Who’s Fooling Who?
The notion that official Washington, DC, and specifically the Democratic Party, only recently discovered that official Russia, and specifically that bad boy Vladimir Putin, have been hacking sensitive email accounts to mine political loot for years should come as no surprise. Yet, surprised they were when yet another morsel of sophistry to explain the defeat of Hillary Clinton fell into their laps.
Russian History professor Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and NYU has a little different take on the cyber war that exploded over the holidays. Just before Christmas enough non-evidence had accumulated to prompt the outgoing president to slap stiff Cold War like sanctions against the Russians for meddling in the U.S. presidential election campaign. Based upon an amateurish report issued by the Department of Homeland Security called, “Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities,” which seemed to implicate Russia for hacking into the DNC (what’s new?) and wrecking the chances for Hillary Clinton to win the Presidential election, the President sauntered into action. On December 29th, Mr. Obama announced that because Vladimir Putin’s people had hacked into Hillary’s kindergarten State Department email account and John Podesta’s DNC account, thus throwing the election to Donald Trump, he was throwing out thirty-five Russians and their families. He gave them 72 hours to clear out – persona non grata. Sadly, this strong and necessary message to the pesky Russians for past, present, and future computer age meddling should have been sent six months ago when Rep. Devin Nunes warned about it. What’s more, Mr. Obama promised additional sanctions in the future much like his red lines in Syria, which have had such demonstrable effect on Bashar al-Assad.
One problem: The expulsion of all those Russians fell on New Year’s Eve, which, Professor Cohen reminds us, is a very, very big family holiday in Russia. It’s also a time in America when getting last-minute plane reservations to anywhere is damn near impossible. Apparently, the geniuses in the O-administration didn’t think this one through.
Vladimir Putin, overriding the recommendation of his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov for retaliation in kind, decided to play for the hat trick. He calmly declared that there would be no Russian response, no Americans kicked out of Russia, and no diplomatic property seized or sequestered. Then, he immediately sent a jetliner to Washington to gather all of the 35 diplomats and their families and fly them back to Mother Russia in time for the New Year holiday. Finally, stroke of PR genius, he invited all the children of accredited American diplomats in Russia to celebrate the New Year and the Russian Orthodox Christmas in a glittering gala with him at the Kremlin.
Triple play. Barry’s inept and tardy response to Russian hacking played right into Putin’s hands – three times.
In the week after New Year’s, things really got rolling. The Democrats’ witless effort to excuse Clinton’s loss and tarnish the incoming Trump administration saw a day’s worth of claptrap from National Intelligence Chief, James Clapper whose only resemblance to veracity is a deep voice and big jowls, and who has yet to be prosecuted for perjuring himself before Congress a year ago over NSA spying on American citizens. He released another puzzling top secret report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” heavy on blacked-out passages and light on substance that was swallowed by everybody in the hate Putin first crowd.
An outraged Senator McCain took the occasion to flesh out a fresh new rationale for beating up the Russians while sputtering something about an act of war.
There are plenty of reasons to be very wary of Vladimir Putin. Crimea, Ukraine, Syria come to mind. He’s a stone cold killer and KGB until his dying day. But this recent hacking business can be pinned squarely on the Democrats.
Barack Obama has been in charge for eight years. The unrelenting Russian cyber probes have been known for all of that time. Obama’s actions against he 35 diplomats and their families was laughably late and proportionally over- wrought. Furthermore, only the Democratic National Committee computers were successfully hacked (during the campaign), because the GOP apparently heeded several warnings to strengthen their defenses. Information and gossip might have been stolen, but no votes; so to say that Putin affected the outcome of the election is clearly false. Hillary lost all by herself. And to criticize Donald Trump for downplaying the rukus in hopes of steadying relations with Russia, the critics would do well to recall that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama all believed they could be friends with Vladimir Putin.
End of Story? Not quite. In a final insult to the Obama crowd, Putin declared on Monday morning that America is on a witch hunt similar to the old Cold War days. And in any event, he says he’ll wait for Trump to take office before trying to repair relations with the U.S. (as in, “Just wait ’til your father gets home!”)