Did /pol/ and 4Chan make up the Donald Trump golden showers story?
International Business Times says "yes"
but ...
Mediaite says "no"
and ...
The "4chan did it" story seems to be contradicted by articles in the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times, which identifies the actual source of the documents by his real name. The quote below is from the Times:
"The author of the memos is Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with MI-6, who once served in Moscow. After Mr. Steele retired in 2009, he founded a private firm called Orbis Business Intelligence in London. Former C.I.A. officials described him as an expert on Russia who is well respected in the spy world."
Once you start to believe anything on 4Chan about what's been leaked from there except celeb nudes, you're slipping down a...slippery slope.
ReplyDeleteThe closest I can figure, being conspiratorial here is that this fake news of Putin blackmailing Trump has been put out to discredit the reality that Putin is, in fact, blackmailing Trump, but not with these rather ridiculous stories.
ReplyDeleteI certainly don't think the idea that Putin has Trump in a compromising position is an extreme idea. I got into a twitter discussion a while back with a person who hoped that the political establishment was being destroyed by these wikileaks and referred to the emails being released from Hillary Clinton as 'whistleblowing' and finally hoped that emails from the RNC and Donald Trump would also emerge.
I replied that I thought he was naive and that if Putin had any emails from Trump and/or the RNC with any value that he would use them to blackmail Trump, and I didn't originate this idea myself.
The problem with that is, it's one thing to speculate on something like that, and I'm sure quite a number of people have, it's quite another to have anything approaching tangible evidence, and I'm not aware of anybody claiming to have real and credible evidence that Putin is blackmailing Trump, so I'm not sure why this almost certainly fake nonsense was released.
'well-respected in the spy world'... hence the fact that we know his full name and city of residence.
ReplyDeleteThe fatal, paradoxical flaw here is that if the Russian government did possess something as priceless as the means to blackmail an American President, they wouldn't do such a piss-poor (pun totally intended) job of keeping it a secret.
ReplyDeleteSo it seems both candidates had issues with Russian leaks.
ReplyDeleteThey and you are missing the full story. The 4chan guy handed it to an operative working against trump for both Dems and GOP. HE slipped it into the hands of Intel people tasked with finding dirt on trump. One of those people? The possibly mythical Steele. All of this was laid out on 4chan and hasn't been provably contradicted by anyone.
ReplyDeleteIf memory serves, the contact they passed it to was named Mark Wilson or something like that.
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