With only a few weeks to go before Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America, the effort to discredit his presidency is already in full force. Latching on to legitimate concerns about hacking of government secrets, the Democratic Party and Barack Obama continue to make wildly unsubstantiated claims that Russia engaged in a concerted effort to ensure that Trump became president.
While progressives and even Republican stalwarts like Lindsey Graham and John McCain an unlikely source, RollingStone, has joined Trump in crying foul. Trump and his supporters agree with that magazine’s writer, Matt Taibbi, Something About This Russia Story Stinks.
Skeptical of Russian involvement in the election, Trump said he didn’t know what Senator Graham is doing and pointed out that the South Carolina senator ran against him in the 2016 GOP presidential primary.
In spite of any hard evidence, the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian nationals and promised further sanctions. Speaking of hacks of DNC email, Obama said, “These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government,” he wrote.
The reason the Russia story smells is because proven hacks of DNC email has morphed into a narrative that blames Hillary Clinton’s loss on a state sponsored effort to get Trump election.
The New York Time’s article, “Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking,” is a prime example. It supposedly backed up the article with reference to a joint FBI/Homeland Security report.
The problem is that the much-anticipated US government’s analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking provided virtually none of the promised evidence that Russia had attempted to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The truth is that many independent security experts say there is little way to know the true origins of the attacks.
Taibbi notes that, like the Iraq-WMD debacle, the Russia story take place in a highly politicized environment in which the motives of all the actors are suspect. As he says, nothing quite adds up.
Surely if any government agency had credible proof that Russia had intentionally interfered with our sovereignty more drastic actions would have occurred than the expulsion of a few low-level diplomats.
Confident of evidence that the joint Homeland/FBI report did not produce, Senator Graham (Republican) promised tough sanctions. Time will only show if the Senator has the grace to admit he was wrong,
The Joint Analysis Report (JAR) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While it did find evidence of “lone wolf” hacking, the report pointed to a long-standing targeting of think tanks, universities, corporations, and government organizations.
In spite of months of extensive investigation, all the report has done is to muddy the waters even more. Its lack of hard evidence has led to widespread confusion among news agencies over whether the Russians hacked the DNC emails or whether Russians hacked vote tallies in several swing states (one that has proven to have no credible evidence).
Lacking such evidence, new agencies like the Washington Post continue to blame Russia for the spread of “fake news.” Everything from CNN to Facebook picked up the narrative as though bogus news and misinformation is a recent invention or that the vaunted mainstream press always tells the unvarnished truth.
A UK Guardian article, written by Ben Jacobs and published on December 24 made two claims — both of which are patently false. The first false claim was hyped in the article’s headline: “Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview.” The Guardian’s claim was picked up by US sources and repeated as fact thousands of times.
The second claim was an even worse assault on trustworthy journalism. Jacobs claimed that Assange “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.” The only “evidence” offered was that Assange conducted eight interviews that were broadcast on RT. Assange has provided hard proof that he never has never had any relationships with Putin or the Russians government.
There can be only one reason that the DNC and the likes of Senator Graham claim proof for what has not be proven – casting doubt on the legitimate election of our next president.
~ Conservative Zone
