![]() I criticized his Russian “reset,” his Iran nuclear deal, his opening to Cuba, even his handling of political conflict in Honduras. I was no fan of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Today, just one-third of Republican voters even believe the intelligence community findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, no doubt influenced by the president’s equivocations on the matter. The derivation of the emails (stolen by Russian hackers) and the purpose of their dissemination (to sow dissension among the American body politic) have either been ignored, or, in the case of my conservative interlocutor, ludicrously held up as an example of Russian altruism meant to save American democracy from the perfidious Clinton clan.Ĭontrast Rubio’s principled stand with that of current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who, while now appropriately calling WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service” that “overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from antidemocratic countries,” was more than happy to retail its ill-gotten gains during the campaign. Republican politicians and their allies in the conservative media behaved exactly as the Kremlin intended. Every morsel in the DNC and Podesta emails, no matter how innocuous, was pored over and exaggerated to maximum effect. ![]() Suddenly, Republican leaders and conservative media figures who not long ago were demanding prison time (or worse) for Julian Assange were praising the Australian anarchist to the skies. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Rubio’s GOP colleagues completely ignored his counsel. And he issued a stark warning to members of his party who were looking to take advantage of Clinton’s misfortune: “Today it is the Democrats. “I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks,” Rubio said at the time. During the campaign, as operatives linked to Russian intelligence dumped hacked emails onto the internet, few Republicans stood on principle, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and condemned their provenance. Forty-eight percent of Republicans, meanwhile, think Don Jr. professes disappointment that his Russian interlocutors didn’t deliver the goods. But we now know that they had no problem accepting the Kremlin’s help-in fact, Trump Jr. Smith, who is now deceased, “mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.”Īmid a raft of congressional and law enforcement probes into Russian meddling during the 2016 presidential election, it’s still unclear whether members of Trump’s campaign actively colluded with Moscow. The Journal has also reported that Republican operative Peter W. government has said is working for Russia’s intelligence services. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that a Florida Republican operative sought and received hacked Democratic Party voter-turnout analyses from “Guccifer 2.0,” a hacker the U.S. the only Republican to seek Russian assistance against Clinton. Worst of all, GOP voters never punished him for it. He ran as the most pro-Russian candidate for president since Henry Wallace helmed the Soviet fellow-traveling Progressive Party ticket in 1948, extolling Vladimir Putin’s manly virtues at every opportunity while bringing Kremlin-style moral relativism to the campaign trail. Trump Sr., after all, explicitly implored Russia to hack Clinton’s private email server. None of this should surprise anyone who paid attention during last year’s campaign. ![]() We’ve gone from the Trump team saying they never even met with Russians to the president himself now essentially saying: So what if we did? initially said the meeting was about adoption, not a Russian offer of “ultra sensitive” dirt on Hillary Clinton. That’s politics!” And from elected Republicans, we get mostly silence-or embarrassing excuses. Instead, we get this from the president of the United States, explaining away his son’s encounter with Russian operatives who were advertised as working on behalf of the Kremlin: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. In any other era, our political leaders would be aghast at the rank opportunism, moral flippancy and borderline treasonous instincts on display. Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large swathe of today’s Republican Party. Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary Clinton’s controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have hacked, despite Donald Trump’s explicit pleading with them to do so, but rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta).
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