On Liberty Watch

In a speech liberally seasoned with self-pity, Mrs. Clinton attributed her loss of the 2016 presidential election to a convergence of two “unprecedented” events. According to the New York Times, Mrs. Clinton said those two events were (1) the release of a letter by FBI Director James B. Comey shortly before the election referencing Clinton’s private e-mail server, and (2) an “attack against our country” by Vladimir Putin that took the form of hacking into the e-mails of the DNC and campaign chair John Podesta. The hacks were directed at her, Mrs. Clinton maintained, because Putin had a “personal beef” with her because of her accusation that Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections were rigged. Which, indeed, they were.

Where to begin?

Unprecedented

In one sense Mrs. Clinton is correct. There was plenty of unprecedented behavior associated with the 2016 elections. She didn’t bother to mention that a great majority of it was hers.

Let’s start with the fact that Mrs. Clinton was the first Secretary of State to set up a home-server that she used for all her State Department business, in contravention of State Department Policy. And let’s not forget that she had her legal staff destroy about 30,000 e-mails that were under Congressional subpoena. Or that she lied under oath when she said that the staff read each and every e-mail before deciding which ones to destroy. Or that she lied under oath when she said that she turned over all work related product back to the State Department. Or that she lied when she said that she never sent or received classified e-mail. That was later amended to neither sent nor received e-mail classified at the time. That was a lie too. The list of lies is endless.

It was also unprecedented to have the former President of the United States meet privately in the back of an airplane with the Attorney General who is overseeing the FBI’s investigation of you. It is unprecedented for the former President of the U.S. and his wife, the Secretary of State, to have formed a charitable organization to serve as the family slush fund and money laundering operation. It is unprecedented for the Secretary of State to sign off on a deal giving the Russians control of 20% of all U.S. uranium production capacity, only to see the Secretary of State’s husband collect $500,000 for giving a speech to a Russian bank with links to the Kremlin. And, by the way, that wasn’t the only Clinton deal that carried such a stench. It’s hard to keep track of them all, but this link from the New York Times is a good place to start. The headline, which reads “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal” says it all.

Clinton corruption is hardly a new story. It goes way back to Hillary Clinton’s days as a commodity trader; through the days of renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign contributors, and then to raising campaign cash from firms and individuals with ties to the Chinese military during the 1996 campaign. All told, the Clinton’s went from being “dead broke” in 2000 to a net worth of well over $100 million dollars by 2008. So, yes, there was plenty of behavior that was unprecedented—at least before the Clinton’s came to town.

Mrs. Clinton’s Exercise in Self Deception

Let’s dispense with the fantasy that Hillary Clinton lost the election because of Russian hacking. Virtually every official that will go on record is clear that there is no evidence that voting machines were hacked, or that votes weren’t counted or that people were denied the opportunity to vote because of hacking. The behavior that Hillary Clinton is complaining about is the hack and release of information from e-mail accounts belonging to the DNC and campaign chair John Podesta.

To begin with, this would not be the first time that the Russians pulled this type of stunt. They have been in the agit prop business for at least a half-century. More to the point, this was not some sort of disinformation campaign. What the Russians leaked, primarily through Wikileaks, was in fact accurate information. That doesn’t mean that what the Russians did was ethical, proper or justifiable. Who are we trying to kid here? Vladimir Putin is an ex KGB agent. The KGB does not hire altar boys.

Mrs. Clinton would have us believe that the population was hoodwinked; that they didn’t know the facts, and therefore didn’t vote for her in sufficient numbers. Mrs. Clinton said “Make no mistake as the press is finally catching up to the facts, which we desperately tried to present to the press during the last months of the campaign. … This is an attack on our country.” The idea that the press did not cover the story is simply delusional. The Clinton campaign pressed the Russian angle for months, including during the presidential debates.

Here for instance is a quote from the final presidential debate, which took place on October 19, almost 3 weeks before the election.

Clinton: Russians “have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions, then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the internet. This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly from Putin himself, in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election…”

So she couldn’t get the message out? Nonsense. The story was covered extensively. And remember that during the election season the Clinton campaign refused to say whether the hacked e-mails were in fact authentic, even though they obviously were. But Clinton never acknowledged the authenticity of the e-mails. In the statement above she refers to “American accounts, American websites” etc. The campaign routinely referred to the e-mails as stolen, and possibly fraudulent. (Somehow or other they didn’t mind trafficking in Trump’s stolen tax returns though).

There is a reason the Clinton campaign didn’t acknowledge the authenticity of the e-mails. It is precisely because they are authentic. Acknowledging that fact would mean owning up to their contents and her own duplicity. So Hillary Clinton is left to argue that she lost the Presidential election because the voters were treated to accurate information about her and her campaign. That’s poetic justice for you.

JFB

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The front page of today’s New York Times carries the headline “Trump Falsely Says Claim of Hacking Came After Election”. And that is true enough. Just as it would be true enough for the Times to publish the headline “Hillary Clinton Falsely Claims Not to Have Sent Classified E-Mails.” Or “Hillary Clinton Falsely Claims She Turned Over All Her Work Related E-Mails.” Or, Hillary Clinton Claims, well, you get the idea. So it appears that the Times isn’t so much concerned with lying as it is concerned with who is doing the lying.

And on that subject, ironically enough, the Times points out that the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr. formally blamed Russia on October 7 for hacking the DNC a month before election day. That, by the way, is the same James R. Clapper Jr., who perjured himself before Congress. When Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon asked him point blank if the NSA collected any type of data on millions of American citizens, Clapper’s answer was: “No sir.”

When he was confronted with his lie shortly thereafter he said that he gave what he considered to be the “least untruthful” answer he could.

Which brings us to the matter of Edward Snowden.

Edward Snowden was hired as an NSA contractor in 2013, over three years ago. By June of 2013 Snowden had leaked thousands of classified documents, and by June 23, 2013 he had hightailed it over to Russia from Hong Kong to escape the U.S. Justice Department. As of now he still lives in Russia where he has been granted temporary asylum. So Russia has been harboring a U.S. fugitive who leaked thousands of classified documents to, among others—the New York Times. And that very same New York Times acts surprised that Russia would try to interfere in U.S. domestic politics. What did the Times think Russia was doing then?

Note too that there is no one on the planet who has any evidence whatsoever that Russia’s evidence had an impact on the outcome. Homeland Security Secretary Jeb Johnson said there is “no evidence” that any “bad actor” actually changed the ballot count in the presidential election. And not to put too fine a point on it, the information that was released that is the subject of the hacking complaints wasn’t false. It was factually correct.

Hillary Clinton and Company did stack the rules against Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Donna Brazile was feeding CNN’s debate questions to Hillary Clinton ahead of time. Hillary Clinton’s senior staff did mock Catholics and Catholicism behind closed doors. John Podesta did ask Clinton to call “needy Latinos.” And so on.

The real question that should be on everybody’s mind is not: did Russia attempt to interfere with the election. Of course they did. The real question is: how could the White House be so incompetent that they fell asleep at the switch? And why are they only waking up now? Edward Snowden, who might know a thing or two about hacking, has been sitting in Moscow for 3 years after having been granted temporary asylum. And it is only now that the White House appears to consider that Russia might have been interested in the confidential files maintained by the Presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump? Seriously?

It is entirely possible, if not probable, that the Russians also hacked into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, and that they have in their possession the supposedly personal e-mails that she ordered destroyed. The ones that were under subpoena, by the way. Those e-mails could be the ones that contain the really interesting information. But we will never know. Unless Vladimir Putin decides we should.

JFB

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Another Do Over Attempt

Well, well, well. All of a sudden Progressives have decided that the Russian bear isn’t very friendly after all. And they are terribly upset that the Russian government, meaning Vladimir Putin, “may have” influenced the outcome. And so the latest ploy is to ask for a delay of the Electoral College vote, scheduled for December 19, so that the College’s electors can receive an intelligence briefing. To no one’s surprise, the Clinton campaign backs the effort. The aim is to buy time to convince enough Republican electors to abandon Trump so that they can elect someone else President.

It bears repeating that this is the same crowd that hollered from the rooftops about how Trump might challenge the results if he lost.

In any event, Senate Republicans have walked away from Trump on this. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have announced support for a bi-partisan inquiry into the affair.

His Majesty Disses the Wall Street Journal

Speaking of His Majesty, Trump blasted the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board the other day for criticizing his plan to slap tariffs on imports. “I read the Wall Street Journal the other day” he said. “Honestly, their editorial board doesn’t get it. I don’t think they understand business.”

Au contraire, the WSJ editorial board understands economics very well. It is the Emperor who lacks clothing.

Awkward

Like many of his cabinet picks, Trump’s reported favorite for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson the current CEO of ExxonMobil, had previously announced support of the TPP. His Majesty may wind up being the only one in his government opposed to it.

The Free Market and the “Dumb Market”

In an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, Trump insisted he was going to slap tariffs on goods produced outside the U.S. by American companies. At which point Chris Wallace said “What happened to the free market, sir?”

To which His Majesty replied, “…that’s not the free market when they go out and move and sell back into our country…No, that’s the dumb market, OK? That’s the dumb market”.

Well, it’s good we got that straightened out. Otherwise people might think this is …dumb.

JFB

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The Washington Post reported on Friday that the CIA “…concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the Presidency….” The assessment was so secret that the CIA felt compelled to leak it to the Washington Post, which promptly put it on the front page. While the FBI acknowledged that the Russians intervened by hacking DNC and RNC servers, they were more circumspect about motives. They were apparently unwilling to say explicitly that the Russians were trying to help Trump win.

There are now various calls for the Senate to conduct an investigation of the situation. Senator John McCain joined with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to say they will push “…to unify our colleagues around the goal of investigating and stopping the grave threats that cyber attacks conducted by foreign governments pose to our national security.”

For his part, His Majesty King Donald dismissed the story saying “It could be Russia…and it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” (Why do they always have to pick on New Jersey?) Anyway, the Royal Transition Staff issued a statement that “these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” At that, the usual chorus arrived wailing and moaning about the dire threat to “Our Democracy” and His Majesty’s apparent unwillingness to walk around the town square dressed in sack cloth and ashes to atone for his cavalier dismissal of the opinions of the intelligence agencies.

So let’s unpack all this.

Did Russia Interfere?

Is there any reason to believe that the Russian government tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election? Of course there is. They have interfered one way or another with American politics generally and U.S. Presidential elections specifically for at least 50 years. After all, who provided financing, propaganda and organizational help for communist front groups from the 1940s through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989? The Soviets did, that’s who.

So, yes, of course the Russian government tried to influence the outcome. Did Putin prefer Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton? Probably. So what? They probably preferred Obama to Romney. After all, it was Romney who in 2012 identified Russia as the greatest strategic threat faced by the U.S. And it was Obama who was caught on an open mike telling Putin to wait until after the 2012 election was over, after which time Obama could be more accommodative toward Russia.

Again, so what.

A Little History Here

Russia almost certainly preferred Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan in 1980; George McGovern to Richard Nixon in 1972; Lyndon Johnson to Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Henry Wallace to Harry Truman or Thomas Dewey in 1948. And let’s not be naïve, in addition to agit prop over elections, Russia successfully infiltrated high levels of Western governments. There was the Kim Philby affair in Britain. And to this day lots of progressives deny that Alger Hiss and Ethel Rosenberg spied for the Soviets, despite the mountain of evidence that shows they did. The British government charged Vladimir Putin with ordering the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, in London in 2006. Then there were the cases of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen, caught spying for the Soviets. The Guardian covers the very recent case (2010) of Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley in the story at this link.

So it should hardly come as news that the Russian Government, headed by an ex KGB agent, would interfere in U.S. politics. Or, for that matter, that he would have his opponents murdered. That’s what the KGB does. But how is any of this supposed to have made a difference in the election outcome?

Who, exactly, is surprised by any of this? And why would anyone think that the Russian interference had the desired effect? The Clinton campaign obviously viewed the Russian accusation as damaging to Trump, which is why they harped on it all the time. The absurdity of the argument becomes crystal clear when you consider that the Clintonistas continue to complain that (1) they may have lost the election because of Putin’s interference, but that (2) Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of 2 million votes. So which is it? Did Putin cost Clinton votes, or did she gain them on balance? Or is the argument that the Russians concentrated their efforts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin thereby affecting the outcome. And where is the evidence that the outcome would have been different absent Putin and the KGB?

It is well known by roughly everybody who got beyond their 6^th grade civics class that countries routinely interfere in each other’s internal politics, mostly surreptitiously. The U.S. spent a lot of time trying to knock off Fidel Castro (before he became Obama’s BFF) with plots that could have been concocted by the editors of Mad Magazine. The U.S. succeeded in its efforts to depose Salvatore Allende in Chile (1973), Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam (1963) and Mossaddegh in Iran (1953). It took until 1976 for the U.S. to officially ban assassination as a tool of foreign policy, which it did when then President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11905. That order was reinterpreted and relaxed in 1998 for targets identified as terrorists by the U.S.

On a less draconian scale, we had sanctions imposed on South Africa when it maintained apartheid. The whole point of Radio Free Europe was to support opposition to the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe, as well as to attack the legitimacy of the Russian government. And Barrack Obama injected himself into domestic British politics when he made a speech in London defending the E.U. just before the Brexit vote.

And not to put too fine a point on it, none other than Hillary Clinton is on tape as an enthusiast for rigging foreign elections. In January 2006 Hamas won a resounding victory against Fatah (whom the U.S. supported) in an election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council. In a September 2006 meeting with the editorial board of the Jewish Press, when that subject came up, Hillary Clinton said this.

“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

So much for Hillary Clinton and the sanctity of the vote.

The Upshot

Let’s be clear about what is going on here. It is an effort by progressives to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the November election. Because they lost. And they lost fair and square because they had a lousy candidate, a fact that they are thus far unable to admit. Which is not to say it was a great outcome. It wasn’t and it couldn’t be, given the two major party candidates. But the outcome is what the people voted for under the rules.

All of a sudden Progressives may find that the Madisonian system of checks and balances doesn’t look so terrible after all. But I am not holding my breath waiting.

JFB

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Well, how about that. Jill Stein is demanding a recount of Wisconsin’s Presidential vote. Stein filed the demand about an hour before the deadline, after having raised more than $5 million for the effort. Let’s put this in perspective. According to OpenSecrets.org, a campaign finance watchdog, Jill Stein raised and spent about $3.5 million on her entire Presidential campaign up until October 28, 2016, about a week before the vote. But all of a sudden she managed to raise $5 million in record time to fund a recount in Wisconsin.

And lo and behold, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has announced that it is “participating” in the Wisconsin effort, to make sure that the process is “fair”. Clinton’s campaign also announced it will participate in Michigan and Pennsylvania recounts if a third party demands them. And what do you know, Jill Stein says she intends to do exactly that, provided she can raise the money. Which she very well may; after all she is fronting for Hillary Clinton.

Why else would Stein go through this charade, and why else would anybody contribute to the effort? There were about 2.8 million votes cast in Wisconsin. Trump beat Clinton by 1 percentage point. Stein got all of 30 thousand votes, about 1.1%; Gary Johnson got 106 thousand votes, about 3.6%. It is pretty much the same story in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump bested Clinton by a narrow 0.3 of a percentage point in Michigan, and by 1.2% percentage points in Pennsylvania. Stein’s vote was negligible, around 1% in each state. State by state results are available here.

But it just so happens that Mrs. Clinton needs the combined 46 electoral votes of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to snatch the election away from Donald Trump. Hope springs eternal, but it is simply not going to happen. Even the chief counsel for the Clinton campaign, Mark Elias, noted that “the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states—Michigan—well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount.” And for its part, the White House issued a statement to the New York Times saying that the election was free of interference; that from a cyber security standpoint, the “elections were free and fair.”

So there is virtually no prayer that the result is going to be overturned. But the very same left that was so aghast that Trump said he would wait to see the outcome before committing himself to it is in the process of trying to undermine those results with legal challenges that are otherwise pointless. And the Clinton campaign is, at the very least, providing a big assist.

Is anybody over 21 surprised? Nope.

JFB

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