https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/how-russiagate-was-used-to-justify-fbi-election-interference/?bypass_key=dVk4SkFJOFpKbjUwdmZmNHFvZUc4UT09OjpNWFJMU1ZWTFpVUTRlbkk1WlV0Mk5FZHhSRFZYZHowOQ%3D%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202022-12-10&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart How Russiagate Was Used to Justify FBI Election Interference
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
December 10, 2022 6:30 AM
The false collusion narrative of 2016 became the pretext for the bureau to put its thumb on the scale for Joe Biden in 2020.
Who was the archvillain of Russiagate? It’s an important question, considering the cocksure certainty of the national-security establishment that Russia is a mortal threat to our democratic process, and the fact that that certainty has been used as justification for thrusting the FBI into our electoral politics as a monitor of what is supposed to be our free press and robust political speech.
Ask any Democrat or the FBI — you might even be able to ask both at the same time, since they seem to collaborate quite a bit — and Donald Trump will be the answer. In fact, Adam Schiff, for the moment the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is still howling at the moon about collusion. And as for the FBI? Well, it never had a Trump–Russia-collusion case, but that didn’t stop it from swearing to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had one — not once but four times.
The other commonly cited villain is Vladimir Putin, another one-stop shop for explaining Democratic electoral woes. Hillary Clinton still won’t let 2016 go. For top Democrats and a certain regrettably common type of FBI official, elections have only two possible outcomes: Either Democrats win them or Russia steals them for Republicans.
Let’s dig a bit deeper, though, because Trump and Putin are too obvious. The surest Public Enemy No. 1 in the Russiagate saga is Julian Assange. Trump’s alleged role in the hack that launched a thousand fever dreams was, pardon the pun, trumped up. Putin’s role — given the opaque chain of command from the Kremlin to Moscow’s intelligence services to the battalions of nameless, faceless Russian hackers — is necessarily elusive. But if the “Russia hacked the 2016 election” narrative is true, then the one person we know was guilty beyond doubt is Assange. He’s the WikiLeaks guy. He’s the stolen-secrets clearinghouse for fancy bears, cozy bears, and whatever other bears there may be. We’re to understand that he encourages politically calculated anti-American hacking, he becomes a repository of the purloined data, and he gets it published in major media.
Don’t take my word for it. Just read Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone, which includes page after page of heavy breathing about Assange — his hacker connections, the hack of the DNC server, the publication of thousands of internal emails that turned party leaders crimson, Stone’s quest to connect with him and find out what he and his wily Russki partners would do next to eviscerate the Clinton campaign and steal the election for Trump.
Funny thing though: While Team Mueller, the Justice Department, and their FBI investigators had an awful lot to say about Assange, they never actually charged him with conspiring to hack the DNC’s servers. They never formally accused him of engaging in a cyber-espionage conspiracy with Russia to interfere in a presidential election.
In fact, as I’ve previously detailed, even when the Justice Department finally indicted Assange, it did not accuse him of helping Russia hack the DNC, much less of conspiring with other foreign operatives and foreign powers to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Baker and FBI Election Interference
It’s not as if the DOJ didn’t accuse him of any cyber-espionage conspiracies. Have a look at the current Assange indictment. A superseding instrument filed in 2020, after the comparatively sparse original 2018 indictment, it goes on for nearly 50 pages. First, it lays out a historical narrative about Assange’s elaborate global hacking operations, about the way he particularly targets the United States, our government, and our major institutions. Then, it pleads no fewer than 18 counts, as prosecutors start in 2007 and proceed to describe years of hacking operations.
But here’s the curious thing: For the most part, the indictment says Assange’s crimes ended in 2015 — the year before the 2016 election and the publication of the hacked DNC emails. In two counts at the end, the Justice Department tries to extend the Espionage Act offenses into 2019. I suspect that was done because, if Assange is eventually prosecuted on this indictment, his best defense may be the statute of limitations. For most federal crimes, it is five years; that could be a problem for prosecutors who waited until 2018 to allege misconduct that, in the main, happened eight years earlier. But in any event, the charges the government has strained to stretch into 2019 involve theft of government defense secrets. Assange is not charged with conspiracy to hack the DNC and divulge its emails and internal memoranda.
Strange, no?
Think about it: The Biden administration is now fighting to get Assange extradited from Britain to face the charges. What could more surely have clinched success in that extradition proceeding than charging Assange with having done what the Justice Department, the FBI, U.S. spy agencies, and congressional Democrats have assured us ad infinitum he did to “attack our democracy”? Remember, the Brits were extremely invested in the claim that the 2016 election was stolen by Russia in conjunction with Assange, for the benefit and with the collusion of Donald Trump’s campaign. Christopher Steele, the principal author of the shoddy dossier that framed Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, was a former spy who had run the Moscow desk for Britain’s intelligence services. Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who, according the FBI, triggered the Trump–Russia investigation with a vague inference he drew from a conversation over drinks with an obscure young Trump-campaign adviser, had deep ties to British intelligence. The British government coordinated with the FBI to enable the bureau to run down Trump–Russia collusion leads in the U.K.
If you wanted to impress British and European courts with how vital it is to the U.S. government to prosecute Assange, what would be more powerful than charging him with what, in England, Australia, and America, was apparently regarded as the crime of the century?
On the other hand, there could be a very good reason why Assange hasn’t been charged: The government cannot prove that Russia and Assange conspired to hack the DNC and thus interfere in the 2016 election.
Let that roll around in your brain for a moment. More than six years have passed since the 2016 election. Immediately after the election, President Barack Obama allowed that Russia did what Russia always does: It ineffectually meddled to try to affect the outcome. Before that, during the campaign itself, the Obama administration was well aware of Russia’s mostly moronic troll activity, and of Russian hacking operations that had no actual bearing on the election, yet took no meaningful action in response (unless you deem Obama’s giving Putin a stern look while telling him to knock it off to be meaningful action).
Mind you, I am not saying that Russia did not and does not meddle in our politics, just as our intelligence agencies have spent decades meddling in Russia’s politics. I am saying that Russia is a basket-case country with nukes. Its economy is third-rate. Its population is drunk and disappearing. If the Ukraine debacle proves anything, it is that Russia’s intelligence capabilities — which even at their strongest, during the Soviet era, were never strong enough to sway an American election — are significantly degraded.
Moscow couldn’t even divine the state of play in Ukraine, a next-door neighbor its agents had deeply infiltrated. Yes, Putin is a ruthless little man. The notion, however, that he and his ruling mafia family are ten-feet tall and blindingly efficient, expertly conducting the American electoral process like an orchestra from their Kremlin perch, is hilarious — or it would be, were it not the progressive political establishment’s pretext for not only continuing to insert the FBI into our politics, but actually increasing the bureau’s intrusions, its election-meddling, as we get further and further from the 2016 election that Russia did not actually affect.
The reality is that Hillary Clinton lost an election she should have won in 2016. Why? Because she was a uniquely unpopular and politically tin-eared candidate. Democrats could not bring themselves to admit that their standard-bearer lost fair and square, so they came up with an election-denial narrative. Their story was that “Russia hacked the election” in cahoots with Donald Trump. Unlike Trump’s crude stolen-election claptrap, the Democrats’ farce was well crafted, designed not only to rationalize Clinton’s defeat but to keep Trump under a cloud (and, eventually, to put him in the sights of a special counsel) for the first two years of his presidency.
Of course, the Democrats’ story was always going to have the media behind it. But, as we’ve seen in the ensuing years, it was also backed by a hyper-politicized federal law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus. Who do you think slapped together the Obama-commissioned intelligence report on Russian election interference — the kind of report that the government would ordinarily take over a year to compile — in just a few weeks so that the Democratic administration could manage its public rollout before Trump took office? None other than the same preening national-security professionals who willfully promoted the Trump–Russia-collusion fraud knowing it was a baseless Clinton-campaign smear. None other than the “nonpartisan” former federal officials — in particular, Obama’s two top intelligence chiefs, James Clapper and John Brennan — who would later sign onto the disgraceful mirror-image claim that the New York Post’s 2020 reporting on Biden-family corruption bore “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Let’s assume that the Russian government really did orchestrate the hacking of DNC’s servers in 2016 and then conspired with Assange to disseminate the emails they contained. The DNC emails still had no impact on the 2016 election. They were a tad embarrassing for a number of senior Democrats, but there were no Hillary Clinton emails. The only email issue that bedeviled the former secretary of state during the campaign was her mind-bogglingly irresponsible decision to conduct her State Department business over a private email server. And neither Putin nor Assange nor the Trump campaign can be blamed for that.
The DNC hack was irrelevant to Clinton’s defeat. So was the laughably sparse and juvenile propaganda allegedly spewed out via Kremlin-backed “troll farms” and bots. Both the leaked emails and the propaganda were mere drops in an ocean of election-related rhetoric. They had no impact on the election.
Nevertheless, if you’re going to maintain, against all reason, that the DNC hack was of consequence to the 2016 election, the question of Russia’s culpability cannot be avoided. Alas, after Democrats insisted for months that there was solid evidence of both Russia’s guilt and Trump’s complicity, it turned out that the Russia evidence was iffy at best.
The FBI and the Obama Justice Department never seized or subpoenaed the DNC’s servers, which is a very odd way of treating the corpus delecti of what they told us was the crime of the century. Instead, government investigators relied on the analysis of a private firm, CrowdStrike. As a DNC contractor, CrowdStrike had the same motive as the Clinton campaign and the Democrats to pin the hack on Russia and, derivatively, Trump. But it turned out that, in 2017, the company’s president, Shawn Henry, admitted to the House Intelligence Committee that CrowdStrike’s analysis turned up no hard evidence that Russian operatives (or anyone else) actually “exfiltrated” data from the DNC’s system. Sure, CrowdStrike had a theory. It had some circumstantial evidence that hackers may have laid the groundwork to exfiltrate the data. Henry conceded, though, that it found no “concrete evidence” that hackers actually followed up and filched the DNC emails.
Hmmm.
Then there’s the Mueller probe. With great fanfare, Team Mueller indicted a few dozen alleged Russian operatives for hacking and online-propaganda offenses. As I explained at the time, these indictments were more like press releases than formal charging documents. That’s because the defendants were in Russia. The Mueller prosecutors, many of them partisan Democrats, knew that Putin would never allow the defendants to be extradited to the United States for prosecution. So they issued their allegations in formal indictments, making the too-clever-by-half calculation that they’d never have to prove their claims in court. It was just theater: the crafting of official government documents designed to put the issue of Russia’s culpability to rest, even though indictments don’t prove anything.
Except that the prosecutors screwed up. Team Mueller gilded the lily by indicting not only Russian people but some Russian companies. That was dumb because, unlike people, companies don’t have to worry about being sentenced to prison. In fact, if they’re just foreign front companies, they don’t even have to worry about being bankrupted by an American prosecution, either. They don’t have to hunker down in the shadow of the Kremlin for fear of the U.S. Justice Department.
The rest is history: Much to the chagrin of Mueller’s collusion hunters, the Russian companies showed up in Washington and demanded their day in court, with all the American due process and discovery of the prosecutors’ files that entails. For a while, the hand-wringing prosecutors absurdly fought the discovery demands on national-security grounds. As every federal prosecutor knows, however, once you indict a case, there is no national-security exception to due process. You don’t get to tell the court, “Well gee, judge, y’know, we never thought we’d have to, like, prove this case, so do we really have to show them the evidence?” In the final humiliation, Mueller had no choice but to dismiss the indictment. Maybe Putin’s operatives are as guilty as the day is long, or maybe not, but either way, prosecutors couldn’t risk the public-relations damage a seemingly sure acquittal would have done to their painstakingly crafted narrative. So they folded.
Finally, that brings us back to Julian Assange. The government indicts him, but they don’t accuse him of conspiring to hack the DNC, or of meddling in the 2016 election in any other way. They’re trying to extradite him from Britain, but they won’t accuse him of the crimes the U.S. and U.K. governments worked together to try to prove.
The Justice Department knows that Assange has always maintained that he did not get the stolen DNC emails from Russian sources. Now, it’s quite possible that he’s lying. It’s also possible that he just doesn’t know — Kremlin-directed hackers generally don’t pass out FSB business cards. But the fact of the matter is: If the Justice Department indicted Assange over the DNC emails, our government would not be able to prove that Russia is guilty, and Assange would get to take the witness stand and crow that Russia had nothing to do with it.
That wouldn’t do wonders for the “Russia hacked the election” narrative, now, would it?
Wading through this endless saga, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. At this point, what matters most is not the wayward history of the 2016 election. What matters most is what imperils our democracy: the government’s reliance on that history to justify abuses of power in the here and now.
Since 2016, the FBI has become much more aggressive in policing the free press and political speech. To justify this aggression, it has relied on the allegation, made by blatantly partisan current and former national-security officials, that Russia endangered American democracy through diabolical cyber machinations aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton. In the 2020 election, the bureau collaborated with congressional Democrats to push the bogus narrative that the Post’s reporting — its allegations that members of Joe Biden’s family leveraged his political influence into millions of dollars in foreign money — was “Russian disinformation.” Not content with that, the FBI also encouraged social-media platforms to suppress the reporting. And on the eve of the election, 51 national-security pooh-bahs followed the bureau’s lead, peddling the fiction that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Kremlin plant.
This was profound, counter-constitutional interference in our elections by our government. Yet, we’re expected to tolerate it because of Clinton-campaign-generated spin about Russian hacking that didn’t affect the outcome of the 2016 election, that the government’s lawyers refuse to raise even when — as in Assange’s extradition proceedings — raising it would seem to be in the government’s interest, that federal prosecutors apparently can’t prove, and that may not have happened at all.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced that our totally nonpartisan, highly professional, utterly scrupulous government is being straight with us.
