Did Trump just ask a foreign power to commit espionage?
All Lies Matter
Sissela Bok wrote a book on the ethics of lying. The short version is that lies are almost always unethical because they deprive the person/people being lied to the ability to make proper decisions. Being lied to is also one of the most upsetting things one will encounter in their daily life.
You are probably wondering what the headline has to do with lying, aren’t you?
On July 27th, 2016 Donald Trump said at a press conference, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing….”
So where is the lie? The lie is not in what Trump said, it is everywhere else.
Satire can be a good way to tell the truth and illustrate a point, so let’s use a wildly untrue, in fact impossible, story:
Context: Vince Foster died July 20th, 1993.
Hillary: “In 1993 a ‘vast right-wing’ conspiracy forced me to kill Vince Foster to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
The Donald: “Hey James Comey, I hope you are able to find evidence Hillary off’d Vince Foster. The American people would really like to see that. Oh and Billy, if you’d like to rat on your wife that’d be cool bro.”
Leon Panetta: “Trump is unqualified to be president because he incites violence against Vince Foster.”
American Media: “ 7/27/16 Trump incites the FBI to kill Vince Foster; frame Hillary.”
It sounds ridiculous, I know, that is the point. I will let The Guardian explain the significance further down.
Trump went on to say, “They probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there. So let’s see….”
Hillary Clinton’s storage of classified government documents on a private server in the bathroom of her house has been widely reported on, and to paraphrase FBI Director James Comey, she was grossly negligent. Despite this being national news, I struggled to find a particular date associated with the case: the date she discontinued the use of the server.
Hillary Clinton is a very intelligent person, don’t let anyone tell you differently. She wouldn’t have gotten where she is today if she was not.
Despite the lack of a date, I can guarantee that she is no longer using that server. First off, she is far too smart to keep using a server she is taking heat for. Secondly, the one date I could find was that she turned in the server and associated thumb drive containing classified information to the FBI on August 11, 2015. That’s it, it is not out there to be hacked — except for by the NSA, but they already had everyone’s emails to begin with — so it is foolish to think the Russians, or Israelis, or Chinese, or Nigerian princes could hack and release emails from the server now.
From The Guardian: Donald Trump appeared to incite Russia to hack into and publish Hillary Clinton’s private emails, as her campaign sounded “alarm” at growing evidence of a foreign power “interfering in an American election”.
The relevant part is “to incite Russia to hack into…” It’s too late, Vince Foster is already dead — the server is already in an FBI storage vault. It can’t be hacked. There is no inciting. The worst Trump did was to encourage Russia to admit they conducted espionage operations on the unsecured email account of a sitting US Secretary of State. Somebody at the Kremlin would definitely get fired if that happened…
Establishment talking heads and their media co-conspirators blew up with talk of Trump inciting espionage — except he didn’t. Russia would have needed to hack into the server before Trump even knew it existed. It’s not journalism, it is outright disingenuous. All lies matter, because they prevent people from making informed decisions, but then again, the two words most anathema to the Clintons are: informed consent.
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” — Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
*Note: The claims of Russia interfering in other countries democratic process is like the pot calling the china black. The other significant point is that the “Democratic” establishment is only upset that the people are finding out. Knowledge of what those in power have been doing is viewed as anti-democratic. This “Blame Russia” tactic also exposes which party is pushing for WWIII — President Trump wants cooperation with Russia, President Clinton wants war.
