The anti-Russian angle on the hacking/Wikileaks/Russian influence on the 2016 election is making a mountain out of a molehill, simply because Putin’s influence was wide open and public. He didn’t hide that he favored Trump. He made it plain that Clinton was a dangerous choice.
Russia has a big interest in who becomes the U.S. president and so do many other states, because the U.S. is the big world superpower and the president is extremely powerful. It is only natural that countries that are affected by a large empire in their midst have a stake in who runs it, and they will naturally exert what influence they can on the outcome. The Israelis and the Saudis have their lobbies, their campaign contributions and their favorites, for example. No one really should get exercised over Russia putting in its two bits. This is the name of the game, under current political conditions. There are continual lobbying pressures upon Congress. There is no strong reason to ignore that and make a big deal out of pressures or revelations during an election. Elections and Congressional votes are part of the same process of big government power and favoritism.
According to this recent Wapo article, there is not evidence that the Kremlin directed a hacking operation, obtaining e-mails that went to Wikileaks, thereby helping Trump and hurting Clinton in the election. To quote the article:
“…intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.”
The CIA says it has identified hackers or sources as individuals connected to the Russian government but not in it. The U.S. officials who heard out the CIA on this matter concluded “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.” This is an extremely weak statement in the sense of being critical. After all, during the campaign, Putin openly said that a Clinton victory meant confrontation with Russia. In late October of 2016, Putin raised WW 3 fears related to a Clinton win. One headline read “‘Very aggressive’ Vladimir Putin announces US Clinton WW3 fears in chilling video”. We didn’t need the CIA to tell us that Russia had a favorite, not when this was part of a public record available to anyone. That’s why we can say that the CIA is really saying nothing new here. The hullabaloo about hacking/Wikileaks/Russia is strictly to score political points and to weaken Trump’s power to maneuver.
There is no doubt that Putin favored Trump over Clinton during the campaign. This was known at least as early as this article in December, 2015. There are a number of obvious reasons why Putin favored Trump. Trump by that date had a multi-year history of favorable comments about Putin. Hillary Clinton had an equally long history of antagonism toward Putin. Clinton promised confrontation with Russia. The defense of Russia and the Russian state alone would have made Putin favor Trump.
Did the Kremlin direct leaks to Wikileaks? The case is unproven. Assange denies it. But it makes no difference to much of anything if it were to be shown that it did do so. It would simply affirm a form of blowback. When the U.S. empire takes a big interest in some foreign country, we can expect that country to take a big interest in who is running the empire. U.S. elections cannot be purified and made independent of foreign influences of many kinds. Dirty election tricks, schemes and information leaks are not limited to U.S. political operatives within a given party or between parties.
1:46 pm on December 10, 2016
