Trump And The DNC Servers

Though Trump's a disaster, he's sometimes right, and often far less wrong (or less obviously so) than his political opponents make him out to be. Prima facie, the following is important if true: the DNC refused to turn the physical server(s) in question over to the FBI. Most of the media, leaning left as usual, is deriding Trump for harping on this, for various reasons, some reasonable-sounding, some not so much.

   Here's the ambiguously-named Politifact insisting that Trump gets "all" the "details" wrong...if we interpret his words in the most unfavorable way--i.e., to mean that the DNC servers disappeared. Note that other parts of the quote aren't consistent with that interpretation--e.g. the bit where he asks "why haven't they [the FBI] taken the server?" [my emphasis], clearly indicating that it's still there and could be taken.

   Here's some dude at the Daily Beast:

Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016. The DNC reiterated that Monday in a statement to the Daily Beast.

Ah! So both the DNC and the people they hired said that they gave up all the information! Gosh, I could hardly be more convinced. The emerging line seems to be: there's no reason for the FBI to get the hardware in question, and a lot of the servers are cloud-based, and having the hardware wouldn't be any better, and in fact the images are more important and it's actually worse to get the hardware too! Obviously, I exaggerate...but not a whole lot. For all I know, the unexaggerated version is true. But...the FBI did, apparently, ask for the hardware. And was turned down. One needn't wear a tinfoil MAGA hat to be suspicious about that. In order to explain away skepticism about the DNC, we have to believe that the FBI cyber crimes people don't know the the allegedly basic, obvious facts that the Daily Beast has to patiently explain to us. Why ask for something you don' t need? One answer might be: you ask for everything and take what you can get. If I had to bet, that's the explanation I'd bet on.

   Why didn't the DNC comply? One explanation is that they didn't want to part with the hardware so close to an election. Which seems reasonable.. Though, what with all the images lying around, couldn't they just buy new hardware and restore everything? (Mystic?) And, if the efforts to meddle in the election really were so profoundly important, the DNC couldn't take the hit? It's kind of hard to accept both of the things we're being asked to accept: (a) the Russian meddling struck at the very heart of American democracy, and (b) it was just fine for the DNC to refuse to cooperate fully with the FBI. I don't see how people in panic mode about (a) can accept (b) so readily.

   Anyway, my interest in defending Trump has worn as thin as it could get. But, as is so often the case, his position is being treated as absurd when that isn't obvious. At least not to the layperson, and not on the basis of the information that can be gleaned from the sneering dismissals. This sort of "detail" (it's not really a detail, is it? It's a huge, obviously salient fact) is exactly the sort of thing that can signal shenanigans. If shenanigans by the DNC were to be uncovered, people would say that there was just no reasonable way it could have been ignored. And they'd be right. Reasonable people--reasonable laypeople, at any rate--ought to see it as significant. Perhaps IT types all see it as entirely irrelevant. But if it is, I don't know enough to know that. 

   Needless to say, Trump's performance in Helsinki was still a disaster. He doesn't seem to understand that he's got certain institutional responsibilities whatever his personal views might be. It's hard for me to see his actions as being excusable. But the concerns on which his actions were based seem reasonable. He should have shoved them to the side in that context. But that's a different issue.

   As always, I could be wrong about all this.