It's a perfectly legitimate concern and it's a shame you're being downvoted. Anyone who is concerned about fake news and misinformation should be appalled by the media's treatment of the bogus Russian interference story.
Now the glow has faded — from both the dossier and its promoters. Russia, as Mr. Steele asserted, did try to influence the 2016 election. But many of the dossier’s most explosive claims — like a salacious “pee” tape featuring Mr. Trump or a supposed meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former attorney, and Russian operatives — have never materialized or have been proved false. The founders of Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, are suing Fusion GPS, claiming the firm libeled them. (Fusion has denied the claims.) Plans for a film based on Mr. Steele’s adventures appear dead.
Beneath the dossier’s journey from media obsession to slush pile lies a broader and more troubling story. Today, private spying has boomed into a renegade, billion-dollar industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news.
The Committee did indeed release a bipartisan report making those assertions. Their assertions were bogus because no evidence is cited anywhere in the report. Claims of secret evidence are not evidence.
Considering the polarizing nature of the topic, it seems unlikely there would be a bipartisan agreement on the issue without classified intel to get people on both sides of the aisle behind it.
That, of course, is not proof. But we have also had reports of activity traced back to Russia from other organizations.
They could all be lying, but then that claim takes us strongly into the conspiracy theory territory at the same time that it runs afoul of the "lack of evidence" problem quite a bit more than alternative explanation.
>Considering the polarizing nature of the topic, it seems unlikely there would be a bipartisan agreement on the issue without classified intel to get people on both sides of the aisle behind it.
Congressional support for US global military empire has, unfortunately, always enjoyed complete bipartisan support.
>But we have also had reports of activity traced back to Russia from other organizations.
All sorts of organizations released conclusions, none of these conclusions come with any evidence that be scrutinized. Further, on the rare occasions when arms were twisted under oath, all of these conclusions turned out to be completely baseless. One of the most prominent debunked claims was that of Crowdstrike that the DNC servers were hacked by Russians. In fact, in December 2017 when testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry admitted that not only was there no evidence that Russians hacked the DNC, they had no evidence that it was hacked at all, rather than leaked, or exfiltrated in some other manner. I was never a Trump supporter, didn't vote for him, don't like him at all, but I hate false propaganda even more. Whether it was the CIA and the DOJ doctoring documents in order to spy on US citizens or DNC lawyers feeding false information to the FBI (as detailed in the recent Durham indictment), all of the publicly available information (which after 5 years is voluminous) indicating a "Russian attack on our election" have all been based on lies and baseless assertions. Given this, and the documented record of lies and obfuscations peddled by our "intelligence agencies" for decades, its clear that the conspiracy theory here is the one being pushed by the Washington blob and not people who demand evidence for their wild and oft debunked assertions.
I would be interested in the portion of Shawn Henry's testimony that you are referring to. Because Cloudstrike still maintains their response to the DNC hack observed a Russian presence in examining their servers, and Henry's response to Congress on the topic was:
"We said that we had a high degree of confidence it was the Russian Government. And our analysts that looked at it and that had looked at these types of attacks before, many different types of attacks similar to this in different environments, certain tools that were used, certain methods by which they were moving in the environment,and looking at the types of data that was being targeted, that it was consistent with a nation-state adversary and associated with Russian intelligence."
Attacks that coincide with patterns seen from Russian intelligence is evidence. Evidence isn't proof. If you're standard of evidence is "A Russia n defector with server logs and video recordings of FSB officials confirming the acts".... Well, then you're using the word "evidence" wrong.
