American Amnesia: When Barry and Hillary interfered in Russian, Israeli, and British Elections
Hillary Clinton once famously called for a “full investigation” of the Russian electoral system in the wake of that nation’s 2011 parliamentary (Duma) contests.
Why an American Secretary of State would find it right and proper to interject him or herself into the election procedures of Mat’ Rossiya is still hotly debated. Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton did.
Amazingly enough, while the American liberal media is still pouting and holding their breath regarding the still unproven charge of Russian hacking of the DNC, the same media seems to have quite the memory lapse when it comes to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton interfering with other people’s elections.
Case in point: Putin’s charge of US interference and subsequent orchestration of street protests against the valid and legitimate elected government. As reported by the Brookings Institute;
But why would Putin even want to influence the U.S. presidential election? There are several reasons Russia might want stir up trouble in an already contentious campaign. Russian views of the United States are at a low point; Putin believes the U.S. plays its own nefarious games in Russian politics; and Moscow would like to undermine U.S. international credibility by highlighting the deficiencies in American party politics.
As far as Putin and his inner circle are concerned, it was the United States that moved first to meddle in Russian politics when Putin decided to return for a third term. In 2011-’12, Russian demonstrators took to the streets to protest electoral violations in the parliamentary elections and the lack of alternative candidates to Putin in the presidential election. Putin and his inner circle believed the U.S. was to blame. Putin even asserted that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had either incited or directly financed the demonstrations.
That might at least partially explain for the “misplaced” $6 billion from the State Department coffers during Clinton’s tenure.
But I digress. Unless reminded, most Americans have already forgotten the Obama-Clinton tag team attempt to depose Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in the 2015 elections. As reported by the Washington Times;
The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.
Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a bipartisan staff report.
In one stunning finding, the subcommittee said OneVoice even told the State Department’s top diplomat in Jerusalem of its plans in an email, but the official, Consul General Michael Ratney, claims never to have seen them.
And who could forget Obama’s none-too-subtle threat during the Brexit referendum? Remember the warning of “the UK’s gonna be in the back of the queue” if the British people should be stupid enough not to see his blinding brilliance?
As noted (as only an Englishman can) at the time by Tim Montgomerie of London’s The Spectator magazine;
Nobody could describe Donald Trump as lacking in self-confidence, but the billionaire egomaniac is emotional jelly compared with King Barack. Even before he won the Nobel peace prize, Obama was telling America that his elevation to the presidency would be remembered as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow’. He doesn’t have Mr Trump’s gold-plated helicopter, private jet, penthouse and yacht. But when it comes to self-reverence and sheer hauteur there is no one to beat him.
Someone who believes his political personality can reverse global warming will have no doubts about his ability to persuade the British people to stay in the European Union. Just a few of his mellifluous sentences and a flash of those teeth and surely the British people will go weak at the knees! The polls show that Britain is split on the EU, so King Barack will come and help the nation resolve its indecision — to the delight of David Cameron and George Osborne.
The timing of his visit, halfway through the EU referendum debate, is no accident. There is a longstanding international understanding that world leaders don’t visit during election campaigns — but such conventions were obviously designed for lesser mortals. Obama has no qualms and the Prime Minister has no shame: he needs every endorsement he can get. The Chancellor is pulling all the strings he can so the likes of the IMF’s Christine Lagarde ask us to stay in. Short of engineering a Second Coming, a visitation from King Barack is to their minds the best plug imaginable.
