Vincent J. Curtis
12 Dec 2016
What has been bruited for months broke into the open last
week when the Obama White House released a CIA assessment that Russians were
the hackers that broke into the DNC computers and the email account of John
Podesta and released them to WikiLeaks.
The object of the hacking and leaking, allegedly, was to influence the
outcome of the presidential election to favor Donald Trump.
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton – who is one of the names
in the mix to be named as Trump’s Secretary of State – threw out the
possibility that the Russian angle was a “false flag,” meaning the hackers
planted evidence that the hacking originated in Russia as a means of
distracting attention away from the true identity of the hackers.
Fox News Chief Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano has
for months been speculating that the hacking was actually done by America’s own
National Security Agency (NSA), an agency who chief expertise is SIGINT and
electronic eavesdropping. Judge
Napolitano believes the NSA is behind it partially as revenge against Hillary
Clinton for her use of an unsecured private server that compromised human
intelligence assets overseas, and against Barack Obama for conversing with Mrs.
Clinton about highly classified matters via her secret server. Napolitano believes the high level of
sophistication in covering up the hack is additional evidence that points at
the NSA.
Let’s also not forget that President Obama fired NSA chief
Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn in 2013 for being publicly at odds with the
Administration on the assessment of ISIS.
Flynn, who is going to be Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, may
be popular enough among the rank-and-file NSA personnel that payback on that
account could also be a motivator.
That an intelligence agency may go to war against the
Administration is it supposed to serve is not unprecedented. Between 2004 and 2007, the CIA went to war
against the Bush Administration, doing everything in its power to undermine his
policies in Iraq, and collaterally in domestic issues also. What Napolitano describes is criminal in
nature.
The FBI, on the other hand, has been reluctant to name the
Russian government, and specifically Russian President Vladimir Putin, as being
behind the release hacked emails.
What to make of all this?
In the first place, that the CIA would allow itself to be
used in a blatantly partisan manner shows how politicized the CIA remains. The purpose of pinning the hacking on the
Russians is to de-legitimize Donald Trump, and to draw a number of red herrings
across a path that leads to Hillary Clinton.
In Hillary’s first email scandal, the one involving her
secret server, some 33,000 “private” emails were deleted from her server
despite a congressional subpoena.
Because her email archive had been bleach-bitted, the FBI were not able
to ascertain whether or not that server had been hacked. Those private emails contained
incontrovertible evidence of the quid pro quo that existed between
contributions to the Clinton Foundation and actions by Hillary Clinton in her
role as U.S. Secretary of State. The
Clinton campaign always maintained that the FBI’s failure to find evidence of
hacking in the ruins of her server was proof that her server had never been
hacked.
Every new release of hacked emails tended to show that
Hillary’s server was likely hacked, and only the destruction of her email
archive contrary to the subpoena enabled her to maintain a semblance of
defense. To bolster that defense, the
Russian angle in other hackings was harped upon. Never mind the content of the material, look
at who did the hacking and why: the Russians to help Donald Trump defeat
Hillary. Such was the Democrat mantra,
repeated with the regularity of an alarm clock.
A media utterly and unprofessionally hostile to Donald Trump accepted
the line, and never tried to look beyond it.
The content of Hillary’s second and third email scandals
brought people low. The hacking of the
DNC computer proved that the Committee, and specifically the Chair Debbie
Wasserman-Schultz, were rigging the system to help Hillary win the nomination. The first WikiLeaks disclosure forced the
resignation of Wasserman-Schultz from the position as Chair on the eve of the
nominating convention. Nobody denied
that the content of the emails of the DNC hack were true. The emails released by WikiLeaks weren’t going
to change the outcome of the Democrat Convention, however; all it showed was
that Hillary was, by God, going to be the Democrat nominee this time, and the
DNC was going to make damn sure of it.
Russians being the hackers in this case was kicked around, but nobody
then made a big issue of it. The
embarrassing content of the emails was offset by speculation about who the
hackers were. (Shades of the Benghazi
cover-up scheme!)
Hillary’s third email scandal and the second major WikiLeaks
disclosure undermined her campaign.
Whatever her campaign had to say about her platform was subsumed between
its attacks on Donald Trump’s fitness for office and answering questions about
the details of the hacking of John Podesta’s gmail account. Donna Brazile, who replaced Debbie
Wasserman-Schultz as Chair of the DNC after the latter’s resignation, was
herself forced to resign and she was fired from her job as a commentator on CNN
after the emails revealed that she had fed debate questions to Hillary’s
campaign prior to debates. Trump likened
this to giving the questions to the contestant before filming an episode of the
$64,000 Question, with Hillary being
culpable for not disclosing that she had been fed the question beforehand.
In the face of the massive release of emails by WikiLeaks
that revealed how deep the corruption ran in Hillary’s world, the candidate and
the campaign refused to discuss the content of the emails and play up the
storyline that the Russians did the hacking to help Donald Trump. By now, the possibility that Hillary’s
private emails had been hacked and that she could be blackmailed by the
Russians who had proof of quid pro quo was forgotten because the emails of this
release were so salacious. The campaign
would neither confirm nor deny the content of the emails, they would
immediately change the subject to Russian hacking to help Donald Trump.
Well, Donald Trump won the election in part because of the deep
corruption exposed by the emails.
Suppose the Russians were behind the hacking, what does that
change? The emails released by WikiLeaks
were actual, and they gave the American electorate a lot of things to think
about. In particular, that Hillary would
look upon the presidency as her Eldorado; that American policy would be up for
auction; that the favor of America’s president could be bought. The content of the leaks was devastating.
Regardless of the source of the hack, none of the content
was made up. Whoever was responsible
gave the American electorate a lot more information than they would have got
from the American media left to its own devices and if it weren’t prodded along
by the salaciousness of the leaks.
The claim of Russian origin is simply a means of
de-legitimizing Trump because he is made to appear as their favorite. The hypocrisy of Democrats holding that
Russia is a dangerous foe is too much to discuss at this point. Anyhow, Russian payback against Barack Obama
and his precious legacy can’t be dismissed out of hand.
But if the Russians thought that they could own Donald Trump
because of this hacking, they are in for a surprise. Trump may want to try a new, friendlier
diplomatic tack with Putin, but if Putin makes Trump look like a loser or a
sucker, Trump will react violently and unpredictably. Nobody owns Trump.
Even if all the Democrat allegations are true, that the
Russians did the hacking for the purpose of Donald Trump, that isn’t going to
help the Russians much in dealing with Trump.
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