Monday, June 26, 2017

Does the Real Election Interference Involve the Democrats?

In May, RNLA Executive Director Michael Thielen recounted the Obama administration’s long held propensities for election tampering, the latest effort being the DHS’s bid under former Secretary Jeh Johnson to infiltrate numerous state election voter databases during the 2016 election cycle.

Johnson testified last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee, however, that, even though he did not believe that “votes were altered or suppressed in some way,” his organization did not report on potential Russian hacking for the sake of non-partisanship.


Leaving aside for a minute that Russia ‘hacking’ the 2016 election is a wildly inaccurate portrayal of Russia's digital meddling — which to date are only allegations, nothing proven — there's likely another reason Johnson wasn't quick to cry foul: some of the known, legitimate attempts to hack into state election databases were perpetrated by Johnson's own organization, the Obama-led DHS.

DHS is not alone.  As we detailed Friday, even Democrats are raising questions of interference with the election regarding Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch. What does all this mean?  As Warrington concludes the continued fixation on Russia:

They are little more than an attempt to protect the previous administration from being exposed as election meddlers, albeit unsuccessful ones. But Hillary Clinton's leaked emails, which showed the Democratic National Committee colluding with her campaign to ensure she won the nomination over Bernie Sanders, have already proven that meddling in democratic processes is a strategy the left employs to win. 

Partisan politics in the end is driving this Russia hacking myth. And as Michael Thielen put it, “the reality is that there’s more evidence linking a US federal agency under Obama to state election hacking than there is linking Russia to the presidential election.”

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