The Red Scare Continues...
Collusion. ME [a.F., ad L.] 1. Secret agreement or understanding for purpose of trickery or fraud; underhand scheming or working with another; deceit, fraud, trickery… [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955].
So it wasn't Sheldon Cooper after all. Twelve Russians (not Marcel Lazăr Lehel) have been charged with meddling in the campaign leading up to the 2016 election by hacking into servers and publishing e-mails that, among other things, showed close cooperation between DNC officials and many of the print and television news reporters that the public used to rely on for accurate and unbiased news. Nowadays, not so much.
I suppose this could be considered serious outside interference or collusion. Does the public really need to know or does the public have the right to know about Donna Brazile's (then CNN & ABC contributor and vice chair of the DNC) e-mails of March 5, 2016 in which she supplied questions to the campaign in advance of the CNN primary debate or her e-mail of March 12, 2016 in which she says, in part, “from time to time I get the questions in advance...” and then goes on to pass along the text of a question that will be asked at the CNN town hall with Clinton and Bernie Sanders? Thanks to Wikileaks, now we know.
The routine submitting of drafts of politically-motivated newspaper or magazine articles for prior approval by the DNC (sometimes known as transactional journalism) has probably been going on for years, but in 2016, because of Russian interference and Wikileaks, people were able to read a lot of unfiltered information for themselves before television reporters had a chance to spin it. (I mean it's not like the US ever meddled in Ukrainian politics or anything...)
The Wikileaks e-mail dump of 2016 that I trawled through two years ago turned up countless intra-DNC memos along with e-mail exchanges between DNC staffers and their friendlies in the press. I read until my vision blurred and barely scratched the surface – reading a hundred or so, but scanning the subject lines of at least a thousand. It didn't take long to figure out who was in the tank for whom.
So it appears that President Trump is seriously wrong. There was collusion, massive collusion – between the DNC and the news divisions of NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, major newspapers and other media outlets. Collusion in which the participants worked closely and enthusiastically to affect the outcome of the 2016 election. And do you suppose that in their feckless transparency, television political news reporters ultimately ensured a Trump victory?
Other example of Russian collusion involve Rosatom, Uranium One and the Clinton foundation. This turkey has been investigated for years, and the story has been spun in every direction imaginable, depending on the agenda of the reporter. Although the $2.35 million paid to the Clinton Foundation by the chairman of Uranium One (through his own family foundation) during the period when Rosatom was in the process of acquiring Uranium One may have been purely coincidental, the $500,000 paid by Renaissance Capital (the Russian investment bank which was promoting Uranium One stock) to Bill Clinton for a speech in Moscow after the acquisition was announced wasn't too shabby a gig. I would have made the speech for less.
After the press conference following the recent Helsinki summit, Mr. Trump has been constantly attacked and in some cases accused of treason for not threatening to all but start World War III in order to defend the honor of the DNC and network news. I'd think it more than a bit weird to risk war and put soldiers lives on the line to avenge the damaged reputations of HRC, John Podesta, Cheryl Mills, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and their allies in the press corps.
I also continue to believe that more information is better than less and for the past few years have increasingly avoided tainted news sources, including BBC America, which are heavily curated and embarrassingly transparent. But getting back to the people responsible for the Wikileaks e-mail dump of 2016 – does that mean we should be sending 12 separate thank you notes or would just one do the job? And to think we had to rely on Russian operatives to gain a fuller understanding of the inner workings of our own political establishment and the news reporting business. How pitiful is that?
