How the Russian Hacking Story Became a ‘2 for 1’ for Liberals

When evaluating the importance and veracity of a Washington story or scandal, one of the best rules to apply is the old Latin phrase Cui bono or “Who benefits?”

And evaluated from this perspective, the greatest beneficiaries of the fake news storyline that the Russians “hacked the election” are not the Russians; they are the Obama Democrats. 

First, and most obviously, they benefit from undermining the legitimacy of President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory and long announced plans to try to improve relations with Russia. 

Plans, we might add, that were similarly announced by former President George W. Bush, and we should point out by President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they messed up and couldn’t even get “reset” right in idiomatic Russian. 

Part of this attempt at undermining Trump also involves undermining the president-elect’s relationship with the intelligence agencies and cementing the power of the political flunkies Obama has placed in the top echelons of the agencies. 

As our friend, Fred Fleitz, a former CIA and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence staffer pointed out in a recent column for Fox News:

Friday night, during her last show on Fox News, Megyn Kelly asked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra whether he accepted the conclusion by 17 intelligence agencies in a recently released declassified report that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that this interference came at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Hoekstra gave an answer Kelly did not anticipate. He noted that the declassified report represents the views of only three intelligence agencies, not 17. Hoekstra also questioned why the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) did not co-author or clear the report and why it lacked dissenting views. 

The declassified report issued on Jan. 6 is an abridged version of a longer report ordered by President Obama that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to undermine the 2016 president election, hurt Hillary’s candidacy and promote Donald Trump through cyber warfare, social media and the state-owned Russia cable channel RT. Although the report’s authors said they have high confidence in most of these conclusions, they were unable to include any evidence for classification reasons. 

As someone who worked in the intelligence field for 25 years, I share Congressman Hoekstra’s concerns about Friday’s declassified Russia report and a similar Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and DHS on Oct. 7, 2016. 

I also suspect the entire purpose of this report and its timing was to provide President Obama with a supposedly objective intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that the president could release before he left office to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election. 

I am concerned both intelligence assessments were rigged for political purposes. 

Now that Hillary Clinton has been defeated and the Electoral College has officially declared Donald Trump the winner and he’s set to be Inaugurated, in Clinton’s own formulation, “What difference at this point does it make?”

That’s where the twofer comes in. 

Please note that the original “the Russians hacked the election” storyline started with the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, probably the two most far-left politicized and compromised national security agencies.  

And it is the Department of Homeland Security that has now institutionally benefited by accomplishing a long-held far-left goal—the federalization of elections. 

As the “the Russians hacked the election” storyline reached a crescendo, the Department of Homeland Security quietly announced last Friday that it was declaring the 50-state constitutional election system “critical infrastructure” and in effect taking it over. 

“Given the vital role elections play in this country, it is clear that certain systems and assets of election infrastructure meet the definition of critical infrastructure, in fact and in law,” Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said in a statement. 

According to reporting by The Hill, the Intelligence Community (fake news alert: Only three intelligence agencies, not 17, signed the report) said Friday that no voting machines were tampered with during the 2016 election—but the breadth of the Russian cyber activity throughout the campaign raised the specter that the election infrastructure is vulnerable to digital intruders.  

The new designation will cover storage facilities, polling places and centralized vote tabulations locations used to support the election process, as well as information and communications technology like voter registration databases, voting machines and other systems used to manage the election process and report results. 

In other words, they are assuming control over all the facilities that were not tampered with during the election. 

Considering the clear statement by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks that the Russians were not the source of the material he published, cui bono, “who benefits?” 

For the far left, the “the Russians hacked the election” fake news story is indeed a twofer. The Obama-Soros far left benefits because they now have control, through the federal government, of all the state and local election facilities that by their own admission were not hacked, and the far left benefits because President-elect Trump is being undermined, making his plan to reform and de-politicize the broader intelligence functions of the federal government and rid them of Obama political hacks that much harder. {eoa}

George Rasley is editor of ConservativeHQ, a member of American MENSA and a veteran of over 300 political campaigns, including every Republican presidential campaign from 1976 to 2008. He served as lead advance representative for Gov. Sarah Palin in 2008 and has served as a staff member, consultant or advance representative for some of America’s most recognized conservative Republican political figures, including President Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. He served in policy and communications positions on the House and Senate staff, and during the George H.W. Bush administration he served on the White House staff of Vice President Dan Quayle.

This article was originally published at conservativehq.com. Used with permission.