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Never mind that in the interview he did, Assange CLEARLY wanted to say it was Seth Rich.  You could see it on his face after he mentioned Rich had been murdered and their sources take risks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg

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The Russian troll factories aren't about being anti/pro Trump, their job is 100% about sowing discord in the US.

They will purposely find the most hot button issues and bombard social media trying to create in-fighting by taking the most extreme points of view. Their goal is to divide us and weaken the US from within.

Please read this book, it's become required reading for top Russian political/military staff since the 2000s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

And this is what we're experiencing today....

It's not about choosing sides, it's all about spreading bullshit lies/conspiracy theories all over the internet for the sole intention of weakening/destabilizing our country.

It's the equivalent of an entire country trying to actively troll.

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I posted the first Seth Rich/email leak theory on Arf the morning after he was killed.  Hadn't seen anything about it elsewhere, the possible connection leaps out at anybody completely without Russian help.  No kidding.

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Those Ruskies are into every damn thing !

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I can understand why they would make such a claim when you look at the history of stuff the Soviets did (see below)
With that said, I don't see what the Russians would have to gain from such a lie.

Per Wiki- Mitrokhin Archive

Disinformation campaign against the United States

Andrew described the following active measures by the KGB against the United States:[36]

Promotion of false John F. Kennedy assassination theories, using writer Mark Lane.[37][not specific enough to verify] Lane denied this allegation and called it "an outright lie".[38]

Forged letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to E. Howard Hunt, attempting to incriminate Hunt in the Kennedy assassination.[39]

Discrediting the CIA using the ex-CIA case officer and defector Philip Agee.[40][clarification needed]
Spreading supposedly unconfirmed rumors that the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual.[41]
Attempts to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. by placing publications portraying him as an "Uncle Tom" who was secretly receiving government subsidies.[42]

Stirring up racial tensions in the United States by mailing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, by placing an explosive package in "the Negro section of New York" (operation PANDORA),[43] and by spreading conspiracy theories that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination had been planned by the US government.[43]

Fabrication of the story that the AIDS virus was manufactured by US scientists at the US Army research station at Fort Detrick. The story was spread by Russian-born biologist Jakob Segal.[44]

In 2017, a memorandum was sent to the White House from a group of former U.S. intelligence officials, including William Binney, former technical director at the National Security Agency (NSA).

The team was a veritable who’s who of accredited technical wizards, comprising former top brass from the NSA, CIA, U.S. Air Force Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Council, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and IBM.

The subject of the memo was their forensic analysis of the emails that were allegedly obtained from a hack at the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—a basis for assertions that the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government.

Unchallenged allegations of a computer “hack” permeated nearly all mainstream-media coverage of the investigation and were sprinkled throughout much of the final report from special counsel Robert Mueller. The indictment of 12 Russians by Mueller asserts that the emails were obtained through a remote network breach. The indictment drones on and on about a Russian military unit dubbed “Unit 26165” and “X-Agent malware” that supposedly allowed the DNC emails to be compromised.

But analysis of the files themselves (analysis that team Mueller either never conducted or never discussed) shows otherwise.

What was revealed through forensic analysis of the emails was that they were copied at speeds too high to have been hacked and transmitted over the internet. The metadata indicate that the emails had to have been copied locally—by someone who had physical access to the network—to some sort of mobile hard drive or flash drive.

Binney and former CIA and State Department Counter Terrorism officer Larry Johnson wrote in a report that “the highest transfer rate was 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than possible from a remote online connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincides with the download rate for a thumb drive.”

But let’s set that aside for a moment. The report also fails to account for the CIA’s Marble Framework tool—leaked to the public by WikiLeaks in its “Vault 7” drop—that allows the agency to “mask its hacking attacks to make it look like it came from” another country, including Russia. Even if there was a hack (the only available evidence shows there wasn’t), the CIA could have easily been behind it and left false digital footprints that blamed Russia. Mueller failed to address this, as well.

These are hardly minor details. And it should now be clear to all that exculpatory evidence is something that neither the Mueller team nor establishment media are interested in providing to the public.

Here’s a friendly reminder that Mueller’s team couldn’t possibly have asserted, with a high degree of confidence, that the emails were actually hacked, because they didn’t even examine the DNC’s server. Neither did the FBI.

It’s not inconsequential that the DNC refused to let anyone examine the server. The FBI just accepted the hack narrative based on the word of CrowdStrike, a firm hired by the DNC—a firm whose analyst that supposedly examined the DNC server just happened to have previously worked for none other than … Robert Mueller.

The Mueller report repeatedly uses the words “hack” and “hacking,” yet fails to offer a shred of evidence that a hack actually took place. The public is just supposed to accept on good faith a claim made by a former FBI director (under his own cloud of suspicion), who’s investigating the current president in a case initiated by biased FBI officials whose investigation is based on opposition research provided by the Russians and paid for by the president’s political opposition, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Analysis of the stolen emails not only eviscerates the legitimacy of at least 12 of Mueller’s indictments—the ones against Russians he accused of conducting a hack that never actually occurred—it further calls into question the motives for the origin of the Mueller probe.

Specifically, the report states, “Taken together, these disparate data points combine to paint a picture that exonerates alleged Russian hackers and implicates persons within our law enforcement and intelligence community taking part in a campaign of misinformation, deceit and incompetence. It is not a pretty picture.”

After an investigation that had 19 lawyers, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 500 witnesses interviewed, and more than 230 orders for communication records, not only was there no finding of collusion, conspiracy, or obstruction, we are also still left with a question about how this whole thing started.

Who actually stole the DNC emails?

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"Anonymous sources close to an NSA contractor have comfirmed that it was indeed a local download and not a remote connection to the DNC severs." Buzzfeed.

There. Since that level of proof you offered for the whole russia collusion theory i figure its more than enough.

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Those Ruskies are into every damn thing !

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Psssst. Hey kid. Andy Weisman is a liar that covers up stuff for people that pay him.

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I think they are putting this bullshit out as a preemptive to obfuscate what they think is going to come out soon and is most likely the truth.

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Were they simply promoting fringe theories, or actively creating them?  Especially, were they fabricating *evidence* of them?  All are psy-ops, but the latter two are a bit more severe.  Hiring trolls to spread others' nonsense seems far more likely...but also unnecessary these days.