╌>

Durham, the Disinformation Board and the 2024 Elections

  

Category:  Op/Ed

Via:  vic-eldred  •  2 years ago  •  18 comments

By:   Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. (WSJ)

Durham, the Disinformation Board and the 2024 Elections
Why Elon Musk ties his free-speech fight to the collusion hoax and Hunter's laptop.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T




If you think special counsel John Durham's prosecution of individuals affiliated with Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign concerns only ancient history, in one way you're right.

The FBI seen in the Durham trial is a prelapsarian FBI, nonplussed about how to handle an approach from the campaign of the woman whom all concerned believed would be the next president.

In those more innocent days of 2016, intelligence agency meddling in our election would amount to a comedy of errors, to the disadvantage of Mrs. Clinton, who likely lost because of the late reopening of her email case by the FBI, which certainly wasn’t what the FBI intended.

To Team Obama at the time, the threat that needed to be contained in 2016 wasn’t (and  never became ) Russian meddling, it was the Hillary email investigation. Only later, with Mrs. Clinton’s shocking defeat and the intelligence community’s realization that their actions would come under a scrutiny they never anticipated, was the country plunged into a whole new ballgame. This ballgame and its legacies continue today: the poisonous and illegal intelligence leaks aimed at the incoming Trump administration; the peddling by Democrats and the FBI of the Steele dossier; the FBI’s misleading of a  surveillance court  in order to rummage through the communications of a minor Trump campaign associate.

This new ballgame, this ugly new reality, came into the open in a way that formerly would have been hard to envisage outside  Vladimir Putin ’s Russia, when 50 former U.S. intelligence officials, led by Obama veterans,  concocted  and sold to the media a legend about the Hunter Biden laptop story. We now have one foot in a future that should horrify any American, with U.S. intelligence veterans, like Russia’s  siloviki , gaslighting our electorate to influence a presidential election.

We, and I mean America, have not been ready psychologically to face what happened in 2016: the hyping and overplaying of the real but paltry Russian influence operations aimed at our election in order to  distract  from the activities of our own intelligence agencies, specifically their blundering role in electing Mr. Trump.

Which brings us to today. Election 2024 need not be a relitigation of 2016 and 2020, it need not be another electoral college squeaker, with the incentive to foment or fabricate October surprises, to fiddle with election rules, trying to tilt an expected close outcome. It need not be another apocalyptic, anything-goes partisan showdown that certain elements in American life crave.

But listen, on the left and Never-Trump right, to the unending alarms about a pending 2024 Trump coup. Listen, in the Trumpian camp, to the simmering disaffection from American institutions exacerbated by the continuing drip-drip-drip of revelations about the collusion hoax.

In his  Twitter  fight,  Elon Musk  started out talking generically about free speech but has inevitably been drawn into a discussion of the Steele dossier, the Hunter Biden laptop episode, the stripping of tweeting rights from a president still widely supported among voters.

And speaking for itself is the Biden administration’s Orwellian attempt to  install  a domestic “disinformation” czar in time for 2024, under an agency created to fight terrorism, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

One day historians will honestly revisit these matters. Their most gobsmacking discovery will be that, while it was hardly the deepest cause of anything, the predicate for  everything  was Hillary’s illicit email server as secretary of state.

The collusion hoax was created in 2016 by Mrs. Clinton to  distract  from the server issue.

The FBI intervened, gallumphingly, in the 2016 race because of its possession of what it considered explosive  Russian intelligence  concerning Mrs. Clinton’s server.

And all that followed after Mr. Trump took office had less to do with the intelligence community’s abhorrence of Mr. Trump than you think. It had to do with the intelligence community’s need to bury the story of its own 2016 role in delivering him to the White House. Do not have any doubt about this, especially you liberals and leftists who suddenly embrace the FBI and CIA as your partisan soulmates. The goal of these agencies is protecting their institutional interests and burying their mistakes (as always), not sharing your heroic fantasies of resisting authoritarianism, racism, sexism, or whatever you think Trump and Trumpism represent this week.

Finally, I hesitate to reach for strange variables to account for the inexplicable but I’m tempted by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s theory of a  contagion of stupidity  thanks to social media—because nothing else can explain the national press’s miserable performance in coming to terms with 2016. This includes its  conspiracy of silence  on the Justice Department inspector general’s secret appendix describing the discredited Russian intelligence that set off the FBI’s actions in the 2016 race.


Tags

jrDiscussion - desc
[]
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
1  seeder  Vic Eldred    2 years ago

We can't seem to get any real accountability for all the gaslighting, spying and inappropriate behavior over the past 5 years.

I suggest that the penalty for perjury should be a public hanging on the mall!

 
 
 
Hallux
Masters Principal
1.1  Hallux  replied to  Vic Eldred @1    2 years ago

I hear you have enrolled in Madame DeFarge's knitting school.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
1.1.1  seeder  Vic Eldred  replied to  Hallux @1.1    2 years ago

People are getting impatient.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
1.1.2  Tessylo  replied to  Vic Eldred @1.1.1    2 years ago

No one cares.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
1.1.3  seeder  Vic Eldred  replied to  Tessylo @1.1.2    2 years ago

I take mine with Hazelnut cream and 2 sugars.

 
 
 
Hallux
Masters Principal
1.1.4  Hallux  replied to  Vic Eldred @1.1.1    2 years ago

Perhaps, but then I lack the hubris to speak for them.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
1.1.5  Tessylo  replied to  Vic Eldred @1.1.3    2 years ago

I haven't taken my morning trump yet.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
1.1.6  Tessylo  replied to  Vic Eldred @1.1.3    2 years ago

Get your own damned coffee

 
 
 
Just Jim NC TttH
Professor Principal
1.1.7  Just Jim NC TttH  replied to  Tessylo @1.1.5    2 years ago

Don't forget to wipe your Schumer

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
1.1.8  seeder  Vic Eldred  replied to  Hallux @1.1.4    2 years ago

You also lack the status of being a resident.

 
 
 
Hallux
Masters Principal
1.1.9  Hallux  replied to  Vic Eldred @1.1.8    2 years ago

So what? Like you I have an IP address that extends my 'citizenship' beyond the 'exceptionalist's' navel gaze. A haiku to tickle you awake ...

windward he sets sail,

eyes leeward to cast a spell.

orange in his wake.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
1.1.10  seeder  Vic Eldred  replied to  Hallux @1.1.9    2 years ago

Without citizenship you have no valid interest.

 
 
 
Hallux
Masters Principal
1.1.11  Hallux  replied to  Vic Eldred @1.1.10    2 years ago

One always has a valid interest in those who carry a big stick and stomp their feet. To do otherwise would be criminally negligent.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
2  Tessylo    2 years ago

"Why Elon Musk ties his free-speech fight to the collusion hoax and Hunter's laptop."

He's decided to appeal to the right whackjob base?

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
2.1  seeder  Vic Eldred  replied to  Tessylo @2    2 years ago
He's decided to appeal to the right whackjob base?

If that's a question the answer is NO.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3  JohnRussell    2 years ago

"I love it"

Donald Trump Jr. 's  response , in the SPRING of 2016, to the offer from a "Russian prosecutor" to give the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. In other words, an offer to collude. 

The far right author of the seeded article has constructed a fantasy about the 2016 election that has been disproven time after time. 

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
3.1  seeder  Vic Eldred  replied to  JohnRussell @3    2 years ago
In other words, an offer to collude. 

Who was Igor Danchenko?

 
 
 
Greg Jones
Professor Participates
3.2  Greg Jones  replied to  JohnRussell @3    2 years ago

Never disproven John. The real collusion was among Obama's goons, the Hillary camp, the FBI, and other assorted scoundrels.

 
 

Who is online




64 visitors