U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee email accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen emails on WikiLeaks.
But that finding was reportedly based largely
on the DNC's strange outsourcing of the investigation to a private
cybersecurity firm. Rarely does the victim of a crime first hire a private
investigator whose findings later form the basis of government conclusions.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is many things. But so
far he has not been caught lying about the origin of the leaked documents that
came into his hands. He has insisted for well over a year that the Russians
did not provide him with the DNC emails.
When it was discovered that the emails had been
compromised, then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz weirdly refused to
allow forensic detectives from the FBI to examine the DNC server to probe the
evidence of the theft. Why did the FBI accept that refusal?
That strange behavior was not as bizarre as Wasserman
Schultz's later frenzied efforts to protect her information technology
specialist, Imran Awan, from Capitol Police and FBI investigations. Both agencies
were hot on Awan's trail for unlawfully transferring secure data from
government computers, and also for bank and federal procurement fraud.
So far, the story of the DNC hack is not fully known, but
it may eventually be revealed that it involves other actors beyond just the
Russians.
There is not much left to the media myth of
James Comey as dutiful FBI director, unjustly fired by a
partisan and vindictive President Donald Trump. A closer look suggests that
Comey may have been the most politicized, duplicitous and out of control FBI
director since J. Edgar Hoover.
During the 2016 election, Comey, quite
improperly, was put into the role of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the
investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was
secretary of state. That proved a disaster. Comey has
admitted under oath to deliberately leaking his own notes -- which were likely
government property -- to the media to prompt the appointment of a special
counsel. That ploy worked like clockwork, and by a strange coincidence, it soon
resulted in the selection of his friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Comey earlier had assured the public that his
investigation of Clinton had shown no prosecutable wrongdoing (a judgment that
in normal times would not be the FBI's to make). It has since been disclosed
that Comey offered that conclusion before he had even interviewed Clinton.
That inversion suggests that Comey had assumed that
whatever he found out about Clinton would not change the reality that the
Obama administration would probably drop the inquiry anyway -- so Comey made
the necessary ethical adjustments.
Comey was also less than truthful when he testified that
there had been no internal FBI communications concerning the infamous meeting
between Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, and former Attorney
General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac. In fact, there was a trail of
FBI discussion about that supposedly secret rendezvous.
Before he fired Comey, Trump drafted a letter outlining
the source of his anger. But it seemed to have little to do with the
obstruction of justice.
Instead, Trump's anguished letter complained about
Comey's private assurances that the president was not under FBI investigation,
which were offered at about the same time a winking-and-nodding Comey would not
confirm that reality to the press, thus leaving the apparently deliberate
impression that a compromised president was in legal jeopardy.
There is also a media fantasy about the
Antifa street protestors. Few have criticized their systematic
use of violence. But when in history have youths running through the streets
decked out in black with masks, clubs and shields acted nonviolently?
Antifa rioters in Charlottesville were
praised by progressives for violently confronting a few dozen creepy white
supremacists, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis. The supremacists were
pathetic losers without any public or political support for their odious views,
and they were condemned by both political parties. Yet Antifa's use of
violence was compared perversely by some progressives to American soldiers
storming the beaches on D-Day.
Later, Antifa thuggery in Boston and Berkeley
against free speech and against conservative groups without ties to white
supremacists confirmed that the movement was fascistic in nature.
It was recently disclosed that the FBI and the
Department of Homeland Security had warned the Obama administration in 2016
that Antifa was a domestic terrorist organization that aimed to incite violence
during street protests. That stark assessment and Antifa's subsequent
violence make the recent nonchalance of local police departments with regard to
Antifa thuggery seem like an abject dereliction of duty.
Doubts about official narratives of the DNC leaks and the
errant behavior of James Comey and misinformation about the violent extremists
of Antifa illustrate media bias -- not to mention entrenched government
bureaucracies that are either incompetent, ethically compromised or completely
politicized.
