If there’s one thing Special Counsel Robert Mueller is exceedingly good at it is indicting Russians over whom he has zero jurisdiction. Mueller had previously indicted 13 Russian individuals and companies, and Friday he added 12 more to the list.
It’s a neat little trick – bring charges against people you’ll never get in court, therefore you’ll never have to prove them. This allows Mueller and his team to say they’re “doing something,” that the American people are getting something for the millions his investigation has cost us, while not having to actually prove anything.
Maybe there is something to these charges. I don’t know, and to be honest, I don’t care. I do know the old saying that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich, proving those charges are something else entirely.
What the Russians are alleged to have done amounts to nothing – Facebook posts, fake social media accounts, etc. It’s nothing 12-year-olds couldn’t do, and likely do regularly.
The one thing they are alleged to have done that is serious is hacking the servers of the Democratic National Committee. That’s a serious charge. It’s also completely unprovable, which makes it a brilliant political move by Mueller.
It’s a serious charge. But if any of the people charged with doing it were to show up in court, which is highly unlikely, their lawyers would demand to see the DNC’s servers so they could have their experts examine them. Mueller says Russians hacked them, but the servers have magically disappeared. So how can anyone be certain who hacked them, or if they were even really hacked at all?
Since none of those charged are going to show up in court, there will be no challenge to the allegation, no demand to see the evidence, and no legal embarrassment for Mueller when the charges are dropped because the key piece of evidence not only can’t be provided to the defense, it wasn’t even examined by the prosecutor. He appears to have simply taken the word of the Democratic Party about what happened.
Democrats, naturally, have a vested interest in advancing a story of Russian hacking costing Hillary Clinton the election because the alternative is she was a horrible candidate, the American people wanted nothing to do with her or her ideas, and they ran an awful campaign.
The fact that their “hacked” server disappeared should be a red flag. It’d be like someone claiming they cleaned up a murder scene they stumbled across before calling the police because they’re a neat freak, not because they’re trying to cover up their guilt.
This “problem” with the server having vanished won’t be an issue because there’s no one to make it an issue. But there are plenty of people willing to exploit the charges because this is Washington, and Washington doesn’t need proof or have standards when there is a narrative or an agenda to advance.
And let’s not forget that John Podesta’s email password was “password,” and he gave it to a hacker by falling for a fishing email. Not exactly James Bond-level spying.
Elected Democrats immediately started whining about how President Trump should cancel his planned meeting with Vladimir Putin Monday.
Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, the proud chieftain of the “so white she’s almost translucent” tribe, told the President to “cancel your ridiculous Putin summit and get your butt on a plane back to the United States.” Kamala Harris of California, whose record in the Senate makes Barack Obama’s look like it was riddled with accomplishments, said, “It’s unconscionable for the President to meet one-on-one with Putin, especially given these latest indictments. We need to prevent the next attack, not reward the attackers.”
And that’s just a sampling of the liberal brain trust considered leading contenders for their party’s 2020 nomination.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Mueller investigation, but I do know what is being portrayed as a major development really isn’t. I also know that the idea that politics stops at the water’s edge is now dead. Liberals so hate Donald Trump they’re willing to do anything in an attempt to damage him.
Prepare for more hyperventilating about Russians from leftists than there was during the Cold War, when they actually were trying to destroy us. But keep this in mind – Democrats are now clamoring for “something” to be done to protect our elections in the future. OK, fine.
But first remember no votes were changed, and nothing related to voting or vote counting was “hacked,” even though Democrats and media like to fudge that fact. Second, if you want to protect the integrity of the election bring back paper ballots and require photo ID.
Computer voting started after Democrats claimed paper ballots were flawed after they lost in 2000. After Hillary lost they went in the opposite direction. Their real problem is the American people not wanting them in the White House, because their complaints disappear when they win.
Liberals love to talk about the importance of the integrity of the vote, but they aren’t willing to do literally the least they could do to protect it by requiring people to prove they are who they say they are when they show up at the polls.
Instead of something that will matter, we will get posturing about the need to regulate the Internet to “protect” people from fake stories planted by Russians. Not mentioned will be the fact that, if the allegations are true, all they did was exposed to the voting public things Democrats were saying to each other when they thought no one else was listening. That’s bad, that’s illegal, but that’s not fake.
Exactly how you control what is shared on the Internet will remain a mystery. The people who demand illegal aliens are imbued with Constitutional protections the second they sneak across the border will have difficulty arguing to control what actual Americans protected by that same document can read and share online.
In the end, this will likely amount to nothing. There are show trials and show indictments. What happened Friday appears to be the latter, especially since there will never be a trial. But there sure will be a lot of campaign commercials…
Funny how that works.
PS: In case you haven’t heard, I wrote a book. If you’ve made it this far into this column, you’ll love the book. It’s called, “Outrage, INC: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.” It’s about the ways liberals manipulate the American public, both obvious and subtle, to keep them angry and afraid to prevent them from thinking rationally. It’s not your typical dry political book. Yes, it’s heavily researched and footnoted, but it’s also full of jokes. You tend to remember things you learn while laughing. Check it out.