Center for Security Policy Executive Vice President Jim Hanson discussed with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily claims that Russian hackers influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
A deeply skeptical Hanson said there was “not a bit” of evidence Russia had anything to do with the election results. He found it “comical” that “all the news outlets on the Left – which is basically all the news outlets except you guys,” he said, “have been claiming that the CIA is completely averse to the politicization of intelligence.”
“I don’t think anything could be further from the truth,” Hanson said. “There is hardly – other than, say, the Democrats in Congress – a more politically oriented organization in government than the CIA. It’s horrible. I mean, there are people who have left that place because they couldn’t do their jobs when they were being told to skew intelligence toward preconceived notions. This is a perfect example of that.”
“And then you’ve got career intelligence officials who are leaking to the Democrats and saying things like, ‘The Russians did this to help Trump,’” he continued. “You can tell politicized intelligence immediately when they attribute motive to someone, rather than actions. Because the last thing you can tell, the hardest piece of intelligence, is to tell why something happened. You can tell what happened. You can say the results of what happened. When you say someone did something because of this, or for this reason, you’re projecting your thoughts into their heads, and that’s not possible. So it’s kind of a joke.”
Marlow said the media were trying to “brand it as a black-and-white situation where Donald Trump equals Putin, equals fascism, equals dictatorship, equals totalitarianism,” while “Hillary Clinton equals virtuous, equals Democrats, equals wonderful.”
“That’s painful to even listen to, the second half of that,” Hanson said with a laugh. “Whatever you think of the first half, which was pretty much garbage, the second half is Hillary was quite possibly the most dangerous thing that could have happened to the United States, if she had become our leader. Trump, at least, gives us the opportunity now to go ahead and have an actual reset, where we act like the superpower we are, where we hold accountable these leaders like Putin. There’s no way Hillary could make a deal with Putin, where Trump can stand across the table from him, look him in the eye, and not kowtow, not bow down like Obama did, and actually go ahead and be the big dog in the world arena.”
“So the idea that the Russians somehow are going to be advantaged by having Trump in office is kind of absurd on the face of it. Trump is not going to give them what they want. He’s going to make deals with them that advantage the United States. I’m pretty sure that’s what I want him to do,” Hanson said.
“Here’s the thing: all government agencies, to some extent or other, bend towards the liberal because they are unionized statist operations,” he declared. “Even though you would think that places like the Department of Defense, or the CIA and other places like that, might be lairs of hardcore knuckle-dragging right-wingers, it would shock most people to know just how liberal the career bureaucrats are. It’s one of those things where they support each other, they self-support, they use the rules to their advantage, and they’ve carved out – in the same way they’ve carved out academia and the media – enclaves of liberal thought in places that they certainly don’t belong.”
“Whether they belong in media is one thing. They definitely don’t belong in our national security apparatus,” said Hanson. “The CIA has been doing exactly this kind of skewing of intelligence towards the liberal viewpoint for so long that we’ve never been able to trust what comes out of that building. It’s a shame because you cannot have a safe country, you cannot have a good security policy, if the information you base it on doesn’t come in an unbiased fashion.”
Marlow made the case that the information about Hillary Clinton, her close associates, and the Democratic National Committee revealed by WikiLeaks was so important that many readers did not care precisely how it was obtained, provided it was valid.
“Here’s the thing: I think it’s funny that John Podesta, the political tool from Hillary’s campaign, whose emails showed all of this corruption, immediately claimed in internal communications that he had lost his cell phone, and that was the problem,” Hanson said. “It wasn’t until later, when the Hillary campaign needed an issue to rally people around, that they started claiming that ‘Oh, my God, the Russians hacked us, and this is just some nefarious plot to get Trump elected.’ So to turn what was probably just a simple case of a guy losing his phone, and whoever got ahold of it, and however WikiLeaks got the information – like you said, the information itself was what mattered.”
Hanson said the ground rules in Democrat media are, “If it’s going to be damaging to Republicans, then the source doesn’t matter. If it’s damaging to Democrats, then the source matters and the information doesn’t.”
“Well, no, you can’t have it both ways. If the information’s accurate, and it happens to be damaging because it tells the truth about your criminally corrupt candidate, tough beans. Suck it up,” he said. “And whether the Russians did that – which does not seem to have been proved in any way – or whether they got the information to the WikiLeaks outlet or someone else did, it hurt Hillary because Hillary was a bad and criminally corrupt candidate.”
Marlow said he was surprised to see former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, potentially a member of the new Trump administration, say the Russian hacking claims “could actually be a false flag,” and asking why Russian hackers would have left their “fingerprints” all over such a politically explosive project, instead of “doing it in a way that no one would have known it was them.”
“I worked in cybersecurity, specifically software design to protect information, for a while,” Hanson said. “The bottom line is, the most difficult thing to do in cybersecurity is cyber-forensics: tracing the trail of how information moved around the Internet – because it’s insanely complicated, and like you said, any marginally competent hacker can make it look like some nice lady in Des Moines, Iowa, whose computer they took over was the one doing the bad deed. So I think it’s fair to say that if it’s patently obvious to someone that the Russians did this, you can ask the question: why then is it so patently obvious? There’s no way in any meaningful way that you can say, ‘I can definitively prove that the Russians did this,’ the Russians being one entity because they use cutouts – they use criminal gangs, they use Ukrainian and people located in other areas to do a lot of their dirty work.”
He repeated his skepticism that anyone could both isolate Russia as the entity behind such a hacking operation and also attribute a specific motive or goal to them.
“That is simply projecting onto the facts a set of conclusions that the facts don’t support,” Hanson said.
He predicted the media would “continue flogging it for whatever they can get out of it,” and indulged in a little “projection” himself to say their objective was to “delegitimize the Trump administration.”
“In the same way they’re pretending that somehow the popular vote – which is not how we elect presidents – matters, they are pretending now that because the Russians put out information that damaged Hillary, whether the Russians did or not, that this means Trump should not be president,” he said. “Well, no. The public voted. The Electoral College will put Mr. Trump into office as president. And the Russians, to whatever extent they had any involvement, showed that Hillary was who Hillary is, and, therefore, should not be president.”
“We should all be thankful that she’s not,” Hanson advised. “Move on. Be happy on January 20 that the Obamas are moving out of town, and that however many Trumps move into the White House move into the White House – because that’s a good thing.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
LISTEN:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.