Putin and Those Democratic Emails Clinton blames Russia for the DNC leak. Pre-emptive inoculation?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-and-those-democratic-emails-1469486784
Here’s the last word Democrats wanted to hear at their Philadelphia convention this week: emails. But there it was after WikiLeaks released 20,000 internal emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee revealing, among other things, that party officials had favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.
That wasn’t news, but it gave the Sanders legions a new opening to vent their frustration with the establishment. Their fury brought down Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chair, who on Sunday announced her resignation at the end of the convention but by Monday had been strong-armed by the Clinton campaign to abandon any convention role.
Remember those Casualties of Bill (Clinton) from the 1990s? Ms. Wasserman Schultz is the first Casualty of Hillary in this Clinton comeback. She had to go for the sake of party unity but also because the DNC emails remind Americans of another batch of emails, those belonging to the former Secretary of State.
On that score, it was startling to hear the Clinton campaign respond to the email leak by blaming Russia. Campaign manager Robby Mook accused Russian “state actors” of divulging the emails for “the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” and even suggested several pro-Russian provisions in the recent GOP platform were behind the leak. The media is now noting that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort once worked for a Vladimir Putin crony.
Nothing is beyond Mr. Putin, especially since he is already trying to influence European elections. His allies are bankrolling France’s National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, they supported Britain’s exit from the European Union and fabricated stories this spring to undercut Chancellor Angela Merkel in regional elections. Vlad the Election Impaler might well prefer Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, even if Mrs. Clinton was an architect of President Obama’s 2009 “reset” with Russia.
But then again, Mrs. Clinton’s self-serving email set-up made it easier for him to meddle. FBI Director James Comey recently said that it is likely that her private email server was hacked by “hostile actors” even if he found no specific evidence that it was. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that he’d “lose respect for any serious intelligence agency on this planet if they had not accessed the emails” on her server. CONTINUE AT SITE
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