Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
At this point, I’m not sure which is more embarrassing; Hillary Clinton’s desperate clinging to her theory that the Russians influenced the 2016 Presidential election, or the Left and the mainstream media’s continued enabling of it.
To recap: Clinton believes she lost the election because Russia, in collusion with Wikileaks for some reason, and the Trump campaign, waged an “information war” campaign against her candidacy because Putin wanted Donald Trump to win. Part of this theory hinges upon Russia having hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s servers and then handed those files over to Wikileaks, which worked with Russia and probably others, to coordinate when to release those files in the most damaging way possible.
Yes, it’s sheer lunacy. In reality, Clinton lost because she’s the least likable candidate in the history of American politics and was running for the third term of a regime that had already clearly failed while embracing a social justice movement most Americans are sane enough to reject. She then derided the many Americans who have reasoned opposition to her policies as “deplorable.” But, it’s Russia’s fault she lost.
Well, Russia and some others too, it seems. Yesterday at the Code Conference in Atlanta, Hillary Clinton appeared onstage and elaborated upon her bizarre theory, which now has a new wrinkle: the Russians had help from some Americans.
“They (Russia) did it through paid advertising, we think, they did it through false news sites, they did it through those thousand agents they did it through machine learning which, you know, spewed out this stuff over and over again, the algorithms that they developed. Now, so that was the conclusion,” Clinton began, rattling off a list of prevailing, unsubstantiated theories that apparently 19 intelligence agencies all agree upon.
After that warm-up, the tinfoil hat stuff really got flowing.
“I think it’s fair to ask how that did actually influence the campaign,” Clinton allowed before launching into a long soliloquy about Russia’s historical cyberwarfare activities and how most of the stolen data was used for domestic purposes.
“This was different, because they went public, and they were conveying this weaponized info and the content of it and they were running you know, and there’s all these stories about guys, you know, in Macedonia running fake news sites and I’ve seen them now and you sit there and it looks like, you know, a low level CNN operation or… a fake newspaper. And so, the Russians in my opinion and based on the intelligence and counter-intelligence people I talked to, could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided… guided by Americans, and guided by people who had polling and data. We know that they did that, we understand it,” Clinton said.
The ellipses replace brief interjections by the two on-stage hosts; what appears above, dear readers, are the ramblings of a paranoid, delusional individual. She made nothing but a series of totally unsubstantiated and illogical claims and then failed to back them up with anything. Well, check that, here is her smoking gun.
“Best example, so within one hour, one hour of the Access Hollywood tapes (of Trump’s “Grab ’em by the pussy” comment) being leaked, within one hour, the Russians, or Wikileaks, same thing, dumped the John Podesta emails,” Clinton said, referring to internal campaign emails that Clinton described as boring but contained details that somehow cost her the election.
“You know, just the stuff that is so common, basic. Within one hour they dumped them, and then they began to weaponize them. And they began to have some of their allies within the internet world, like Infowars, take out pieces and begin to say the most outrageous, outlandish, absurd lies you could imagine. And so they had to be ready for that, and they had to have a plan for that, and they had to be given the go-ahead. ‘Okay, this could be the end of the Trump campaign, dump it now. And then let’s do everything we can to weaponize it,’” Clinton said with a straight face.
So, crazy-ass Alex Jones was sitting in his basement somewhere in Texas, drinking his filtered water when he gets a phone call from the Kremlin telling him to check Wikileaks and start doing the Infowars thing with the emails released there? That theory makes sense to anyone?
“And we know it hurt us. Because as I explain in my book, you know, the Comey letter, which was, now we know, partly based on a false memo from the Russians. It was a classic piece of Russian disinformation — comprimat, they call it. So, for whatever reason, and I speculate, but I can’t look inside the guy’s mind, you know, he dumps that on me on October 28th, and I immediately start falling. But what was really interesting, since the mainstream media covered that, as I say like Pearl Harbor, front pages everywhere, huge type, etc. And all of the Trump people go around screaming, ‘Lock her up, lock her up,’ and all of that. At the same time, the biggest Google searches were not for Comey, because that information was just lying out there, it was for WikiLeaks. And so voters who are being targeted with all of this false information are genuinely trying to make up their minds.”
Here, Clinton is mixing two separate incidents into one so as to fit her theory. Comey’s letter to Congress on Oct. 28 that re-opened the investigation into her private email server was not based in any part upon any intelligence, fake or otherwise, from Russia. The impetus came from the FBI’s investigation into explicit messages sent from former Democratic congressman and estranged husband of Huma Abedin (Clinton’s top aide), Anthony Weiner, to a 15-year-old girl. That investigation turned up emails upon Weiner’s laptop that the FBI deemed pertinent enough to the probe into Clinton’s private email server to warrant re-opening the case.
The fake Russian intelligence she’s referring to was a document received by the FBI during the primary season – not general election – that paraphrased an email allegedly sent between DNC Chair Debbie Wassermann Schultz and Leonard Bernando, an official with George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The document never contained a copy of the actual email, and said email was never released by Wikileaks. It alleged that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had been in contact with a Clinton staffer named Amanda Renteria and had assured her the email probe wouldn’t go too deep and hurt Clinton’s campaign. So, if voters were “genuinely trying to make up their minds,” by searching Wikileaks after Oct. 28, they sure as hell wouldn’t have found the document that influenced Comey’s decision to end the email server investigation in July. All they would have found were the actual emails sent among DNC staff colluding to torpedo the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
It was the mere existence of that document, fake as it was, and the likelihood it would be leaked, coupled with Lynch’s meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix with Bill Clinton aboard his plane, that prompted Comey to declare the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s email servers to be over last July; despite not having cleared that decision with Lynch or anyone else. That Comey had every reason to believe the document was disinformation being spread by Russia, or someone, has lead many to criticize him for basing his decision to close the investigation upon it.
“Comey had little choice, these people have said, because he feared that if Lynch announced no charges against Clinton, and then the secret document leaked, the legitimacy of the entire case would be questioned,” The Washington Post reported last week.
So, to translate from Clinton-speak to truth: Comey’s decision to close the investigation was bad because it was based on fake intelligence from Russia, which she says is the same as Wikileaks although Wikileaks never published the email alluded to in the fake document. His letter re-opening the investigation based on evidence gleaned from an investigation into her top aid’s husband’s ridiculous behavior hurt her election bid because the mainstream media decided to cover the FBI re-opening an investigation the mainstream media covered the hell out of for months on end. Gotcha.
“But here’s what I believe. I believe that what was happening to me was unprecedented and we were scrambling. We went and told everybody we could find in the middle of the summer, the Russians were messing with the election. And we were basically shooed away, like, ‘Oh you know, there she goes, vast right-wing conspiracy.’ Now it’s a vast Russian conspiracy. Well, turned out we were right. And we saw evidence of it. We could track it. And we couldn’t get … we could not get the press to follow it and we never got confirmation. Remember, Comey was more than happy to talk about my emails, but he wouldn’t talk about the investigation of the Russians. So people went to vote on November 8th having no idea that there was an active counter-intelligence investigation going on of the Trump campaign,” Clinton said.
So far, said investigation has turned up exactly nothing, which surprises no sane person. Here, she’s simply insisting she’s right and that she’s proven her case, despite the fact she isn’t and hasn’t. Her own “best arguments” quoted above, are based on delusions and speculation. She goes on to elaborate on how she very simply should have won the election.
“I won three million more votes than the other guy did [cheers, applause]. And I had a very, very close contest. Basically our votes were neck and neck. He ended up with more delegates and you know, depending on how you counted, I was slightly ahead, slightly behind. So we were absolutely on par when it came to actually getting votes. I won two Senate races in New York. So I never said I was a perfect candidate, and I certainly have never said I ran perfect campaigns, but I don’t know who is or did. And at some point it sort of bleeds into misogyny. And let’s just be honest, you know, people who have … [applause] a set of expectations about who should be president and what a president looks like, you know, they’re going to be much more skeptical and critical of somebody who doesn’t look like and talk like and sound like everybody else who’s been president.
And you know, President Obama broke that racial barrier, but you know, he’s a very attractive, good-looking man with lots of…,” Clinton said before being interrupted by the host who pointed out that Obama was “likeable enough.”
Clinton, doesn’t have that going for her. Thing is, “the other guy” doesn’t exactly fit the description of what an American president should look like other than being male – the Left, in fact never misses an opportunity to point out how physically unattractive he is generally. She didn’t lose (this time) to the svelte, dashing Barack Obama, but rather to the fat, tiny-handed Cheeto with literally ridiculous hair.
Clearly, her increasingly-elaborate theories as to why she lost the election are pure madness. It’s mostly the Russians, but, as she said, misogyny is to blame too, of course. The mainstream media, however, seems content to continue enabling her flailing about and are more than happy to give her a platform to do it upon.
There may, however, be some signs of wear. When asked what she thought Trump meant by his strange Tweet the other night containing the non-word “covfefe,” she replied: “I thought it was a hidden message to the Russians.” CNN insisted in its headline that she was “joking.” Naturally, CNN didn’t provide any of the above context in their analysis, instead preferring to simply assume she meant it in jest, which we all learned in Journalism 101 not to do. In fact, most of the video clips of her rather long appearance in Atlanta are rather carefully edited and don’t contain much of the lunacy reported above. Fortunately, Recode was nice enough to provide a full transcript.
I’m probably optimistically misreading the editing of those clips and CNN’s insisting she was joking as “Russiagate fatigue,” on the part of the MSM; not that it matters anyway. Until, and even after, the various “Russiagate” probes turn up nothing of consequence, the media will have to cover it. It will be interesting to see how far down the rabbit-hole they’re willing to follow the theory of history’s least-likable presidential candidate as to why she lost.
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