On today’s BradCast, what we know and don’t about newly reported charges that the CIA is said to believe Russian state-actors interfered in the U.S. election on behalf of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, even as attempts to verify the actual Presidential election results, and concerns that they were hacked or otherwise in error, are blocked by Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania and come to an official close in Wisconsin. [Audio link to show posted below.]
Over the weekend, Washington Post and New York Times each reported on unnamed sources alleging a “secret” “consensus” of U.S. intelligence agencies charging Russia tried to interfere with the Presidential election in order to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. National security journalist and author Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel.net offers a measure of skepticism about the explosive reports on those allegations, which she suggests could echo what proved to be blatantly misrepresented and cherry-picked intel by the George W. Bush Administration in their run-up to the Iraq War.
We discuss what we know and don’t know concerning the newly reported charges, which parties have an interested in forwarding them and why they are arising in this form now, and how those concerns can possibly square with seemingly contradictory resistance — by both Republicans and Democrats alike — to human verification of the stunning and poll-defying 2016 Presidential election results reported in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
Speaking of which, late on Friday, a 3-2 split vote at the MI state Supreme Court denied a hearing of Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s appeal of a 3-Republican judge decision that aborted the state’s disastrous paper ballot hand-count last week. And today, a federal court in PA denied [PDF] Stein’s lawsuit seeking a statewide hand-count of paper ballots and a forensic analysis of the 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting and computer tabulation systems used across most of the state. Also today, the state of Wisconsin completed its partial statewide hand-count and certified Donald Trump as the winner of that state’s electoral vote. (Final tallies are not yet available from the Wisconsin Election Commission, but as of earlier today Reuters reported “Trump with a increase of 628 votes, Clinton with an increase of 653 votes and Stein with an increase of 68 votes”. Those are net increases, without reflecting the total number of originally-mistallied votes, nor explaining that most of the state’s largest counties simply ran the hand-marked paper ballots back through the optical-scan computers again to derive their “recount” totals.)
All of that amidst a repeated, coordinated, well-funded and familiar efforts by Republicans and Team Trump to block any and all verification of Presidential election results in all three states. “Cronyism, bureaucratic obstruction, and legal maneuvering have run roughshod over the democratic process,” Stein said following Friday’s Supreme Court decision in MI after tens of thousands of votes were deemed “unrecountable” due to the state’s arcane “recount” laws while the attempted count was still underway last week. “A recount should not be this difficult or controversial. If you take out money from a bank, the teller counts it twice — and the second time, they count it in front of your eyes. It should be well understood that something as important as a presidential election requires a basic level of quality assurance and verification.”
We have all of the latest details on today’s BradCast…
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[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_MarcyWheeler_CIARussiaInterference_WIRecountEnds_PA-MICourtRulings_121216.mp3]
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NPR sure isn’t helping. I came in about 15 minutes late on the Diane Rehm show this morning, and they were covering the Russian election tampering story.
It was obvious to me they were struggling not to bring up the machines. Low and behold, if you expand the transcript and do a word search, the only place the word machine comes up is in the comments section.
Diane Rehm does try to cover this issue and in fact I put up a conversation here where she grilled one of these voting machine shills pretty well, and never got a decent answer. Can’t remember the guys name right now. This is from today:
Problems with voting machines is something that is simply not brought up in the corporate media, or on NPR. Diane tried though. She masked her question by saying “mechanisms” and the guest gave an answer that didn’t mean anything, only he could understand:
Seems to me that if you could count those 75,000 no-vote ballots in Detroit and show that they actually DID have votes on them, we could make a case that something was up.
This is SO frustrating!
Diane Rhem show 12-12-2016
go to 30 mins for important info on Failure of lawyers in MI? MICHIGAN Jim Soper
Part 1 of a great, detailed, sometimes shocking interview with Jan BenDor of the Michigan Election Reform Alliance (MERA)
https://www.facebook.com/ballots4bernie/videos/1345095295564206/
… Daelv said on…
Facebook says registration required… nope.
For non-facebook types:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdFkEFKVjRE
I listened and… holy fuck.
If the information is accurate then Jan
BenDor is right: this was n’t a “recount”
This was a crime.