If Donald Trump’s Thursday morning Twitter stream is designed to provide a smokescreen for the Senate chopping away health care for millions of Americans, he’s definitely lighting up the diesel fuel and damp garbage. Not only did Trump flat-out lie about the nature of former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, not only did Trump continue to dispute Russia’s involvement in hacking Democratic emails, he went into new territory.
He declared that the hack of the DNC email server never really happened at all.
That’s correct. Donald Trump is now claiming that Democrats faked being hacked. And, presumably, released thousands of their own emails to Wikileaks, where Trump could express how much he loved the site, and Trump could feed out-of-context quotes from those emails to his rallies to stoke the flames of HIllary-hate. Because … that would be great.
Putting a “why” to this may seem difficult. But clearly, if Democrats faked an intrusion into their own servers and handed the emails to Wikileaks, they had to know that Hillary’s close personal friends Julian Assange and Roger Stone would lure trusting Donald Trump into using the damaging emails. So that Hillary would lose … but then Obama officials could then twist every intelligence office in the nation into saying that the Russians were behind it, and after that Democrats could claim that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians, and they could all work together to thwart Trump’s plans. It was probably all planned when Bill Clinton visited Loretta Lynch’s plane (and don’t let the fact that the plane thing came later throw you off, Clintons are tricky).
It all makes perfect … nonsense.
Trump started the current twitting with lies about what former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.
Johnson’s actual testimony was eye-opening. Revealing that the hacking went far beyond spreading false stories and cracking open email accounts. Instead, Johnson revealed that the Russians had taken actions against state-level databases in a bid to alter or delete voting rolls. Actions that were definitely not like what we’ve seen in previous elections.
Himes: But we had never seen what the Russians called active measures … the insertion of information designed to alter an outcome. That’s what makes this unprecedented?
Johnson: Yes.
When it comes to Trump’s claim that Johnson said there was no tie between Trump and Russia, what Johnson said was that he’d seen what everyone else had seen.
Gowdy: At the time you separated from service in January of 2017, had you seen any evidence that Donald Trump or any member of his campaign colluded, conspired, or coordinated with the Russians or anyone else to infiltrate or alter our voter infrastructure?
Johnson: Umm. (pause) Not beyond what has been out there, open source, and not beyond anything I’m sure this committee has already seen and heard before directly from the intelligence community. So anything I have on that is derivative of what the intelligence community has … and the law enforcement community.
Johnson also made it explicitly clear that he couldn’t say whether or not Russian involvement affected the outcome of the race.
After making his first “HOAX” claim, Trump repeated it a few minutes later.
The big Democratic scam involves actions that hurt the party and the candidate months before the election, because … it would serve as an excuse for losing the election?
Dear America: It it wasn’t clear to you before, Donald Trump is insane.