Bigger than Watergate: The Russian-orchestrated DNC email hack places our national sovereignty at stake
A foreign power actively interfering in our electoral process is more significant than any partisan feud
Topics: Bernie Sanders, DNC 16, DNC email hack, Donald Trump, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Elections News, Politics News
Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Credit: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin/Lucas Jackson/Richard Drew)The shame of it is that “Watergate” is such an overused metaphor in political conversations. Everything, it seems, is just like the 1972 break-in and attempted bugging by Richard Nixon’s “plumbers” at the Democratic National Committee headquarters inside the Watergate Hotel. The problem, therefore, is that any news stories that are absolutely similar to Watergate, or worse, will be laughed off as yet another wacky conspiracy theory.
The so-called DNC Email Leak is that story. It’s Watergate multiplied by a factor of a thousand — it’s Watergate, but the “plumbers” are composed of Vladimir Putin, his Russian intelligence services and aided by the useful idiots at Wikileaks; the Nixon-style beneficiaries are Donald Trump and the GOP; and the victim is, once again, the DNC. Only this time, the burglars got away with it and the information gathered in this case was dumped into public view last Friday, mysteriously enough on the day after Trump delivered one of the most tyrannical speeches in American presidential history, turning the DNC email revelations into a de-facto fifth day of Republican National Convention festivities. Oh, and instead of Nixon resigning, the chair of the DNC was forced to resign. That’s how twisted this is, and I can see how it might seem unbelievable. It’s not.
Yes, I get it. Some of the content contained in a handful of the emails (out of a 19,000 email tranche) was fishy in terms of DNC officials expressing dissatisfaction with Bernie Sanders and his campaign. (Bernie’s religious beliefs should never have been discussed, for example.) We’ll circle back to the veracity of the emails momentarily. However, what we know so far greatly outpaces anything damning about the DNC officials themselves. What we know, and what’s rapidly developing by the day, is that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Putin’s intelligence apparatus broke into the DNC’s network, stole the emails, set up a front account, and handed over the emails to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization via that account. We also know that Putin and various Russian oligarchs have been giving money to Donald Trump. And we know that Trump’s foreign policy closely aligns with Putin’s, especially when it comes to the Baltics and NATO, which Trump has repeatedly stated will be allowed to fall to Russian aggression on Trump’s watch.
As of this writing, further details along with the chain-of-evidence is still being established by journalists, security experts and the FBI. (By the way, before anyone kneejerks to the “crazy conspiracy theory” conclusion, it’s worth noting that everyone from the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, to A-list reporter Richard Engel, along with The Daily Beast, ABC News, NBC News, Yahoo! News, Slate, TPM, Vice and The Washington Post have been uncovering new and frightening aspects of this story going back to June and culminating with the past 48 hours.) According to investigative journalists at Vice’s “Motherboard,” in particular, a security firm hired by the DNC discovered the existence of “two sophisticated adversaries” that had infiltrated the Democratic Party’s internal email network. Known as “APT 28″ and “APT 29,” the handles are used by both the Russian intelligence service, the FSB (formerly the KGB) and the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. Later, using a front handle known as the aforementioned “Guccifer 2.0,” the agencies announced back in June that it had given Wikileaks “thousands of files and mails.”