Monday, September 25, 2023

Right, As Usual



The Mueller report explicitly chose not to exonerate Donald Trump for anything, did not find anything approximating a "hoax, neither the Inspector General nor Mueller "rubbished" the Steele dossier, and if Miranda Devine believes that a presidential candidate warning the nation of the threat from Russia "put us through hell," she has a rather limited perspective on hell.


— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) September 25, 2023

 

John Durham's probe into the FBI investigation into a possible connection between the Trump campaign and Russia produced no evidence of what Trump had called the "crime of the century." Ken Starr's investigation of the sex habits of Democratic president Bill Clinton's sex habits cost $52 million. 

And yet in July of 2018

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office. The indictment charges twelve Russian nationals for committing federal crimes that were intended to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of  the Russian military. These GRU officers, in their official capacities, engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0" and through another entity

Hillary Clinton tells Jen Psaki

That is his modus operandi in the sense that he hates democracy, he hates the West, and he particularly hates us and he has determined that can do two things simultaneously. He can try to continue to damage and divide us internally and he's quite good at it and sadly he has a lot of apologists and enablers in our own country, people who either don't see the dangers or dismiss it out of hand and/or maybe agree with some of the position he's taken on certain things, including his barbaric invasion of Ukraine. So, dividing us and then trying to seize territory in such a brutal way to try to expand his reach, to try to restore the Russian empire, if not the former Soviet Union, that is who he is.

I've said that for years. Part of why he worked so hard against me he didn't think he wanted me in the White House and part of where we are....

She has said it for years, and Vladimir Putin had good reason to help prevent the former Secretary of State from being elected. Five days before the 2016 presidential election, The Washington Post reported

In one of her last acts as secretary of state in early 2013, Hillary Clinton wrote a confidential memo to the White House on how to handle Vladimir Putin, the aggressive and newly reinstalled Russian president. Her bluntly worded advice: Snub him.

"Don't appear too eager to work together," Clinton urged President Obama, according to her recollection of the note in her 2014 memoir. "Don't flatter Putin with high-level attention. Decline his invitation for a presidential summit."

It was harsh advice coming from the administration’s top diplomat, and Obama would ignore key parts of it. But the memo succinctly captured a personal view about Putin on the part of the future Democratic presidential nominee: a deep skepticism, informed by bitter experience, that will be likely to define U.S.-Russian relations if Clinton is elected. Her lasting conclusion, as she would acknowledge, was that “strength and resolve were the only language Putin would understand.”….

Clifford Kupchan, chairperson of consulting firm Eurasia Group and Russia expert who attended private meetings with Vladimir Putin while Clinton was Secretary of State, stated "It may well be useful that she has a tough image. Mrs. Clinton has been through the same journey that a lot of us have gone through on Russia, which is dashed hopes" and "she doesn't wear deeply tinted sunglasses of any kind."

The NATO alliance, which President Trump had attempted to scuttle, has rallied to President Biden's call for a united front against the Russian attack on Ukraine. By contrast, Biden's immediate predecessor in March of 2022 had attributed the invasion two-and-a-half weeks earlier to "a lot of love" on the part of the Russian president. The invasion may have been deterred, making the leadership of our 56th President unnecessary, had Hillary Clinton, who warned Obama about Putin, not lost to Donald Trump, who would have only encouraged and supported Vladimir Putin's territorial ambition. But her emails!

 


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