CIA apparently told Obama in August 2016 that Putin was trying to help Trump win

The latest liberal line on this is, "Why hasn't Trump expressed his outrage?" I guess that's supposed to serve as some sort of proof that he must have been in on it. I eagerly await their statements of satisfaction when Trump tweets, "How dare the Russians help me win!" But really, there's not a lot here we hadn't figured out a long time ago. Putin hates Hillary, probably because she's a liar and a horrible human being, and didn't want to have to deal with her. He probably also viewed Trump as an amateur he'd be able to roll, but I think it was more about his extreme disdain for Hillary and the expectation that there would be no real way to deal with her because you can't believe a word she says. Anyway, if the Post is to be believed (big if, for sure), Obama had detailed information about this 10 months ago, and that included fairly damning evidence that Putin personally ordered it all to happen:

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Here's a question: If U.S. intelligence knew about this last August, why couldn't they do anything about it? If the Russians were able to hack John Podesta's e-mail and expose via WikiLeaks that he thinks Christians are backwards clods, no one in the U.S. government was in a position to reach out to him or anyone else with the Hillary campaign or DNC and have them redouble their cybersecurity? You'd think an operation like this would be much harder to pull off when your rival is on to you, but apparently not in this case. As with every story about this, we're given the standard disclaimer that no one has any evidence the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians on this, because for obvious reasons they didn't. The media trumpets every Russian interference story in the hope that people will assume collusion was part of the deal, but the always have to kinda sorta admit there's no real reason to believe that. When you really think about it, if the Russians could do all this on their own, why would they even want the Trump campaign's involvement? Now you've got another party involved that you don't know that well and might not be able to control, and you're having to coordinate details whereaas without them you can just give the orders and do what you want. Plus, if Trump helped you pull it off, he was a partner in the operation and you sort of owe him, even though you could argue he also owes you for helping him win.

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But let's say Putin helped Trump and Trump knew it, and was in on it, and Putin expects a payoff. How could he force Trump to pay up without exposing his own operation, unless his leverage is blackmail using some sort of dirt like the stuff in the widely discredited dossier we heard about some months back? And from Trump's end, what if he agrees to coordinate with Putin, only to have Hillary win anyway and inherent the intelligence on all of it upon taking office? Trump's going to prison for sure in that case. Why would he take that risk, especially when the polls indicated he was probably going to lose? This whole collusion theory makes no sense for Putin and no sense for Trump, and there's absolutely no evidence any of it happened. Yet here were are still taking about it for some reason.

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