Читать книгу Killing the Deep State - Jerome R. Corsi. Ph.D. - Страница 32

On December 15, 2016, Hillary made a speech in New York to donors who the New York Times reported had collectively contributed roughly $1 billion to her 2016 presidential campaign, again blaming her defeat on a long-running strategy implemented by Russian president Vladimir Putin to discredit the fundamental tenants of American democracy. “Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me,” Clinton said. “He is determined not only to score a point against me but also undermine our democracy.”6

Clinton acted as if Trump’s collusion with Russia and WikiLeaks was a proven fact. “This is part of a long-drawn strategy to cause us to doubt ourselves and to create the circumstances in which Americans either wittingly or unwittingly will begin to cede their freedoms to a much more powerful state,” Clinton insisted. “This is an attack on our country.”7 What’s important to remember here is that while WikiLeaks did obtain emails from the DNC and from Podesta, it has never been proven—in either case—that the Russians themselves hacked the DNC, nor has it been proven that WikiLeaks was working with the Russians.

On December 16, 2016, Assange made another public appearance in an interview conducted by Sean Hannity that was first broadcast on Hannity’s national radio show and subsequently broadcast that night on Hannity’s Fox News television show. Assange made clear that Russia did not provide the Podesta emails or the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. He insisted the source of the email leaks “was not a state party,” denying that they came from any government. “We’re unhappy that we felt that we needed to even say that it wasn’t a state party,” he said.

Finally, Assange pushed back against Hillary’s accusations. “Normally, we say nothing at all,” Assange told Hannity. “We have a conflict of interests. We have an excellent reputation, a strong interest in protecting our sources, and so we never say anything about them, never ruling anyone in or anyone out. Sometimes we do it, but we don’t like to do it. We have another interest here that is maximizing the impact of our publications. So in order to protect a distraction attack against our publications, we’ve had to come out and say, ‘No, it’s not a state party. Stop trying to distract in that way and pay attention to the content of the publication.’”

When Hannity suggested that the leak came from a disgruntled source within the DNC, possibly even within Podesta’s office, Assange sidestepped, refusing to answer the question, in direct contrast to the way in which he vociferously denied that the source was Russia.8

Yet on December 18, 2016, 10 days after the election, Podesta repeated the “Russia collusion” theory in an interview conducted by host Chuck Todd on NBC’s Sunday morning show Meet the Press.

In response to Todd’s direct questions, Podesta insisted the presidential election had been “distorted” by the Russian intervention. Asked if the election was a “free and fair” election, Podesta railed against Putin. “I think the Russians clearly intervened in the election. And . . . now we know that . . . the CIA, the director of national intelligence, [and] the FBI all agree that the Russians intervened to help Trump and that as they have noted this week, NBC first revealed that Vladimir Putin was personally involved with that,” he insisted. Pressed by Todd to directly answer whether the election was “free and fair,” Podesta accused Russia of wanting Hillary Clinton to lose. “A foreign adversary directly intervened into our Democratic institution and tried to tilt the election to Donald Trump. I think that if you look back and see what happened over the course of the last few weeks, you see the way the votes broke, you know,” Podesta replied. “I was highly critical of the way the FBI—particularly the FBI director—managed the situation with respect to the Russian engagement versus Hillary Clinton’s emails.”9 Republican defenders of Trump pushed back against Hillary and Podesta, suggesting that the “Russian collusion” narrative was a Democratic Party invention that was being disseminated by the Deep State.

Then on December 18, 2016, Representative Peter King (Republican, New York), a member of the House intelligence community, pushed back against the “Russian collusion” meme. King insisted that CIA Director Brennan was orchestrating a “hit job” against president-elect Donald Trump by leaking information suggesting Russia was behind the hacking of Podesta’s emails to the press, despite having “no evidence” to prove the assertion. “And that’s what infuriates me about this . . . we have John Brennan, supposedly John Brennan, leaking to the Washington Post—to a biased newspaper like the New York Times—findings and conclusions that he’s not telling the intelligence community,” King said in an appearance on ABC’s This Week Sunday show. “It seems like, to me, there should be an investigation with what the Russians did but also an investigation of John Brennan and the hit job he seems to be orchestrating against the president-elect,” he insisted.10

Though unconfirmed, reports circulated that the Obama administration’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, held a meeting in his last days in office to float the idea of going to a Supreme Court justice to block Trump’s inauguration on the premise that he only won because he colluded with Russia to hack Podesta emails that Russia leaked to WikiLeaks. “Clapper discussed blocking the inauguration on the grounds that Trump was an illegitimate president due to alleged Russian interference in the elections,” Patrick Howley, a writer for BigLeaguePolitics.com, reported. Supposedly, a high-level member of the intelligence community who witnessed the meeting reported that Clapper discussed going to one of the three female Supreme Court justices to make the case that the alleged Russian interference could invalidate Trump’s claim to the presidency.11