Russia Did NOT Throw America’s Election Robert Charles Posted: Jan 08, 2017 12:01 AM
Vladimir Putin is a de facto authoritarian, head of Russia’s struggling democracy and economy, 12 years a president, 16 years a KGB agent, and author of both Crimea’s annexation and Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. This does not make him all-powerful, or decider of anything in America. Whatever Russia’s motivations, the whole “Russia threw our election” by hacking narrative seems more and more like political gamesmanship.
For starters, the Obama team knows well that there was no hacking of any voting machines. They also know our adversaries incessantly probe – and voraciously hack – whatever they can. They know Russia, China, Iran and North Korea try all the time – and China managed to steal sensitive information on 18 million Americans from the Obama Administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
But frankly, this “Russia did it” story is wearing thin. So thin, that even the New York Times wrote this weekend: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: Hard evidence to back up the [intelligence] agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack,” adding: “That is a significant omission.”
Obama’s team knows other things. They know the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton Campaign servers (not to mention former Secretary of State’s “home brew server”) were left wide open, vulnerable. They know the better-protected Republican National Committee (RNC) server was probed, but apparently not penetrated. They know the media want this narrative, since it explains their flat-footedness, undermines President-elect Trump, and offers a way to delegitimize America’s election of a conservative president – a decisive, humiliating defeat for the Obama team.
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http://townhall.com/columnists/robertcharles/2017/01/08/russia-did-not-throw-americas-election-n2268354
