Obama administration has concealed and/or manipulated intelligence at key times in the last few years. Those episodes do not give Republicans any confidence that the Obama Intelligence Community will be straight with them this time. Three examples:
1) On
Benghazi, Republicans felt they had to pull teeth to get the story of the Intelligence Community's role in the administration's blame-it-on-the-video talking points.
2) On the Central Command matter, Republicans felt the administration distorted intelligence in an effort to suggest more progress in the fight against Islamic State than had actually occurred.
3) On the bin Laden documents, Republicans have pushed for the declassification and release of thousands of pages captured when U.S. forces killed the al Qaeda leader in 2011. Slow-walking would not begin to describe the administration's response, with few papers released to this day.
In light of all that, it's fair to say that Republicans have near zero confidence that the administration will play the Russia election hacking intelligence straight. If anything, Republicans have a healthy respect for the ability of IC and White House officials to manipulate intelligence and spin things their way.
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Posted: 20 Dec 2016 04:46 PM PST
(John Hinderaker)
The Democratic Party has been making a fool of itself ever since Election Day. (Before that too, probably, but that’s a different post.) An utter lack of self-awareness apparently disables Democrats from understanding that 1) they lost the presidential election because they nominated the worst candidate of modern times, 2) they have been losing ground across the large majority of America for a decade or longer, and now are at best a minority party everywhere except California, New York and a few other enclaves, and 3) their party’s leadership is uniformly both geriatric and corrupt.
A lefty named James Kunstler turns a jaundiced eye on his fellow liberals, and dissects their “Russia hacked the election!” theme:
The headline deployed everywhere last week, “Russia Hacks Election,” was designed by the Deep State players to deviously lead the broadly dim public to think that Russia somehow interfered with the balloting process, which was not possible since voting machines are not hooked up to the internet. And then it was repeated endlessly by the cable news networks and the newspapers, under the number one rule of propaganda: that if you repeat something often enough, the public will swallow it.
This dishonest meme was also designed to distract the public from the substance of the emails disclosed by WikiLeaks — namely, the scamming and trickery of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the influence-peddling of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, which had her flirting with indictment last summer, and only reinforced her already-established public image as an unscrupulous person.
The New York Times especially worked the “Russia Hacks Election” story to a fare-the-well, saying in its Sunday edition:
The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Moscow put its thumb on the scale for Mr. Trump through the release of hacked Democratic emails, which provided fodder for many of the most pernicious false attacks on Mrs. Clinton on social media.
False attacks? What, that Hillary’s cronies put the DNC’s “thumb on the scale” against Bernie Sanders? That Donna Brazille gave Hillary debate questions beforehand? That as Secretary of State Hillary gave more face-time to foreign supplicants based on their contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and expedited arms deals for especially big givers? That she collected millions in speaking fees for sucking up to Too-Big-To-Fail bankers? That The Times and The WashPo and CNN reporters were taking direction from Hillary’s PR operatives?
Consider, too, how the Deep State “Russia Hacks Election” meme was ramped up to top volume coincidentally the week before the electoral college vote, as a last-ditch effort was launched by the old-line media, the diehard Hillary partisans, and a bunch of Hollywood celebrities, to persuade electoral college delegates to switch their votes to deprive Trump of his election victory.
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