Since the night of the election, when media coverage of election night went from joyous to stunned to near-weepy, the progressive left has been in a self-righteous lather about President-elect Trump’s victory. They are pulling out all stops in an effort to undermine President-elect Trump and his presidency. Indeed, they seem intent on seeing that he not take office at all.
Blaming everything and everyone but themselves and their candidate (with a few notable exceptions), the left took to the streets to riot, they took up their pens to advocate the end of the Electoral College, they bully and harass electors attempting to sway their votes, and they’ve recently landed on Russian involvement in the elections.
Attributed to the culture of each agency, the FBI is uncomfortable stating that the Russians definitely intended to help President-elect Trump because there is no factual evidence to support that conclusion; the CIA, on the other hand, is more comfortable with drawing inference from evidence and results and states confidently that Russia did indeed intend to help Trump.
In a secure meeting room under the Capitol last week, lawmakers held in their hands a classified letter written by colleagues in the Senate summing up a secret, new CIA assessment of Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.Sitting before the House Intelligence Committee was a senior FBI counterintelligence official. The question the Republicans and Democrats in attendance wanted answered was whether the bureau concurred with the conclusions the CIA had just shared with senators that Russia “quite” clearly intended to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton and clinch the White House.For the Democrats in the room, the FBI’s response was frustrating — even shocking.During a similar Senate Intelligence Committee briefing held the previous week, the CIA’s statements, as reflected in the letter the lawmakers now held in their hands, were “direct and bald and unqualified” about Russia’s intentions to help Trump, according to one of the officials who attended the House briefing.The FBI official’s remarks to the lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee were, in comparison, “fuzzy” and “ambiguous,” suggesting to those in the room that the bureau and the agency weren’t on the same page, the official said.The divergent messages from the CIA and the FBI put a spotlight on the difficulty faced by intelligence and law enforcement officials as they try to draw conclusions about the Kremlin’s motives for hacking Democratic Party emails during the 2016 race. Officials are frequently looking at information that is fragmentary. They also face issues assessing the intentions of a country expert at conducting sophisticated “influence” operations that made it hard — if not impossible — to conclusively detect the Kremlin’s elusive fingerprints.
Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, states, “I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now. There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it.”
Among the bizarre “evidence” being amassed is that Russians hacked the RNC but . . . withheld the information they found.
[T]he Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.
In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.
Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.
It seems that the main “evidence” of Russian “intent” to influence the election for Trump is . . . Trump won. He couldn’t possibly have won on his own merit or message, they imply, so it had to be Russian involvement. How else could their experienced, inspiring, trustworthy, and delightful candidate have lost?
Meanwhile, Harry Reid is not content to limit his loathing for James Comey to calling for Comey’s resignation. Now he’s actually claiming that the FBI “hid” evidence of Russian meddling in the election.
“The FBI had this material for a long time but Comey, who is of course a Republican, refused to divulge specific information about Russia and the presidental election,” Reid told MSNBC on Saturday. Comey testified to Congress in July that he was no longer a registered Republican, though he belonged to the party most of his life.“Everyone should know WikiLeaks was involved from the very beginning,” Reid continued. “They leaked the information as if it was run by one of the great political operatives in America when in fact it was run by the political operatives in Russia.“Russia has a pretty good way of cheating. Look at what they did with athletes,” he added, alluding to the long-running doping scandal of Russian Olympic athletes.Pressed on whether he believed Comey had information on Russia’s influence and sat on it, Reid replied: “That’s right, that is true.”
All of this is intended to call into question Trump’s victory and the legitimacy of his presidency.
When coupled with the recent demands that the Electoral College be eliminated and the pressure on electors to change their votes, the progressive left has flown into overdrive with this Russian influence story. One Democrat in the House, Rhode Island’s David Cicilline, is even going so far as to argue that the electors should weigh Russian influence in their decision to cast their ballots on December 19th: “To the extent that foreign interference in the United States presidential elections may have influenced the final result, I believe the electors have the right to consider that.”
The left seems to hope, if not dare fully believe, that the election results can be overturned in some way. Over at HuffPo, they wildly claim that supposed Russian involvement with the election could “give the courts legal authority to install Clinton.”
The American voter is being completely ignored in this entire discussion, however, as it appears that the assumption is that without this alleged Russian interference Americans would have elected a woman they have loathed since the 1990’s, whose private email server and fast and loose treatment of secret information exposed national secrets to all kinds of security threats (including those by Assange, China, North Korea, and Russia), whose Clinton Foundation corruption was reported by the New York Times (not RT), and whose entire platform consisted of shoring up Obama’s deeply unpopular legacy and a $15 minimum wage. Oh, and . . . woman!
The Wikileaks emails did nothing to change anyone’s mind. People who already disliked Hillary saw them as confirmation of everything they dislike about her, and the people who already supported Hillary saw the emails as falsified or delegitimized due to Russian influence (an accusation widely made at the time).
In other words, even if Russia were behind the hacks and wanted to influence the election, showing Hillary to be a lying, untrustworthy corruptocrat didn’t change anyone’s mind. Hillary herself made that point quite often saying that voter knowledge of her email scandal and questionable Foundation activities were “baked in” to voters’ choice for president.
She and her team were confident that against Trump’s failings, Hillary would win with nothing new to say or offer and by ignoring a giant swath of the country whom they believed to be a lock for her. They were wrong.
They’d do well to take Hillary’s advice.
The shoe is on the other foot now, and it is the left who cannot handle reality.
Perhaps the biggest irony in this entire episode is that its the Obama Democrats who are complaining about foreign meddling in elections. These are the same Obama Democrats who regularly take huge sums of money from foreign sources for their own elections, who actively use taxpayer money to try to defeat the Israeli prime minister in his reelection bid, and who cackled gleefully over their role in the ouster and death of a foreign leader.
So while the progressive left wails and rends its garments because they can’t handle reality, we can look forward to more stories geared toward undermining President-elect Trump and his presidency.
Just as they did with President George W. Bush when they spent his first four years in office calling him an illegitimate president, they’ll do the same to President Trump. In fact, we shouldn’t be at all surprised by this turn. There is a long history in our country of the winning president being questioned as an “imposter” or as otherwise illegitimate.
For his part, President-elect Trump is confident that once he takes office and his policies take effect, he’ll win over the reticent and sweep to an even bigger victory in 2020. This scenario is far more likely—and far more welcome—than the sore losers on the left successfully stopping him taking office on January 20th.
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