WarSclerotic

Russian Hacking Conspiracy Theory Implodes, Front Page Magazine, Matthew Vadum, December 16, 2016

The Left’s crusade against Republican presidential electors is kicking into high gear even as the CIA-attributed story that Russian hackers won the White House for Donald Trump is going up in flames.

There is still no evidence –at least none that has been made publicly available– that the Russian government or Russian-backed cyber militias hacked anything to help Trump win the election but that’s not halting the Left’s efforts to delegitimize his presidency before it even begins.

Against this backdrop, members of the Electoral College are preparing to gather this Monday in the 50 states and the District of Columbia to fulfill their constitutional duty. Adding to the drama, some electors are demanding intelligence briefings on the alleged hacking before they vote.

But sometimes not everyone on the Left gets the memo.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch yesterday undermined the Left’s post-election jihad against Trump by rejecting the proposition that the Russian government (or anyone) hacked into voting machines used in the recent election.

“We didn’t see any sort of technical interference that people had concerns about, in terms of voting machines and the like,” she said at an event hosted by Politico.

While community organizers across America whip their followers into a state of frenzy, stories are still being planted in the media by the Central Intelligence Agency or sources claiming to speak for the spy agency. Yet the CIA refuses to be held to account.

When federal lawmakers did their job this week and demanded proof of the Russian hacking allegations, intelligence agencies refused to show up to provide congressional testimony.

Most reasonable people would infer from this appallingly arrogant behavior by the CIA, which has long been home to left-wing Democrats and squishy moderate Republicans, that all this damning evidence we keep hearing about does not actually exist.

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) blasted “Intelligence Community directors” for their “intransigence in sharing intelligence with Congress [which] can enable the manipulation of intelligence for political purposes.”

Intelligence overseer Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is hopping mad over the CIA’s obstructionism. It is “absolutely disgraceful,” he said, that the intelligence community is refusing to brief lawmakers about the alleged Russian hacking program while false information is being surreptitiously funneled to the media to discredit Donald Trump.

“There is no consensus opinion, and yet we find it in the New York Times and the Washington Post and yet the House Committee on Intelligence was told nothing about this,” King said.

“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 United States,” King said. He acknowledged it is possible that someone in Congress could also be leaking false information.

Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest escalated the time-limited administration’s war of words against the incoming president.

Referring to Trump’s fabled July 27 press conference at which the media falsely reported the then-GOP candidate had invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton, Earnest said matter-of-factly Wednesday that Trump asked Russia to use cyberwarfare against Clinton.

“There’s ample evidence that was known long before the election and in most cases long before October about the Trump campaign and Russia — everything from the Republican nominee himself calling on Russia to hack his opponent,” Earnest said.

“It might be an indication that he was obviously aware and concluded, based on whatever facts or sources he had available to him, that Russia was involved and their involvement was having a negative impact on his opponent’s campaign.”

“That’s why he was encouraging them to keep doing it,” Earnest said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose site released thousands of purported emails from senior Democrats during the recent election campaign, threw cold water on the Russian hacking conspiracy theory.

Assange told Sean Hannity yesterday, “Our source is not the Russian government.” He also said the information WikiLeaks received “has not come from a state party.”

What Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 17 suggests Assange may be right.

“As far as the WikiLeaks connection [to Russian hackers is concerned] the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided,” Clapper said. “We don’t have as good insight into that.”

Assange told Hannity WikiLeaks received almost nothing on Republicans. “We received about three pages of information to do with the RNC and Trump but it was already public somewhere else.”

Interestingly, Assange, who has been built up in the media to be some kind of radical anarchist, stood by America’s constitutionally prescribed system for choosing a president.

He said:

There’s a deliberate attempt this week to conflate a whole lot of different issues together. It seems to be as a desire, an extremely dangerous and foolish desire, to flip members of the U.S. Electoral College around into getting up John Kasich or Hillary Clinton on the 19th. It’s foolish because it won’t happen. It’s dangerous because the argument that it should happen can be used in four years’ time or eight years’ time for a sitting government that doesn’t want to hand over power and that’s a very dangerous thing. There’s [Hillary] Clinton-aligned PACs putting out ads with lots of celebrities trying to push these electors to do it.

Who’s doing all this conflating? President Obama, Assange suggested.

Hannity asked Assange if the president knows Russia isn’t behind the Democrat electronic document dump and is “purposefully” pushing a false narrative to delegitimize Trump. Assange replied, “yes … there is a deliberate effort to conflate” underway.

Hannity piled on the CIA, noting that “for over 10 years WikiLeaks has never been proven wrong, not one single time.”

The radio talk show host said the CIA pushed the lie that the coordinated military-style attack on U.S. assets in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012 arose out of a mere protest.

“The CIA advanced that false story that it was a spontaneous demonstration when we now know it was a terrorist attack. And they advanced it through the CIA in Langley,” Hannity said. “There were some people there that were playing politics at the CIA, advancing a false narrative, a story that we know is false.”

But facts are malleable things and reality is never an obstacle to the plans of the Left.

The fact that Trump never asked Russia to hack Hillary and the CIA apparently has nothing to back up its wild allegations is no reason for those who wish to overturn the recent verdict of the American people to back off.

Something called Electors Trust is claiming that somewhere between 20 and 30 Republican electors are considering not voting for Trump on Monday, the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress Action Fund’s propaganda site ThinkProgress reports. Co-founded by radical Harvard law professor Larry Lessig, Electors Trust claims to provide “free and strictly confidential legal support to any elector who wishes to vote their conscience.”

In a dramatic come-from-behind victory, Trump won 306 of the 538 available elector slots on Nov. 8. Left-wingers want to peel off enough GOP electors to deprive Trump of the magic number 270 he needs to formally secure the presidency in the official Electoral College vote this Monday.

There is almost no chance this coup will succeed but even if the Electoral College were to reach a stalemate Trump would still be on track to become president. With each state’s delegation casting a single vote, the current Republican-dominated House of Representatives would elect a president. The current GOP-dominated Senate would elect a vice president with each senator casting a single vote.

Trump-haters could still try and throw a wrench in the works when the new Congress convenes in January. When Congress begins to officially count the electoral votes, they could apply pressure to lawmakers to contest those votes. But it’s a very hard slog. A written objection has to be made to the president of the Senate, that is, Vice President Joe Biden, and it has to be signed by at least one senator and one House member.

Both chambers then debate the objection separately. Debate is limited to two hours. Afterwards, both the Senate and the House of Representatives rejoin and both must agree to reject the electoral votes for them not to count.

Making matters more difficult for the Trump-blockers, Lessig’s estimate of having as many as 30 sympathetic Republican electors in his pocket is almost certainly a hallucination on his part that helps to create the false impression that his anti-democratic campaign is succeeding.

More responsible whip counts place the number of likely faithless electors in the single digits – enough for an interesting historical footnote but not enough to keep Trump out of the Oval Office.

In an email Lessig cited “three groups that I know of working with/supporting electors,” and said that his faithless electors’ estimate is “based on my confidence in the reports from these three groups.”

Lessig told Chuck Todd on MSNBC Tuesday that he shares the goal of groups like Hamilton Electors to convince at least 40 Republican electors to say they’re contemplating dumping Trump.

Lessig is just one of many mass hysteria-afflicted leftists trying to stop Trump from becoming president.

Some officeholders are demanding a congressional investigation of the supposed hacking saga. Others liken the cyber-conspiracy they fantasize to 9/11 and are demanding an independent blue-ribbon commission be created. Maybe Jesse Jackson Sr. will invite the United Nations to participate.

Up to 55 electors –54 of whom are Democrats– have reportedly called upon Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to authorize intelligence briefings on the alleged Russian cyberattacks before the Electoral College votes. California elector Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is spearheading the effort.

Democrat activist Daniel Brezenoff is paying for full-page ads in newspapers across the country such as the Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution asking electors to “vote their conscience” and reject Trump, Politico reports.

Then there are the left-wingers who have been doxxing Republican electors.

“Liberal groups, including a new one called Make Democracy Matter, have disseminated the names and contact information of the electors and encouraged people to contact Republican electors and ask them to change their vote,” hippy rag Mother Jones reports. “And those messages are arriving to electors’ inboxes, voicemails, and homes by the thousands.”

So now at least we know where all the death threats Republican electors are receiving are coming from.

Left-wing activists call this kind of in-your-face harassment “accountability,” an Orwellian euphemism to be sure. Accountability actions focus on harassing and intimidating political enemies, disrupting their activities, and forcing them to waste resources dealing with activists’ provocations. It is a tactic of radical community organizers, open borders fanatics, and union goons. Taking a cue from Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, they want to shut down, humiliate, and silence those who fail to genuflect before their policy agenda, or in this case, ignore the votes of the 63 million Americans in 3,084 of the nation’s 3,141 counties or county equivalents who chose Donald Trump for president.

Make Democracy Matter, by the way, shrieks on its homepage that “We can stop Trump from imposing his racist agenda on America … we can build systems and structures that protect people from harm and dismantle white supremacy.”

MoveOn plans to run a 30-second ad on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today featuring faithless Republican elector Christopher Suprun from the 30th congressional district in Texas.

“The CIA report is frightening,” Suprun says in the video even though as far as anyone knows he’s never seen the elusive report.

No doubt the Van Jones-founded Megaphone Strategies, a self-described “social justice media strategy firm” hired by parties unknown to turn Suprun into 2016’s Cindy Sheehan has helped put him in the media spotlight.

In a sanctimonious New York Times op-ed earlier this month, Suprun denounced Trump, saying, “He does not encourage civil discourse, but chooses to stoke fear and create outrage. This is unacceptable.”

After writing that “Mr. Trump lacks the foreign policy experience and demeanor needed to be commander in chief,” he repeats the proven lie that during the campaign Trump said “Russia should hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.” He adds, “This encouragement of an illegal act has troubled many members of Congress and troubles me.”

Suprun, by the way, is quite a piece of work. GotNews discovered he “joined and paid for cheating website Ashley Madison in 2012, using the same address registered to his 9/11 charity, while bankrupt, likely unemployed, and married with three young kids, after he and his working wife owed over $200,000 to multiple creditors.”

More than 35,000 people have signed a Change.org petition demanding Suprun “be removed” as an elector.

And then there are the famous college dropouts from Hollywood.

Something called Americans Take Action, apparently doing business as Unite for America, put together a celebrity-larded public service announcement to urge Republican electors to vote for somebody, anybody, other than Donald Trump on Dec. 19.

In the video we learn that idiot actors Martin Sheen, Debra Messing, Bob Odenkirk, James Cromwell, Noah Wyle, and singer Moby have suddenly become champions of the government-limiting U.S. Constitution.

“Our Founding Fathers built the Electoral College to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue, and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is, ‘to an eminent degree, endowed with the requisite qualifications,’ ” Sheen solemnly intones in the video.

A somber Messing repeats Sheen’s words, “to an eminent degree.”

You get the picture.

It’s also been fascinating watching left-wingers embrace Founding Father Alexander Hamilton solely because he wrote Federalist No. 68 which explains the Electoral College and the qualifications of a president.

Because the Left’s narrative paints Trump as a rabid Russophile, these people who otherwise would use the Constitution as toilet paper are heeding Hamilton’s warning that foreign powers might seek to raise “a creature of their own” to the presidency.

And they scream bloody murder about Holy Mother Russia, a country they were only too happy to serve in the days of the Soviet Union when Russian President Vladimir Putin was a colonel in the KGB.

KGB collaborator Ted Kennedy must be rolling in his grave.