Last year. That wall street journal scoop, again, about a week and a half ago, was about this wealthy republican operative who had funded, whod been involved in Opposition Research efforts and dirty tricks campaigns against bill clinton. All the way back in the 90s in arkansas. What shane harris at the wall street journal was able to report was that republican operative, peter harris, at the end of last summer, he assembled a team to try to get in contact with, to try to get in cahoots with Russian Hackers. Before peter smith died earlier this year at the age of 81 he freely admitted to the wall street journal that he had surmised that these Russian Hackers he was trying to get in contact were probably linked to the russian government. That didnt bother him. He thought the russian government hackers attacking our election system might have been able to hack Hillary Clintons emails. And so he formed this team late last summer to try to find the appropriate group of hackers, to try to ma
Before peter smith died earlier this year at the age of 81 he freely admitted to the wall street journal that he had surmised that these Russian Hackers he was trying to get in touch with were probably linked to the russian government. That didnt bother him. He thought the russian government hackers attacking our election system might have been able to hack Hillary Clintons emails. And so he formed this team late last summer to try to find the appropriate group of hackers, to try to make contact with them, to try to get Hillary Clintons stolen emails off of them so those emails could be deployed against her in the campaign on behalf of trump supporters. So its really interesting bombshell reporting from shane harris, again, about a week and a half ago. It was a big advance in terms of what we understand about this story and what we as americans understand about what happened to our country last year. I mean, it is now wellestablished or it is at least furthermorely attested to by multi
Reported today. But i want to start with something that came out in midmay. Time magazine published a big story about one prong of the russian attack on the u. S. Election last year. As weve been talking about that, it had three different components. First there was the straight up hacking effort by russia to try to penetrate local and state election systems all over the country. Mostly targeting Voter Registration rolls. We still dont have a clear sense of why they did that, what they did with the access that they gained through that attack. What they were trying to do, whether that might have been laying the groundwork for something in the future. Ill say just personally, i find it mildly distressing that under rt Trump Administration, the department of Homeland Security doesnt seem interested in investigating what the consequences were of that hacking attack and whether u. S. Election systems might be compromised in a way because of that attack that we may not learn about until that
July weekend where we wish to anticipate having fun with our friends and family, this is certainly, certainly a terrible, terrible tragedy. I want to thank and commend our First Responders. Thanks to their response, the work of the medical professionals and our hospitals and by the grace of god all of the victims are expected to survive. I want to reassure our public that this was not an act of terrorism but a tragedy. A local community tragedy. It does not appear to be a planned shooting. It appears that there was a disagreement amongst a small subset of individuals at a concert that turned violent because of the presence of rivalries and weapons. I want to take a moment here in a minute after our officials give their briefing to address some of the bigger issues affecting our community. But there are two things that are readily apparent. We must do more to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people. And government can do something to help us with that. We also, also, should be ou
Politically inconvenient news. That is true of weekends in general. Holiday weekends, all the more so. So i do hope you get some time off for the Holiday Weekend. I hope you enjoy your weekend in general. But just keep in mind, this is one of those times to sort of just keep eyes open. All politicians, all public figurers to a certain except have to manage the art of diverting peoples attention at times. Changing the subject. Creating deliberate distractions and, you know, some politicians are better at it than others but all good politicians have to be able to do it to a certain degree. Our current president is very, very, very good at it. He doesnt just have that skill like a normal politician. He has a peculiar nuclear version of it. Let me explain what i mean. A normal political way, a normal politicians way to change the subject, the way a normal politician does it is to stop talking about whatever that person finds inconvenient or unfavorable or uncomfortable, stop talking about