Unraveling the Russian Hack Conspiracy Propaganda–DOUBLE UPDATE

By Larry Johnson, NO QUARTERS USA

Let me stipulate up front that both the United States and Russia engage in covert and clandestineinformation operations. It is called espionage. It is but one aspect of the broader intelligence activity also known as spying. Time for all you snowflakes in America to grow up and get a grip and deal with with reality. If the respective intelligence organizations in either country are not doing this they are guilty of malpractice and should be dismantled.

There are two basic types of espionage activity–Covert refers to an operation that is undetected while in progress, but the outcome may be easily observed. Killing Bin Laden is a prime example of a “covert” operation. A Clandestine Operation is something that is supposed to be undetected while in progress and after completion. For example, if the U.S. or Russia had a mole at the top of the National Security bureaucracy of their respective adversary, communicating with that mole and the mole’s very existence would be clandestine.

So, the alleged Russian meddling in our election–was it covert or clandestine?

The whole “blame Russia” movement to account for Hillary’s unexpected failure to win the Presidency got a new shot in the arm with today’s announcement that Obama ordered:

a full review into hacking by the Russians designed to influence the 2016 election, White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco said Friday.

The stupidity of this is profound. If this review leads to the “discovery” that Russia is carrying out espionage activities in the United States then we have passed the threshold of learning that there is gambling in a casino.

The real irony in all of this is that Wikileaks, thanks to the hack of the DNC and John Podesta emails, exposed the reality of Democrats working surreptitiously to tamper with and manipulate the election. Here are the highlights from that leak:

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz Calls Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver an “A–” and a “Liar”

In May the Nevada Democratic State Convention became rowdy and got out of hand in a fight over delegate allocation. When Weaver went on CNN and denied any claims violence had happened, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, once she was notified of the exchange, wrote “Damn liar. Particularly scummy that he never acknowledges the violent and threatening behavior that occurred.”

Highlighting Sanders’ Faith

One email shows that a DNC official contemplated highlighting Sanders’ alleged atheism — even though he has said he is not an atheist — during the primaries as a possibility to undermine support among voters.

“It may make no difference but for KY and WA can we get someone to ask his belief,” Brad Marshall, CFO of the DNC, wrote in an email on May 5, 2016. “He had skated on having a Jewish heritage. I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”

Building a Narrative Against Sanders

“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” DNC National Secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote in an email to National Communications Director Luis Miranda on May 21. After detailing ways in which the Sanders camp was disorganized, Paustenbach concludes, “It’s not a DNC conspiracy it’s because they never had their act together.”

The London Observer noted that:

The release provides further evidence the DNC broke its own charter violations by favoring Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee, long before any votes were cast.

It was the Clinton spokesman, Robbie Mook, who launched the claim on July 24, 2016 that these leaks were done by the Russians in order to help Trump:

The source of the leak has not been revealed, though Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said on ABC News’ “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday that he believes the Russians were instrumental in it.

“Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these websites,” Mook said Sunday. “It’s troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”

The Clinton campaign started planning to smear Trump as a Putin stooge as early as December 2015. The Podesta emails showed clearly that the Clinton campaign decided early on to clobber Trump for his “bromance” with Putin. It was Brent Buwdosky almost one year ago (December 21, 2015) who proposed going after Trump with the Russian card in an email to Podesta:

Putin did not agree to anything about removing Assad and continues to bomb the people we support. We pushed the same position in 2012 (Geneva 1, which HRC knows all about) and Geneva 2 in 2014. Odds that Putin agrees to remove Assad are only slightly better than the odds the College of Cardinals chooses me to someday succeed Pope Francis. Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria.

Going after Trump as a Russian stooge was in the Clinton playbook long before Trump won a primary. One the wedge issues for Clinton with respect to Trump was Syria. Trump took a strong stand (which many thought would hurt him with Republicans) in declaring we should not be trying to get rid of Assad and that America should cooperate with the Russians in fighting the Islamists. Clinton, by contrast, called for imposing a No Fly Zone that would have risked a direct confrontation with Russia.

Blaming Russia for Hillary’s flame out is absurd. The Russians did not create and lie about Hillary’s server. They did not force her to back the multilateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA and TPP. They didn’t set up the Clinton Foundation as a cash cow for the Clinton family. They did not force her to advocate imposing a No Fly Zone in Syria and having  been a cheerleader for past wars, including Iraq and Libya. Vladimir Putin did not slip her a mickey and cause her to pass out at the 9-11 memorial, which fueled concerns about her health. And they did not infect her lungs and cause her to have extended coughing jags. They did not cause her to call Americans deplorables. They did not make her say that the coal industry should be shutdown. With that kind of record, coupled with her shrieking, screechy voice, why are folks surprised that she did not win?

So now Democrats and several Republicans are in a lather over the Russians stealing the election for Trump. The list of conspiracy theorists pushing this nonsense include John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Angus King of Maine, Brent Budowsky and Adam Schiff. I defy anyone, to explain to me how Russian meddling gave Trump the win.

The realities are this. First, as noted in the Budowsky email, the Clinton campaign came up with the idea of accusing Trump of being a stooge of Russia. They thought they’d get political bang out of that. They didn’t.

Second, the hack of the DNC emails confirmed that the suspicions of many that the DNC and Hillary were collaborating to screw over Bernie and rig the election. That was not fake news. Cold, unwelcomed truth. That’s when this drum beat about the big, bad Russians started meddling in our election started. Why? To distract attention away from the ugly reality that the DNC and Hillary were cheating.

The subsequent Wikileaks avalanche of Podesta emails reinforced as fact the existing suspicion that the media was in the bag for Hillary. But no amount of media help and foreign money could transform Hillary into a likeable candidate. She was dreadful on the campaign trail and terrible at talking to the average American. Even her boy, Brent Budowsky, reluctantly acknowledged this in an email to John Podesta on Wednesday, August 26, 2015:

While I have been warning for some time about the dangers facing the Clinton campaign, aggressively in privately, tactfully in columns, during this latest stage I have been publicly defending her with no-holds barred, and here is my advice based on the reaction I have been receiving and the dangers I see coming to fruition.

I would recommend you assemble a short reading list of everything surrounding President Kennedy’s full acceptance of responsibility after the Bay of Pigs, beginning with the substance and tone of his unequivocal taking of responsibility and ending with his huge rise in the polls, to nearly 90% favorable ratings, after he did this.

And then I would suggest she plan the equivalent and take full, absolute and unequivocal responsibility for making a mistake with the private emails and give an honest, direct, explanation of the reasons I believe she used those private emails. . . .

She could say she was right anticipating this, but wrong in overreacting by trying to shield her private emails, and she takes full responsibility for this, and apologizes to her supporters and everyone else, and now she has turned over all information, it will ultimately be seen that there no egregious wrongs committed.

She needs to stop talking like a lawyer parsing legalistic words and a potential defendant expecting a future indictment, which is how she often looks and sounds to many voters today. Instead, she should take full responsibility for a mistake with no equivocation, and segue into the role of a populist prosecutor against a corrupted politics that Americans already detest…..and make a direct attack against the Donald Trump politics of daily insults and defamations and intolerance against whichever individuals and groups he tries to bully on a given day, and while defending some Republican candidates against his attacks, she should deplore their being intimidated by his insults and offering pastel versions of the intolerance he peddles.

In other words, she should stop acting like a front-runner who cautiously tries to exploit the rules of a rigged game to her advantage, and start acting like a fighting underdog who will fight on behalf of Americans who want a higher standard of living for themselves, a higher standard of politics for the nation, and a higher level of economic opportunity and social justice for everyone.

Like JFK after the Bay of Pigs, the more responsibility she takes now the more she will succeed going forward.

Give Budowsky credit for one thing, if Hillary had followed his advice she might have won the election. But she was too busy exploiting the rules of a rigged game and trying to smear Trump as a Russian agent while failing to exercise genuine, sincere personal responsibility.

UPDATE–This is an extremely dangerous time now. Barack Obama appears to be actively working to discredit the Trump election and has enlisted the intelligence community in the effort. How else to explain this disconnect? Yesterday, as noted above, Obama directed the intelligence community to:

“conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders,” she said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. “This is consistent with the work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were seeing.”

Then comes news last night that:

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Why do you order a review if the CIA has already made a factual determination? In fact, we were told in October that the whole damn intelligence community determined the Russians did it. USA Today reported this in October:

The fact-checking website Politifact says Hillary Clinton is correct when she says 17 federal intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is behind the hacking.

“We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing,” Clinton said during Wednesday’s presidential debate in Las Vegas.

Trump pushed back, saying that Clinton and the United States had “no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else.”

But Clinton is correct. On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The USIC is made up of 16 agencies, in addition to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

I heard from a knowledgeable friend in September that Hillary’s campaign was pressing the Obama White House to lean on the intel community and put something out blaming her woes on the Russians. That led to the October statement. And now we have the CIA  via a SECRET report (that is leaked to the public) insisting that Trump’s victory came because of the Russians.

This is a damn lie. The CIA is now allowing itself to be used once again for blatant political purposes. The politicization became a real problem under Bush. Let’s not forget that these are the same cats who insisted it was a slam dunk that were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The same group who missed the rise of ISIS. Barack Obama told CNN’ Van Jones the following the other night:

“The ability of ISIL to not just mass inside of Syria, but then to initiate major land offensives that took Mosul, for example, that was not on my intelligence radar screen,” Obama told Zakaria, using the administration’s term for the Islamic State terror group.

Also worth reminding ourselves that the head of the ironically titled “Intelligence Community” is a proven liar. Jim Clapper lied to the Senate about the NSA spying on Americans three years ago (December 2013):

In a letter issued the day after a White House surveillance review placed new political pressure on the National Security Agency, the seven members of the House judiciary committee said that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, ought to face consequences for untruthfully telling the Senate that the NSA was “not wittingly” collecting data on Americans.

“Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony – witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress,” wrote representatives James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Trent Franks, Raul Labrador, Ted Poe, Trey Gowdy and Blake Farenthold, citing “Director Clapper’s willful lie under oath.”

There is a consistent pattern in the Obama Administration of lying to the American people, especially when it comes to National Security matters. The NSA is not an isolated case. We also have Benghazi, Syria and Libya as other examples of not telling the truth and misrepresenting facts.

In my lifetime, going on 60 years, I have never seen such a display of incompetence as is being manifested by Barack Obama and mental midgets that surround him.

What they can say for sure is that the DNC and Podesta emails were hacked. Those hacked emails were passed to WIKILEAKS. Those emails were then released to the public. What the intel community will be hard pressed to prove is that the Russian Government conceived of and directed such a campaign.  This is the true information operation to meddle in the U.S. election, but that isn’t Russia. That’s Obama.