It's quite clear from scrolling through this that MAGAs have absolutely no clue how intelligence works. The intel community gets endless material from everything including recruited foreign assets, liaison services, open news sources, and even call-ins from people who claim to know something. Any bit of intel is assessed and then corroboration from secondary sources or methods is sought. Assertions are not instantly accepted as fact. For example, one could ask all 100,000 attendees to the Rose Bowl game "Did an alien spacecraft land on the field and abduct the UCLA quarterback?" 99,999 people would laugh., Perhaps one would say, "You saw that, too?" That one person's assertion would not be taken seriously, partly because it's ridiculous, and partly because there is no corroboration. Sadly, Trump's style would be to take that silly assertion and---like in his lie-filled speech last Thursday---state it as fact. OTOH, when various reports surface that Trump's 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort was alleged to have traveled to Spain and handed detailed internal polling data to GRU asset Konstantin Kilimnik, that fact was corroborated in multiple ways---from airline flight records of both men, to liaison reports from Spanish intel, to phone intercepts, to intel from clandestine assets. Confronted with all that data, Manafort admitted what he did on behalf of the Trump campaign. Of course Trump pardoned him for a number of crimes for which Manafort was convicted, since Trump lies about his campaign's willing cooperation with Russia in 2016, when even the Marco Rubio-led SSCI Report on the 2016 election noted several instances of willful cooperation by Trump's campaign and Russia.. The matter of China's "interference" in 2016 or 2020---as opposed to Russia's clear efforts to interfere plus the Trump campaign's willing cooperation with Russian assets---was minimal. There was never any indication of "bamboo" in ballots cast in Arizona in 2016, though it was asserted. China may have purchased voter records, as these are available for purchase by anyone, but China is also known to collect all possible data on Americans who might be targets of espionage operations (such as working on vital technology or classified military programs). That is no smoking gun. Since there was no corroboration of Chinese attempts to influence the 2016 election, nothing was produced as an intelligence report. The FBI has looked at it, the CIA had looked at it, Congress had looked at it, AG Barr had looked at it, Durham had looked at it.....and there was nothing. What Trump's latest lackey---little Bill Pulte---is doing is taking reports from those years and cherrypicking sentences out of context, in fact, leaving out the discrediting of assertions altogether. Not so surprisingly, Pulte did not look into the hard intelligence of willful cooperation between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, nor has he included any of the confirmed and corroborated intelligence from 2020 that Russia was again working to influence the election in Trump's favor.
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