Was Russian Election Interference Really About Trump — or About Clinton?

As the fog clears over the persistent allegations that Donald Trump conspired with Russia to rig the 2016 presidential election, we are left with the naked reality that the Trump-haters in the political and media elite willfully ignored a theory on Russian interference far more plausible than collusion with Trump.

What if the documented Russian meddling - resulting in 25 indictments against Russian actors by Robert Mueller - actually was aimed not at steering Trump to victory and turning him into a robotic pro-Russian Manchurian candidate but at defeating Hillary Clinton at all costs?

There is ample evidence to suggest that then-Secretary of State Clinton’s denunciation of the 2011 Russian election as fraudulent infuriated the victorious strongman Vladimir Putin to the point that he contemplated revenge against her impending presidential campaign in 2016. Consider this contemporaneous report from The New York Times:

“In a rare personal accusation, Mr. Putin said Mrs. Clinton had sent ‘a signal’ to ‘some actors in our country’ after Sunday’s parliamentary elections .… Mr. Putin said that hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘foreign money’ was being used to influence Russian politics, and that Mrs. Clinton had personally spurred protesters to action … ‘I looked at the first reaction of our U.S. partners,’ Mr. Putin said. ‘The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers.’”

Of course, as soon as Trump did the unthinkable and defeated Clinton, the shell-shocked American left and leftist political establishment, with the aid and comfort of the Trump-deranged media, focused exclusively on how Trump must have cheated. They believed - and do to this day - that it simply was not possible that the American people would elect this vulgarian unless things were not on the level.

And soon, the media felt the wind at their backs, thanks to illicit investigations of Trump by the Obama Justice Department, predicated, ironically, on a fake Russian dossier ordered up by the Clinton campaign. So the notion that Russian interference - most notably in the release of leaked emails day after day that became a form of Chinese water torture for Hillary’s campaign - was carried out for any reason other than helping Trump was hardly considered.

But the evidence of Putin’s boiling hatred for Clinton was there all along in some of the media reporting, such as a story by Politico in July of 2016 titled, “Why Putin Hates Hillary,” with the subtitle, “Behind the allegations of a Russian hack of the DNC is the Kremlin leader's fury at Clinton for challenging the fairness of Russian elections.” It states categorically, “When mass protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin erupted in Moscow in December 2011, Putin made clear who he thought was really behind them: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

And then came the story’s money passage: “Putin sees Clinton as a forceful proponent of ‘regime change’ policies that the Russian leader considers a grave threat to his own survival.”

Now, if you think Putin would simply let bygones be bygones and allow Hillary to float unimpeded to an expected easy victory over Trump, I have some great property in the Everglades to sell you.

It is entirely plausible, likely even, that Putin would have engineered the same beat-down on Hillary had the Republican nominee been Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, or anyone else.

But would any GOP president other than Trump have set the political and media establishments on fire with conspiracy theories? Would the swampocracy have felt similarly threatened by the election of a conventional Republican politician to the point of fabricating a collusion hoax that consumed almost two years of the Trump presidency? It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out the answer.

Then there is the matter of whether Russian meddling in our election was something unique or even extraordinary. Longtime Russia scholar Stephen Cohen - a leftist who has been trashed by his fellow travelers for daring to dismiss allegations of Trump-Russia collusion - put to rest the notion that Russian meddling in 2016 was something new or different in an interview with Liberty Nation.

“If we had an hour, we could go through all the episodes when not only did Russia, Soviet Russia particularly, interfere or meddle in our elections, in one way or another, but equally importantly, the way we meddled in their internal affairs. The historical, dramatic, shocking moment is when the Clinton Administration literally saved President Yeltsin, then president of Russia, from certain defeat in 1996 …. What some Russians did is what we and the Russians have been doing for almost a century. That is, fiddling around with the other’s politics.”

It is inarguable that the political and media establishment engaged in purposeful myopia about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Their Pavlovian anti-Trump response precluded the possibility - or likelihood - that it was aimed at taking down Hillary rather than singularly propping up Trump. And this perfectly undergirds the argument that the complicit elite media regularly concocts explosive anti-Trump narratives based on their transparent bias and need for ratings. Russiagate was their story, and they were sticking with it, come hell or high water.

This entire sordid episode foisted on the American people by the Trump-deranged left-wing political and media establishments, which all but ignored Putin’s revenge against Clinton, perfectly embodies the words so eloquently lyricized in the classic song “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel: people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.