Updates - See also:
4/29/2017: Trump and Russia: UK Government was handed dossier on Donald Trump links to Russia last year, court papers reveal: it covers "at least" five years of communication, co-operation and conspiracy between Mr Trump's camp and Russian intelligence officials." | See also: 1.13.17 - Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's frustration as FBI sat on Donald Trump Russia file for months | UK was given details of alleged contacts between Trump campaign and Moscow - The Guardian: "A statement by Steele's defence lawyers, endorsed by the former MI6 agent, said Orbis was hired between June and November last year by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research consultancy to look into Trump's links with Russia. In that period, Steele ..."
4.29.17 - Lawmakers wary of Russia's ability to plant dirt, fake evidence | Facebook Hints You-Know-Who Tried To Manipulate U.S. Election | Facebook admits 'malicious actors'...
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Summary of this post:
"The statistical effects of the clearly significant (rather rapid, switch-like) changes in the voters' sentiments after the October 28 Letter can be considered as the practically established fact: see the graphs below. The most interesting detail is that this sudden, abrupt changes started well before October 28, 2016, date."
"And while it isn’t proof of anything, the pattern is at least consistent with a “shock” caused by a burst of negative news for a candidate, as opposed to a more gradual decline."
Who and how managed this explosive burst of the negative and "fake news" about Mrs. Clinton?"
The statistical effects of the clearly significant (rather rapid, bullet-like) changes in the voters sentiments after the October 28 Letter pic.twitter.com/U0RXwzpLpG— Mike Nova (@mikenov) April 24, 2017
Federal Bureau of Investigation - NYT
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The statistical effects of the October 28 Letter
and the questions to the FBI - by Michael Novakhov
"After the release of the Comey letter, Trump's favorability shot up six points. It's dipped slightly since then, but only by a few hairs. In over a year of campaigning, only one thing had a serious impact on the presidential race. James Comey."
M.N.: Comey's overall "motivations" might be complex and at the same time simple:
the security of the country. The details of these complexities are not easy to read. A lot of specific questions could and should be asked, especially with regard to the "October 2016 Surprise", and the ridiculous (it is hard to find a different word) "Weiner sexting scandal", and the directly related Weiner's-Abedin computer email trove investigation. We still do not have an answer ("any answer" at this point, well or not so well, substantiated and reasoned) as to how this enormous amount (650,000) of the e-mails (not just the casual after work reading) got in their laptop: who, how, and why dumped them. And if Weiner case was the FBI's so-called "sting operation" (and the clearly politically motivated at that), and if the Russians or any other foreign (intelligence) entity assisted in dumping these e-mails, then the questions arise, if there was any collusion, spoken or not, between the FBI (or its part, pursuing Weiner) and these entities. The question also arises if the "Clinton's e-mails investigations" were the deliberate and planned (and flawlessly performed) diversionary tactic: to deflect the attention and the resources from the FBI Investigation of Donald Trump, at the time a Presidential candidate.
"After the FBI discovery, on a laptop belonging to former congressman Anthony Weiner — but believed also to have been used by his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton — of a cache of Clinton emails that may not have previously been identified, FBI Director James Comey reportedly gathered his lieutenants and legal team in a conference room to discuss the crucial next steps. The investigation into Clinton’s email practices and private server clearly was no longer closed, as he’d famously announced, and so Comey faced a decision.
His options, as he saw them, according to new New York Times reporting on the matter, were (a.) to reveal that the Clinton case, which he had publicly declared closed, had now been reopened to accommodate perusal of those emails, and thereby potentially tilt the election outcome in Donald Trump’s favor, or (b.) to have the emails examined without such a revelation and thus leave the bureau open, down the line, to charges that it had protected Clinton, who then held a relatively comfortable lead in most polls.
As he addressed his FBI team, Comey, a Republican but an Obama appointee, weighed that dilemma. When an adviser, according to the Times reporting, asked whether Comey should “consider that what [he was] about to do may help elect Donald Trump president,” the director, according to the report, told his agents:
‘If we ever start considering who might be affected, and in what way, by what we do, we’re done.’ - James Comey
His decision had been made."
The allegations, in the various press reports, that Weiner-Abedin emails lingered in the FBI New York office for some time, (for about one month, from the early to the late October 2016), before they were "discovered", and became the focus of the investigation, do not help to dispel the "conspiracy theories", and raise the questions about the very convenient and possibly orchestrated timing of this affair.
And this might be one of the real, not imaginary bombshells dropped by the NYT article about Comey and his decisions.
The significance of this massive (650,000) emails "discovery" should have been clear immediately, unless some group of people within the FBI was playing for time, to increase the momentum of the FBI announcement closer to the Election date.
The only other explanation would be the utter unprofessionalism, unlikely in this particular case, but not out of the realm of possibilities, and not such a rare occurrence, even for the FBI. Whatever the "hypothetical" explanations, some adequate explanation from the FBI is due. The lack of the "great urgency" and the "crashing software" during the whole month are unlikely to be perceived as "adequate and reasonable" by the "adequate and reasonable" members of the Congressional Committees.
Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler confronted Comey about the appearance of a double standard during a congressional hearing, after then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who had been briefed on aspects of the Trump-Russia probe by CIA Director John Brennan, wrote a letter to Comey imploring him to go public.
“After you investigated Secretary Clinton, you made a decision to explain publicly who you interviewed and why,” Nadler said to Comey. “You also disclosed documents, including those from those interviews. Why shouldn’t the American people have the same level of information about your investigation with those associated with Mr. Trump?”
According to The Times, "Mr. Comey never considered disclosing the case. Doing so, he believed, would have undermined an active investigation and cast public suspicion on people the FBI could not be sure were implicated."
FBI Dir just informed me, "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation." Case reopened— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016
The October 28 Letter apparently was disclosed by J. Chaffetz,
who since decided not to run again, and the "Capitol Hill still trying to figure out" why, and "WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON WITH JASON CHAFFETZ? - One of the most powerful lawmakers in Congress says he might resign, and nobody really knows why", while Mr. Chaffetz himself denies, that "scandal would force him out early".
Thus, we can assume that the credit and responsibility for presenting Mr. Trump and his questionable "Trumpism" as the gift to the world, belong squarely to him...
"Although the sourcing is rather solid that the FBI is investigating Jason Chaffetz for Russia-related campaign finance fraud, we can’t yet verify the part about the $10 million flowing from Russia to Trump to Chaffetz after he leaked the letter. But if that part does prove true, it’ll help explain much of what was going on in the final days of the election – and it would certainly explain why Chaffetz is suddenly cutting and running in the midst of what had been a still-rising political career."
No deed, unauthorized by the FBI, should go unpunished; good, bad, or in-between, unless is intended explicitly and directly for leaking... Quite an interesting and complex picture, indeed.
The great drama surrounding Mr. Comey's meeting(s) with the FBI leadership on this issue, the October 28 Letter, and the blackmailing threats of the resignation letters, which drove him to apparently, great angst and insomnia, only thicken the cloud of suspicions.
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It is also worth remembering that at that time, very close to the Election day,
the rumors were spread, including the Russian propaganda outlets and the social media,
about the impending and the inevitable Weiner's arrest by the NYPD, apparently planted by none else but Erik Prince, who, as it was reported later, sought or engaged into the "backdoor" communications channels with the Russians. Mr. Guiliani's acute political omniscience, apparently fed and fortified by his old FBI friends, is also of note, and also fits the pattern of smoke from the camp fire. The appointment of the new chief of the FBI's New York Field office (considered, rightly or wrongly, a bastion of the FBI's Trumplandia) in July of 2016, at the strategic point of the Presidential campaign, relevant or not, is also a curious occurrence.
The statistical effects of the clearly significant (rather rapid, bullet-like) changes in the voters' sentiments after the October 28 Letter can be considered as the practically established fact: see the graphs below. The most interesting detail is that this sudden, abrupt changes started well before the October 28, 2016 date.
See: "statistical change in trump and clinton supporters after october 28 letter"
- Google Search
This can be deduced from this graph based on the "Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll Oct. 24-27, 2016":
As is evident from this graph, the voters' sentiments started to change somewhere on October 20 - 24, probably in response to some pointed mass media campaign,
which, as it is known, was facilitated by the presumably Russian cyber-bots. The letter itself might be just the contributing factor, synergistic with the adverse media campaign led by the Russian propaganda machine, of which the "Pizza-gate" was the latest offshoot.
The reversal point in the "Tone of media coverage" can be pinpointed to the October 16, 2016, date, when, after some compensatory waves, this "tone" continued the same pattern and the directions through the Elections. Prior to these reversal point, the intense media campaigns, including the foreign (including the Russian twitter bots, etc.) and the Wikileaks operations started after the debates, in September (including the September 11, 2016, episode), and intensified further in the beginning of October 2016, leading to the "October Surprise".
The FBI - Comey's letter boosted this continuity in the directions of the "tones of media coverage", but did not initiate or start them, it looks like it was secondary in importance and significance to these general "tones of media coverage".
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7778155/percentage_of_clinton_coverage._scandal_related..png)
"If we’re assuming an immediate response in polls in response to an event, [although it is more logical to assume that there is a certain "latency period" of 1 to 3, to 14, and to 21 days between the emergence of the news and the emergence of the emotional-psychological response to them - M.N.] then the ObamaCare premium spike would be a far better explanation than the Comey letter, which took place later.
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THE OBAMACARE NOT COMEY EFFECT - December 11, 2016
aca announcement october 24 2016 | aca announcement october 24 2016 and clinton ratings
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Frankly, I suspect both had an impact, and further suspect there may have been something else driving the differential late turn to Trump in the Rust Belt.
And I suspect we still don’t have the data to explain what made a bunch of Rust Belt voters move to Trump right before the election."
At this time there are more data to assume that it was the anti-Clinton social media campaign driven by the Russian Twitter bots that might have made the difference, and might explain, at least in substantial part, beyond and in addition to the other deep factors, such as anti-Obama and the associated anti-Clinton rage, what "made a bunch of Rust Belt voters move to Trump right before the election."
"The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience.
Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)
This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians...
The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win, researchers said."
While the statistics of the Russian propaganda bots activities around that time could not be found but would be interesting to see, the descriptive accounts of its intensification during the last 10-7 days prior to Elections, as in the above piece, are quite convincing.
The graph on the top of this post illustrates the "statistical change in trump and clinton supporters after october 28 letter" (GS),
as reflected in Trump's favorability ratings, most vividly. It also looks that the Comey's "clearance" 3 days before the Election day, was not reflected in any appreciable statistical effect. The "Intra-Trump" sentiments remained relatively stable after the elections and started to diverge only in the beginning of April 2017, as is seen in the top graph. This might be an indication, that the cumulative effects of the Russian propaganda probably played the role more decisive than the "letters" per se. And the "blackening", negative propaganda apparently, sticks much stronger and longer, because the "embellishing, positive" white propaganda, is perceived as nothing of the ordinary, as something that is supposed to be this way.
The overall wave-like pattern was observed by the noted pollster, Nate Silver:
"Clinton’s poll numbers were arguably a bit inflated in mid-October amid a very rough period for Donald Trump. And even before Comey, the media seemed eager for one last twist in the news cycle, so Clinton may have been due for a period of greater scrutiny one way or the other — for example, over emails from the Clinton campaign released by WikiLeaks.
Trump should get some credit, as well, for having been comparatively disciplined on the campaign trail. He’s gained about 2 points in national polls since Oct. 28, while Clinton lost 1 point.
Still, if you look at our win-probability graphic, while Clinton’s chances were slightly declining already after she came off her post-debate peak, the rate of decline began to accelerate a couple of days after Comey, once we began to receive some post-Comey polls. Now the decline has leveled off, and her lead has held steady over the past several days. One advantage of having a model like ours that’s pretty quick to detect changes in the polls is that we can potentially make better inferences about the cause of polling shifts. And while it isn’t proof of anything, the pattern is at least consistent with a “shock” caused by a burst of negative news for a candidate, as opposed to a more gradual decline."
"Nate Silver, the editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, said The Times' report showed "the case that the Comey letter — or the media's handling of the letter — cost Clinton the election is painfully obvious."
It is tempting to assume that the moods, the ebbs and flows of the voting public's preference sentiments,
as shown on the above graph, are somewhat similar to the biological process of peristalsis, and to continue the analogy, are governed by the certain rules and habits of the mass mental digestion processes of the news fodder in their media cycles: it is slow, somewhat "autonomous", self-determined to a degree, and moves along the certain temporal - stretched out in time and the time-z sinusoidal patterns, with the interplay of the psychosocial tensions determining their shape. It is also similar to the sinusoidal, supply-demand tensions reflecting the movements of the stock prices, as the reflection of the mass psychology.
As N. Silver observed, Mrs. Clinton's "chances of winning", (which is a very different measure from the "intra-candidate" favorability ratings, as in the graph on the top), started to decline slightly after the highs of the "win" in the debates, and then, after the October 28 Letter, accelerated their declines rapidly, "consistent with a “shock” caused by a burst of negative news for a candidate".
Who and how managed this explosive burst of the negative and "fake news" about Mrs. Clinton?
"In many ways, the campaign was also jinxed.
Every time it looked like things were breaking their way, another disaster happened. Most famously, on Friday, Oct. 7, 2016, 17 intelligence agencies announced their conclusion that Russia was trying to influence the outcome of the election to help Donald Trump. That news alone might have won the election for her. But, within an hour, the Russian bombshell was overshadowed both by discovery of the crude “Access Hollywood” tape and release of the first emails stolen by hackers from the account of her campaign chairman, John Podesta. Reversals of fortune happened so often that the campaign adopted the refrain: “We’re not allowed to have nice things.”
There were, in fact, several external factors that contributed significantly to Clinton’s stunning defeat, most notably: Russian interference; James Comey’s public scolding of Hillary and re-opening of the email investigation; Bernie Sanders’s surprising success; and the failure of the media to take Donald Trump seriously and subject him to scrutiny." - [Some hyperlinks added - M.N.]
By now, with the benefit of the hindsight, as always, and with all the tidbits of the additional information dripping in, it becomes "painfully obvious", to use Nate Silver's words, that it is very likely that all the major informational (anti-Clinton) operations of the Trump's campaign were skillfully and adroitly managed by the some mysterious Moscow centers and structures, among them possibly by RISS.
"The clear connection between Trump's campaign and the Russian intelligence, engaging in cyber-thefts, collections of "kompromat", blatant propaganda through Russian government's information channels, such as "Sputnik" and "RT', and possibly the wide range of other activities, that we might not be fully aware of, makes them practically a single information-intelligence entity, created under the guise of the free democratic elections." - from "The Autumn Of Our Discontent".
This is a matter of the enormous National and Global Security importance and implications (the alleged recent, and the same Russian hackers' interference in the French Elections is the case in point), a matter of the newly emerged Information (including its cyber aspects) Security issues and concepts, and all the foreign and domestic players in these shenanigans have to be investigated with the utmost thoroughness, painstaking attention to the details, objectivity, openness to the self-criticism, and the readiness to uncover everything and everyone, regardless of their official positions and/or past credits.
This is the "Putin International":
the ideology does not really matter, and it never really did. The World Domination ("World Revolution") - the Power, and the tools for its acquisition (and now, the new cyber and disinformation tools) - that what mattered in 1920 - s, and that what really matters to the neo - Soviet Putin and his new reincarnation of the International that he tries to build.
In fact, the information, and particularly the digital information, became fully weaponized by the various players, including, very clearly, for the political and the geopolitical purposes. This raises the strategic issues of response and perhaps some re-focusing in the intelligence and the counterintelligence endeavors.
In addition to these "Russian and other foreign media and intelligence influence on the Elections of 2016" issues, many other questions, including Mr. Trump's finances, and possible financial obligations, formal or informal, his conflicts of interests, his special warmth for Russia (a rather rare case of the pure and platonic love on the part of the seasoned businessman and the consummate deal-maker), and many, many other questions are very much on the agenda.
Many good questions could and should al-zo be asked when Mr. Comey testifies in the closed session of the House Intelligence Committee next week, and al-zo for year-z to come. It is never too late to learn.
At the mean time, I hope that James Comey and Mike Pompeo have a good time and enjoy the beautiful z-z-zunny weather in New Z-z-z-eeland and the environ-z-z-z.
Michael Novakhov
2:45 PM 4/23/2017 | Updates: 10:17 AM 4/25/2017 - 9:47 PM 4/25/2017.
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"CIA director Mike Pompeo is among members from 15 agencies believed to be attending the conference and may well have been among those onboard the plane, which jetted in via Wellington."
FBI boss Comey arrives in New Zealand ahead of conference https://t.co/mSuHXW2fvH— Mike Nova (@mikenov) April 23, 2017
FBI Investigation of Donald Trump - 4.23.17 -
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5:17 PM 4/23/2017 - Copy - FBI Investigation of Donald Trump - 4.23.17 -
James Comey - Google News
Clinton emails investigations - Google News
FBI Investigation of Donald Trump - Google News
