Stonefaced Shutdown

On the same day that Trump confidante and Nixon apologist Roger Stone was arrested and charged by Robert Mueller's investigation with lying about the nature of his involvement in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, Trump himself was forced to end the government shutdown after five weeks and agree to the same deal he rejected at the last minute back in December to keep the government open.  This happened as FBI Director Christopher Wray was expressing outright anger over the shutdown and the impact it was having on his agency even as FBI agents were . . . arresting Roger Stone in Florida.

Stone apparently was more active than he has been willing to admit in exposing e-mails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) regarding Hillary Clinton's campaign after WikiLeaks found that the DNC had a cut-rate firewall and hacked some very damaging attitudes from Hillary and her campaign toward Catholic voters, Wall Street, her wimp-out on single-payer health care,  and just about everything else.  Stone was apparently vigorous in pursuing of Russian-hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election bid.  He was allegedly very active in talking with Julian Assange, the director of WikiLeaks - which may or may not be a Russian front - in getting the material released in a timely  matter so it could be leveraged against the Clinton campaign.  Then he tried to tamper with a witness, a talk-radio host, to keep him from telling the truth to Mueller about the nature of the conversations that had over WikiLeaks.

Does your head hurt yet?

While there is no accusation toward Trump of colluding with the Russians, it's clear that Stone was deeply involved in manipulating sensitive information to ensure a Trump victory (although the Democrats helped by nominating Hillary).  It won't be long before Trump is implicated. 

Oh yeah, the 2020 presidential election.  Bernie Sanders is running, and Beto O'Rourke won't decide for several months.  Never mind, Beto.  I'm taking a serious look at Colorado senator and rumored presidential candidate Michael Bennet . . .    

From Russia With Love

Okay, all of those Hillary fans blaming Russian hackers for their candidate's loss to Donald Trump may have a case . . . 

The Washington Post just reported that the CIA suspects that agents in the Russian government may have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee computer and, for the purpose of getting Vladimir Putin's man Trump in the White House, providing WikiLeaks all those embarrassing e-mails showing a cynical, jaded Democratic establishment trying, ironically, to manipulate the campaign.  I haven't heard anything about voting machines being hacked, but this story of possible manipulation of information designed to implicitly help is a disturbingly new spin on an old story.

Russia also hacked the Republican National Committee computer, according to the CIA, but withheld its embarrassing e-mails so as not to help Hillary.  Julian Assange, meanwhile, says WikiLeaks did not act in concert with the Russians to produce those e-mails.    

Although Trump - now famous for not receiving most intelligence briefings as President-elect - doesn't buy the CIA's charges, two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer of New York and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have called for an investigation into the charges.  McCain has cited past attempts by the Russians to manipulate elections in other Western countries and says that the integrity of our own elections is at stake.  President Obama has launched an investigation as well, which may or may not be completed by January 20.

I only hope that once they do that, someone starts investigation the rigging of the Democratic primaries.    

Some people are already calling for a do-over of the election.  Can we have a do-over of the nominations while we're at it?