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Comment by psychlops | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, I'm shocked. The US would never do such a thing and to discover that others may want to influence american politics for their benefit is astonishing.

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It’s notable because he was indicted by Muller for election interference, so it’s confirming the accusation that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election. It’s also newsworthy because many people didn’t (or still don’t) believe any election interference happened, and that it’s the first time (that I’m aware of) where a foreign nation was accused of so directly and materially attempting to influence a US election.

But you’re right, I’m sure lots of countries do this all the time, including the US.

The reason russian influence entered the zeitgeist was a PR push from people who worked in the HRC campaign and DNC insiders who needed to blame Trumps win on external factors to distract from their "pied piper" strategy of deliberately elevating trump during the primaries because they thought he would be easy to beat.

(https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaig...)

There is no evidence (afaik) that russian influence materially swayed the results of the 2016 election.

Not-so-fun-fact: the DCCC is still using this strategy to funnel funds from democratic donors into right-extremist candidates races in the 2022 cycle:

https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-spent-43-million-helping-...

https://theweek.com/speed-reads/1015258/the-pied-piper-strat...

Election interference need not be measured by its impact to be illegal. Maybe it swayed the election maybe it didn’t, but the individual in the article just admitted to the crime he was indicted for as a result of the Muller report.

Does legality even matter? I doubt Putin will be willing to extradite his 'chef' because he harmed america's interests for russian benefit.

To foreign entities, it probably only matters in terms of international relations.

To domestic entities, the laws of the land certainly matter. If an adversarial foreign entity is breaking domestic laws without penalty, then domestic entities can focus more on the preventative aspect of enforcement of the law.

But yeah, if you have no enforcement and no deterrence then the law might as well not exist.

The US would never!

https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.htm...

Three years before this Clinton, the US Congress and corporate media cheered as Yeltsin shelled the Russian parliament with the help of the Russian Army. The idea was to support a strongman Russian president with tight connections to Russia military and military intelligence against the elected parliament. He appointed Putin to take over for him when he left.

Nowadays the same US politicians and press bemoan Putin and the lack of democracy in Russia. It's a complete farce.

I'm going to assume that your "shock" is of the same kind as Captain Renault's when he says he is shocked, shocked to find that there's gambling going on at Rick's.

It is as if they never played Civ1 game and never used Saboteur to cause unrest in a city.

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