Russians, Hackings and Allegations
The indictment of FSB agents is the really worrying story.
The favorite conspiracy narrative peddled by Democrats and their Leftmedia allies after Donald Trump’s historic election victory was the baseless theory of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia in order to throw the election to Trump. After months of the intelligence community conducting investigations, no evidence has yet been found to substantiate the Left’s claims. And the narrative seems to be quickly dying. On Thursday, Barack Obama’s former CIA director, Mike Morell, threw more cold water on the collusion narrative, stating, “There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.” As Trump has been saying, there is simply nothing there.
But there also appears to be little evidence to support Trump’s claim last month that Obama “wiretapped” his Trump Tower headquarters during the campaign. This bomb shell announcement was effective in that it brought back to light other instances in which Obama targeted journalists and others for surveillance. It also served to effectively counter the mainstream media’s meritless accusation against Trump and his supposed Russian connections. While there seems to be little evidence in support Trump’s claim, questions still abound as to whether Obama may have ordered some sort of surveillance of Trump or of his associates. Trump hasn’t backed off his accusation.
This week, a much more substantive Russian spying story came to light. Four Russians were indicted for the massive criminal hacking of Yahoo in 2014. Two of the Russians are agents of the FSB — the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, equivalent to our CIA. These agents were part of Center 18, which was a unit that had been working with the FBI in helping to catch cyber criminals. The creation of this cooperative cybersecurity task force was Obama’s brain child.
But here’s the rub. A report from the Justice Department states, “Instead of working with the FBI and CIA to catch hackers, the FSB officers were actually working with hackers themselves.” Isn’t that what one would expect spies to do? To put it bluntly, Obama wanted to play nice with Moscow and foolishly invited the foxes into the hen house. This is the real story that should have Americans seriously worried, not some unsubstantiated story of Trump colluding with the Russians.
(Edited.)