Hillary Clinton and her supporters continue to blame others for her loss to Donald Trump, despite a poorly run campaign with an unpopular candidate. James Comey was a hero to Hillary Clinton and her supporters when Comey announced his recommendation against prosecution, but now, along with Vladimir Putin, he is receiving the blame in Clintonland for Hillary Clinton’s loss. Attacks on the FBI by John Podesta have now prompted Loretta Lynch, generally seen as an ally of the Clintons, to break rank and defend Comey over both the investigation of alleged Russian interference in the election and the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. CNN reports:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch defended the FBI’s handling of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, swatting away criticism from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman as uninformed…
Much of the trashing happened in The Washington Post, where Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta lambasted the agency as slow to respond.
“He’s not involved in the ongoing investigation so he wouldn’t be privy to everything that would have been done or said to that. But as I said, he’s entitled to his opinion,” Lynch said of Podesta. “I can tell you that this investigation was taken seriously from the beginning.”
Lynch repeatedly declined to address Podesta’s specific allegations, saying she could not comment on an ongoing investigation. But she suggested that the longtime Democratic power-broker was tainted by his political connections and was not an unbiased observer.
“I know also because of his involvement with the campaign, he’s going to have a certain interest in this and a certain view of that,” she said. “Everyone has a great deal of respect for him. So I allow him that opinion, but I disagree with that.”
Lynch also declined to say whether the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server earned more attention from law enforcement than the Russian hackings, saying it would not “be helpful to try and draw equivalencies to any investigations.” But she broadly defended the government’s handling of cyberthreats as “extremely high quality.”
Even back when James Comey was a hero to Clintonistas, there was selective hearing of his statement which pointed out both carelessness and dishonesty on the part of Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton frequently lied about this initial FBI report. Clinton’s statement that, “Director Comey said my answers were truthful” was the first lie listed by Glenn Kessler (listed in no particular order) in his listing of The biggest Pinocchios of 2016. Hillary Clinton’s frequent lies during the campaign negated any advantage she might have had over Donald Trump, who has shown very little regard for facts or reality.
Julian Assange continues to deny that Russia was the source of the leaked email. Regardless of the source, the media coverage continues to downplay the fact that Hillary Clinton lost for many reasons unrelated to the Wikileaks email, and that she deserves any negative impact from the information revealed about her campaign regardless of its source.
Sam Kriss has made comments in Slate regarding the question of Russian interference in the election which are similar to my previous posts on this topic:
It’s possible that the Democratic National Committee leaks were caused by Russian hackers—but given that the hack took place thanks to John Podesta clicking on a link in a phishing email, displaying all the technological savvy of someone’s aunt extremely excited by the new iPhone she thinks she’s won, it could have been anyone. The “leaked” CIA concerns over Russian meddling were quite clearly leaked deliberately by the CIA itself, an organization not exactly famed for its commitment to the truth; they’re the conclusions of an investigation that hasn’t even happened yet and on which there’s no consensus even among the gang of petty Caligulas that calls itself the intelligence community. Still, it’s possible. Countries sometimes try to exert influence in each other’s internal affairs; it’s part of great-power politics, and it’s been happening for a very long time. When Americans meddled in Russia’s elections, it was by securing victory for Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s very own Donald Trump, a man who had sent in tanks to shell his own parliament. Leaked cables suggest that Hillary Clinton’s own State Department interfered with the political process in Haiti by suppressing a rise in the minimum wage. And American involvement in the politics of Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran was mostly through military coups, sponsored by none other than the CIA. There was no question of these countries repeating their elections; anyone the generals didn’t like was tortured to death. Next to the mountain of corpses produced by America’s history of fixing foreign elections, a few hacked emails are entirely insignificant.
Whatever Russia did or didn’t do, the idea that its interference is what cost Hillary Clinton the election is utterly ludicrous and absolutely false. What cost Hillary Clinton the election can be summed up by a single line from Sen. Chuck Schumer, soon to be the country’s highest-ranking Democrat: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” As it turned out, he was fatally wrong. It wasn’t the Russians who told the Democratic Party to abandon the working-class people of all races who used to form its electoral base. It wasn’t the Russians who decided to run a presidential campaign that offered people nothing but blackmail—“vote for us or Dangerous Donald wins.” The Russians didn’t come up with awful tin-eared catchphrases like “I’m with her” or “America is already great.” The Russians never ordered the DNC to run one of the most widely despised people in the country, simply because she thought it was her turn. The Democrats did that all by themselves.
What the Russia obsession represents is a massive ethical failure on the part of American liberals. People really will suffer under President Trump—women, queer people, Muslims, poor people of every stripe. But so many in the centrist establishment don’t seem to care. They’re far too busy weaving themselves into intricate geopolitical power plays that don’t really exist, searching for a narrative that exonerates them from having let this happen, to do anything like real political work.