would later show, members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (known derisively as CREEP) broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters, stole copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones.
The wiretaps failed to work properly, however, so on June 17 the group returned to the Watergate building. As the prowlers were preparing to break into the office with a new microphone, a security guard noticed that they had taped the building’s locks. The guard called the police, who arrived just in time to catch the spies red-handed.
It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings. In August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. Most voters believed him, and in November the president was reelected in a landslide.
Here is Roger Stone bragging about back-channel communications with Julian Assange, as well as reports that the U.S. is finding evidence that Russia intelligence is providing the hacked documents to Assange.
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2016/10/12/trump-ally-roger-stone-admits-back-channel-tie-to-wikileaks/
MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Roger Stone, a self-described master of the political dark arts and the longtime ally of Donald Trump, admits he has had “back-channel communications” with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over the release of thousands of emails stolen from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Stone, however, said he was not provided the hacked material in advance nor was he involved in the timing of their release.
“I do have a back-channel communication with Assange, because we have a good mutual friend,” Stone told CBS4 News Wednesday evening. “That friend travels back and forth from the United States to London and we talk. I had dinner with him last Monday.”
Assange was granted asylum by the government of Ecuador in 2012 and has resided ever since in that country’s London embassy.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/politics/russia-us-election/
There is mounting evidence that the Russian government is supplying WikiLeaks with hacked emails pertaining to the US presidential election, US officials familiar with the investigation have told CNN.
As WikiLeaks continues to publish emails belonging to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, US officials told CNN that there is growing evidence that Russia is using the organization as a delivery vehicle for the messages and other stolen information.
The methods of the disclosures "suggest Moscow is at least providing the information or is possibly directly responsible for the leaks," one US official said.
US intelligence officials are still investigating the degree of connection between Russia and WikiLeaks but they remain confident that Russia is behind the leaks themselves.
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And yet people say they did. I wonder why? I know an IP address in the malware spying on the DNC is a server in Russia. But anyone anywhere on the Internet could set that up. They would just need to know how to hack. That's a lot of suspects. So, who had motive?
I can think of one person, and he has a friend named Roger Stone.
