John Podeta in his own words.
John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, suggested Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was indeed “personally involved” in the election email hacks because Russia wanted Donald Trump as its “lap dog” in the White House.
“Russia clearly intervened,” Podesta said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in a series of carefully worded responses about who was behind the hacked emails and their impact on Clinton’s losing campaign.
Podesta’s “lap dog” comment was an apparent reference to New York Times op-ed columist Nicholas Kristof implying Saturday in the paper that Trump would be a “lap dog — a Russian poodle.”
Podesta, whose personal email account was hacked, also said Sunday that he has been contacted by the FBI only once about the ordeal, two days after WikiLeaks began publishing on Oct. 7 the trove of electronic messages.
He said that “NBC revealed that Putin was personally involved” and that the “CIA, FBI and (Director of National Intelligence James Clapper) all agree that the Russians did it to help Trump.”
I haven’t watched the interview since I don’t watch the MSM in any capacity whatsoever. But I’m willing to bet that the interviewer didn’t challenge him on the lie he told. The FIB and the ODNI have certainly not said any such thing.
Meanwhile, much of the media has ignored the rather salient fact that the FBI is by no means in agreement with the anonymous and secret CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the election in order to help elect Donald Trump.
Nor, for that matter, is the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI), which has declined to endorse the CIA report. This is perhaps less surprising than it first might seem, considering that as recently as November 17 ODNI Director James Clapper testified before the House Intelligence Committee and acknowledged that “as far as the WikiLeaks connection, the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided.”
See also a Fox News report. The national intelligence community has said the opposite of what Podesta claimed they said. Furthermore, as we’ve discussed before, the CIA is alone in this assessment and lacks the reputation to say such things. No reputable party is asserting that the emails given to Wikileaks came from anywhere but insider leaks.
John Podesta is a bitter clinger, we must conclude. But consider for a moment what he wants you to believe. He wants you to believe that release of his emails, by whatever method at all, caused the American public to reject the Clinton campaign because of its nefarious contents, and therefore that those contents should never have been released.
