A casual observer who watches only mainstream-media news coverage might reasonably conclude that American elections are in grave danger from external hackers, that the principal source of such hackers is Russia, and that the principal beneficiary of such election hacking is Donald Trump. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no evidence that Russian hackers changed the vote count on election day. In fact, this is not even the claim, which is that Russia was responsible for the leaked DNC e-mails and manipulated social media on behalf of Trump. That said, American elections have had integrity problems having absolutely nothing to do with foreign intervention, but these election frauds have been known for years.

So the question is, “Why the sudden controversy regarding elections, and why is the sudden media attention mistakenly focusing on outside hackers while ignoring the greater danger of the inside job in election fraud?”

Much of the current Russian hacker controversy can be traced to the 2016 presidential campaign trail, when candidate Donald Trump was making a facetious point regarding Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s careless lack of proper safeguarding of classified information on her e-mail servers. Responding to charges from Clinton and the media that he is chummy with Putin, Trump, during a nationally televised campaign address, asked in frustration: “What would I have to get involved with Putin for? I have nothing to do with Putin. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know anything about him.” Then, in what was obviously a facetious dig not only at Hillary Clinton but also at President Barack Obama and the FBI/DOJ, which were supposed to be investigating Hillary’s e-mail scandal (but were instead giving her a free pass), candidate Trump said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

The Clinton campaign immediately feigned outrage and charged that Trump’s sarcastic comment was itself proof of collusion with Russia. “This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent,” the Clinton campaign said in a widely quoted press statement. Wolf Blitzer and Jim Acosta, two of CNN’s anti-Trump commentators, immediately called the Trump comment “astonishing” and “jaw-dropping,” giving credence to Team Clinton’s spin on the matter. The New York Times, PBS, and the rest of the establishment media, likewise, took what was clearly a mocking comment and transformed it into a treasonous comment.

The Russian Hacker Conspiracy

On multiple occasions during the election cycle, Hillary repeated the accusation that the Russians were conspiring to aid Trump. Then when Trump won the election, virtually every major-media personality glommed onto the claim, doing their utmost to discredit Trump’s victory and set him up for impeachment. But the entire theory verges on inanity.

The “Russian interference” meme regarding the 2016 presidential elections is actually a tangled complex of wild conspiracy theories by the same folks who regularly deride conspiracy facts as “crazy conspiracy theory.” The most ludicrous and easily disprovable claim of Russian hacking and Russian collusion is the charge that Russians somehow hacked our voting machines and changed votes across the country. There has been no evidence offered to show this has happened. For this to have happened nationwide, with the many types of voting system technologies, it would have to have involved a major conspiracy. The accusers need to present evidence.

Though it is possible that some voting equipment has Internet access, either wireless or by direct electrical connection, during the voting or the processing of election results before the results are made public, allowing hacking, it’s not only unlikely, but such questions do not appear to have been answered.

The more common charge by the Democrats and their media allies is that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign servers and then disseminated the dirt they found to WikiLeaks, which in turn disseminated it to the American public. First of all, that theory has been totally debunked by some of the most noted technical analysts, including former top NSA analyst Dr. William Binney. These experts point out that according to the technical data, the DNC data was not “hacked” and downloaded via the Internet, but was physically downloaded onto an external device, such as a USB memory stick or thumb drive. That means someone on the DNC staff with access to the data did it. And this is what WikiLeaks has claimed, that they were given the material by a source at the DNC. Thus, the source was an internal leak, not a Russian hack.

It certainly should be noted, however, that the WikiLeaks accusations, along with the information that Hillary Clinton illegally used her personal Web server for classified State Department business — despite previously signing two disclosures that made clear such behavior was illegal and a major national security risk — were all true. Those revelations were so devastating that Clinton and her media collaborators knew that the best damage-control strategy would be to shift attention away from the damning facts exposed by the leaks to false charges about how the evidence was obtained: by Russian hacking. The second part of the strategy was then to link the Russian hacking to her opponent, Donald Trump.

The Russian hacker conspiracy theory positing that Russians hacked the U.S. election to aid Donald Trump lacks credibility in many ways, not the least of which is motive. Why would the Russians enter into a conspiracy with Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton when the Russians were beneficiaries of such sweetheart deals as Uranium One and the transfers of U.S. technology to help Vladimir Putin build Skolkovo, Russia’s version of America’s high-tech Silicon Valley?

As a brief refresher, Uranium One is the incredible deal in which the Obama administration — with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a lead player — sold 20-25 percent of U.S. uranium mining reserves to Putin’s Rosatom, the Russian state-owned atomic energy company, in 2010. Talk about national security and treason implications! This Obama-Clinton “Uraniumgate” scandal surely fills the bill. It may be topped by Skolkovo, however. Skolkovo is Putin’s prize hi-tech showpiece, his version of Silicon Valley. Disregarding warnings from the FBI and other intelligence agencies that the Skolkovo project presented national security threats to the United States, Clinton and Obama approved and promoted the transfer of prime technology from Cisco Systems, Boeing, Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and other U.S. tech giants to this strategic Kremlin program.

Further, even the left-wing New York Times admitted in a long article on September 20, entitled “The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far,” which is meant to paint Trump as guilty (yet lacks proof of virtually everything it claims to be true), that it is believed that fewer than 100 Russian spammers posed as Americans and sent messages to Facebook or designed websites to encourage people to vote for Trump. The fact is that it just is not realistic that those 100 spammers influenced the public to any appreciable extent. The left-wing Columbia Journalism Review put the numbers into perspective in its article “Don’t Blame the Election on Fake News. Blame It on the Media”:

A New York Times story reported that Facebook identified more than 3,000 ads purchased by fake accounts traced to Russian sources, which generated over $100,000 in advertising revenue. But Facebook’s advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 was $8.8 billion, or $96 million per day. All together, the fake ads accounted for roughly 0.1 percent of Facebook’s daily advertising revenue. The 2016 BuzzFeed report that received so much attention claimed that the top 20 fake news stories on Facebook “generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments” between August 1 and Election Day. Again, this sounds like a large number until it’s put into perspective: Facebook had well over 1.5 billion active monthly users in 2016. If each user took only a single action per day on average (likely an underestimate), then throughout those 100 days prior to the election, the 20 stories in BuzzFeed’s study would have accounted for only 0.006 percent of user actions.

Even recent claims that the “real” numbers were much higher than initially reported do not change the basic imbalance. For example, an October 3 New York Times story reported that “Russian agents … disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service.” Big numbers indeed, but several paragraphs later the authors conceded that over the same period Facebook users were exposed to 11 trillion posts — roughly 87,000 for every fake exposure — while on Twitter the Russian-linked election tweets represented less than 0.75 percent of all election-related tweets. On YouTube, meanwhile, the total number of views of fake Russian videos was around 309,000 — compared to the five billion YouTube videos that are watched every day.

Moreover, Columbia Journalism Review pointed out that large left-wing media dominate social-media posts, so their views would have easily overwhelmed posts by Russian spammers.

Even the New York Times noted in its September 20 article, “Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money.”

Interestingly, even while Donald Trump was being accused of being a puppet of President Putin by Hillary and the left-wing media, most big-name media chastised Donald Trump for a comment he made in a debate with Hillary Clinton in which he wouldn’t come right and out say that he would immediately concede defeat if the vote count didn’t go his way, because he worried that there might be lots of vote fraud.

Mainstream Media Does a Flip-flop

During the campaign, Donald Trump was derided when he mentioned his suspicions that the election might be rigged. He cited, for example, statistics that showed there are millions of voters on the rolls who should not be registered to vote. Negative media coverage about Donald Trump’s concerns of electoral fraud hit a crescendo during and shortly after the Third Presidential Debate. When asked in the debate on October 19, 2016 if he would accept the results of the election, rather than contest them, Trump said: “I will look at it at the time.”

Fox News’ Chris Wallace, who should have been impartial, grilled Donald Trump, saying:

But, but sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?

Hillary Clinton jumped on the bandwagon:

That is not the way our democracy [sic] works. We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.

… He is denigrating, he is talking down our democracy [sic] and I, for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.

President Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch also joined the chorus, as reported by the Wall Street Journal for October 21, 2016:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, speaking to reporters in Italy, said that “we don’t see [ballot fraud] as an actual threat.”

Mr. Obama, speaking at a Clinton rally in Miami, ridiculed Mr. Trump and then asked the crowd to stop laughing. “When you suggest rigging or fraud without a shred of evidence, that is not a joking matter. That is dangerous.” He said, “When you try to sow the seeds of doubt in people’s minds about the legitimacy of our elections, that undermines our democracy [sic].”

While Donald Trump was castigated by the political Left for bringing up the topic of election fraud (though he presented evidence that it takes place), Hillary Clinton and media personalities have claimed continually since her election loss that Russia hacked the election to elect Trump (without a shred of credible proof that the Russians actually affected the election results), and the claim has been treated as gospel. It’s a blatant double standard and complete hypocrisy, hence why more and more of the public doesn’t believe politicians, the major networks, and news publications.

Real Dangers to Our Elections

Just because there is no evidence damning Trump’s electioneering in the last election, doesn’t mean that all U.S. elections are aboveboard affairs. American election safeguards have experienced erosion in such areas as reducing or eliminating public access to witness the process, voter registration lists being inaccurate, same-day voter registration, lack of a paper trail in the ballots, elimination of precincts in favor of voting by mail, early voting, not making precinct-level election results public immediately, and not counting the absentee ballots in public at the proper precinct.

On August 16, Direct Action Texas, a group that strives to clean up voter rolls, announced that 280,000 legal-resident, non-citizens in Texas are illegally registered to vote. And four million registered voters in Texas cannot be verified in the database of the Texas Department of Public Safety databases, as is required by law, or by other government databases. That’s 30 percent of all registered voters in the state. It is likely that a large number of those registered are illegal immigrants.

Photo: GettyImagesPlus

This article appears in the October 22, 2018, issue of The New American.