Trump was chump, not grand schemer
Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russians in the plot to “wage information warfare against the United States” during the 2016 campaign, the time has come to ask the critical question:
What did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it?
Oh, come on — we know what President Trump knew. Nothing. He still thinks he actually won the 2016 election (he didn’t; Hillary Clinton lost it). And these indictments add another million words or so to the emerging story that:
• The Trump campaign would have happily sold a family member into the international slave trade (probably Eric, right?) to get their hands on Hillary’s deleted emails;
• There’s zero evidence that any such transactions occurred, likely because Trump had nothing to offer.
Trump was part chump, part dupe, part willing victim. What Trump wasn’t, was in charge of the United States intelligence and national security apparatus in 2014. From the indictment:
“From in or around 2014 [emphasis added] to the present, defendants knowingly and intentionally conspired ... to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”
In 2014, Trump wasn’t president. He wasn’t even playing one on TV (“The Apprentice” was on hiatus). It was Obama’s job to protect America’s electoral system from all enemies, foreign and domestic. His attorney general, Loretta Lynch. His FBI director, Jim Comey. His director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.
. . . . Hey, wait a minute.
THAT Mike Flynn? The one who took a plea deal from Mueller in the Russia gate investigation? That’s the one. These were the people on watch as the Russian scheme to sow discord in our democracy — and to use scams, fraud and bots to do it — unraveled. Trump haters are making much of the fact that still-unknown persons inside the Trump campaign were in contact with the fraudsters. They scoff at the idea that they “didn’t know.”
And yet, the entire intelligence and security apparatus of the U.S. government, with all the resources of Obama’s “Verizon Spy-os” surveillance policy of collecting cellphone and Web data, didn’t know, either.
Hey, remember way back when the liberal media was telling us how super-smart the FBI is and that we should stop criticizing it?
Two years of a coordinated attack. Two years of using social media and secret means to carry out their instructions to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them.)” Two years, and the Obama administration missed the entire thing.
Why? Maybe the Russians are just that good. Another, more evidenced-based theory, is that Team Obama missed the Russian efforts because they were so minuscule. According to Facebook, the Russians bought about $100,000 worth of ads on the site during the 2016 election. To put that in perspective, Facebook takes in about $1 billion a month in advertising and other revenue — that’s $100 million every day. A hundred grand isn’t even a cup of coffee by comparison.
Then there’s the tiny trickle of actual content from this scheme. The media ran huge headlines claiming that Russian Facebook posts in 2015 and 2016 (once again — who was president at the time?) had a reach of 126 million people. Sounds huge. But as Facebook lawyer Colin Stretch explained, that number “equals about four-thousandths of 1 percent (0.004%) of content in news feed, or approximately one out of 23,000 pieces of content” during that same two-year period.
This is, as The Atlantic put it, “worse than Watergate”? Please. It’s not even worse than Deflategate.
Either Trump was part of one of the biggest scandals in American history — right under the nose of the incompetent Obama administration — or this was just Russia being Russia and, while serious and criminal, their behavior had no significant impact on our election.
It’s your turn, liberals:
Pick one.