I’ve been having difficulty getting behind the outrage of the alleged hacking of the election by Russia. While any interference in an election would be bothersome, something about this story did not sit quite right with me. This is not new for something that comes out of Washington. The average you and me are hardly privy to a straight scoop on high-level government dealings but when it involves the intelligence community, we may as well be talking about weather on another planet; the real story is buried in many layers of secrecy and deception. As I set out in my December 10 commentary, “realize that a lot of news is not and cannot be fully validated for days, weeks, or even months. Take everything with a grain of salt.” A few days ago, the story was: we’ve been hacked; how can [the democrats] use this to invalidate the election. The end. A story on December 13th in the New York Daily News details how a simple typo caused the hack. Today, the Brits, ever on the cutting edge of news, in a Daily Mail article, proclaimed the affair an inside job. Which of these is true? All the above are possible, and yet, I think there are underlying questions that are bothering me more than the headlines at face value.
First and foremost, there is far greater indignation among the Democrat stalwarts towards the hacks than the plethora of scandals that it revealed. Its as if the hacks gave the Hillary’s DNC a mulligan. I don’t know what planet they think we live on but it’s that kind of arrogance that turned America away from team-Hillary.
So what of Russia? Russia was being Russia just like China is China and dozens of other players not friendly toward America. They hack and they hack all the time. They are hacking us right now while you read this because we’re in a silent cyber war. These are the same people that have our name stamped on an ICBM. If anything, assuming that the analysis is correct which it may or may not be, we just witnessed political Darwinism in action. Hillary had a notoriously sloppy record on cyber security and there was already concern – and then news – and then proof from the FBI, that the Clinton home server was hacked. Although the DNC was the primary target of the Russian hack, there was this connection: Hillary did not adequately guard her information by using her own server. Hillary as the leading figure in the Democrat party did not learn from her own failure. A WSJ article indicates that the FBI warned the DNC about two hacks on their servers and they blew it off for 7 months and all they can do about it is whine that the FBI should have come in person! There could be no expectation that Hillary would have been any more competent to safeguard the United States in a cyber war. While that series of conclusions might seem simplistic and linear to some people, I believe it accurately reflects her pattern of leadership in shunning expertise outside of her small circle with a detailed and specific bad technology track record.
In all the headline news, a small detail was glossed over in the reporting of this story. Quoting the NYT, a Digg summary pointed out the “The CIA’s conclusion does not appear to be the product of specific new intelligence obtained since the election…Rather, it was an analysis of what many believe is overwhelming circumstantial evidence.” Who brought us out here for what?! Add to this that the FBI concluded that no one could say for sure what the actual objective was for the hack.
So this is the hyper-synopsis: Russia hacks the DNC – we think. Nevertheless, real ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ by DNC folks were revealed because the Russians wanted Trump elected, or maybe not. This possible interference could be a national and constitutional threat; therefore, we will cause an authentic national and constitutional crisis by attempting to invalidate an entire election based on “an analysis of what many believe is overwhelming circumstantial evidence.” God save us.