President Obama was warned that Russia would try to interfere in America's elections. So, what did he do?
Nothing, except to tell us – and a rightly concerned candidate named Donald Trump – that all that such concerns were silly.
“There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even you could even rig America's elections there's no evidence that that has happened in the past or that there are instances in which that will happen this time,” Obama said at the height of the 2016 election. “And so, I invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.”
Fast forward to November of 2016, after Trump won, and all the Democrats can talk about is how the Russians rigged the election. How else could Trump have possibly won? And last week’s indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of 13 Russian Internet trolls is their latest evidence that, yes, an election CAN be fixed.
Maybe they have given up on their mantra that Trump “colluded” with the Russians. After all, it has been more than a year, and there is absolutely no evidence such a thing took place. At least not with Trump. Hillary Clinton and Russia collusion? That’s a different story, though one few seem willing to report.
It was the Clinton campaign that bought and paid for a fake-news, anti-Trump dossier full of Russian lies, propaganda and salacious details that were never verified. Clinton used that to try to influence the election, and then to help her allies in the FBI mount a bogus counterintelligence operation against Team Trump.
As for President Trump, when the fake news, abusively biased propaganda news media ignores the real story, he tells it 280 characters at a time.
“How funny that the fake news media doesn't want to say the Russian group was formed in 2014, long before my run for president?” he tweeted. “Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I did not know.”
He’s right. Mueller's indictment clearly lays out that this Russian attempt to influence the election started in 2014 under Obama's watch, and he was warned and he did nothing to stop it. In fact, by the way, go back to 2012, during a presidential debate. Remember Obama mocking Mitt Romney for saying Russia still posed a very serious foreign policy threat? Looks like Romney was right, Obama was wrong, and the media was clueless.
So Russia did meddle in the election. And Clinton, not Trump, colluded with Russia. But here is the other point the media keeps missing: None of it changed the election.
“There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said last week. “There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.”
We also know now that Russia’s goal in meddling in the election was not to help Trump or Clinton win. It was to pit us all against each other. The Moscow-commissioned cyber trolls were out to rile us up, make us argue and make us angry. This continued throughout the election and after Trump won. And President Obama, who had been warned about it, did nothing.
Mission accomplished, Mr. Putin.
Adapted from Sean Hannity's monologue on "Hannity," Feb. 19, 2018