Special Counsel

Now, I’m just an average guy, but it seems to me that we have known for years, decades even, nigh on a century that the Russians have been meddling in electoral processes around the globe when it was impossible or too obvious for them to act overtly. It has been acknowledged that even though Senator Joseph McCarthy was an unscrupulous grandstander, he was also correct that there were communist sympathizers operating at the highest levels of the U.S. Government. So barely covert Russian meddling in U.S. politics is nothing new.

The view from here is that rather than aid one candidate or another (HRC was a shoo in remember) the goal was simply to undermine American confidence in its public institutions. Or perhaps the Russians have better polling in the U.S. than any of the companies that do that sort of thing. It was said (I said it myself) that it would be impossible for Trump to overcome the built in lead that HRC had in the Electoral College, and the Big Blue Wall across the upper mid-West into Pennsylvania could never be breached. How did the Russians know what no one else knew?

The answer is, it seems to me, that they didn’t care who won. My belief is that they have four years’ worth of damning emails linking Hillary and Bill Clinton to corruption at the Clinton Foundation that would make Hugo Chavez blush. They also knew and still know that the Clinton’s primary motivator is monetary gain, so they knew how to deal with that. Trump is a different story, but compared to Vladimir Putin or the other dictators of the world, he’s a Boy Scout. So, if HRC wins, they can control her with her emails and cash, and if Trump wins they can cripple his presidency with clever manipulation of misleading and fraudulent news stories and promotion of public unrest. There was no way for the Russians to lose.

However, now there’s a special counsel, who has been give broad investigative powers to investigate “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election”. That is a much larger picture than is being focused on, because it includes the hacking and release of the Podesta emails which conceivably contain huge as yet unopened cans of worms. Releases by WikiLeaks, and a whole host of other information sources.

People are seeing “going after the Trump campaign”. What actually turns up may be a bit more interesting.

But that’s just what an average guy thinks.