Russian interference in America's presidential election last year has been a recurring theme in left-leaning media outlets for some time now, with allegations that Russia "hacked the election" in Donald Trump's favor appearing so frequently and with such confidence that liberals no longer even think of questioning their validity.

Anyone who's been paying attention, however, will have noticed that the accusations are often vague and that the term "hacked the election" is somewhat misleading if based on the evidence so far been presented.

Indeed, and I say this as someone who strongly dislikes Trump, it's hard not to believe that the whole scandal has been deliberately manipulated by the left -- by skipping over obvious weak points in their argument and being imprecise with wording -- in order to make Trump look like a Russia agent who has somehow managed to infiltrate America's highest public office.

However, the left's accusations received a serious blow from an article published last week by Patrick Lawrence, and, perhaps not surprisingly, that blow has received extremely scant attention from places like CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, et al. What is surprising, however, and quite laudable, is that the article was published in The Nation, a well-respected liberal magazine, and picked up by very left-leaning Salon.com.

Neither has given anything close to favorable attention to Trump so far, and, indeed, both have been quite hostile towards him, thus lending the article a level of credibility it would lack if published by a more conservative outlet.

Central to the left's reasoning the election was compromised is the WikiLeaks dump of DNC files last summer. The left's argument is that WikiLeaks was working in conjunction with the Russian government and that the leak of the files was meant to harm Hillary Clinton's chances of beating Trump in the election.

What the article published by The Nation details, however, is a report that argues against this assumption put together by an independent organization of ex-intelligence officers called Veteran Intelligence Officers for Sanity (VIPS), a group formed in 2003 in response to America's invasion of Iraq and that comprises former members of the NSA and the CIA. Suffice it say that VIPS is hardly lacking in professional credibility.

The report by VIPS essentially makes two crucial points, which are based on the group's analysis of materials and files related to what has until now been called a "hack." The first is that the "hack" was actually a leak. That is, rather than someone from the outside hacking into DNC servers to obtain the files dumped by WikiLeaks, the files were, in fact, taken by someone working within the DNC.

This is based on the amount of the data that was taken and how quickly that data was downloaded. Basically, VIPS concludes that the dumped data was downloaded at a speed impossible for someone operating out of Romania to obtain (the theory until now has been that the hack came from a hacker known as Guccifer working in Romania on Russia's behalf).

Indeed, VIPS states that the data was downloaded too fast even for someone hacking the servers from within the U.S. In short, the download speeds VIPS found could only have been reached by someone taking the data directly from the server.

Also undermining the accusation that the hack/leak came from outside the U.S. is the fact that time stamps on the dumped documents show that the downloads occurred in America's eastern time zone, not in Europe.

The other pertinent conclusion reached by VIPS is that documents involved in the hack/leak were purposely altered to make them appear more Russian. This was done, according to the group, by simply copying and pasting metadata from the leaks into Word documents with Russian language settings. Why this was done and who did it is open to speculation.

This is potentially headline material, and yet most major liberal media outlets have completely ignored it. Why? One obvious theory is that the information is being willfully ignored by journalists on the left because they've already invested so much in the Russian hacking theory that it'd be a huge embarrassment to admit they'd been wrong all this time.

Whatever the case may be, a response from the left would be helpful. The Nation's article is very persuasive, but, as someone who knows nothing about the technical details of hacking, I can't say that I'm in any position to knowledgably judge its claims. However, for now, they are very persuasive.

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