Moscow is at it again. They’ve infiltrated our election and duped the American people to elect their plant and almost red, the orange Donald Trump. That’s what some rabid Democrats want everyone to believe.
The Democrats are trying to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency by accusing Russia of meddling in the election. They believe Hillary Clinton was sabotaged by Russian hackers so Donald Trump would become President; Hillary would have won otherwise. There are no real facts to back up this claim, just more wild speculation from the left.
The record does reveal, however, that key Democratic players and institutions were negligent with security, which may have jeopardized the interests of the United States. The Democrats only have themselves to blame for any security breaches and for Hillary’s loss this past November.
The nation-states with the most active cyber spying programs against the United States are Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. The US also gathers intelligence, including hacking, on these nations and all its enemies through the National Security Agency.
Since hacking has become commonplace, there should have been no surprise that enemies of the US would be trying to hack the computer systems of politicians, office holders and political parties. But what is surprising is the lack of security used by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
The media and the Democrats are giving a false narrative as a part of their continuing ‘fake news’ series that Russia didn’t target the RNC because they were only interested in defeating Clinton. In fact, the mainstream media have recently reported that the CIA believes that the RNC was hacked as well. But Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, refutes these claims.
According to Priebus, once the revelations of the DNC hack became known, the RNC asked the FBI to review all of their systems. The conclusion by the FBI was there wasn’t any evidence of hacking. The FBI should know better than the CIA since the CIA wouldn’t be doing this type of forensics, but the Bureau would be. There weren’t any leaks from RNC emails because they had adequate security protection for their servers.
There were, however, four real security breaches that came to light during this past election cycle. They were Hillary’s hidden server, the spear-phishing scheme that obtained John Podesta’s emails, the hacking of the DNC and the WikiLeaks email dumps.
Hillary’s Hidden Server
One of the reasons why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump was her hidden server. She set up an unsecured private server in her home’s basement to run all her state department emails through and then lied about it.
The server only came to light because of the Benghazi hearings. Congress then issued a subpoena for Clinton to turn over all her work-related emails. She instead permanently deleted 33,000 emails and turned over the rest. FBI Director, James Comey refuted many of her public statements when he testified before Congress and he also called her actions "extremely careless." Comey revealed that there was indeed classified material on her server and said in a July 5, 2016 press release that it was “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”
Hillary Clinton risked national secrets and American lives by using a private server that was not on a secured federal network. Since the Secretary’s email address was publicly known, it’s very likely that her server was hacked by Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and possibly many others.
Back on July 27, 2016, many were speculating what could be on the deleted 33,000 emails and Trump said, “I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening; I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
This statement is the basis for the Donald Trump and Russia collusion conspiracy theory spouted today by Democrats. The real goal of their accusations is to delegitimize the presidency of Trump to remove any mandate he has to pass his agenda.
John Podesta’s Email
According to a June 16, 2016 report by SecureWorks CTU, John Podesta’s email account was accessed by a spear-phishing scheme. Podesta was sent a phony email that appeared to come from Google requiring him to change his password.
The spam had a Bitly link (a URL shortening service) to redirect Podesta to a fake Gmail login page. Once he entered his credentials, malware redirected him to his real account while at the same time giving the malware access.
The Clinton campaign used the domain name, HillaryClinton.com and issued emails with that domain to all her staff. Many of those emails were setup to use Google’s Gmail service instead of the HillaryClinton.com mail server.
So, in John Podesta’s case, it wasn’t a hacked server by the Russians that brought to light the revelations of Podesta and the Clinton team, but spam made to fool Podesta. Once again, it was a lack of cyber security and common sense that harmed Clinton’s campaign; not Donald Trump working with the Russians.
The DNC Hack
The Democratic National Committee’s servers were hacked and some emails were dumped right before their national convention. These emails showed Hillary Clinton and the DNC colluding with one another to defeat Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary.
The DNC blames Russia for these hacks and has gathered some circumstantial evidence through the cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. There isn’t any evidence, however, that Putin and Trump were working together to undermine the Clinton campaign. The Democrats don’t want people to focus on the actual content of the emails, but to instead agree with them that it was unfair that the truth was revealed.
WikiLeaks Dumps
Unfortunately, hacking exists today and organizations need to protect sensitive information with proper security measures. The act of hacking, for some reason, has been tolerated by the Democrats given their lack of concern about security. What crosses the line with them is when their hacked information is then released to the public.
No one knows who leaked the hacked DNC and Podesta emails to WikiLeaks. The Democrats were outraged that WikiLeaks released these emails to the public.
Previously the left has applauded ‘whistleblowers’ and leaked documents. Don’t they remember Watergate, Sarah Palin's E-Mails, Edward Snowden, and the Panama Papers, to name a few? Isn’t the truth what’s important here?
The Democrats and the mainstream media are all for leaking when it helps their candidate. They were more than willing to support leaks against Donald Trump:
The New York Times illegally obtained from a leaked source the 1995 tax return of Donald Trump and published it and wrote a story about it. This was the first October surprise.
NBC waited for the best opportunity to leak a 2005 Access Hollywood video of Donald Trump and Billy Bush. The audio portion of their conversation that took place in the bus was illegally made public. The salacious conversation was recorded in Trump’s dressing room and should have remained private. This was another October surprise that was meant to ensure an election win for Hillary Clinton.
The 2016 election had leaks that harmed both candidates, Clinton and Trump. The public was given truthful information and then made an informed decision. The truth may have been unlawfully obtained or disclosed, but the public was able to learn about Trump’s past and they learned about the workings of the Clinton machine.
Donald Trump won the election because his message appealed to working class voters and Hillary Clinton lost because her only message was that Trump was unelectable. The results of the election were not because of Vladimir Putin and his red army of hackers swaying the American electorate.