The Putin factor comes in handy for the latest tactic in a series pursued since the November 8 election, for delegitimizing Trump’s victory and negating his fitness to reach the White House.
This campaign may resonate strongly on America’s future policy and position as a world power, because it is designed to block Trump’s path to a deal with Putin for resolving the Syrian conflict. The Obama administration has no wish to see the new president succeed where it failed for nearly six years.
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Aleppo’s fall to the Assad regime with the surrender Thursday, Dec. 15, of the Syrian rebel forces locked in a corner of the eastern districts was the most disastrous military and strategic setback to befall the Obama administration for two years. It started evolving in September 2015, when Russia stepped up its military intervention in the Syria war and rescued Bashar Assad.
When Aleppo succumbed to the Russian-backed government army and its allies, Iran, Hizballah and fellow Shite militias, it did not fall alone. It brought down the entire architecture of US-backed positions in northern Syria. The US had invested in and trained local groups, such as the Syrian Kurdish militia and the rebel Free Syrian Army, as the bedrock for its policy and interests in the conflict. Those groups have melted away.
The acknowledged overlords of northern Syria today are Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who can claim the Aleppo victory. Bashar Assad and Iran are reduced to playing second fiddle. But whereas the Al Qods chief Iranian general Qassem Soleimani commands pro-Iranian forces in the region, America has been divested of all its military assets and has no real say in the next chapter of the horrific war.
Hence US Secretary of State John Kerry’s despairing appeal Thursday in a press briefing to bring the bloodshed and suffering to an end: “We can’t have another Srebrenica” – a reference to the Serbian slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Serbs in 1985 – he said.
Kerry has toiled tirelessly for a diplomatic solution to the dreadful Syrian war, but his appeal falls on senses hardened by the many Srebrenicas perpetrated in more than five years of conflict. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been slaughtered – according to an unofficial estimate up to a million – and many subjected to chemical warfare. The secretary can’t count on the Kremlin to relent and so, even after the last Syrian rebels and their families are out of Aleppo, the killing will go on.
In Washington, 10,000 kilometers away, the Aleppo calamity is being dished up as a political tool. The claim was heard Thursday that the “same Vladimir Putin” who sponsored the atrocities in Aleppo, also interfered in the US presidential election by sending hackers to influence the results in favor of Donald Trump. The claim is touted by Obama administration spokesmen and the Democratic Party, whose candidate Hillary Clinton lost the election. It appears to be fodder for a Democratic party drive building up for the president-elect’s impeachment even before he is sworn in as president on Jan. 20.
The Putin factor comes in handy for the latest tactic in a series pursued since the November 8 election, for delegitimizing Trump’s victory and negating his fitness to reach the White House.
This campaign may resonate strongly on America’s future policy and position as a world power, because it is designed to block Trump’s path to a deal with Putin for resolving the Syrian conflict. The Obama administration has no wish to see the new president succeed where it failed for nearly six years.
Putin will have no qualms about capitalizing on Washington’s preoccupation with its internal power struggle and will build up as many gains in Syria as he can before Donald Trump takes over. Obama’s threat Friday, Dec. 12, to retaliate for Russia’s efforts to influence the presidential election will just provoke the Russian president to move faster and more determinedly in his grab for more assets in Syria.
House Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are crying foul after the FBI, CIA, and National Intelligence directors refused to brief them on the Russian cyber attacks that occurred during the presidential campaign. The Washington Post reported on Friday that according to anonymous sources, the CIA determined that Russia interfered in the election with the purpose of helping Trump’s campaign.
According to members of the House Intelligence Committee, that was the first time they had heard that analysis, even though intel officials had been briefing the panel on Russian cyber attacks for many months.
In an effort to fulfill his committee’s oversight responsibilities, Chairman Devin Nunes requested that National Intelligence Director James Clapper, along with FBI Director James Comey and CIA Director John Brennan, brief committee members in a closed session on Thursday. Nunes was not pleased Wednesday when the briefing had to be canceled due to their refusal to appear.
The California Republican, in a letter sent to Clapper on Monday, said he wanted clarification about why the CIA is now saying that Russian hacks of political campaign committees earlier this year appeared to be aimed at helping President-elect Donald Trump and hurting Democrat Hillary Clinton. Nunes pointed to testimony from Clapper in a public hearing in November that the Intelligence Community lacked the evidence to draw such a conclusion.”It is unacceptable that the Intelligence Community directors would not fulfill the House Intelligence Committee’s request to be briefed tomorrow on the cyber-attacks that occurred during the presidential campaign,” Nunes said in a statement released Wednesday night. “The legislative branch is constitutionally vested with oversight responsibility of executive branch agencies, which are obligated to comply with our requests.”
However, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that “senior administration officials have regularly provided extensive, detailed classified and unclassified briefings to members and staff from both parties on Capitol Hill since this past summer and have continued to do so after Election Day.”
“Last week, the President ordered a full Intelligence Community review of foreign efforts to influence recent presidential elections — from 2008 to present,” the director’s office said in a statement Wednesday. “Once the review is complete in the coming weeks, the Intelligence Community stands ready to brief Congress — and will make those findings available to the public consistent with protecting intelligence sources and methods. We will not offer any comment until the review is complete.”
Some members of the intelligence community [IC] have been selectively leaking comments to the media, however.
Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a permanent member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, appeared on Fox News’ The Kelly File Wednesday night to talk about the situation — which he called “absolutely disgraceful.”
King said members of the IC had been telling his committee for months that there was no proof that the Russians were trying to help Donald Trump.
“All we’ve heard from the intelligence community over the last several months is they could not say that there was any attempt to undermine Hillary Clinton, to help Donald Trump. The consensus was, there was an attempt by the Russians to put a cloud over the election — to create disunity. Well, that’s what’s happening right now, and it’s the intelligence community that’s doing it!” he thundered.
The congressman reiterated that the IC had told the Intel Committee previously that they couldn’t prove that there was an attempt to favor one candidate over the other.
King noted that Director James Clapper had even said publicly on November 17 that the IC “lacked strong evidence connecting Russian government Cyber-attacks and WikiLeaks disclosures.”
He continued: “And now, we have this — as far as I know, there is no decision by the CIA, there is no consensus opinion, and yet we find it in the New York Times, the New York Post and the House Committee on Intelligence was told nothing about this. And yet it’s our committee — it’s Devin Nunes — who has jurisdiction over the CIA and all the intelligence agencies. This violates all protocols and it’s almost as if people in the intelligence community are carrying out a disinformation campaign against the president elect of the Unite States. It’s absolutely disgraceful and if they’re not doing it, then it must be someone in the House or the Senate who’s leaking false information and there should be a full investigation of this.”
Megyn Kelly asked King if the Washington Post story Friday was the first time’s he’d heard that Russia was trying to help Trump.
“Yeah,” King replied, “and they have time to leak it to the Washington Post and the New York Times, but they don’t have time to come to Congress — and its the House Committee on Intelligence that has the absolute jurisdiction over the CIA and the intelligence community.”
Asked what kind of game he thinks the IC is playing, King said, “I don’t think there is any conclusion that they [the Russians] were attempting to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Who is the CIA? When they say the CIA has made this conclusion, is that Brennan? Who? …There is no finding, there is no assessment that we’ve seen. If they have something, they have an obligation to show it to us. Maybe there is none. This could be a whole house of cards. I see it as some kind of disinformation to discredit our the incoming president-elect and that’s absolutely disgraceful.”
“If something so dramatic happened between November 17 and this week to change their assessment, didn’t they have the obligation to come before the Congress and tell us that?” King asked. He pointed out that no one from the intelligence agencies is on the record making these claims. “If it is true, they’re leaking it, and that’s a crime. If someone is making it up, that’s also wrong. This stinks. It’s wrong,” he concluded.
Last week, writing for this blog about a faithless elector, I cited the passage from Federalist No. 68 (attributed to Alexander Hamilton) noting that the members of the Electoral College were bound by the Constitution to meet in their individual states. I had no idea that that very limitation would be relevant to the curious call by some electors for an intelligence briefing, a call endorsed by John Podesta, Clinton campaign chairman — as I learned from the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal, December 13.
For present purpose, I would call to the attention of Mr. Podesta and all Anti- and Never-Trumpers wherever they might be, the opening line of the Twelfth Amendment of the United States Constitution: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President….” Federalist No. 68 makes it clear that the aim of the Founders was to keep the lid on “tumult and disorder” at a convocation of the Electoral College. But a section of Federalist No. 68 that I did not think required quoting, previously, also makes it clear that the aim of the Founders, in keeping the members of the Electoral College confined to their separate states, was to reduce as much as humanly possible “cabal, intrigue, and corruption,” described in No. 68 as “[t]hese most deadly adversaries of republican government….”
How, then, would the proponents of intelligence briefings for the electors propose such briefings take place? Clearly, the spirit of the Twelfth Amendment would prevent an Electoral College briefing for all electors meeting in one place. Should there, then be briefings in the separate states, plus the District of Columbia? Who would conduct the briefings? Would intelligence briefings under the auspices of the national government be consistent with the state basis of the Electoral College? And wouldn’t all electors need to have security clearances for intelligence briefings? Surely, the briefings could not be held under the lax rules approach of the HIllary Clinton e-mails. Or would the briefings solely consist of readings from vague and unsubstantiated articles published in the Trump-resisting New York Times?
The moral I infer from all the commotion about the alleged (fake news?) shadow cast by Russia over the recent presidential campaign is simply this: never underestimate the left’s penchant for what Federalist No. 68 called “cabal, intrigue, and corruption” for purpose of undoing “republican [lower-case ‘r’] government.”
There is, also, an observation in Federalist No. 41 (attributed to James Madison) that seems worth noting in the present context: “A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself.”
In the course of research for my two-volume history of Ronald Reagan I read through a lot of declassified CIA assessments and reports, and was amazed at how consistently bad, and most often wrong, the analysis was. Here’s one example I included in the book:
On October 5, 1973, the CIA’s daily bulletin commented on Egyptian military exercises on the west bank of the Suez canal, just across the canal from the Israeli-occupied Sinai peninsula: “The exercise and alert activities . . . in Egypt may be on a somewhat larger scale and more realistic than previous exercises, but they do not appear to be preparing for a military offensive against Israel.” The very next day, the CIA’s daily bulletin reiterated its judgment that “For Egypt a military initiative makes little sense at this critical juncture.” Before the ink was dry, 70,000 Egyptian troops and 800 tanks started rolling across pontoon bridges over the Suez. Syria launched a simultaneous surprise attack in the Golan Heights to Israel’s northeast. The attack had been carefully planned for months, yet Egypt achieved complete surprise over the CIA.
I could go on with a whole catalogue of CIA assessment blunders, from the Bay of Pigs, repeated wrongheaded conclusions about Vietnam, completely wrongheaded conclusions about the Soviet economy almost to the very end, and underestimating Soviet military expenditures and arms buildups. The CIA concluded after Pope John Paul II was named in 1978 that it “will undoubtedly prove extremely worrisome to Moscow.” For this keen analysis American taxpayers must pay? (And who can forget the CIA concluding about 10 years ago that Iran had given up its drive to develop nuclear weapons. Was anyone fired for that assessment?)
The left loves to remind us of the CIA’s assurances that WMDs in Iraq was a “slam dunk,” but my favorite example of CIA cluelessness was its 1986 assessment that real per capital income in East Germany was higher than real per capita income in West Germany ($10,440 versus $10,220)—a proposition so absurd that you needed to have an Ivy League education to believe it. But that’s just the problem; any taxi driver in West Berlin could have told you this was nonsense, but the CIA didn’t have any taxi drivers on their payroll, preferring sophisticated Ivy League graduates instead. This misprision turned out to be a cause of alarm and dismay in the eastern bloc. East Germany’s chief spymaster Markus Wolf later confessed: “For a time in the late 1970s and 1980s the quality of the American agents was so poor and their work so haphazard that our masters began to ask fearfully whether Washington had stopped taking East Germany seriously.”
Richard Nixon hated the CIA, and they reciprocated that hatred in ways that are still probably not fully known. Reagan’s great CIA director, William Casey, knew the CIA was dysfunctional and mostly went around it in his drive to undermine the Soviet Union. Another excerpt from my second Reagan book:
What Casey found was a stifling bureaucracy; Robert Gates wrote that it had slowly turned into the Department of Agriculture. Casey had been around Washington long enough to know that the CIA bureaucracy would not be susceptible to sweeping reform schemes; he had said as much at his confirmation hearings, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee “This is not the time for another bureaucratic shake-up of the CIA.” He also had the requisite distrust of the CIA’s inertia. The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky recalled visiting Casey with a proposal for nasty deed against the USSR. “It’s just great,” Casey told him, “but let me give you some advice: don’t tell anyone in the CIA about it; they’ll screw it up.” He focused instead on trying to get specific divisions of the CIA to conceive of their mission in radically new ways. Casey and Gates did shake up CIA analysts when they announced that henceforth the accuracy of individual reports would be taken into account when it came time for promotions.
The basic problem of the CIA is that, like any other bureaucracy, it will tend to send up the kind of assessments that it thinks its political masters want. Hence the Vietnam-era findings that were always congenial to LBJ (until they weren’t congenial), etc. The latest CIA assessment that Russia influenced our election may be true, but it is also highly convenient for what the Obama Administration would like to hear just now, no?
So if Trump really wants to “drain the swamp,” maybe he should revive an idea first proposed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan back in the 1990s—abolish the CIA. And Trump can claim it is a bipartisan idea: Moynihan isn’t the only Democrat who has made the suggestion. Bernie Sanders has been for abolishing the CIA. It would be fun to watch liberal critics of the CIA twist themselves into knots if Trump proposed this. Pass the popcorn.
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pledged to support a congressional investigation into whether Russian hacking affected the 2016 election. Republicans have nothing to fear from such an investigation, because they won the election fair and square.
No, Russia is not the friend that President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent several years pretending it was. But the idea that Russian hackers coronated Trump is only the latest left-wing opiate — after white supremacists and “fake news” — designed to dull the pain of electoral defeat, and postpone the reckoning that must occur if Democrats are to pose a significant threat as an opposition party at any time in the near future.
Here are just ten of the reasons the “Russian hacking” story is a sham — a left-wing twist on the red-baiting McCarthyism of the 1950s.
1. There is actually no new information leading the CIA to its conclusion. The New York Timesreports: “The C.I.A.’s conclusion does not appear to be the product of specific new intelligence obtained since the election, several American officials, including some who had read the agency’s briefing, said on Sunday. Rather, it was an analysis of what many believe is overwhelming circumstantial evidence — evidence that others feel does not support firm judgments — that the Russians put a thumb on the scale for Mr. Trump, and got their desired outcome.” In other words, someone only decided after Trump won that it the accusation was worth making.
2. The “evidence” that the CIA has gathered is inconclusive. The FBI also disagrees with some of the CIA’s conclusions about Russia’s motives. “While lawmakers were seemingly united on the need to present a strong bipartisan response, the FBI and CIA gave lawmakers differing accounts on Russia’s motives, according to The Post,” The Hillreported on Sunday.
3. The CIA is not making public claims that Russia hacked the election. Several CIA veterans, in fact, have urged caution about the leaked reports. As Newsweekreports: “‘I am not saying that I don’t think Russia did this,’ Nada Bakos, a top former CIA counterterrorism officer tells Newsweek, in a typical comment. ‘My main concern is that we will rush to judgment. The analysis needs to be cohesive and done the right way.’” Thus far there is not even a clear idea what the CIA’s conclusions are.
4. Despite left-wing “fake news,” there is no evidence Russian hackers actually distorted the voting process. The most that the CIA is alleging is that the Russians may have helped hack of the Democratic National Committee emails, as well as (possibly) the emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chaiman John Podesta. There is zero evidence Russian hackers messed with voting. Ironically, Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount has eliminated any doubt about the integrity of the results.
5. The Obama administration has a history of manipulating intelligence for political gain. The most under-reported scandal of Obama’s presidency was the CENTCOM scandal, in which it emerged that “senior U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) leaders manipulated intelligence assessments in 2014 and 2015 to make it appear that President Barack Obama is winning the war against the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).” There is even more reason to doubt the truth of a selective leak about the election.
6. Julian Assange and Wikileaks have vigorously denied that the Russians were involved in Wikileaks’ disclosures. Of the Democratic National Committee emails, Assange said: “That is the circumstantial evidence that some Russian, or someone who wanted to make them look like a Russian, was involved, with these other media organisations. That is not the case for the material that we released.” Assange made similar denials about the Podesta email leaks later in the election.
7. The fact that the Russians might constantly be trying to hack U.S. systems, and might even specifically have targeted the election, does not prove that they succeeded. Nor does it prove that they tipped the election to Trump even if they had some effect. As pollster Frank Luntz tweeted: “Did Russia also hack Hillary’s campaign calendar and delete all her stops in rural Wisconsin, Penn., and Michigan?” Hillary Clinton lost the election for reasons entirely of her own making.
8. Foreign interference in elections is nothing new — and the Obama administration is a prime culprit. In 2015, the Obama administration made a strenuous and not-terribly-well-hidden effort to swing the Israeli elections toward the opposition and away from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The State Department gave $300,000 to a “pro-peace” Israeli group, which then paid political activists whose goal was to unseat Netanyahu. In 1984, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) actually asked for Soviet help. Russian efforts to intervene would be bad, but not unique, either for Russia or for the U.S.
9. What would the consequences of allowing undue Russian influence in our elections be, exactly? Would we yield primacy in Eastern Europe to Vladimir Putin? Would we give up our plans for missile defense? Would we make deep unilateral cuts in our nuclear arsenal in exchange for flimsy concessions ? Would we tolerate a Russian land invasion of a friendly, pro-Western country? Would we cede the Middle East to Russian hegemony? Because Hillary Clinton and Obama already did that.
10. Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation for the “Russian hacking” story is that it is “fake news” that suits the left-wing media. It is not unknown for Russia to use false propaganda to affect public opinion in foreign countries. Nor is it unknown for the U.S. media to use bias, “fake news,” and outright lies to shift public opinion in this country. The current focus on Russian “hacking,” based on no new evidence and — again — zero evidence of tampering with the voting process.
President-elect Donald Trump continues to defy convention and ruffle institutional feathers. In a wide-ranging interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump indicated he will delegate daily intelligence briefings to subordinates. From the Daily Mail:
“I get it when I need it,” [Trump] said on Fox News of the top-secret briefings sessions, adding that he’s leaving it up to the briefers to decide when a development represents a “change” big enough to notify him.
“I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump said.
Read in excerpt like that, Trump’s remarks may come across as arrogant. He presumes that he will be in office for two terms, touts his own intellect, and downplays the importance of a critical presidential role.
However, when viewed in context [below], Trump’s position proves much less provocative. His “smart person” comment comes off less as a reference to some exclusive ability, and more like the standard capacity most of us have to remember something when first told. He could have just as easily said, “I’m not an idiot. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words.”
Trump went on to note that his generals and Vice President-elect Mike Pence will receive routine daily briefings, presumably including the redundancies he seeks to avoid. This is consistent with his articulated tendency to delegate tasks to “the best people.”
Trump also addressed bipartisan concerns regarding Russia’s influence in the election.
“It’s ridiculous,” Trump said of the CIA’s assessment [that that Russia tried to interfere with the presidential election].
[…]
Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, shrugged off allegations that Russia helped Trump win.
He said: “The Russians didn’t tell Clinton to ignore Wisconsin and Michigan.”
The Democratic candidate was expected to win in these two states but they went to Trump instead.
“She lost the election because her ideas were bad. She didn’t fit the electorate. She ignored states that she shouldn’t have and Donald Trump was the change agent,” Priebus said on ABC’s ‘This Week’.
Priebus may be overstating the case when he says the election results “had nothing to do with the Russians.” But those claiming Russia’s influence was decisive likewise overstate their case.
It remains unclear what actionable conclusions could emerge from investigations into suspected Russian hacking. Indeed, given the likely role Hillary Clinton’s private email server played in any such hacking, Democrats might be wise to let the issue go.
Now, the same news outlets that refused to cover the Russian government’s hacking into White House and State Department computers and email systems try to tell us that an intrusion into Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s and John Podesta’s email accounts by someone–allegedly the same Russian government–is a story of world-historical importance. What a load of bulls–t.
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You probably don’t. We broke the story on Power Line in October 2014, writing about it here, here, here, here, here and here. The White House’s computers were down for weeks because of the intrusion by a “foreign power,” which the administration finally identified as Russia. It wasn’t just the White House, either; it was the entire Executive Office of the President, which comprises a good chunk of the executive branch. Nor was that all: the State Department’s computer system was hacked, too.
While we pounded away at the story, the White House refused to respond to our inquiries. The Washington press corps, which must have known that the White House’s computers were out of action, maintained a discreet silence, declining to write about the Russian hack, even though many D.C. reporters no doubt followed the story on Power Line. Why the coy silence? Because it was October 2014, weeks before the midterm elections, and the story reflected poorly on the Obama administration, which didn’t even discover the intrusion itself. It turned out that American officials were alerted to the Russian hack of the White House and State Department by an unidentified ally (I’m guessing Israel).
Only when the election was safely over did news outlets like CNN report the story (“How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House”). Throughout, the Obama administration minimized the story, claiming that no harm was done and only unclassified material was accessed–an excuse that, as CNN wrote post-election, “belies the seriousness of the intrusion.”
Now, the same news outlets that refused to cover the Russian government’s hacking into White House and State Department computers and email systems try to tell us that an intrusion into Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s and John Podesta’s email accounts by someone–allegedly the same Russian government–is a story of world-historical importance. What a load of bulls–t.
(But Obama says his Administration is the most transparent in history.
You can see right through him. — DM)
So, as chance would have it we are currently hosting a newly arrived visitor from Mars, who has been avidly following the headlines. Having studied our world for some time, he is intrigued by the news, as reported first by the Washington Post on Friday: “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.”
This is the story in which U.S. “officials” told the Post it is “now ‘quite clear’ that electing Trump was Russia’s goal.” Earlier in the week, according to White House spokesman Eric Schultz, President Obama “instructed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of the pattern of malicious cyber activity related to our presidential election cycle.” Obama wants this report completed and submitted to him before the end of his term, Jan. 20 — now less than six weeks ahead.
Since this story broke, we have been trying to field questions from our inquisitive Man from Mars, who seems oddly disinclined to take things at face value. (We think our visitor is a he, so I’ll proceed on that assumption, though we have not inquired about gender identification).
I’m sharing below some excerpts from our chat. For convenience, I’ve abbreviated “Man from Mars” as MFM. Our replies, I am attributing simply to “Us.”
MFM: This is shocking news about Russia, but surely meddling in America’s elections is not new. What were the findings of the deep-dive report produced at speed by the Obama administration, its concerns leaked in advance to the press, over the effects, starting early in his first term, of the IRS targeting conservative groups?
Us: There was no such report. There were congressional hearings in which a prominent witness from the IRS took the Fifth. There were tussles over destroyed hard drives, emails not turned over, or some turned over long after the deadlines, and this year brought news that the targeting may still be going on — see Kim Strassel’s May 19 column in the Wall Street Journal on the “The IRS’s Ugly Business as Usual.”
MFM: But wasn’t Obama deeply worried that this targeting might silence a lot of conservatives, skew public debate and warp America’s political process?
Us: Nah. In 2014, Obama in a TV interview dismissed it all as nothing worse than “bone-headed decisions,” saying there was “not even a smidgen of corruption.” So much for that.
MFM: OK. But what about the deep-dive report Obama demanded, urgently, prior to the 2012 presidential election, to shed light on his own administration’s lies about the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi. You remember, all that “messaging” about an ad hoc mob, and blaming the “video.” That sure looked like Obama was trying to mislead the American public in order to bolster his campaign line that “the tide of war is receding,” plus his administration’s claims that leading-from-behind in Libya was a success. I mean, there were four Americans murdered, including — as I discern from your Earth records — the first American ambassador killed on the job in 33 years. Obama, who had the authority to send help directly to Benghazi, never did. What does Obama’s urgently ordered, in-depth and surely impartial report tell you about what Obama himself was doing that night?
Us: Get real. Obama was hardly likely to order an all-out urgent investigation of himself and his team, especially during the final weeks of his reelection campaign. He was already booked to go to Vegas, he needed his sleep. Anyway, by the morning after the Benghazi attack, the damage was already done. So — as somebody-or-other told Congress — “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
MFM: Right-o. I can see that a president needs his sleep. But I’m still puzzled over these latest news stories that imply President Obama thinks Russia is an enemy trying to subvert the United States. Yes, but…wasn’t Obama a buddy of Vladimir Putin?
Us: Well, yes. But only for the first six or seven of Obama’s eight years in office. There was Obama’s chummy 2009 “Reset” with Russia — you remember that mislabeled red button Hillary Clinton presented to Russia’s foreign minister. Obama threw in, as a bit more swag for Putin, the gift of shelving missile defense plans for Eastern Europe. And when NATO missile-defense plans became a sore point with the Kremlin during Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, there was that open-microphone moment in which Obama was caught promising Putin’s sidekick, Dmitry Medvedev, “After my election I will have more flexibility.” To which Medvedev replied, companionably, “I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you.” Pretty friendly, actually. But, hey, dude, that was like four years ago.
MFM: Fair enough. But wasn’t there a bit more to it?
Us: OK, yeah, but let’s not get too bogged down in the past. There was Obama’s 2013 red line in Syria over chemical weapons, which he erased by way of basically turning over the Middle East to Putin — and, of course, to Iran. And of course there was the case that same year of Edward Snowden, the guy who fled the U.S. with a trove of National Security Agency secrets. After a quick sojourn in Hong Kong, Snowden washed up as Putin’s guest in Russia, where Putin has not gotten around to sending him back. Obama apparently didn’t like that, but he didn’t let a transient thing like wholesale plundering of the NSA, or Moscow’s asylum for the plunderer, interfere with buddying up to Moscow to clinch the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
MFM: Well, at least when Putin snatched Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Obama made him give it back.
Us: Umm, actually, no, he didn’t. Russia now owns Crimea, has roughed up more of Ukraine and seems to be eyeing the Baltics. Though Obama did impose sanctions on Russia, which Putin didn’t like.
MFM: And those sanctions, of course, stopped Russian aggression and put Putin back in his box?
Us: Would you like more coffee?
MFM: Thanks. You Earth people have such nice customs.
Us: Coffee’s even better with sugar, not salt. Try it.
MFM: Wow. Who knew? Which brings me to just a few more questions. In the stories this week about the urgent report Obama has ordered — following up on conclusions reached secretly with “high confidence” by U.S. “intelligence agencies” that Russia acted covertly to promote Donald Trump over Hillary — why are all the official sources anonymous? I see a couple of officials quoted by name, commenting on the need for such a report, including Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, who had breakfast recently with some reporters. But the whole thing seems based on specifics which the press has attributed only to anonymous “officials briefed on the matter,” or officials “who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.”
Us: Look, this is delicate stuff. The intel guys have to worry about exposing sources, and there are clearly big secrets involved. Check out the cloak-and-dagger stuff in the penultimate paragraph of the Washington Post story, telling how administration officials briefed select members of Congress, in ” a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information.” That ought to tell you just how extremely secret and classified this stuff is.
MFM: Call me an idiot, but how secret is an assessment that has details of its contents leaked to one of America’s major newspapers, including the sweeping conclusion that, as one nameless “senior U.S. official” told the Post, “Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.” Isn’t Obama, with his concerns for the integrity of state secrets, trying frantically to stop these anonymous officials from leaking these secrets to the press? Haven’t people lower down the food chain gone to prison for leaking classified information?
Us: Yes, but as you say, those jailbirds were lower down the food chain. Maybe Obama doesn’t know who exactly is leaking this information to the press. As you say, they’re anonymous.
MFM: Give me a break. If these anonymous officials have it right about Russia’s cyber abilities, I’d bet the Russians already know who these same anonymous officials really are. Surely Obama could find out. If he can’t find out direct, maybe he could order U.S. intelligence to steal the information from the Russians? Can’t he order up another urgent report, to get to the bottom of who’s leaking some of the state secrets that inspired him to order up the original urgent report?
Us: Enough already. You may know plenty about Mars, but you’ve got a lot to learn about White House politics under Obama.
MFM: Speaking of Mars, we Martians love conspiracy theories. There’s lots here that we don’t know, but all this leaking seems tilted toward delegitimizing the victory of Donald Trump, even before he takes office. I mean, how does someone defend himself, when accusations are all over the headlines, conveyed by anonymous officials, while the actual basis for these stories is officially secret? Is that what Obama meant when he promised to run the most “transparent” administration ever?
Us: Give it a rest. U.S. elections are sacred to our democracy, and if anyone — and we mean anyone — tries to fiddle them, we have to get to the bottom of it.
MFM: Calm down. I’m just curious. If the Russians did try to intervene, by hacking and flooding the public with emails humiliating to Hillary and the Democrats, but not to Trump, then did Trump have any control over this? Wasn’t it the responsibility of Obama to protect the country, and the election, from any such intrusions?
Us: You’ve been reading too much fake news. Obama’s a busy guy. He’s been trying for years to control the level of the oceans. He can’t cover everything.
MFM: And if the Russians, emboldened by Obama’s reset and flexibility and vanished red lines, did actually try to tip the 2016 American election, did they succeed? Did it make a difference?
Us: Look, please stop with the questions. We’re just the little guys here. Normal Americans. We don’t have time to read reams of emails dumped out by anybody. We come home tired from our day jobs. Or we’ve been reading about the wealth and fashions of the liberal elite, and the fat pensions of the federal bureaucracy, while we work the part-time night shifts, and look for any extra income we can scrounge up.
I’ll tell you what we read during the recent presidential campaign. We read the letter that arrived a week before the election, from our health insurance company, informing us of the double-digit rate hike slated for our premiums, yet again. We read about the terrorist attacks — in Paris, Nice, San Bernardino, Orlando — inspired or linked to ISIS, the “JV team” that was expanding its murderous reach while Obama was still boasting about killing Osama bin Laden. We listened to Obama exhorting people to vote for Hillary, in order to cement and extend his legacy. We listened to Hillary denouncing tens of millions of Americans as “deplorables.” Did Russia make her do that?
MFM: Don’t ask me. I’m from Mars.
Us: We get it. But watch out. If you keep asking questions like these, someone’s going to report you as part of a Russian plot. Speaking of… enough with the coffee. It’s gonna take more than caffeine to get through these next six weeks. Ever tried vodka?
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