#DNCLeaks. #DemsInPhilly, and Manchurian Candidate Putin-Trump conspiracy thinking (updated)

Maybe it's not full-on conspiracy thinking, but its at least 50 percent conspiracy thinking to claim, as has Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is deliberately timing the leaks of hacked emails to help Donald Trump.

(Update, Aug. 19: Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort has resigned over issues of his "connections" to pro-Russian Ukrainians.)

First, the first hacked emails that have been released date back to March 2015, three months before Trump announced his candidacy. (That said, we don't know when Guccifer 2.0 started the hacks.)

Second, the leaks started a five weeks before the RNC, undercutting Mook's "timing" issue, at least for Guccifer. Julian Assange and Wikileaks? That's different, on the release timing.

And, Julian Assange has weighed in, saying the timing of the leaks; release was his, for anti-Clinton revenge, And the NYT has backed off the Putin ideas, calling it 'unproven speculation.'

Third, it IS conspiracy thinking, IMO, to claim Trump changed the GOP platform's Russia plank to make it even more "friendly," in coordinated timing with the email leaks. Loose cannon Donald Trump is NO Manchurian Candidate.

Fourth, as last December's fracas between Bernie Sanders and DNC staff showed, DNC servers have long had known security problems. Apparently, DNC Chairwomen Debbie Wasserman Schultz was either too cheap, or else too beholden to DNC cybersecurity contractors, to get that fixed. Apparently, Team Mook and the rest of Camp Clinton was too cheap, or too beholden to the DNC's anti-Sanders coordination, to push her to do that.

Fifth, other Manchurian Candidate bullshit, from Josh Marshall, gets destroyed here.

Sixth, as Adam Johnson notes, Putin's FSB would actually have to be pretty inept to be behind this.

Others, like Vice's Motherboard, are also saying that people need to back off direct claims the Russian government is directly linked.

Shoot me dead; James Taranto, wingnut WSJ columnist, says something sensical on the issue. And yes, if you look in context, it's semi-clear that he was joking.

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Update: We have a semi-plausible, at a minimum, non-Russian hacker suspect now too. "Detox Ransome" is a money-first, not ideological hacker. But, if he already got into DNC servers last fall, he could just wait for the highest bidder. Assange still gets Wikileaks' tip jar filled pretty regularly, I think. Sounds like a very plausible marriage of convenience.

I would think either Ransome or Assange could spoof fake Russian metadata,m too, either halfway well with a few errors or maybe deliberately well with fake errors.

And, Epoch Times, the reporting site, is NOT Russia Today or Sputnik News. It's my Chinese-American Falun Gong practitioners.