Our next point: the “election” was not “hacked” – not by the Russians, not by anyone else. The voting rolls were not tampered with; the voting machines were not tampered with; the results were not tampered with; the count was not tampered with. Don’t take our word for it - The President himself said that in mid November (after Mrs. Clinton was defeated) that the election was free and fair; his own Attorney General said “we didn’t see the sort of technical interference. . .in terms of voting machines and the like.” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson (like Mrs. Lynch, an Obama appointee) said that the DHS cyber security team “we see no evidence that hacking by any actor altered the ballot count or any cyber actions that deprived people of voting.”
Yes, someone disclosed thousands of emails that were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton and her top operatives. But not even once has even one of the recipients or even one of authors of even one of the emails in question asserted that the content was false or tampered with. Every email that was released was one written by and sent by or sent to a top Democratic party personage. And those people and the party obviously would have preferred that none of the material was disclosed – but political parties and government officials are always trying to keep their business secret, and that is especially true of potentially embarrassing items during an election campaign. The Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign are claiming that the release of those emails was detrimental to her campaign. It probably was, but so were most of the 55,000 emails from Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department that were ordered released by a judge. We think that the “Russian hacking” claim is just one more effort to overturn the election, or at a minimum to undercut Mr. Trump’s victory; this includes the recount, the claim that the popular vote should determine the winner, the attempt to subvert the electoral college, and other ploys.
Anyway, if there was hacking the hackers should be confronted and punished, and the President has expelled 35 Russian “diplomats” (and we use the term loosely) in retaliation for the “hacking,” and it may be apt and the right thing to do. But it does raise the question of why the President did not retaliate when the State Department email system was victimized by a cyber attack by Russian hackers; nor did he retaliate when the fingerprints of 5.6 million Americans were stolen; nor did he retaliate when Chinese hackers launched multiple cyber attacks on the United States, some of which resulted in the theft of intellectual property.
And then we have this report from NBC News: “[The Obama Administration] thought [Mrs. Clinton] was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road.” In other words, they didn’t want to get involved in a potential cyber-war, or in other ways to upset the applecart for a new Clinton administration. Obviously, they have no such concerns about what might befall a new Trump administration.
The lesson of this episode, for political party operatives and government workers alike, is this: do not use unsecured email for sensitive communications; do not presume one’s email is secure; do not use email to make embarrassing gossip or revelations, insults or flippant comments. Mr. Podsesta and the Democratic National Committee have learned this the hard way.
The naked truth is that the American voter has known Mrs. Clinton for over 24 years, and over that time, a lot of people have grown to love her, and a lot of people have grown to dislike her. The voters who liked her didn’t change their minds because of the emails, and the ones who didn’t like her had made up their mind long before the emails were leaked.