Back in October 2019, I abandoned an essay I had begun about Andy McCarthy's book, Ball of Collusion, regarding his statement of faith in the Intelligence Community/Mueller Report finding that "Russia" "hacked" the DNC. As many will recall, the evidence for this finding is a redacted draft report submitted to the FBI by a DNC contractor, Crowdstrike.
After the recent release of December 2017 testimony of Crowdstrike co-founder (and Mueller protege) Shawn Henry in which Henry admits that Crowdstrike had no evidence for this foundational charge, I found myself thinking about that essay fragment (below), and wondering about all the corrections (including in McCarthy's book) that become mandatory to straighten out a badly twisted record. These corrections are not happening, however. Nor is anyone asking why this vital House testimony remained locked away from public sight for two and half desperate years. These are not idle considerations. The charge that "Russia" "hacked" the DNC was the kick-off of the entire Trump-Russia disinformation campaign that served as the Obama administration cover for its anti-Trump conspiracy.
The charge was universally promoted, set in play and driven by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, the "IC," and, of course, the #FakeNews complex. But it was also accepted by pretty much everyone else, including by almost everyone on the Republican side of the spectrum. Most distressingly, Nunes Committee Republicans accepted and immortalized the baseless charge in their final March 2018 report on Russia and the 2016 election.
But Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry told this same committee in December 2017 that Crowdstrike had no evidence for the "Russia hack" charge.
Yes. But there it is, Russia hacked the DNC, in the Nunes Committee Report.
For me, this is ample evidence that Nunes and his committee never had any intention of exposing the high crimes at the core of Trump-Russia: FBI collusion with the Democratic Party to perpetrate the fraud that the Republican presidential candidate was a Russian agent. If that's not treasonous, what is?
Taking cues from ranking members Nunes and Jim Jordan when Mueller came before Congress, the Republicans not only failed to nail Robert Mueller for not investigating the DNC server (and the FBI's failure to investigate the DNC server), they didn't bring it up. No one wanted to know why there had been no FBI investigation into the murder of DNC official Seth Rich, either, despite Rich having been all but named by Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange as his DNC-email-source. Nor were there questions about why Assange himself has never been interviewed. No, all of a sudden, the only thing Republicans seemed to want to talk about with the Special Counsel in the hot seat was the arcane figure of Joseph Mifsud.
The importance of the "Russia hacked the DNC" Big Lie cannot be overstated. Before the fabrications of the "Steele dossier," it was this Putin's-hack-for-Trump charge that drove the attack on the legitimacy of President Trump's electoral victory and presidency, his loyalty to this country, and also the loyalty of his supporters. It was also one of the conspirators' justifications for the surveillance and subversion of the Trump campaign and White House.
So much time has passed, so much false narrative has been pounded into place. The fact that overturns its basis may finally be released, but rather than setting us free, it just sits there, ignored.
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Here is the top of the unpublished essay that came to mind today:
Midway through Ball of Collusion, I have come upon a ball of confusion I could not pass. It is in Chapters 9 and 10, where the reader arrives at a discussion of what I consider the most vulnerable point of exposure for the anti-Trump conspiracy: the events around and including the release by Wikileaks of the DNC emails which revealed to the American public that Hillary Clinton and the DNC were themselves colluding to rig the 2016 Democratic primary process against Bernie Sanders, among other acts of corruption and hypocrisy.
The identity of the source of these Clinton-crushing emails is still unknown. The approved narrative, repeated incessantly in unison to a point where it resembles something closer to gospel than the line of propaganda that it is is this: (1) Russia "hacked" the DNC and passed the emails to Julian Assange for dissemination by Wikileaks because (2) Putin hated Hillary.
Why do I call this a line of propaganda? Because the evidence for this outrageous claim -- that Donald Trump was helped into the presidency by Kremlin cyberattacks on the Democratic Party -- is based on a report -- a redacted, draft report -- issued not by the FBI or other government investigative agency, but by a DNC contractor named Crowdstrike, an IT company heavily capitalized by Google Capital (now Alphabet) with a checkered reputation whose co-founders, including Soviet-born Dmitri Alperovitch and Shawn Henry, have associations with anti-Trump centers of Washington establishment power -- the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council (Alperovitch) and Robert Mueller's FBI (Henry).
In other words, the "hoax" part of the "Russia hoax" starts here. Despite the inadequacy of this evidence, however, Andrew McCarthy accepts and promulgates this same unproven theory that the source of the DNC emails published by Wikileaks was the Russian government's Crowdstrike-alleged "hack" of the DNC.
We, the People, are to believe that it was "Russia" that "hacked" the DNC server. For one, Andrew McCarthy does, as he points out many times. His rationale? Because the so-called Intelligence Community says so. This may seem incredible at this advanced stage in our national education about the dark arts and seditious nature of the US intelligence world, and especially since McCarthy is referencing the January 6, 2017 ICA, discussed here.
"So, to be clear," McCarthy writes on p. 179, "I accept, and have always accepted, the intelligence agencies' conclusion, echoed by Mueller, that Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic email accounts. There are skeptics who do not accept this conclusion, and they are not all crackpots as the media-Democrat complex would have you believe. But I do accept it."