By Virginia Murr
When seemingly intelligent, professional people state something as fact, or state a thing repeatedly, the public tends to be influenced by such comments. A problem arises when those seemingly intelligent, professional people are lying.
The sad fact is that some people are willing to sell their integrity for financial gain, a status boost, preferential treatment from people more wealthy and powerful than them, or any of the other millions of self-serving reasons.
As a society, we must hold these people accountable. Glossing over the lies and ensuing damage only serves to perpetuate the behavior. Why would they stop if nobody holds them accountable? The importance of holding such liars accountable is magnified a hundred-fold by the 2016 Presidential debacle.
We have known for some time that Russia is actively engaged in a cyber war against the United States. And we’ve long known some of the details — such as, Russia has been actively manipulating social media as well as hacking political operatives and U.S. election systems.
Russia’s ongoing cyberwar has been firmly clarified and documented in the Special Counsel’s 448-page “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” (aka, The Mueller Report). https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5955997/Muellerreport.pdf
One of the most glaring facts in Mueller’s report is that Russia did, in fact, hack Hillary Clinton’s emails as well as DNC servers. Thus, confirming what investigative journalists and the intelligence community have been claiming since the summer of 2016.
Despite the evidence available early-on to the public, the Russian hack was manipulated into a narrative that condemned the DNC, Hillary, and those associated with the Clinton campaign. And the narrative persisted throughout the election and was amplified by Russia’s social media operations.
It wasn’t just fake Russian accounts supporting the narrative. We had very real, public figures such as tech guru John McAfee stating the opposite. And “backing up” their counter-claims with “facts.” In true gaslighting fashion, McAfee even referred to accusations against Russia for the hack as “propaganda.”
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/817234507065688065?lang=en
Former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan (and associate of Julian Assange), Craig Murray, also claimed that the DNC was not hacked by Russia. To the contrary, he claimed that the data was not from a hack; instead, it was leaked by DNC insiders.
To be clear, this is not a journalist attempting to protect a source. This is an outright lie from a former UK government official that effectively protected Russia.
Julian Assange, Murray’s associate, unsurprisingly perpetuated the same lie.
Then we have a U.S. Congressmen (at the time), Dana Rohrabacher, supporting Assange’s overt lies, going so far as to say that Assange and Wikileaks had evidence that the hacked data was not from Russia; rather, it was from the DNC itself. Rohrabacher even tried to get Senator Rand Paul to set up a meeting with President Trump and Wikileaks so they could present the non-existent evidence.
Former National Security intelligence officer, William Binney — presumably an expert on such matters as national security and foreign cyber-attacks — not only pushed the Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory at the top levels of the U.S. government, but was a fervent defender of the narrative that the DNC was not hacked by Russia.
Binney not only argued against a Russian hack of the DNC, he used his group of intelligence veterans (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS) to write a memo to President Trump, giving a supposedly expert analysis of the case. The analysis concluded that the DNC information an inside job.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/ Binney Letter
Notably, current U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton purposefully cast doubt on the Russian hacking of the DNC — six months after intelligence reports were made public that Russia had hacked the DNC. In a sleight-of-hand political maneuver, he even suggested the hack was simply being politicized by the Obama administration.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/23/bolton-mcmaster-present-contrast-on-russian-hacking-441566
And, of course, there is the President himself, Donald Trump — who, upon my reading of the Mueller report, appears to be the font for the lies that were told about Russia’s hack of the DNC.
http://time.com/4591183/time-person-of-the-year-2016-donald-trump-interview/
And here Trump is directly contradicting cyber experts and simultaneously stating that the DNC had perpetuated a “false flag.” Note: This article is a month before Trump’s infamous request for Hillary’s emails. Yet, here he is, already insinuating publicly that he would like to have those emails.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/dnc-hack-donald-trump/
Partisanship does not change Truth
Whether you like or despise Hillary Clinton has zero bearing on the fact that Russia launched a multi-pronged cyber-attack against our country before the 2016 Presidential elections. It also has zero bearing on the fact that Clinton told us the truth about it. From the 2nd Presidential Debate 2016:
https://transcripts.factcheck.org/presidential-debate-washington-university/
Alarmingly, the Russian cyber-attack is still happening. It is ongoing, in part, because so many public lies by seemingly intelligent, professional people influenced public opinion, caused road-blocks to investigations and hampered the implementation of necessary counter measures to protect our country. Thus, by default, the liars have facilitated Russia’s attack on America. It is well beyond time we hold them accountable for it.
