The Other McCain

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No, Russia’s ‘Rinky-Dink Troll Operation’ Did Not Change the 2016 Election Result

Posted on | February 20, 2018 | Comments Off on No, Russia’s ‘Rinky-Dink Troll Operation’ Did Not Change the 2016 Election Result

The simple fact behind last week’s indictment of 13 employees of a Russian outfit is that, if this is the sinister “collusion” that the liberal media have been warning us about, there’s no way such a miniscule effort could have cheated Hillary Clinton out of the presidency.

Ace calls it a “rinky-dink troll operation” and Da Tech Guy asks, “Where’s the beef?” Honestly, it’s laughable. Adrian Chen, the reporter who first called attention to the Russian firm behind the online effort, dismisses it as “ineffective” and derides as “paranoia” the fear-mongering portrayal of the operation as an “immense propaganda machine.” Rick Moran reminds us that “the total expenditure from both parties (campaigns, SuperPACs, etc) in 2016 was well over $2 billion dollars,” so that a handful of Twitter and Facebook accounts could not have made a significant impact. We must therefore ask, why have the media and the Democrats spent more than a year shrieking about the alleged “collusion” (of which we have seen exactly zero evidence so far) between Russia and the Trump campaign? Daniel Flynn has some thoughts:

An administration siccing the surveillance state on the opposition party’s presidential candidate based on dubious reports compiled by the favored presidential candidate’s campaign ranks as a terribly reckless strategy risking the future freedom of its architects for their future power, no?
“Not if you think you will win the election and no one will ever find out,” an animated Joseph diGenova tells The American Spectator. “That’s why they did it. They thought she would win and no one would ever find out.”
Alas, Hillary Clinton did not, as so many expected, win the presidency. So, the incoming administration, investigated by dubious means, got to see what the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and various Justice Department officials believed it would never see. . . .
Specifically, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence memo’s finding that the Justice Department knew that the information justifying its application for a FISA warrant to obtain electronic surveillance came from a Hillary Clinton campaign opposition research operation, i.e., Christopher Steele’s “dossier,” yet withheld that information, possibly constitutes a legal problem for James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and others involved in applications to the court. Beyond this, reports that the Justice Department relied on a second dossier compiled by Cody Shearer, a political hatchet man without the pretense of credibility that Steele, a longtime British intelligence agent, provided for his “dossier,” further complicates legal matters for government employees involved in what increasingly looks like partisan work done on the federal government’s dime.

Now, hold that thought — the Obama administration illegally obtaining warrants to spy on Trump’s campaign, based on bogus information provided by Fusion GPS and Cody Shearer — while you consider this: In March 2017, Professor Glenn Reynolds intuited exactly why Democrats started pushing the “collusion” narrative after the election:

The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.

What this means, of course, is that President Trump is absolutely right in calling the media’s “collusion” narrative “fake news.” But what it also means is that the Mueller investigation is actually part of an ongoing attempt to cover-up wrongdoing by the Obama administration!



 

Category: Corruption, Media Bias, Russia

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