Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
On Monday, FBI Director James Comey spent several hours testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, during which time he confirmed that his agency is looking into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. He added that the investigation could take months.
According to Comey, the FBI has been probing any possible ties between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia since July of last year, meaning the investigation has already consumed eight months and who knows how many millions of taxpayer dollars.
“He said that while the Russian government wanted to hurt Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s, intelligence agencies made no judgment on whether the efforts influenced the outcome,” reads part of Patricia Zengerle and Warren Strobel’s piece for Reuters.
Among Democrats, it’s now orthodox dogma that the Russians “hacked” the election, which is why Hillary lost, because third-party voters and the FBI probe into Clinton. Yes, the preceding sentence made no sense; I am quoting orthodox Democrat dogma here. Ever since November 9 of last year, the Left has been desperate to pin Hillary’s loss on something other than their own failure; for whatever reason, the Russia narrative has become the current favorite theory.
Comey stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a personal disdain for Hillary Clinton – which is easy enough to understand – and that hatred motivated him to direct his spy agencies to “hack” the election. Given their “success,” Comey warned they were likely to try it again.
“’They’ll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018. And one of the lessons they may draw from this is that they were successful because they introduced chaos and division and discord and sowed doubt about the nature of this amazing country of ours and our democratic process,’” Reuters quoted Comey as saying.
Actually, all the hackers did was expose some perfectly valid reasons to doubt how amazing this country’s “democratic” process is when they – though not necessarily Russian ones – were able to get into the poorly-protected emails of many members of the Democratic National Committee and reveal their shady dealings. For example, the emails released by WikiLeaks showed that Donna Brazile used her position within the Democratic Party to forward questions for an upcoming primary town hall between Clinton and Bernie Sanders to the Clinton campaign in an attempt to hurt the Sanders campaign. Her only regret is that she was ham-fisted as hell in doing it.
“’My conscience — as an activist, a strategist — is very clear,’ the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee said Monday during a satellite radio interview with liberal activist and SiriusXM host Joe Madison. She added that ‘if I had to do it all over again, I would know a hell of a lot more about cybersecurity,’” Callum Borchers wrote for The Washington Post back in November.
She’s not ashamed she tried to “hack” the primary for Clinton, she’s ashamed she got caught in the act.
For jaded pricks like me, the layers of irony here are many and delicious. First, Democrats now hang on Comey’s every word as he goes after Trump, even though they were ready to put his head on a pike outside DNC headquarters after he re-opened a probe into Clinton late in the campaign. Of course, the real, bitter, terrible irony here is any American politician having the unmitigated gall to complain about any foreign power “interfering” in a U.S. presidential election. I mean, how dare they?
Of course, to be fair, the USA doesn’t really “interfere” in foreign elections so much as they depose sitting leaders and install dictators. After all, never forget September 11… 1973 when the U.S. overthrew the elected leader of Chile and installed dictator Augusto Pinochet – who has since, sadly, come to be something of a folk-hero among misguided Internet “AnCaps.”
The U.S. also overthrew a popular Iranian Prime Minister in Mohammad Mosaddegh back in 1953, because he nationalized the nation’s oil fields, cutting American and British oligarchs out of their businesses. This, of course backfired on the U.S. spectacularly with the rise of Ayatollah Kohmeini and the Islamic Revolution, the exile of the Shah and the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Looking back, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright correctly pointed out America’s mistake.
“In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh . The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs,” Albright wrote in 2000.
Ya think?
Those are, of course, just two examples of the many instances over the years that the USA has either tried or succeeded in orchestrating a foreign coup on behalf of the oligarchs. Crying about foreign interference in our political process now just seems silly and hopelessly out-of-touch with reality.
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