DAY 133: Putin admits there was hacking of the 2016 election by Russians and calls them "patriotic"

Vladimir Putin admitted today there was hacking by Russians of the 2016 election. Although he claimed the hacking was not done by the Kremlin, he admitted it may have been done by "patriotic" hackers.

According to The New York Times:

Shifting from his previous blanket denials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Thursday that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks last year to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.

While Mr. Putin continued to deny any state role, his comments to reporters in St. Petersburg were a departure from the Kremlin’s previous position: that Russia had played no role whatsoever in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that, after Mr. Trump’s victory, the country had become the victim of anti-Russia hysteria among crestfallen Democrats.

Why call them "patriotically minded"? Does that mean Putin approves of the hacking?

Of course he does. According to The New York Times Magazine, the Kremlin is the one paying the trolls who actually tried to influence the 2016 election and were successful at adding fuel to the far-left voters, who ended up dividing the vote that otherwise would've given Hillary Clinton the Electoral College.

And that was way back in 2015. The Kremlin's "troll farm" was revisited again by The New Yorker in 2016 in an article titled The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks that includes the following:

The agency is what is known in Russia as a “troll farm,” a nickname given to outfits that operate armies of sock-puppet social-media accounts, in order to create the illusion of a rabid grass-roots movement. Trolling has become a key tool in a comprehensive effort by Russian authorities to rein in a previously freewheeling Internet culture, after huge anti-Putin protests in 2011 were organized largely over social media. It is used by Kremlin apparatchiks at every level of government in Russia; wherever politics are discussed online, one can expect a flood of comments from paid trolls.

The article points out that Russian trolls are not successful in changing public opinion. Instead, their purpose is overwhelm social media with fake news and generate doubt.

The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.

Which is exactly what made far-left voters in America vote for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, thus dividing the liberal vote in four key states Hillary Clinton needed to win.

Of course it was the Kremlin the one behind the Russian trolls and hackers. And Putin is admitting it because he knows there's just too much evidence of the hacking to deny it.

Should be interesting to see what Donald Trump says now that his master, Vladimir Putin, is admitting Russians did hack the 2016 election. Because, if you remember, Trump has always denied Russia had anything to do with it.

But now Putin has given Trump a taste of what Sean Spicer has to go through every day.