The New York Times published an in depth report yesterday on the Russian effort to influence the election.  It is the work of a team of reporters: Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane.  One highlight of their report is that it provides a schedule of the releases of the hacked emails.

• On July 6, 12 days before the Republican National Convention began in Cleveland, Guccifer released the D.N.C.’s battle plan and budget for countering it. For Republican operatives, it was insider gold.
• On July 22, three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped out 44,053 D.N.C. emails with 17,761 attachments. Some of the messages made clear that some D.N.C. officials favored Mrs. Clinton over her progressive challenger, Mr. Sanders.
• On July 25, Trump sent out a lighthearted tweet: “The new joke in town,” he wrote, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous D.N.C. e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”
• On Oct. 7, a month before the election, the Wikileaks site began the serial publication of thousands of private emails to and from Mr. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager.
  • The Trump campaign knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans. Days before the Podesta email release began, Roger Stone, a Republican operative working with the Trump campaign, sent out an excited tweet about what was coming.
  • Wikileaks began to release Podesta’s emails one hour after the The Access Hollywood tape was released showing Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

The article states, “every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”

In the video below, David Sanger describes all the signals U. S. Officials missed that allowed the Russians to influence the election.  These same signals were also missed by the media.  Instead of reporting on the Watergate 2.0 burglary, like Woodward and Bernstein, they reported on the information that was stolen, helping the burglars achieve their goal.  The New York Times is only getting around to reporting on the burglary after the election.  No one viewed this election from a glass house.

Following the Links From Russian Hackers to the U.S. Election

 Click on the picture below to see a video of David Sanger discussing the New York Times investigation on CBS This Morning.

Sanger discusses the missed signals and how U. S. officials were slow to react.  He compares it to the Sony hack a few years ago which he believes was handled much better.  He says there is evidence the Republican National Committee was hacked by the Russians, notwithstanding the claims by some Republicans.  The Russians just did not get into the main computer system of the RNC; they instead got into systems that are connected to the RNC system and were able to get some RNC information.  Sanger suggests what occurred is unprecedented.  Watergate did involve a foreign power and it did not influence a U. S. election.