Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and CIA made $600 million business deal in 2013 which isn't disclosed in Washington Post articles reporting on the agency. In 2016 Bezos was named to a Pentagon advisory board. Bezos also has financial interest in a new engine for military use

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Dec. 2013 article

"Amazon, under the Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, recently secured a $600 million contract from the CIA."...

12/19/2013, "Amazon, ‘The Washington Post’ and That $600 Million CIA Contract," The Nation, Greg Mitchell

"It’s been a rough couple days for The Washington Post. Word emerged that hackers invaded its internal system—for a few days, no less—all of its staffers had to change their passwords as the company tried to figure out how much data had been compromised. 

Meanwhile, a petition campaign was launched related to news that Amazon, under the Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, recently secured a $600 million contract from the CIA. That’s at least twice what Bezos paid for the Post this year. Bezos recently disclosed that the company’s Web-services business is building a “private cloud” for the CIA to use for its data needs. 

Critics charge that, at a minimum, the Post needs to disclose its CIA link whenever it reports on the agency. Over 15,000 have signed the petition this week hosted by RootsAction.

In a statement released by the Institute for Public Accuracy, media writer/author Robert McChesney observes:

When the main shareholder in one of the very largest corporations in the world benefits from a massive contract with the CIA on the one hand, and that same billionaire owns the Washington Post on the other hand, there are serious problems. The Post is unquestionably the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media. Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself.
If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation—say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government—the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the Post to take a dose of its own medicine.”

See article by Norman Solomon for a fuller accounting. He notes:

Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying,

“We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.”"

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Added: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is named to new Pentagon advisory board. He also has financial interest in a new engine for military use....

7/26/16, "Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos Join Defense Innovation Board," DefenseNews.com, Aaron Mehta

"Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Amazon head Jeff Bezos and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein are among the newest names to join Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s new Defense Innovation Advisory Board.

Carter announced those names as part of a list of ten new members for the board, which he created in March to advise the Pentagon on technology innovation issues. The board is headed by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, the Google parent company....

"We’re always doing everything we can to stay ahead of potential adversaries.” [Ash Carter said]...

But the biggest names are Tyson...and Bezos, the Amazon founder who also owns The Washington Post. Bezos is also the head of Blue Origin, a space launch company working with the United Launch Alliance to develop a new engine for military launch.

Although not as flashy a name as some of the others, the inclusion of McQuade is notable, as United Technologies is the only legacy defense contractor involved in the board.

The board will work over the summer before providing initial recommendations to Carter by October."

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More: Endless wars only happen with endless US taxpayer dollars:

7/26/16, "There’s No Business Like the Weapons Business," Scott McConnell, The American Conservative, William D. Hartung (via TomDispatch.com) 

"As long as the world stays at war or on the verge of it, Lockheed Martin’s profits won’t suffer — and, of course, its products will help ensure that any such “volatility” will prove lethal indeed.

Under Hewson, Lockheed has set a goal of getting at least 25 percent of its revenues from weapons exports, and Boeing has done that company one better. It’s seeking to make overseas arms sales 30 percent of its business.

Good News From the Middle East (If You’re an Arms Maker) 

Arms deals are a way of life in Washington. From the president on down, significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will live the good life. From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of U.S. embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms. 

And the Pentagon is their enabler. From brokering, facilitating, and literally banking the money from arms deals to transferring weapons to favored allies on the taxpayers’ dime, it is in essence the world’s largest arms dealer."...

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Added: 12/20/16, "The CIA, Washington Post, And Russia: What You’re Not Being Told," Mintpressnews, By Carey Wedler | AntiMedia

"History reveals actual collusion between the CIA and news outlets, including the Washington Post."

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Yuuuuge container of Trump Butt-hurt salve. Apply liberally for 8 years

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from Free Republic commenter to post below:

Skip to comments

"Woman Snaps At Wisconsin Electors: "You Don't Deserve To Be In America!" "This Is Not America!"

RealClearPolitics ^ | December 19, 2016 | RealClearPolitics

Posted on 12/19/2016, 3:02:42 PM by i88schwartz"

"50 posted on 12/19/2016, 3:22:03 PM by carriage_hill ( Peace is that brief glorious moment in history, when everybody stands around reloading.)"


 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3506323/posts


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DNC ignored professional cybersecurity warnings it was given before emails leaked, such as it had out-of-date firewalls. Knowingly disregarding warnings can cause lawsuits. DNC was already greatly embarrassed and needed to divert attention from its negligence-Bloomberg, Riley, July 26, 2016. (Desperately needing to blame someone for "hacking into" its system, the DNC chose the Russians)

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7/26/16, "Democrats Ignored Cybersecurity Warnings Before Theft," Bloomberg, Michael Riley 

"The Democratic National Committee was warned last fall that its computer network was susceptible to attacks but didn’t follow the security advice it was given, according to three people familiar with the matter. 

The missed opportunity is another blow to party officials already embarrassed by the theft and public disclosure of e-mails that have disrupted their presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia and led their chairwoman to resign. 

Computer security consultants hired by the DNC made dozens of recommendations after a two-month review, the people said. Following the advice, which would typically include having specialists hunt for intruders on the network, might have alerted party officials that hackers had been lurking in their network for weeks -- hackers who would stay for nearly a year.

Instead, officials didn’t discover the breach until April. The theft ultimately led to the release of almost 20,000 internal e-mails through WikiLeaks last week on the eve of the convention.

The e-mails have devastated party leaders. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chairwoman, has agreed to resign at the end of this week’s convention. She was booed off the stage on opening day after the leaked e-mails showed that party officials tried to undermine the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton, who was formally nominated on Tuesday evening. Party officials are supposed to remain neutral on presidential nominations. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is examining the attack, which law enforcement officials and private security experts say may be linked to the Russian government. President Barack Obama suggested on Tuesday that Russia might be trying to interfere with the presidential race. Russian officials deny any involvement in the hacking and say they’re not trying to influence the election. 

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said Wednesday that he didn’t think Russia was behind the attack. But he also said he hoped the Russians would get their hands on e-mails that Clinton exchanged using a private server while she was secretary of state, to expose any e-mails she might have deleted. 

The consultants briefed senior DNC leaders on the security problems they found, the people familiar with the matter said. It’s unclear whether Wasserman Schultz was present. Now, she is likely to face criticism over not only the content of the e-mails -- including one in which a party official proposes pushing stories in the news media questioning Sanders’s Jewish faith -- but also the failure to take steps to stop the theft in the first place. 

“Shame on them. It looks like they just did the review to check a box but didn’t do anything with it,” said Ann Barron-DiCamillo, who was director of US-Cert, the primary agency protecting U.S. government networks, until last February. “If they had acted last fall, instead of those thousands of e-mails exposed it might have been much less.” 

The assessment by Good Harbor Security Risk Management, headed by the former Clinton and Bush administration official Richard Clarke, occurred over two months beginning in September 2015, the people said. It included interviews with key staff members and a detailed review of the security measures in place on the organization’s network, they said.

Security Flaws

The review found problems ranging from an out-of-date firewall to a lack of advanced malware detection technology on individual computers, according to two of the people familiar with the matter. 

The firm recommended taking special precautions to protect any financial information related to donors and internal communications including e-mails, these people said.

The DNC paid $60,000 for the assessment, according to federal filings.

Mark Paustenbach, a spokesman for the DNC, declined to comment on the Good Harbor report. Emilian Papadopoulos, president of Washington-based Good Harbor, said he couldn’t comment on work done for a specific client. 

Missed Warnings 

The security review commissioned by the DNC was perhaps the most detailed of a series of missed warnings. Officials at both the Republican National Committee and the DNC received government briefings on espionage and hacking threats beginning last year, and then received a more specific briefing this spring, according to another person familiar with the matter. 

Cyber-security assessments can be a mixed blessing. Legal experts say some general counsels advise organizations against doing such assessments if they don’t have the ability to quickly fix any problems the auditors find, because customers and shareholders could have cause to sue if an organization knowingly disregards such warnings. 

Papadopoulos said a risk analysis by his firm is designed to “help an organization’s senior leadership answer the questions, ‘What are our unique and most significant cyber security risks, how are we doing managing them, and what should we improve?’” 

The firm typically recommends that clients conduct a so-called breach assessment to determine whether hackers are already lurking in the network, Papadopoulos said. He wouldn’t confirm whether such a recommendation was among those delivered to the DNC. 

“We give recommendations on governance, policies, technologies and crisis management,” he said. “For organizations that have not had a compromise assessment done, that is one of the things we often recommend.” 

It isn’t certain a breach assessment would have spotted the hackers, according to Barron-DiCamillo, but it would have increased the chances. “"Why spend the money to have Good Harbor come in and do the recommendations and then not act on them?,” she asked." 

===========================  

Added: NASA's most secure files were hacked at least 13 times in 2011 alone. NASA computers weren't encrypted.





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NY Times Editorial Board: "The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust," 7/31/2014. CIA hacked into computers of US Senators and their staff using a fake online identity. CIA chief John Brennan at first denied the hacking took place, then in July 2014 finally admitted it

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7/31/2014, "The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust," NY Times Editorial Board 

"In March, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was indignant when Senator Dianne Feinstein charged that the agency had broken into computers used by staff investigators from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which she leads. “As far as the allegations of C.I.A. hacking into Senate computers,” he said, “nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t 
do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the scope of reason." 

But reason seems to have little to do with the C.I.A.’s operations, as Mr. Brennan apparently discovered far too late. On Thursday, the Central Intelligence Agency admitted that it did, indeed, use a fake online identity to break into the Senate’s computers, where documents connected to a secret report on the agency’s detention and torture program were being stored. Mr. Brennan apologized privately to Ms. Feinstein and to Senator Saxby Chambliss, the vice chairman of the intelligence committee, and promised to set up an accountability board to determine who did the hacking and whether and how they should be punished.

The accountability and the apologies, however, will have to go much further. It’s not just two senators that the C.I.A. has offended by this shocking action. It is all of Congress and, by extension, the American public, which is paying for an intelligence agency that does not seem to understand the most fundamental concept of separation of powers. That concept means that Congress is supposed to oversee the intelligence community and rein in its excesses. It cannot possibly do so effectively if it is being spied on by the spy agency, which is supposed to be directing its efforts against foreign terrorists and other threats to national security.

The committee has been working since 2009 on a comprehensive history of the agency’s antiterror program during the George W. Bush administration, which involved illegal rendition to other countries, detention, and torture of suspects, all producing little useful intelligence. It has been frustrated at many points by stonewalling from the agency, which provided misleading information, hid important facts inside a blizzard of excess documents, and forced endless delays in the declassification process. The 6,300-page report still has not been made public, though parts of it may be released later this month, and it is expected to undercut the Bush administration’s claims that its actions were both legal and effective.

Late last year, the agency suspected that Senate investigators had obtained an internal C.I.A. review of the torture program. Senate officials said the review was in a database they were allowed to see, but realized that the C.I.A. had broken into a private Senate computer server and found the review. A summary of an agency inspector general’s report, released Thursday, said C.I.A. hackers even read the emails of Senate staffers. Then they exhibited a “lack of candor” to agency investigators.

In an extraordinary speech on the Senate floor in March, Ms. Feinstein accused the agency of having “undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.” The institutional affront even drew Republican criticism. If the charge was true, said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, “heads should roll, and people should go to jail.”

One of those heads may need to be Mr. Brennan’s. If he knew about the break-in, then he blatantly lied. If he did not, then apparently he was unaware of the lawless culture that has festered within the C.I.A. since the moment it was encouraged by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to torture suspects and then lie about it. That recklessness extended to the point where agency officials thought nothing of burglarizing their own overseer. Senator Mark Udall of Colorado said the action was illegal and required the resignation of Mr. Brennan. 

The C.I.A. needs far more than a few quiet personnel changes, however. Its very core, and basic culture, needs a thorough overhaul."

"A version of this editorial appears in print on August 1, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust."

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Untold story of Bay of Pigs, 1961 failed CIA attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. CIA used invasion dollars to pay gangsters to assassinate Castro. Against JFK instructions, CIA ordered US pilots to fly over Cuban beaches. JFK finally fired CIA chief Allen Dulles-Newsweek, Sept. 2011 article

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9/3/2011, "Untold Story of the Bay of Pigs," Newsweek, Robert Dallek

"Newly declassified CIA documents reveal new blunders and how close America came to war during the failed invasion of Cuba."

"From a transport ship floating in Cuba's Bay of Pigs, CIA operative Grayston Lynch knew the US mission to overthrow Fidel Castro was faltering. The Cuban exiles he had brought with him had abandoned their posts, so he grabbed the boat's recoilless rifles and machine guns and began firing at the aircraft overhead.

On a day of chaos and infamy in April 1961, Lynch would soon understand the consequences of his shooting. He had fired on his agency's own planes, which were trying to protect the US-led Cuban exiles invading the island from being slaughtered by Castro's forces. "We couldn't tell them from the Castro planes," Lynch later explained.

The Bay of Pigs is one of America's most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since. Yet, for 50 years, details like Lynch's story were hidden away in top-secret CIA files that were finally released this month and reviewed by NEWSWEEK.

The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the US from entering into a full conflict with Cuba.

The disclosure is the handiwork of the dogged researcher Peter Kornbluh and his Washington-based National Security Archive. The right-to-know group used the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits to force the CIA to release all its major documents on Kennedy's failed efforts to overthrow Castro, who this month turned 85 and stands as a living reminder of America's failure to repel communism on an island just 90 miles from Florida.

Written by then–CIA chief historian Jack Pfeiffer between 1974 and 1984, the five-volume history - the last volume of which remains classified - seeks to spread the blame beyond the agency to the State Department and White House, while confirming that the invasion was even more disastrously handled than previously known.

Among the details hidden from public view all these years are that a CIA official transferred funds from the invasion budget to "pay the mafia types" for an assassination plot against Castro, which was so secret that the chief of invasion planning, Jacob Esterline, was not told what the money was for. 

Despite repeated White House instructions to keep US forces from directly participating in order to preserve plausible deniability of American involvement, the CIA ultimately gave permission for US pilots to fly aircraft over the beaches. The aviators were told that, if they were shot down and captured, they should describe themselves as mercenaries and the US would "deny any knowledge" of them.  

Sadly, four US airmen lost their lives, and it wasn't until 1976 that they were given medals in ceremonies their families were encouraged to keep secret. Before Kennedy inherited the Bay of Pigs invasion plan from the Eisenhower administration, then–vice president Richard Nixon was a forceful advocate of bringing down Castro and urged the CIA to support "goon squads and other direct action groups" operating inside and outside Cuba. 

Perhaps most disturbing of all, the CIA task force in charge of the paramilitary assault did not believe it could succeed without becoming an open invasion supported by the US military. The assessment was part of a brief prepared for President-elect Kennedy that he never saw. Kennedy later told one of his aides that the CIA and military did not believe he would resist their pressure to have American forces engage when the invasion was on the verge of failure.

Pfeiffer's revelations are buried in a lengthy, comprehensive, and argumentative history. The volumes, which include 1,200 pages of narrative and documentary appendices, describe the White House, and particularly Kennedy, as responsible for the embarrassing defeat: It cost the invaders more than 100 lives, gave communists around the world a propaganda coup, and made a mockery of Kennedy's promise of a new day in relations with Latin America. 

In public, Kennedy put on a bold show of confidence, accepting that he alone was responsible. But in private, he struggled to make sense of the catastrophe: "How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?" he repeatedly asked his aides. He was furious at the CIA for having misled him. Waiting several months before he compelled CIA Director Allen Dulles to resign, Kennedy told him, "Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving. But under our system it is you who must go."

In the CIA history, Pfeiffer sought to aggressively defend the agency against two earlier assessments: a Kennedy presidential commission headed by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Maxwell Taylor and including Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and the report of the CIA's inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick.

In Pfeiffer's judgment, the CIA got a "bum rap" from the Taylor-RFK report for a "political decision that ensured the military defeat of the anti-Castro forces." That decision was Kennedy's refusal to use US air power to support the invasion or to save it once it became clear it was headed for defeat. 

Pfeiffer argued it was absurd for Kennedy to think that he could hide America's role in the invasion. 

"The US government's plan to maintain plausible deniability of its anti-Castro involvement had the impenetrability of the emperor's new clothes," he wrote. Hence, Kennedy's own subsequent self-recrimination about being "stupid." He could not forget his pre-invasion conversation with Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who asked how many men were invading and how many men Castro could field against them. Kennedy replied, perhaps 1,500 invaders and 25,000 opponents. Acheson marveled at Kennedy's naiveté: "It doesn't take Price Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren't as good as twenty-five thousand," he said.

Kirkpatrick asserted that the CIA's poor "planning, organization, staffing, and management" were the principal reasons for the failure. Specifically, the agency's uncertainty that an invasion would "trigger an uprising," which it considered essential to the success of the operation, and numerous leaks alerting Castro to the coming attack should have persuaded Dulles and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, Kirkpatrick said, to ask Kennedy to call it off. Also, the refusal to accept Kennedy's word that he would not use American forces to prevent a failure made the CIA the responsible party.

The debate over who was to blame for the Bay of Pigs is a perfect example of what the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl meant when he said, "History is argument without end." But it is well to revisit this disaster not to assign blame anew but to recall John Quincy Adams's cautionary advice: America "does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.""

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CIA which can't and won't be audited for its use of US taxpayer dollars, has become a political lobby for those who favor unaccountable, top down centralized government closely partnered with the Washington Post and NY Times-Ishmael Jones, Oct. 2010

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10/19/2010, "CIA sues Ishmael Jones: His response," American Thinker, by Clarice Feldman. Jones' book about the CIA, "The Human Factor"

"Despite the growth of internet news and talk radio, the New York Times and the Washington Post retain enormous power. Their reporters have developed excellent sources among top CIA managers. These sources illegally provide classified information on such things as torture/interrogations and Iraq WMD intelligence failures, and in exchange these journalists will not attack the CIA's bureaucracy because to do so would be to attack their sources. A member of the Senate intelligence committee told me he met with CIA officials to propose changes to improve clandestine operations and the CIA fought back through a Washington Post column the very next day. In not confronting intelligence reform, journalists who cover the CIA build careers and win prizes, but in doing so the New York Times and the Washington Post, located in America's two primary terrorist target cities, abandon their readers. In order to protect their readers, these newspapers should pay more attention to intelligence reform. Journalists who explore CIA dysfunction are nearly all political conservatives....

Democrats have greater faith in the efficiency of government and tend to be less responsive to intelligence reform. They are reluctant to believe that top-down centralized government can be dysfunctional. The CIA has come to form a political ally, a lobbying group, a supporter.... 

The book contains no classified information and I do not profit from it. CIA censors attack this book because it exposes the CIA as a place to get rich, with billions of taxpayer dollars wasted or stolen in espionage programs that produce nothing. Despite the talented work force, more than 90% of employees now live and work entirely within the United States where they are largely ineffective, in violation of the CIA's founding charter.... 
  
The key indicator of the CIA's lack of operational accountability thus remains: no top manager has ever been disciplined, demoted, or even reassigned for failure to provide the intelligence the President needs. 

In working toward financial accountability, I focused on a single issue. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress gave the CIA more than $3 billion to increase its deep cover capabilities overseas. During the years after 9/11, the CIA was not able to field a single additional effective deep cover case officer overseas. The money disappeared in increased pay packages to employees, expensive boondoggles, the enrichment of contracting companies run by former CIA employees, and the expansion of CIA offices within the United States. More than 90% of CIA employees now live and work within the United States.

In meeting with members of congressional intelligence committees to discuss financial accountability, I was in for a surprise. I had expected a variety of reactions, but not the one I got. They politely interrupted me. They already knew about the missing $3 billion. They already knew about this accountability failure, this waste and theft. They agreed with me. But they couldn't do anything about it. There is simply no financial accountability mechanism to deal with waste and fraud at the CIA.

The Government Accountability Office (the GAO) audits government spending. A 2001 GAO report says: "We have not actively audited the CIA since the early 1960s, when we discontinued such work because the CIA was not providing us with sufficient access to information to perform our mission...we have made a conscious decision not to further pursue the issue."

When the waste and stealing start, effective clandestine operations end. The contracting game at the CIA has continued at full force, and has even mutated into a faux industry that uses the jargon of real business. M&A, profit margins, and synergy are discussed as if this were a real American industry instead of a bunch of government contracting scams. 

Real human sources work doesn't take much money, just agent pay, hotel rooms, airplane tickets. With the money forced into the system after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it seemed to make the system burst. Intelligence operations ran better before 9/11 simply because there was less money.

Citizens Against Government Waste published one of my articles, in which I suggested that CIA employees be given a whistleblower mechanism, the ability to contact cleared law enforcement officials when they see fraud and waste. The CIA currently has no whistleblower system....

Politicians can make a difference. CIA dysfunction thrives in the political conflict between left and right. Traditionally the CIA has been perceived as a gang of right wingers seeking to topple leftist governments. Some see the CIA as the hand behind worldwide conspiracies and complex dirty tricks. The CIA actually encourages this viewpoint."...

Despite my efforts to make intelligence reform a bipartisan issue, nearly all of the articles I've written have been in conservative media, and most of the meetings I've had with politicians have been with conservatives. Conservatives are quick to acknowledge dysfunction in government bureaucracy."...





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Appearing before House committee on Nov. 17, James Clapper declined to comment on whether Russia shared any information over 18 months leading to US elections-Reuters

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11/17/16, "U.S. spy chief to resign as Trump takes office," Reuters, Dustin Volz, Mark Hosenball

"Before last week's presidential election (James) Clapper's office issued a pre-election declaration accusing Russia of hacking U.S. political operatives and individuals as part of a scheme to “interfere with the U.S. election process." On Thursday (Nov. 17) he declined to comment on whether the Russians had shared any of the [allegedly] hacked information with unnamed Americans in the past 18 months.... 

Clapper appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives intelligence committee hearing on Thursday and Representative Adam Schiff, the committee's top-ranking Democrat, lightheartedly said he hoped Clapper would stay in the job for four more years.
.......
"I submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good," Clapper responded. "I've got 64 days left.""...
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Clapper: Russian "activity" slowed down weeks before Nov. 8 US election:

11/18/16, "Clapper hot air claims Russia stopped hacking after US warnings," sott.net

"Weeks before the November 8 election that was won by Republican Donald Trump, the U.S. intelligence community said publicly that senior Russia officials likely authorized the hack of e-mails of the Democratic National Committee."...

[Ed. note: No "hacking" needed. DNC virtually gave its information away by failing to take advice of computer security experts it hired in Sept. 2015, thus allowing unspecified intruders to reside on its computers for nearly a year, well into 2016: 7/26/16, "Democrats Ignored Cybersecurity Warnings Before Theft," Bloomberg, Michael Riley

 "The Democratic National Committee was warned last fall that its computer network was susceptible to attacks but didn’t follow the security advice it was given, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The missed opportunity is another blow to party officials already embarrassed by the theft and public disclosure of e-mails that have disrupted their presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia and led their chairwoman to resign.

Computer security consultants hired by the DNC made dozens of recommendations after a two-month review, the people said. Following the advice, which would typically include having specialists hunt for intruders on the network, might have alerted party officials that hackers had been lurking in their network for weeks -- hackers who would stay for nearly a year.  Instead, officials didn’t discover the breach until April....

Cyber-security assessments can be a mixed blessing. Legal experts say some general counsels advise organizations against doing such assessments if they don’t have the ability to quickly fix any problems the auditors find, because customers and shareholders could have cause to sue if an organization knowingly disregards such warnings."...]

(continuing): "Those e-mails were later leaked, embarrassing party leaders.

Russia denied the hack.

Clapper, who is director of national intelligence, said the formal accusation and later threat of retaliation appeared to shut down the activity.

"It may have had the desired effect, since after the issue of the statement and the communication took place between our government and the Russian government [weeks before the Nov. 8 election], it seemed to curtail the cyber activity that the Russians previously were engaged in,"
he said."...

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Republican party has exhausted ideological theme of 'free markets' it has ridden since about 1980. Enter economic nationalism-because the economy is what voters care about most-and Donald Trump to give the Republican Party a reason to exist-Sept. 2015, Ian Fletcher

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Sept. 2015 article:

"The Republican party has essentially exhausted the two ideological themes it has ridden on since about 1980-- free markets and social conservatism -- and needs new ones to survive."

9/30/2015, "Donald Trump Is Trying to Save the Republican Party From Itself," Ian Fletcher, Huffington Post
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"I'm neither endorsing nor condemning Mr. Trump, but I do think he's trying to save the Republican party from itself in a very rational way. The last thing he is is a clown or dilettante. (OK, maybe a clown.)
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Why? Because the Republican party has essentially exhausted the two ideological themes it has ridden on since about 1980-- free markets and social conservatism -- and needs new ones to survive.
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Any ideologues out there, I'm sorry: American history makes quite clear that partisan ideological themes don't last forever, in either party. They're good for a few decades, then they evolve or get dumped....
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First, consider the exhaustion of free-market ideology. This doesn't mean that free markets per se, which obviously have enormous validity, are dead as an idea. But it does mean that pushing even further in the direction of free markets is dead as an idea.
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Why? Most obviously, the 2008 financial crisis, whose effects we're still dealing with, was an effect of markets allowed to run amok, not of markets being insufficiently free. (Yes, I know you can blame it all on the government, but that's a tendentious "reality is the opposite of what you see" argument.) 
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There's a happy medium between too much and too little regulation, and we've basically reached the limit of our ability to improve our economy by deregulating further. 
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In public perception, this wasn't always the case. It certainly wasn't in 1980, when Ronald Reagan rode this theme to victory. And argue the timing if you like, but surely the reader recalls the romanticism about markets of the late 1990s? Remember California deregulating its electricity market in 1996? (Which handed control over to Enron, by the way, and led to blackouts in Silicon Valley.)
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So "Even freer markets!" has lost its credibility as an ideological theme. If you disagree, then what industries would you now propose to deregulate, and how do you think that would improve things?
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The increased public interest in economic equality is also playing a role here. There are conservative policies that reduce inequality, but they're old-school paternalist conservative policies, not free-market conservative policies. (Some people will tell you that "conservative" simply equals "free market," but this is simply ignorant of history, though I don't have the space to elaborate here.)
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Social conservatism is a more complicated topic, but in a country where both public opinion and the Supreme Court support, to take the obvious example, gay marriage, it doesn't look like a net electoral winner from now on....
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So what's the Republican party to do? Luckily, there are other right-wing themes out there to be had, though not an infinite number of truly big ones, substantial enough and popular enough to float a national political party on.
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Enter nationalism. Specifically, economic nationalism, because the economy is what voters care about most. Mr. Trump's protectionism is a form of economic nationalism. So is his stance against immigration. (Again, I take no position on the merits, but anti-immigrationism is definitely a form of economic nationalism.) 
................
Trump is not the first person to come up with this strategy: as I noted in an article during the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was going in this direction already, albeit much less aggressively than Trump.

Romney pledged to crack down on China's currency manipulation. He threatened the use of countervailing duties if necessary, a serious and previously ideologically taboo attempt to blunt America's trade deficit. He said illegal immigrants should "self deport."

Why was Romney less aggressive? For one thing, that was several years ago, and the causative trends hadn't yet gone so far. Two, he wasn't a billionaire, only a humble multi-millionaire, so he had to cater to the Republican donor class. Which, while not sincerely socially conservative, very much adores free-market ideology as the perfect rationalization for their crony-capitalist reality. (Their interpretation of "free" markets is "government won't interfere with private distortions of markets in my favor.")
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Come to think of it, even Patrick Buchanan got there first, in the sense of taking economic-nationalist positions (anti-free-trade, anti-immigration) as a Republican primary candidate in 1992. 
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But Buchanan, of course, never attracted more than a fringe following. It's no mystery why. One, he wasn't a billionaire who could finance an entire campaign while defying the donor class and cowing the Republican establishment with the tacit threat of a third-party run tipping the election to the Democrats. Two, the credibility of "even freer markets are always the solution" economics hadn't exhausted itself in 1992. (As noted above, it didn't even peak until the late 1990s.) Three, there was not yet a collapse of social conservatism forcing a search for new ideological themes.
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Even poor old H. Ross Perot fits perfectly into this picture. He was a trade hawk, anti-immigration, and relatively socially liberal. But he tried to do it without the legitimacy and infrastructure of an established party, and his political inexperience led to him getting spooked out of the race by, among other things, Republican dirty tricks. Still, astonishingly popular with the voters for a while.
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So economic nationalism is a rich theme that's been waiting to be exploited for a long time. Like, say, civil rights in the early 1960s. Mr. Trump's comically blustering persona, which seems to confuse a lot of commentators, fits perfectly into this picture. Why? Because it enables him to seem much more right-wing than he really is, which is essential to retreating from obsolete rightist positions without incurring the wrath of primary voters. (Trump's the most experienced show-biz politician since Reagan; of course he figured this out.) Every time some liberal yaps about his being a dangerous crypto-fascist menace, it re-glues this mask, though one of his biggest vulnerabilities is that it will fall off.
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The bigger joke is that the Republican establishment is fighting so hard against being saved. They may be the last to figure this all out."




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