So, with the FBI now saying that Russia interfered to help President-elect Donald Trump win the election, the Left will come to full froth over the holidays. I mean they haven’t been mentally capable of accepting responsibility that Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate who lost a winnable election due to arrogance and campaign incompetence; they decided that tens of millions of working class voters weren’t worth the time—big mistake. So, while Russia might have tried to tile the election in Trump’s favor, let’s not forget the Obama administration’s $350,000 initiative to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election bid in 2015. Some might call this...interference (via Washington Times):
The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a bipartisan staff report.
In one stunning finding, the subcommittee said OneVoice even told the State Department’s top diplomat in Jerusalem of its plans in an email, but the official, Consul General Michael Ratney, claims never to have seen them.
In the end, Netanyahu handily defeated the Israeli Left in the 2015 Knesset elections. So, it seems that interference in other people’s elections isn’t really all that unusual. In fact, the CIA used to remove, sometimes violently, Latin American leaders we didn’t like. It was the Cold War mentality. Still, Congress should look at all the evidence concerning Russia’s interference in our election, along with other cyber threats we face from other nations. Did it sway the election? No. Just like how fake news didn’t tilt the election in Trump’s favor, Russia’s cyber activities didn’t either, since most of the damning information about Clinton didn’t come from Russia. The Clinton Foundation, the email server, etc. were all known prior to the DNC hack. Wikileaks’ Julian Assange says his source is not Russian, though he couldn’t say for sure that the documents leaked by hacker Guccifer 2.0 were not Russian.
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Millions of white working class voters broke for Trump because they wanted change, and they were tired of being ignored by the political class, not because the Russians tried to give the president-elect a boost. Millions of Obama supporters, some of them two-time supporters, didn’t vote for Trump because of Russia—and they certainly didn’t vote for him due to racism. Trump winning because of racism has been one of the craziest reasons the Left has offered to explain Clinton's shocking defeat.
Clinton also contends that Comey’s letter informing Congress that the FBI would be examining more emails days before voters went to the polls cost her the election. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) have made similar allegations, though those are not the fault of the Russians. That’s all on Clinton who used an unauthorized and unsecure email server to conduct official business. If she just followed protocol, the FBI and Director Comey wouldn’t have been in the 2016 election news. Moreover, Comey faced a difficult decision, as he faced accusations of politicizing the investigation no matter what he did after the bureau discovered more emails on the laptop of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Getting back to the point, the Russians may have run interference during our election, but we had a taxpayer-funded effort to try and boot Netanyahu. Does this make it right? No—but let’s cool it with the notions that a) that this is totally unheard of; and b) this shows that Trump’s win is illegitimate and that Clinton was cheated. Clinton lost. Period. The Department of Homeland Security noted that no such cyber attacks occurred on election night, and that the ballot count was not impacted. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that there was also no “technical interference” on the night of the election. So, the areas where once could tilt the election through hacking were not touched. It all boils down to the Left not being happy that some information about the Democrats’ dirty laundry was made public.
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