The CIA is claiming that Russia “intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency,” according to the Washington Post, which identified “actors” with connections to Russian intelligence who were allegedly part of a wider operation “to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.”
The CIA’s “secret assessment,” came one day after Hillary Clinton, in her first speech since the election, decried the “epidemic” of fake news. It was not about “politics or partisanship,” the losing candidate said, but voters have good grounds to believe it is about politics and partisanship.
Recall Clinton’s claim, in the second presidential debate, “We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election.” As is often the case, the former First Lady and Secretary of State was wrong about that.
Though it held no free and open elections of its own, Russia has often intervened in America, which does hold free and open elections, a hallmark of a democratic republic. It might surprise millenials to learn that Russia had its own political parties in America, and ran their own candidates. Russia wanted those candidates to win and the other candidates to lose.
In 1948, Communist Russia, then under the mass murderer Josef Stalin, backed the Progressive Party. At the top of the ticket was Henry Wallace, a former vice-president and agriculture secretary for FDR.
Communist Russia, part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, wanted Wallace to win. Russia wanted Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey to lose. Truman prevailed over Dewey, and Russian-backed Wallace finished last, behind even the Dixiecrat Party of southern segregationist Strom Thurmond.
Millenials and even baby boomers may be unaware that the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was not like American political parties. The Communist Party was a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR, a division of Soviet foreign policy.
It was tough for the Party after the death of their hero Stalin and Khrushchev’s revelations of 1956. In 1964, however, the Communist Party backed Lyndon Johnson, claiming this was necessary to block anti-Communist hardliner Barry Goldwater. The Democrat Johnson prevailed over the Republican, a victory of sorts for the Communists.
In 1972, the CPUSA candidate for president was Party boss Gus Hall, with African-American running mate Jarvis Tyner on the bottom of the ticket for vice-president. The Russians wanted Hall and Tyner to win but Republican Richard Nixon carried 49 states, prevailing easily over Democrat George McGovern, who began his career in the 1948 Wallace campaign.
In 1976 the Communist Party ran Hall and Tyner again. The Russians, a hostile foreign power, wanted Hall and Tyner to win but Democrat Jimmy Carter managed to squeak out a win over Republican Gerald Ford. During the campaign, the Republican Ford had proclaimed “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration,” perhaps the stupidest statement by any candidate in U.S. history. The Russians continued to dominate Eastern Europe and in 1980 the Communists’ big issue was new U.S. missile deployments, which the Soviets opposed.
That year the running mate of the white Stalinist Hall was black Communist Party militant Angela Davis, a feminist professor arrested in 1970 for supplying guns for a bloody courthouse takeover. The Russians wanted Hall and Davis to win against the Republican Reagan, the Democrat Jimmy Carter, and the independent John Anderson. Reagan prevailed in a landslide, carrying 44 states.
Communists Hall and Davis teamed up again in 1984. As in 1980, the USSR, a foreign adversary, wanted Hall and Davis to win but they lost to Ronald Reagan. Also in 1984, the nuclear freeze movement, backed by the USSR, played a role in the election of pro-freeze senatorial candidates John Kerry of Massachusetts, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Paul Simon of Illinois, all Democrats.
Meanwhile, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton gave Russia pretty much everything it wanted in the so-called Russian re-set, and Clinton Cash noted other favors. Hillary Clinton, like her former boss in the White House, did not exactly take a hard line against Putin’s advancement in Ukraine and threats to the Baltic States.
As the record shows, foreign adversary Russia tends to back the losers in American elections. A month after her loss, Hillary Clinton decries an epidemic of fake news, claiming this charge has nothing to do with politics or partisanship. The next day comes the CIA charge that Russia aided Donald Trump. That claim is entirely understandable, completely predictable, and totally without significance, as big a whopper as Hillary Clinton’s notion about unprecedented election intervention.
The CIA’s Russia allegation confirms that the outgoing president has commandeered the intelligence community, headed by the clueless James Clapper. In similar style, the current president has corrupted the IRS, the Justice Department, and even the FBI, whose director James Comey found no basis for charges against Hillary Clinton. As David Horowitz noted, this was the most breathtaking fix in American history.
The CIA’s Russia caper is a major strike of a campaign to delegitimize president-elect Donald Trump. The campaign is certain to continue, with free ad copy from the old-line establishment media.
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