There are a few things about the indictments handed down by the Special Counsel’s office on Friday that the mainstream media seems determined to ignore. Perhaps that’s because to highlight these aspects of the document would be to admit that they’ve gotten the Russia/Trump narrative wrong for a long, long time.
The first inconvenient fact of the indictments is that there is no allegation, as made crystal clear by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, that anything Russia did during the election changed one vote in November. So even though it is obviously a serious issue if we have a foreign power trying to sway the results of our elections, let’s not go overboard and start believing that they had any material effect on the outcome. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what Putin and his team of oligarchs would love us to believe. It is, actually, what far too many people on the left DO believe. It’s time for a reality check, and these indictments provide one.
The second inconvenient fact is that the Russians weren’t only “helping” Donald Trump. They were also helping Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders, both of them darlings of the progressive left. “By 2016, defendants and their co-conspirators used their fictitious online personas to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” reads the indictment. “They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Trump.”
The third inconvenient fact is that, after the election was over, the Russians began sponsoring rallies and events AGAINST the newly-elected president. One was held on November 12, 2016 under the title: “Trump is NOT my President.” Another one was held on November 19 in North Carolina: “Charlotte Against Trump.” At the same time, the groups named in the indictment were also sponsoring rallies FOR Trump.
If you’ll recall, when the U.S. intelligence community first began telling the public that Moscow had meddled in the election, they told us that the point was not necessarily to support Donald Trump but rather to sow distrust and discord in American democracy itself. They didn’t actually care who won the election, they just wanted to cause as much chaos as they could. Since that time, of course, the narrative has changed. Now it’s given as fact that Putin wanted Trump in the White House, because that’s the only way the dossier and the tale of collusion makes sense. But this indictment hearkens back to that original assessment – Russia attacked America’s democracy, NOT the “Democrats.”
As such, there’s no reason to think Trump had anything to do with it and there’s no reason to believe that Hillary Clinton lost the election because of it.
But in order for America to understand these conclusions, the media has to report the facts. They seem oddly reluctant to do that.
