{"id":74311,"date":"2017-06-06T08:32:52","date_gmt":"2017-06-06T12:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=74311"},"modified":"2017-06-06T08:32:52","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T12:32:52","slug":"hillary-clintons-deceptive-blame-shifting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=74311","title":{"rendered":"Hillary Clinton\u2019s Deceptive Blame-Shifting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exclusive:<\/strong> While complaining about \u201cfake news\u201d that undercut her campaign, Hillary Clinton continued her own \u201cfake news\u201d falsehood about the U.S. intelligence assessment on Russian election \u201cmeddling,\u201d reports Robert Parry.<\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

By Robert Parry
\nConsortium.com<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton has grown even more insistent that she was not at fault for her stunning election defeat last November, claiming that 1,000 Russian \u201cagents\u201d and their American collaborators were a decisive factor, a bizarre twist that further locks the Democrats into their evidence-light \u201cRussia-gate\u201d obsession.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton at the Code 2017 conference on May 31, 2017.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In comments<\/a> at a California technology conference on Wednesday, Clinton also repeated one of her favorite falsehoods \u2013 that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that Russia hacked Democratic emails and ran a covert influence campaign against her.<\/p>\n

Referring to a report<\/a> released by President Obama\u2019s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Jan. 6, Clinton asserted that \u201cSeventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election. They did it through paid advertising we think; they did it through false news sites; they did it through these thousand agents; they did it through machine learning, which you know, kept spewing out this stuff over and over again. The algorithms that they developed. So that was the conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Clinton\u2019s statement is false regarding the unanimity of the 17 agencies and misleading regarding her other claims. Both former DNI James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan acknowledged in sworn testimony last month that the Jan. 6 report alleging Russian \u201cmeddling\u201d did not involve all 17 agencies.<\/p>\n

Clapper and Brennan stated<\/a> that the report was actually the work of hand-picked analysts from only three agencies \u2013 the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation \u2013 under the oversight of the DNI\u2019s office. In other words, there was no consensus among the 17 agencies, a process that would have involved some form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a community-wide effort that would have included footnotes citing any dissenting views.<\/p>\n

Instead, as Clapper testified<\/a> before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 8, the Russia-hacking claim came from a \u201cspecial intelligence community assessment\u201d (or ICA) produced by selected analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, \u201ca coordinated product from three agencies \u2013 CIA, NSA, and the FBI \u2013 not all 17 components of the intelligence community,\u201d the former DNI said.<\/p>\n

And, as Clapper explained, the \u201cICA\u201d was something of a rush job beginning on President Obama\u2019s instructions \u201cin early December\u201d and completed by Jan. 6.\u00a0Clapper continued: \u201cThe two dozen or so analysts for this task were hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, as any intelligence veteran will tell you, if you hand-pick the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion since the agency chiefs would know who was, say, a hardliner on Russia and who could be trusted to deliver the desired product.<\/p>\n

On May 23, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former CIA Director John Brennan confirmed Clapper\u2019s account about the three agencies involved.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t a full inter-agency community assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies, and for good reason because of the nature and the sensitivity of the information trying, once again, to keep that tightly compartmented,\u201d Brennan said.<\/p>\n

In other words, Clinton\u2019s beloved claim that all 17 intelligence agencies were in agreement on the Russian \u201chacking\u201d charge \u2013 an assertion that the \u201cfact-checking\u201d group Politifact has certified as \u201ctrue\u201d and that has been repeated endlessly by the mainstream U.S. news media \u2013 is not true. It is false. Gee, you might even call it \u201cfake news.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Mysterious \u2018Agents\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

But Clinton\u2019s false claim about the intelligence consensus was not her only dubious assertion. Her reference to the 1,000 Russian \u201cagents\u201d is not contained in the Jan. 6 report, either. It apparently derived from unconfirmed speculation from Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, who mentioned this claim<\/a> at a news conference on March 30, admitting that he didn\u2019t know if it was true.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: \u201cWe know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports \u2013 and we\u2019ve got to get to the bottom of this \u2013 that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been reported to me, and we\u2019ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, \u2018Clinton is sick\u2019, or \u2018Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source\u2019 \u2026 fake news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, many stories about Clinton being sick or her taking money from special interests weren\u2019t \u201cfake news.\u201d In late 2012, she suffered<\/a> from a blood clot and \u2013 during the 2016 campaign \u2013 she was staggered by a bout of pneumonia. She also was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches to Wall Street and other groups.<\/p>\n

Warner didn\u2019t specify where his information about the \u201ctrolls\u201d came from but it paralleled a claim by freelance journalist Adam Chen who asserted in a podcast with Longform that Russian \u201ctrolls\u201d began writing favorably about Trump in late 2015. (The CIA\/FBI\/NSA report also apparently alluded to the same report without mentioning the name of the journalist or specifying the number of alleged \u201ctrolls.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cI created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching,\u201d Chen said<\/a>, referring to a 2015 reporting project that he turned into a rather thinly sourced New York Times Magazine article<\/a> accusing a Russian oligarch of funding a professional \u201ctroll\u201d operation in St. Petersburg, Russia. \u201cI check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on, but they\u2019re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although such \u201ctroll\u201d and \u201chacking\u201d complaints are treated as a one-way street \u2013 coming only from the evil Russians \u2013 the reality is that U.S. intelligence agencies, their allies and U.S.-government-funded \u201cnon-governmental organizations\u201d have mounted similar operations against Russia and other targets.<\/p>\n

It is always difficult to nail down precisely where such operations are originating, but the Russians have cited previous cases of malicious hacking aimed at senior officials, including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, whose accounts were hacked<\/a> in 2013 and 2014 including publication of a false resignation and a confession of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

In 2015, the \u201cPanama Papers,\u201d a vast trove of documents purloined from a Panamanian law firm, became an investigative project that involved a USAID-funded news outlet and led to attacks on President Vladimir Putin for corruption even though his name did not appear in the documents.<\/p>\n

So, this high-tech spy-vs.-spy game \u2013 if that\u2019s what it is \u2013 does not appear to be originating entirely from the Russian side of the street. But the U.S. intelligence community is not going to divulge what it knows about the attacks against Russia, only what it can \u201cassess\u201d about Russia\u2019s possible attacks against Western targets.<\/p>\n

No Self-Criticism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Neither, of course, are Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party eager to engage in a serious self-criticism about how they managed to blow an extremely winnable race against an extraordinarily flawed candidate in Donald Trump. Rather than look at their own missteps and misjudgments, they are presenting themselves as innocent victims.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, at the outset of a bilateral meeting on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In Wednesday\u2019s interview \u2013 after misrepresenting what the Jan. 6 report actually said \u2013 Clinton suggested that the Trump campaign must have colluded with the Russians in \u201cweaponizing\u201d the data.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did they know what messages to deliver?\u201d Clinton asked. \u201cWho told them? Who were they coordinating with, or colluding with? \u2026 [The Russians] were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it. \u2026 So the Russians \u2014 in my opinion and based on the intel and the counterintel people I\u2019ve talked to \u2014 could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided. \u2026 Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Clinton lacked any proof of this convoluted accusation, she cited as her \u201cbest example\u201d the fact that \u201cwithin one hour, one hour of the \u2018Access Hollywood\u2019 tapes being leaked [in which Trump was caught boasting about groping women], within one hour, the Russians \u2014 let\u2019s say WikiLeaks, something \u2014 dumped the John Podesta emails.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, if you changed the context of this claim slightly \u2013 and made a similar jump in logic \u2013 you would surely be labeled a nutty conspiracy theorist, but instead Clinton has drawn nods of agreement for this wholly unsubstantiated speculation.<\/p>\n

Yet, besides blaming the Russians and WikiLeaks for her loss, Clinton spread the blame even wider, for instance, to The New York Times for focusing too much on her decision to use a private email server while Secretary of State \u2013 \u201cthey covered it like it was Pearl Harbor\u201d \u2013 and for the Times\u2019 Nate Silver publishing optimistic odds on her chances for victory. \u201cI also think I was the victim of a very broad assumption I was going to win,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Clinton also placed blame on the Democratic National Committee for lacking money and sophisticated technology. \u201cI get the nomination. So I\u2019m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,\u201d she said. \u201cI mean it was bankrupt; it was on the verge of insolvency; its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, when Clinton was asked about some of her own \u201cmisjudgments,\u201d she slipped back into the defensive posture that contributed to her troubles as a presidential candidate. For instance, regarding why she gave lucrative speeches to Goldman Sachs between her time leaving the State Department and announcing her White House run, she answered coyly, \u201cThey paid me.\u201d<\/p>\n

When pressed on the point, Clinton retreated behind the sanctity of the 9\/11 terror attack and the issue of women\u2019s rights. Reminded that \u201cyou\u2019re not somebody who needed that money for the next week\u2019s shopping, and you knew you might run, so why do it?\u201d \u2013 she responded:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most common thing that I talked about in all those speeches was the hunt for Bin Laden. You know, that was one of the central missions that I felt from the time the towers fell on 9\/11 as a Senator from New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, Clinton added, \u201cyou know, men got paid for the speeches they made. I got paid for the speeches I made. And it [the paid-speech issue] was used, and I thought it was unfairly used.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blocking Witnesses<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, while the Democrats dig themselves deeper into the so-far empty pit of blaming Russia for their electoral disaster, the Russia-gate investigation continues to take on other curious aspects, such as an unwillingness to hear from some of Donald Trump\u2019s advisers who have been named in accusations and who have volunteered to testify publicly.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On Wednesday, Carter Page, a Navy veteran and businessman who had lived in Russia, announced that his plans to defend himself in testimony next week before the House Intelligence Committee had been placed on hold by the Democrats.<\/p>\n

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the committee and a major sparkplug powering the investigation, offered a curious denial of Page\u2019s complaint while confirming the truth of it.<\/p>\n

The New York Times, which has been another advocate for blaming Russia, phrased the postponement of Page\u2019s testimony as if Page were the unreasonable one, reporting:<\/p>\n

\u201cRepresentative Adam Schiff \u2026 dismissed accusations from Carter Page, another Trump adviser who is under scrutiny, that the committee is preventing him from testifying. Mr. Schiff \u2026. said the investigation would first review relevant documents before interviewing witnesses.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Page, who has been portrayed via intelligence leaks to the news media as essentially a traitor, won\u2019t be given the opportunity to defend his reputation until Schiff and the other Democrats decide the time is ripe.<\/p>\n

Yet, it\u2019s not as if the House Intelligence Committee has not taken public testimony about Russia-gate. For instance, former CIA Director Brennan was allowed to speak<\/a> indirectly about Page and other possibly treasonous Americans amid media reports naming Page as one of those suspected Russian \u201cagents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normal investigations grant the people under attack at least the opportunity to defend themselves and their reputations in a timely fashion, rather than make them live under the cloud of suspicion without having a chance to state their case.<\/p>\n

If their sworn testimony is later undermined by evidence developed by investigators, the witnesses can be called back and called out on possible perjury. So, it\u2019s not as if Schiff and the other Democrats are surrendering prerogatives by letting Page testify now rather than later. Indeed, Page would be putting himself in legal jeopardy if he is caught lying.<\/p>\n

Even the Republican-driven \u201cBenghazi investigation,\u201d which also had the look of an over-the-top \u201cwitch hunt,\u201d gave Secretary of State Clinton and other Obama administration officials multiple opportunities to explain their response to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate.<\/p>\n

But, so far, a similar courtesy has not been extended to the targets of the Russia-gate investigation.<\/p>\n

___
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Exclusive: While complaining about \u201cfake news\u201d that undercut her campaign, Hillary Clinton continued her own \u201cfake news\u201d falsehood about the U.S. intelligence assessment on Russian election \u201cmeddling,\u201d reports Robert Parry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}