The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Pro Tip: Avoid Bragging

Posted on | November 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Pro Tip: Avoid Bragging

 

If you’ll read Chuck Ross’s timeline of the story involving WikiLeaks, Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi and a guy named Randy Credico, you’ll perceive that the essential mistake involved was bragging about inside knowledge of what WikiLeaks had and when it would be released, with regard to the hacking of Clinton aide John Podesta’s emails.

Obviously, hacking someone’s emails is a crime and, although we have no reason to believe that Stone and Corsi had prior knowledge of this crime (which a federal indictment says was committed by Russian intelligence operatives), they obviously were aware that WikiLeaks had obtained possession of these emails and intended to release them.

Was it necessary or in any way helpful for Randy Credico to post to Facebook a photo of himself outside the Ecuadoran embassy in London (where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken asylum) in September 2016 declaring, “I have a feeling that in the next couple days some very damaging material will be coming out from the gentleman inside that embassy”? No, this was neither necessary nor helpful, and neither was it helpful a few days later for Stone to tweet, ““I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon. #LockHerUp.” Four days later, WikiLeaks released the first batch of Podesta emails and what was the benefit of the previous public boasting about it? Perhaps the comments on social media had value, in some sense, as publicity for the impending releases, and we are assured that no one on the Trump team knew that Russian intelligence was behind the hacking, but still: Why brag about it?

Talk about drawing a target on your own back!

Ever since Assange and WikiLeaks emerged in 2010 — publishing U.S. secrets stolen by the traitor Bradley (“Chelsea”) Manning — I have been anti-Assange, and the fact that WikiLeaks was “on our side” in 2016 does not change that. Obviously, it’s not Assange’s fault (and not Roger Stone’s fault or Trump’s fault) that the DNC and Podesta were hacked, but neither was it smart for Stone, et al., to align themselves so publicly with this operation, e.g., “my hero Julian Assange.”

Granted, Stone and his colleagues were sailing in uncharted waters. So far as we know, no presidential campaign had ever previously been the target of data breaches like what happened to the Democrats in 2016, and never had WikiLeaks been involved in such a political operation. Because there was no established playbook for how to deal with such an event, this meant that Stone and his colleagues were improvising — making up the rules as they went along, with no apparent concern for the potential consequences. Almost certainly, they did not imagine that a special prosecutor would be appointed to investigate the 2016 campaign and, proverbially, “You can indict a ham sandwich.”

On the upside, if this is the biggest thing Mueller’s got — if this WikiLeaks thing is the only “Russian collusion” he can find — then it’s really nothing. There is no reason to believe these hacked emails affected the outcome of the election, which is another reason why it was so stupid of Stone to have boasted about it. What was the big secret revealed by Podesta’s emails? How did that change the outcome in 2016? Were any voters swayed by the content of Podesta’s emails?

Jerome Corsi is now reportedly trying to negotiate a plea deal with Mueller, which doesn’t bode well for Roger Stone. Would any of this be happening if Stone had just kept his mouth shut about WikiLeaks?



 

Category: Crime

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