If It Was the Russians, What Were They Really Up To?

Assuming you believe the Russians hacked the DNC emails and gave them to Wikileaks (which Julian Assange — a leftist anarchist and no Republican, obviously– denied), Daniel Greenfield argues that you ought to ask yourself, Cui bono? Who were the Russkies trying to benefit?

The Russia conspiracy theory hinges on the single creaky claim that the Democratic National Committee hacks were a Russian plot to elect Trump. The theory and all its illegitimate stepchildren, including Robert Mueller and his infinitely expanding corps of prosecutors, lives or dies by the DNC hacks.

Trying to elect Trump by releasing damaging insider information from the DNC never made any sense. The DNC was already a dysfunctional organization that was being run by the Clinton campaign. Undermining its leadership had little impact on the election, but a great deal on control of the DNC.

There has never been any evidence that the DNC hacks swung the election. The vast majority of people never even heard of them. Only a handful of political insiders and watchers, already deeply and unpersuadably committed to one side or another, could name the contents of a single email.

When you want to understand the motive of a crime, follow the money. See who benefited from it, not casually, but deeply and significantly enough to justify the effort and risk of undertaking it.

The hacks targeted Clinton allies and sought to undermine their influence within the Democrat Party.

Russiagate’s fervent conspiracy theorists spin an unlikely scenario in which Moscow had picked Trump early on, and then abandoned him in a crowded field against 16 candidates, while assuming that he would naturally triumph. Instead of leaking Jeb Bush’s campaign emails or Marco Rubio’s, they bided their time and waited to release Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s and John Podesta’s emails.

That’s not a plan to help Trump win. It is a plan to take over the DNC.

Let’s look at what the Russians were actually doing during the election. They had set up fake Facebook sites aimed at the left on issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to the pipeline protests. That is not the behavior of a foreign intelligence operation that wanted Trump to win and the left to lose. Instead the Russians appeared to have allied with the left to push the Democrats even further to the left.

RTWT