Posted on 07/21/2018 10:52:53 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The Russia conspiracy theory hinges on the single creaky claim that the Democratic National Committee hacks were a Russian plot to elect Trump. The theory and all its illegitimate stepchildren, including Robert Mueller and his infinitely expanding corps of prosecutors, lives or dies by the DNC hacks.
Trying to elect Trump by releasing damaging insider information from the DNC never made any sense. The DNC was already a dysfunctional organization that was being run by the Clinton campaign. Undermining its leadership had little impact on the election, but a great deal on control of the DNC.
There has never been any evidence that the DNC hacks swung the election. The vast majority of people never even heard of them. Only a handful of political insiders and watchers, already deeply and unpersuadably committed to one side or another, could name the contents of a single email.
When you want to understand the motive of a crime, follow the money. See who benefited from it, not casually, but deeply and significantly enough to justify the effort and risk of undertaking it.
The hacks targeted Clinton allies and sought to undermine their influence within the Democrat Party.
Russiagate’s fervent conspiracy theorists spin an unlikely scenario in which Moscow had picked Trump early on, and then abandoned him in a crowded field against 16 candidates, while assuming that he would naturally triumph. Instead of leaking Jeb Bush’s campaign emails or Marco Rubio’s, they bided their time and waited to release Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s and John Podesta’s emails.
That’s not a plan to help Trump win. It is a plan to take over the DNC.
Let’s look at what the Russians were actually doing during the election. They had set up fake Facebook sites aimed at the left on issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to the pipeline protests. That is not the behavior of a foreign intelligence operation that wanted Trump to win and the left to lose. Instead the Russians appeared to have allied with the left to push the Democrats even further to the left.
Targeting the DNC’s infrastructure also pushed the Democrats further to the left. The email hacks and leaks didn’t elect Trump, but did shake up the DNC. Bernie Sanders reemerged as the figurehead of a leftist movement to take over the DNC. Bernie’s boy, Keith Ellison, claimed the No. 2 spot at the DNC. And Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, the left’s current crush, is the latest triumph for that machine.
The socialist left were the biggest beneficiaries of the DNC hacks. The stolen emails confirmed claims by the Bernie campaign that the process had been rigged against them. It justified their campaign to clean up the mess by taking over the DNC while wiping out key Democrats who had been opposed to them.
The left was also the political movement with the richest and deepest connections to Russian intelligence. The media claims that Putin and his old KGB comrades are the natural allies of the right, but the alliance between the far left and Russian intelligence agencies dates back almost a century.
Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the USSR. It’s hard to find a Marxist dictatorship backed by Russia that the elderly socialist hasn’t praised and supported at the expense of our national interests. Bernie praised Castro, he supported the Sandinistas, and his foreign policy was little more than a KGB wish list.
Certainly Russian intelligence services would have been aware of Bernie Sanders as a political sympathizer and maintained a file on him. On a visit to the Soviet Union, he would have interacted with KGB personnel or those reporting to them: as was true of any important foreign visitor at the time.
Is it really farfetched to believe that a lefty politician, who had a history of visiting and supporting Communist and Marxist countries, and their agendas, didn’t receive some support from Moscow?
The political movement that Bernie Sanders emerged from was notorious for its Russian ties.
. As Discover the Networks notes, Sanders had worked as an organizer for the United Packinghouse Workers Union (UPWU) which was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for its Communist ties. An article in Class Struggle magazine described UPWU as one of the "communist led or influenced unions". Sanders had also spent time at a pro-Soviet Kibbutz.
While the media pursued Trump over his ties to Russian businessmen, Bernie had direct ties to organizations controlled directly or indirectly by Russian intelligence agencies.
Bernie flew a Soviet flag outside his office. As Paul Sperry noted, “Sanders addressed the national conference of the US Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to ‘the triumph of Soviet power in the US.’”
Given all this, is it really implausible that the Russians were trying to help Bernie Sanders?
The media made a great deal out of a memo by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory, allegedly claiming, “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump--we support them.)” This memo likely had more to do with the Agency’s objective of blending in on the left and the right to embed pro-Russian content than with Moscow’s larger political objectives, but the media quickly skips over the Sanders part of that memo while treating the Trump part as damning.
But if the Russians were trying to back a politician, would Trump or Bernie have been their choice?
Trump favors a strong foreign policy based on our national interests. Bernie boasts of opposing our national interests. Trump wants a strong America; Bernie wants an international socialist alliance.
But the Russians didn’t believe they could rig an election. They wouldn’t have believed that they could make Bernie president or even a presidential nominee. However they may have rightly thought that they could push the Democrats further to the left and boost their political allies within the DNC.
The Democrat hacks did little for Trump, but they gave Bernie a shot at taking over the DNC.
If we assume that Russia’s project was well-planned, proportional and successful, which considering the track record of their operations in this country is a sensible assumption, then that is what happened.
The post-election Dems are obsessed with Russia, but they’ve also moved further to the left. And, regardless of the rhetoric, the Russians spent generations building up ties with the American left.
Whether it’s Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein or any of the other socialists, the DNC hacks weakened the Democrat establishment and strengthened a movement that Russia once used as its hand puppet.
The Democrats have made plenty of cracks about Trump as a “Manchurian Candidate”. But the movie’s Manchurian candidate was publicly opposed to Russia while secretly benefiting from Russian election interference. That doesn’t describe Trump. It could describe Bernie Sanders. Or many others on the left.
Jill Stein, who initially cashed in by raising money for an election recount, fell afoul of Russiagate and is using recount cash to pay for the legal expenses of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian election interference. The money is going to the Partnership for Civil Justice, part of the International Action Center, and allegedly a front for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party.
The left has been crying, “Russia” and “Treason” on every network and in every newspaper. It might want to consider what a real investigation of its ties to Russian intelligence agencies will turn up.
Wow! I bow to your superior argument. Such wisdom is beyond mortal ken.
Good luck with your crusade against the deep state. I’m sure your vehemence will prove effective against all their wiles and gain you acclaim and adherents throughout the intellectual realm.
Does this mean Seth Rich had nothing to do with it? No, of course it doesn't. Just because Russians were snooping and quietly spying for months and months doesn't mean that a totally unrelated activity, a disillusioned young man downloading a bunch of emails one night, DIDN'T happen. I doubt the Russian hackers and Seth Rich had anything to do with one another, or were aware of one another at all.
When Putin says he didn't give the emails to Wikileaks, he's probably telling the truth, because Assange said the same thing. Not the Russians. Doesn't mean the Russians hadn't been snooping around the whole time, though. But any activity, Russians, Seth Rich, whoever, any activity that took place before the DNC nominations and that hurt Hillary has to be looked at as possibly aimed at helping Bernie, not Trump.
And Daniel has a VERY good point in that: helping Trump in 2015, early 2016, would more likely entail going after HIS competition (Rubio, Cruz, Bush), not going after Hillary.
Stating a fact of public acceptance doesn’t necessarily indicate agreement. Why enter the arena if you aren’t prepared against the first attack?
Surely, you realize that most people don’t follow FReeq threads? Whether true or not, much of the topics are unknown to many, and will be virulently attacked. The Chans and Reddit forums follow a model that is foreign to most here. Though they often lead FR in content and analysis, the non-linear approach, filled with meandering twistings and dead ends, is almost incomprehensible to many traditional readers. Looked at literally, their patterns are indistinguishable from conspiracy sites.
Following information and disinformation can result in no other result. That’s why so much disinformation is put out. Obfuscation and vilification are intentional. The closer one gets to truth; the more obfuscation. Associating real fact with conspiracy theories is standard operating procedure. Trying to outshout the chorus only makes it worse.
Not all who wander are lost; not all who wear black are enemies.
> “There was Russian hacking.”
There is ALWAYS Russian hacking. It’s a given. The question is why wasn’t there more robust cybersecurity on the part of democrats and their servers and cyber networks?
Because their servers were either illegal or selling secrets or both. And they were just plain stupid like John Podesta leaving a default email password as ‘password’ or letting Imran Awan carry passwords for many members of Congress.
The Russians do not hack from GRU offices in Moscow. They do it right on American soil from their ‘retreats’ at Centreville, MD and Oyster Bay, Long Island.
They find, use, pay insiders for speed and to escape detection. Imran Awan did the inside job for them. Dems are scared to death that Imran will be pulled into other indictments and end up singing. I tend to think there must be hit contracts out on this Awan and maybe others.
There's that name PODESTA again!
I probably won’t go so far as to say they hacked the server (though only because they technically don’t even NEED to hack the servers remotely, just steal the information via one of their plants). However, I have little doubt that they would at the very least be involved in these actions, or that they did it to back Bernie Sanders (I doubt they did it for Trump, especially when someone like Putin wouldn’t want America restored).
Oh, I agree completely. I'm just saying, "let's not try to say there's no such thing as Russian hacking" because yes, there was, and is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.