Investigating the Russians

Yesterday's hearings on the Hill brought two of my favorite places to work, the FBI and Congress, together in the same room.  Both were true to form.  The FBI says little to nothing about on-going investigations.  Congress asks about them anyway, because they want to be seen to try, but they usually don't get anywhere with that track.  They didn't this time either.

The real link with Russia is slightly different than some of Congress wants to admit.  The Russian news outlet RT published a lengthy outline of what it considered to be U.S. State Department interference with the Russian national election, starting with communication between the Hillary Clinton-led State Department and Golos (an independent election watchdog in Russia) Executive Chief and Deputy. The RT article claims Golos was paid for violation reports, and before the investigation was finished in Russia, Hillary Clinton criticized the election results were “unfair”.  They quoted Vladimir Putin as saying “However, when financing comes to some domestic organizations which are supposedly national, but which in fact work on foreign money and perform to the music of a foreign state during electoral processes, we need to safeguard ourselves from this interference in our internal affairs and defend our sovereignty.”   As Dov Levin of the Washington Post described, Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton were not friends.  Mrs. Clinton had a long record of criticizing Putin directly, and held the most hawkish views on Russia of any of the Obama foreign policy team.  So, if Putin really believed the U.S. was interfering with Russian election processes, and he believed that the author of some of those actions was the hawk in the White House meetings, he might have sought some reciprocal action.  This is the nature of Information War.

We have yet to hear much about the real reasons for Russia's interest in our national elections, but my take on it will be slightly different than the Democratic view.