Russian Hacking Hysteria - Matthew Vadum

by Matthew Vadum

The Left can't stop blaming the vast Russian conspiracy.

All this talk of a vast Russian conspiracy to hack U.S. computer networks to put Donald Trump in the White House is difficult to believe.

It may turn out to be true that somebody either hacked the Democratic National Committee or leaked emails from inside the DNC to expose Democrats’ dirty tricks against the Trump campaign. Among those illicit operations were the effort to foment violence at Trump campaign rallies, rigging the Democrat primaries against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and the leaking of debate questions by then-CNN pundit and now acting DNC chairman Donna Brazile.

The Left’s immediate goal, as it was during and after the bitter 36-day-long Bush versus Gore recent in Florida in 2000, is working toward a broader narrative. Left-wingers are laboring to delegitimize the incoming president because he is a Republican. Democracy isn’t working properly if it puts non-leftists in power, left-wingers reason, so all GOP chief executives must be vigorously opposed.

Commie agitprop director Michael Moore is encouraging angry left-wing mobs to come to Washington, D.C., and riot in the streets of the nation’s capital on Inauguration Day in an effort to prevent or at least cast a shadow over Trump’s assumption of the powers of the presidency. The idea is to do as much damage as possible to Trump before he even gets sworn in.

Selective recounts in states Trump won aren’t yielding election-changing results so now Electoral College members pledged to vote for Trump are being besieged by angry radicals who are threatening them with death if they vote for Trump on the appointed day Dec. 19. Corrupt partisan shills like Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, former head of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, are demanding that presidential electors be burdened with unprecedented, utterly inappropriate intelligence briefings before they vote.

Left-wing Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) openly embraces an Electoral College coup against Trump, calling him a “potentially dangerous president” who is “not only unqualified to be president, he’s a danger to the republic.”

After recounts and threatening electors, paranoid fear-mongering about Russia is the Left’s fallback position.

And more than a few Republicans are playing along with the Left.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) both lined up behind the deeply dysfunctional Central Intelligence Agency, which is home to plenty of left-wing Democrats, chief among them being CIA Director John Brennan. The ultra-politically correct Brennan, who steadfastly covers up for Islamofascism, has admitted to voting for the Communist Party’s presidential candidate in 1976, an acknowledgement that ought to have instantly and permanently disqualified him as CIA chief.

McConnell said Monday he had the “highest confidence” in U.S. intelligence agencies and Ryan praised those same agencies for “working diligently” to combat cyber attacks from abroad. Trump haters Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) joined incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) in calling for a congressional investigation into the alleged Russian hacking.

President Obama clownishly weighed in Monday night, announcing on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” that he has called for a full review of the evidence of Russian hacking “to prevent this kind of interference from having an impact on elections in the future.”

President-elect Trump himself dismisses the allegations as “ridiculous,” accusing the Democrats of fabricating the claim to explain the stunning electoral shellacking their party received in Nov. 8 elections.

“I don’t believe it,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel. “I think it’s just another excuse.”

Yet Americans keep hearing from the mainstream media that unnamed sources in the intelligence community say this alleged Russian-led pro-Trump computer hacking happened during the recent election cycle. This is exactly how intelligence agencies disseminate lies and cover stories.

In an emperor-wears-no-clothes moment, press releases are being blasted out saying that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agree that Russia set out to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but nobody is willing to go on the record with what they actually know.

So there is no publicly available evidence whatsoever that Russians engaged in cyberwarfare specifically in an effort to have an impact on the U.S. election. All we have so far are unproven claims about actions and presumed intent made by figures in the U.S. intelligence community. The Russians may have participated in hacking against U.S. targets but it isn’t clear why they did so or if they acquired anything useful.

And as press time neared Monday night, Reuters reported that the agency that oversees those 17 U.S. spy agencies has not endorsed the CIA-backed theory that Russian hackers intervened to help Trump’s campaign.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not doubt the CIA's analysis of Russian hacking operations, it is withholding its approval of the assessment “because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named.”

The Reuters article continued:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA's analysis - a deductive assessment of the available intelligence - for the same reason, the three officials said.

There is good reason to be skeptical of the CIA’s findings.

This is the CIA of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and traitor Aldrich Ames.

This is the CIA that failed to notice in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the economically sclerotic Soviet Union was disintegrating.

"The CIA failed in its single, overriding defining mission, which was to chart the course of Soviet affairs," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) observed in 1992.

During the Cold War the CIA was penetrated repeatedly by Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies which supplied false intelligence to American decision-makers for years.

The agency “bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times,” according to Benjamin B. Fischer, the CIA’s former chief historian. “The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure” that allowed double agents to spread disinformation and “wreaked havoc” on the agency.

CIA officials have been criticized as incompetent, overly bureaucratic, and resistant to change for years.

Bill Gertz writes at the Washington Free Beacon that:

Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence—the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink.”
The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.

More than four dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period worked secretly for Communist Cuba and provided disinformation to the CIA.

“In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double-agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi,” Gertz wrote.

The CIA reportedly didn’t know the Berlin Wall was being planned in 1961 until the East Germans started building it and learned in 1989 that it was being torn down by watching cable television.

So the CIA is far from perfect and it is filled with people who don’t want change to come to the intelligence community.

And it needs to be noted that after such a tumultuous campaign, it’s easy to forget who took the lead in making a false connection between Trump and the Russians to begin with.

It’s a Big Lie originated by NBC reporter Katy Tur during the DNC convention in Philadelphia and then vigorously promoted by the New York Times and CNN.

Recall that Clinton admitted to grabbing some 66,000 emails and then returning about half of them which she claimed didn’t touch upon personal matters. She said those personal emails were deleted.

At the July 27 press conference, Trump, half-jokingly, urged the Russians to hand over those supposedly personal emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. He added sarcastically: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

A few minutes later Tur used a loaded question to introduce into the media ecosystem the lie that Trump had invited Russia to engage in cyberwarfare.

"Do you have any qualms about asking a foreign government — Russia, China, anybody — to interfere, to hack into the system of anybody in this country?"

“Hey, you know what gives me more pause, that a person in our government, crooked Hillary Clinton — here’s what gives me more pause,” Trump said, as Tur tried to sneak in follow-up questions.

He continued:

Be quiet, I know you want to, you know, save her. That a person in our government, Katy, would delete or get rid of 33,000 emails. That gives me a big problem. After she gets a subpoena. She gets subpoenaed, and she gets rid of 33,000 emails. That gives me a problem. Now, if Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.

A few minutes after the press conference, Trump restated on Twitter his point about the e-mails: “If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted e-mails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!”

But almost immediately after the comments were made at the media event the New York Times lied on Twitter, writing: “Donald J. Trump called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email, essentially sanctioning a foreign power’s cyberspying.”

As Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

And so Katy Tur’s Big Lie was engraved in deep relief into the Left’s narrative, allowing it be repeated over and over again and hardening into fact in the eyes of the mainstream media.

Now this lie is being used by Democrats, Never Trump Republicans, and the media to undermine the legitimate victor in the presidential contest.

And this is only the beginning.

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265123/russian-hacking-hysteria-matthew-vadum

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