Sharyl Attkisson: No, Russia Didn't Hack Our Election

It’s another day of hysteria over Russia hacking the 2016 election from the Left, of which there is zero evidence to back up that claim. The allegation is that Russian-backed hackers penetrated the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails and gave that information to Wikileaks. That is not the same as hacking the election, which has become one of the most absurd pieces of fake news out there. As Guy wrote earlier today, a poll noted how a majority of Democrats actually think that Russia stuffed the ballot boxes for Trump, showing how far liberals will go to avoid having a serious debate about why they lost.

Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson listed eight facts that cast doubt on the whole acid trip of Russia hacking the election, noting that a) the DNC hack really wasn’t all that serious compared to other cyber attacks; and b) the level of foreknowledge is just so far out of the realm of possibility for this to actually be a serious hypothesis. For instance, Attkisson noted that if this were true, the hackers would need to have known beforehand that tens of thousands of Trump voters were planning to vote for Clinton in order to execute this attack...that never happened:

It seems a difficult task to prove the hacks somehow “affected the election” or “helped Donald Trump win.” For example:

• One would have to show that tens of thousands of Trump voters were planning to vote for Clinton but changed their mind based solely on the WikiLeaks emails.
• One would have to believe the emails somehow managed to only affect the electoral vote but not the popular vote (which Clinton won).
• One would have to believe the emails somehow selectively swayed voters in key swing states, but not voters in states where Clinton won.

[…]

There have been many serious cyberattacks reported against U.S. government institutions, but no comparable news coverage or announced U.S. retaliatory measures. For example:

• In 2015, Russian hackers attacked the State Department email system in what was called the “worst ever” cyberattack against a federal agency.
• Also in 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management reported 5.6 million Americans’ fingerprints were stolen in a malicious cyberattack.
• The GAO reports that between 2006 and 2015, the number of cyberattacks climbed 1,300 percent — from 5,500 to over 77,000 a year at 24 federal agencies.
• Last March, China government hackers continued a malicious pattern of cyber attacks on U.S. government and private networks, according to U.S. Cyber Command chief Mike Rogers. China has been linked by U.S. intelligence agencies to wide-ranging cyber attacks aimed at stealing information and mapping critical computer networks for future attacks in a crisis or conflict.

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Now, one of the talking points about the Russians trying to tilt the playing field for Trump was the fact that they hacked both the DNC and the Republican National Committee, but only released the DNC data. Well, the RNC denies being hacked and a Wall Street Journal piece added that the RNC’s cyber security prevented infiltration. As for the Wikileaks aspect of this liberal delusion, co-founder Julian Assange has vociferously said that that his sources are not Russian (he could not say with the same certainty about how hacker Guccifer 2.0 obtained his information.) Granted, I’m sure that’s not going to satisfy many regarding the allegations of Russian interference, but it still doesn’t offer any evidence to the Kremlin actually messing with the vote tallies. The program that’s used for Pennsylvania’s voting system isn’t connected to the Internet, and the counties that pushed Trump over the top in Michigan and Wisconsin used paper ballots. So, unless Russia infiltrated the election boards of hundreds of counties across the country, this is, as it always was, a wacko conspiracy theory.