In late 2016, Obama was angry.
Oh, not about the election of Donald Trump, of course, if his public statements were any indication.
He was supposedly angry, so angry, at Russia and its supposed interference in our 2016 election that he got out his pen and phone and expelled 35 Russian diplomats.
Here is what the New York Times reported:
WASHINGTON — President Obama struck back at Russia on Thursday for its efforts to influence the 2016 election, ejecting 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposing sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services.
The administration also penalized four top officers of one of those services, the powerful military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U.
Intelligence agencies have concluded that the G.R.U. ordered the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations, with the approval of the Kremlin, and ultimately enabled the publication of the emails it harvested to benefit Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
The Hill reported that it was quite an array of sanctions at the time:
The measures include a slate of economic sanctions, diplomatic censure, and public “naming and shaming.” The president also hinted at possible covert cyber measures but did not provide details.
The president also announced that the State Department will expel 35 Russian intelligence operatives and shutter two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used by Russia for intelligence purposes.
The Times added:
Taken together, the sweeping actions announced by the White House, the Treasury, the State Department and intelligence agencies on Thursday amount to the strongest American response yet to a state-sponsored cyberattack. They also appeared intended to box in President-elect Trump, who will now have to decide whether to lift the sanctions on Russian intelligence agencies when he takes office next month.
Obama even amended his own executive order to extend his powers to sanction, with travel bans and asset freezes on some Russian officials.
Just one problem: The Russians didn’t do what the embittered Democrats claimed they were doing — to Get Trump.
Nothing. They didn’t hack the DNC and they didn’t collude with Donald Trump to get him elected to the presidency. The charges, the expropriations, the sanctions — were all for innocent people. Even the Russian state was innocent.
That was what Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse found buried at the bottom of the Durham report.
Sundance laid it out with these details:
♦ First, John Durham clearly shows in his 306-page report with a 48-page classified appendix, that Russia did nothing to interfere in the 2016 election. The entire Russian Interference operation was a Clinton fabrication, later enhanced by a Federal Bureau of Investigation who used the fabrication as a cover-up justification to hide their surveillance of the Trump campaign.
♦ Second, accepting the empirical, factual, and inherently true reality of the first point – consider that President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats to retain the Clinton fabrication and FBI lies. Think about this one carefully, the Obama administration expelled Russian diplomats in order to retain a domestic political ruse! President Obama did this *after* CIA Director John Brennan briefed him about the Clinton fabrication.
There were no Russian diplomats involved; there was no Russian election interference; there was no Russian hacking of the DNC; it was all a fraud created by the intelligence community (IC), FBI and Main Justice to support Hillary Clinton’s lies and then cover their own targeting tracks.
♦ Third, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, with the full support of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, indicted 14 Russian entities under completely bogus pretenses. All of that effort was done to assist the Clinton narrative, cover for Obama and then use the special counsel to cover up the Trump targeting operation. The totally bogus construct explains why the fabricated indictments were sealed in the DOJ National Security Division in perpetuity, thereby keeping the fraudulent construct hidden from public review forever.
So Obama’s wrath was nothing but a fiction to protect the partisan Democrat narrative that they had been promoting about Trump and the Russians, which originated from the embittered political camp of losing Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.
How would you feel about that if you were a Russian, especially now, reading that it was all a political hoax with you the one chosen to be the whipping boy? You got sanctioned, you got kicked out, you got travel bans, you incurred costs, and some “name and shame” all based on lies.
Might you start thinking of the U.S. as kind of a sleazy, dishonest player on the world scene? Would you have problems trusting them? Might you step up your activities against it? It would seem natural.
The Russians, remember, had already calculated by their own devices that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election and the Kremlin was planning for that, so they were as surprised as anyone that the American voters thought otherwise when the election results came in in November 2016.
That they were blamed for the result and sanctioned for hacking and colluding they didn’t do, and knew they didn’t do, and knew that Obama knew they didn’t do, surely must have made them angry.
Russian President Vladimir Putin initially adopted a wait-and-see attitude to see if Trump would set things back to rights, but by March of 2017, three months into his term, Trump had appointed Democrat ally Fiona Hill to be his Russia advisor, and although she was smart enough to generally pooh-pooh the Russia collusion claims in her statements, apparently nothing was done to restore the Russia relations after Obama’s partisan fit of pique at Russia’s expense.
Net result: By May, Putin expelled 755 American diplomats and staff and expropriated two American properties in retaliation. That was to get the numbers of embassy personnel even, as the U.S had a much bigger official diplomatic presence in Russia than the Russians had in the U.S. That certainly didn’t serve U.S. interests to say the least, given that the U.S. must have had a much bigger spy operation going on against Russia than Russia did against the U.S., or, at the least official one which seems most likely.
In other words, how did it serve U.S. interests to falsely accuse and sanction Russia for something it didn’t do?
Stuff like that makes countries mad, and fosters considerable distrust. Was that in the U.S. interest? Did that raise our standing and reputation in the world or did it contribute to emerging problems? The Russians were remarkably patient for a while as the accusations were leveled but the lies kept coming and then things got ugly.
It’s horrible stuff when we consider the bigger picture, and the picture we see today. Right now, the U.S. and Russia are in a proxy war against one another over Ukraine, with several hideous sideshows involving cowardly and let-the-Americans-do-it allies, as well as huge amounts of money spent at a time of high inflation with little accountability. Our military readiness has been affected just on the supply front. There are odd fires at U.S. food factories over here even as we read reports of strikes at strategic assets inside Russia. The Nordstream II gas pipeline somehow got blown up and somehow nobody knows who did it.
And as this unwelcome, unpopular, and costly entanglement with Russia goes on, China is on the rise, with increasingly aggressive actions amid reports out there that they could beat us in a shooting war. Another inconvenient development: Russia has allied with China.
The worst of this is that it need never have happened. Foreign policy should always be off limits to partisan disputes, but apparently not by Obama. Relations with Russia could have been good and ties friendly. Russia could have advanced economically and moved closer to the West had these sleazy Obama fictions never happened.
Russia has always been torn between leaning east or leaning west, and for most of the 21st century has leaned westward. Keeping Russia friendly to the U.S. would have been a boon for keeping China in check and Russia peaceable. Instead, the Russians were a convenient target for abuse by Democrats and were thrown to the wolves, all to promote the lie that Democrats were “victims” of Russian machinations instead of simply rejected by U.S. voters for their utterly repellent agenda.
That’s been an expensive lie for us in the aftermath because any smart superpower should go out of its way to keep as many friends as it can, especially among the those with nuclear weapons. Making Russia an enemy for nothing more than partisan political purposes is not the act of someone who represents America. It’s the act of a community organizer, a partisan political hack, a creep who shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of power, owing to an inability to distinguish the national interest from the partisan interest.
That’s the old Obama we know however, and now he’s disgraced us on the world stage as a dishonest sleazeball country, not a nation founded on fairness and democracy. His act and the acts of the Deep State were not only detrimental to democracy here, they were very detrimental to foreign policy abroad. False charges open the door to harsher spying, retaliation, and belligerent actions. It was yellow journalism and other schemings on the American side that got us into the Spanish-American war of 1898 when Spain was baselessly blamed for blowing up an American ship in the Caribbean. Any questions as to why Brittney Griner got such a harsh sentence for such a piddly crime in Russia? Or why a young Wall Street Journal reporter sits in some Russian prison on phony espionage charges? What on earth do the Russians think? And how can anyone fail to understand them at least for whatever they are doing with this blotch on our nation’s record? Who started this garbage? How do the decent among us make it right?