Who Did the Hacking/Leaking?

This article first appeared in New English Review



Hillary in happier times


It is pretty amusing to see the Democrats and mainstream media suddenly transform themselves into neo-cold warriors, but that's what they have done over this Russian hacking story. The accusation is that Vladimir Putin and the Russians were behind the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta during the recent election. The wildest speculation is that they actually hacked into the voting machines to swing the election to Donald Trump though there is not one shred of evidence to support that. But did they have anything to do with the compromise of DNC and John Podesta emails that wound up in the hands of Wikileaks?

President Obama is taking the line that, yes, he knew as far back as September of 2015 that the Russians were engaged in hacking, but he said nothing about it until after Hillary Clinton had lost the election to Donald Trump. The official line is that he was more concerned with getting Russia to cooperate in Syria. (That worked out really well, didn't it?) Now the President is shocked-shocked and outraged- that Russia would engage in espionage against us. But that's what adversarial nations do (including us), and hacking is part of that.

Now Hillary Clinton is claiming that the Russians hacked into the DNC and Podesta emails due to a personal animosity between her and Putin. But wait! Was she not the nation's top diplomat? Didn't she do that re-set button thing with Russia? The nation's top diplomat should not let personal animosity get in the way of her work. Having good relationships with your foreign counterparts-even adversaries- is part of the job description. At least that's what my State Department friends all told me when I served with DEA in Thailand and Italy in the 1970s and 1980s respectively. My, how times have changed since then. Maybe Mrs. Clinton was not a very effective secretary of state, but we already knew that.

Don't get me wrong. I want us to get to the bottom of it as well. If the Russians stole the emails of the DNC and Podesta, it behooves us all to know. The House Intelligence Committee also wants to know. That's why they asked the intelligence community to send representatives to Capitol Hill this week to brief them-behind closed doors, of course. Yet, the CIA, which is apparently behind the leaks from "intelligence sources" that it was the Russians who were behind it and gave the documents to Wikileaks, refused to comply, which has outraged Peter King (R-NY), who is starting to suspect the worst about the motives of these "intelligence sources".

Enter into all this comes Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, from his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. On Thursday of this week, he told Fox News' Sean Hannity that neither the Russians or any other nation provided the emails to Wikileaks. When Hannity asked about claims by one Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, that he received documents in a wooded area near American University in Washington DC in September 2016 from a disgruntled Democrat party employee who was disgusted with the way Bernie Sanders was treated in the primary,  Assange declined to get into it. If Assange is telling the truth, those emails were not hacked, merely turned over by someone from within the Democrats' own ranks.

You can draw your own conclusions about the credibility of Assange, Wikileaks, or Murray, who is also a pretty controversial character, but consider this: In ten years of existence, Wikileaks has never put out false information. That's a pretty good track record.

In closing, Hillary also thinks that the hacked/leaked emails led to a drop in her voter support, thus contributing to Trump's victory. Perhaps, but it apparently didn't change much in California. It was California, which she won by 4 million votes, that gave her a popular vote majority over Trump.