This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Oops. Did President Barack Obama acknowledge that the extraordinary propaganda campaign to blame Russia for helping President-elect Donald Trump become president has more holes in it than a sieve?
Eloquent obfuscation has been the name of the game, but inadvertent admissions are dispelling some of the clouds.
Does the Russian government hack? Of course. Did it hack the emails of the Democratic National Committee? Yes, almost certainly. If Russian intelligence did not do so, this alone would constitute gross misfeasance, and its heads' heads should roll -- the more so, since the DNC was such easy pickings.
But that is not the question.
The Missing Link
It was WikiLeaks that published the very damaging information, for example, on the DNC's dirty tricks that marginalized Bernie Sanders and ensured that Mrs. Clinton would win the Democratic nomination. What remains to be demonstrated is that it was "the Russians" who gave those very damaging emails to WikiLeaks -- QED, as we used to scribble beneath the proof of a theorem in geometry.
At President Obama's January 18 press conference, he admitted, "the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked." [Emphasis added}
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).