The Kremlin’s role in the presidential election

The FBI isn’t the only state organisation to have taken an interest in Hillary Clinton-related emails, said Mark Galeotti in Foreign Policy: the Kremlin has, too. The bureau may have got its hands on thousands of messages which have passed through Clinton’s private server, but for several weeks before this, the website Wikileaks had been releasing emails damaging to Clinton that were hacked from servers belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and to Clinton’s campaign chief, John Podesta. It’s widely believed Moscow is behind this sabotage campaign. And with good reason. For Vladimir Putin, the “temptation to meddle” in the US election “must have been irresistible”: what easier way could there be to weaken Clinton, help out the more Russia-friendly Donald Trump, and generally sow distrust in the US political process? Yet unlike the FBI revelations, the Wikileaks hacks haven’t appeared to inflict very much damage on her campaign.

The Wikileaks attacks have proved a damp squib, agreed Bill Scher on Realclearpolitics.com. All they’ve revealed is that Clinton sometimes speaks out of both sides of her mouth on issues such as free trade; and that her staff are “obsessively calculating political operatives” who are sometimes rude about people. Big deal. No, these leaks have exposed more than that, said Timm Amundson in The Federalist. They’ve shown that DNC officials conspired to thwart the campaign of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s Democrat rival; that leading journalists colluded with Clinton aides to depict her in a flattering light; and that when she was secretary of state, the lines between State Department and the Clinton Foundation were seriously blurred. These leaks should make the US media feel ashamed of how they’ve covered the 2016 election, tearing into Trump while acting as barely disguised cheerleaders for Clinton. People mightn’t approve of Wikileaks’s methods, but at least someone has been subjecting the would-be president to a bit of scrutiny.

The conservatives who have been cheering on Wikileaks in its war with Clinton seem to have forgotten something, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. Before Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was revealing Clinton campaign emails, he was “leaking stolen, classified national security information that has endangered the US and its allies across the world”. True, some journalists have gone easy on Clinton, but that doesn’t justify the “embrace” of Assange, a man who is acting as a willing stooge of the Kremlin and who properly belongs “in jail”.