Eric Lund @ # 18: But there is circumstantial evidence as well. The most recent Clinton/Podesta e-mail leak was reported on a news source with close ties to the Russian government.

The Russia/Wikileaks connection (pretty clearly established) accounts for that without any need to invoke the CrowdStrike (“FSB! GRU!”) hypothesis.

FTR: I make NO claim the Kremlin did NOT do this – just that the case as presented so far does not hold up well (that is, none of the varying versions I’ve read), especially given the ease of leaving false fingerprints.

Has Wikileaks jumped the shark with this?

They aren’t a neutral party here. Julian Assange is on record as favoring Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

jane@20: You need to recalibrate your snark meter.

I don’t see Trump as an oligarch in the sense you raise in #16.

Where Trump comes in is that he runs a seemingly legitimate business that is used to launder profits from more questionable ventures. The American Mafia has always had such businesses, La Cosa Nostra in Sicily has always had such businesses, and I assume that Russian oligarchs need such businesses as well. Trump needs funding wherever he can get it–regular American banks prefer not to do business with him. So Trump and the Russian oligarchs need each other.

The Russian “fingerprints” – at least as presented so far – look pretty faint in this case.

The direct evidence is thin, because these guys make a decent effort to hide their tracks. But there is circumstantial evidence as well. The most recent Clinton/Podesta e-mail leak was reported on a news source with close ties to the Russian government. It also was a fake: one of the e-mails from Podesta included a lengthy document attributed to Sidney Blumenthal, but Kurt Eichenwald has identified himself as the actual author of that document. The curious thing here is that Trump seems to have known about this document dump before it was reported publicly.

The conclusion – Trump spouts a lot of Russian propaganda because, for some reason, American white supremacists organizations love Russia and Trump and his team get a lot of their information from white supremacist web sites.

I don’t see Trump as an oligarch in the sense you raise in #16. Trump’s control of others comes through BS and bunkum and he moves on when people catch on to his shtick. I believe the oligarch’s are a little more direct and brutal in their control

What is a Russian Oligarch? These days, this is the head of a mafia like organization that also supports the return of some of the old ways, with control over other countries like the USSR had, but without the bother of a socialistic philosophy.

As Marcus Ranum, an actual (and cynical) computer expert pointed out in a separate case, when you’ve been mugged by a stranger, and you’re supposed to be a Tough Guy™, you have a strong incentive to tell everybody he was as big and strong as Mike Tyson. In computer terms, that means blaming a “state agent” instead of a handful of dudebros in some Edinburgh basement.

Berlusconi => Murdoch

(use two angle brackets and the interpreter reads tags…)