How many dots does it take to make a smoking gun?
By now it is irrefutable that Russia meddled, interfered and likely tilted the 2016 Presidential Election enough to cheat Hillary Clinton out of the presidency and hand it to Donald Trump.
That should be enough to nullify the election, but, like the Republicans’ refusal to follow up on blatant impeachable offenses. It will take evidence of blatant collusion with a foreign power to steal the election to force any action.
But as the revelation by the NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner, the 25-year-old Air Force veteran charged with mailing classified information to a news organization, showed, the Russian engagement with the election process was a lot greater than the government has revealed.
Indeed, Russian actors tampered with the election databases in 39 states. We are being led to believe that they did not alter votes or tabulations, but how do we really know that to be true, especially with the ease and vulnerability of “black-box voting”?
Comey and James Clapper and others have also said that Russian attempts to meddle in elections is nothing new — but what was achieved in the 2016 election was way more intensive and more effective than ever before. What if they managed to toss people off the rolls in key states, like Wisconsin, where Trump “won” by about 23,000 votes (less than 1 percent), where 200,000 votes were suppressed.
As Hillary Clinton (who has been proved right in all her claims) said, the Russians needed help to “weaponize” their hacking and their interference.
They needed to know just which electoral districts they could penetrate in order to move an imperceptible number of votes for Trump to win. That’s why despite winning the national popular vote by 3 million, it took only a difference of 70,000 votes across three states to give Trump the Electoral College.
So here’s my theory on the case: The Russians were hacking and having a fake news campaign designed to destabilize the election and engender mistrust in the democratic election process, and weaken Clinton’s presidency once she won. (Trump constantly claiming that the election would be “rigged” if he didn’t win, and inciting his followers to take 2nd Amendment remedies is what shut up the Obama Administration from going public and kept Democrats from screaming “foul” after the election).
And Obama also feared that unleashing a counter cyber strategy, like shutting down their power grid, or some major sanctions, would cause Putin to cause more havoc in the election, since “black box voting” has so little security to begin with.
But at some point, either the Russians made Trump an offer he couldn’t refuse (because of what they had on him, financially and personally), or the Trump campaign actively partnered with the Russians to “weaponize” — that is pinpoint — where their cyber attacks, fake news and social media trolling could be most effective.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was responsible for the data mining operation out of Austin that pinpointed districts that needed to be turned.
And it was Robert Mercer, the billionaire who is Trump’s principal donor (and who chose many of his cabinet members and aides), whose data-mining technology was used — that’s how the Russian hacking and fake-news operation was “weaponized.”
The purpose, as noted in the Washington Post’s report about the Austin data mining operation, was to suppress voting by key pro-Clinton demographics: women, blacks and liberals. Roger Stone (the Nixon dirty-trickster), Paul Manafort (who was paid a decade ago to develop programs against Putin opposition), Nigel LeFarge (who met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange) all had active engagement with Russians and hackers.
But I believe the key was Michael Flynn, who Trump was forced to remove as National Security Adviser, who had the contacts, knowledge, and motive as the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from which he was fired by Obama, plus had financial ties to Russia and Turkey which he failed to disclose or get authorization for, a criminal act. That’s why Trump went to such lengths to try to get Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
The final evidence of collusion during the election and corruption now is that Trump and Sessions have done absolutely nothing to secure our elections from interference, while doing everything possible to appease Putin’s interests and obstruct the investigation.
So far, Trump keeps insisting there is no evidence of actively colluding to steal the election.
But we don’t actually know if that is true, especially since the investigation is just unfolding despite everything being done to obstruct, slow and end the investigation, thanks to a free press (so far), we are learning more each day.
If it is found that the Trump campaign in fact had ties to Russia, it would not be sufficient remedy to impeach Trump and leave Mike Pence and Trump’s cabinet in place.
There would be cause to nullify the election altogether, remove his entire administration (who are “fruit of a poison tree), and install Clinton who actually won the election.
Election nullification never happened before?
Nothing like Trump and the Russian election tampering ever happened before either.
