Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team just indicted for election meddling 12 Russians, but are the latter the Dirty Dozen? Note that the film by that name was about 12 criminals who, though having checkered pasts, certainly brought to mind the proverb, "It's an ill wind that blows nobody good."

The Friday Mueller announcement amounts to what could be called vanity indictments. As Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz pointed out yesterday on Fox News’ The Story, Russia will never extradite the (allegedly) dirty dozen, which mean they’ll never be tried and that we likely won’t ever learn more about their complicity. Moreover, said Dershowitz, “This indictment proves that we never needed a special counsel. This indictment could have been brought by ordinary prosecutors, ordinary FBI agents; there’s no conflict here — it’s Russians they’re going after” (video below).

And going after them they are, as the Daily Mail reports:

A dozen Russian intelligence officers are facing new U.S. federal grand jury indictments alleging they hacked into American computers with the explicit intention of interfering with the 2016 presidential election.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign organization and the Democratic National Committee were targeted, including Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who announced the indictments on Friday, declined to identify him specifically.

He also said the Russian defendants infiltrated computers at U.S. state boards of election and secretaries of state, plus software suppliers whose products help election officials verify voter registration data.

Computer records related to at least 500,000 voters were stolen, but no evidence has emerged that the election itself was compromised or that the result was affected.

Rosenstein told reporters Friday that the defendants worked for the GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence agency.

One group of officers were tasked with infiltrating computers and stealing data, while another worked to distribute it through anonymous channels in the U.S.

Rosenstein also emphasized that no Americans are charged with criminality in the indictments and that, as indicated above, there’s no evidence that any votes were changed (video of his press conference below).

This accords, mind you, with what Barack Obama himself said before the 2016 election when he was asked about Russian hacking. He stated that our voting systems were secure and that the meddlers’ aim was to sow division and discord; this is why the Russians also allegedly spread anti-Trump propaganda after the election.

Our voting systems’ unassailability was emphasized pre-Nov. 8, 2016 by Hillary Clinton as well — in fact, she essentially labeled Donald Trump anti-American for suggesting that US elections could be stolen.

Yet the tune changed markedly after Clinton’s unexpected 2016 defeat. Since then, she and other Democrats have strongly implied — and perhaps occasionally stated explicitly — that the election was stolen with the help of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. This propaganda has damaged our nation, contributing to protests, violence, political rhetoric’s descent to a nadir of nastiness, and the unreasonable sense among many Americans that Trump is an illegitimate president.

In other words, in a cynical attempt to regain political power, the Democrats are creating the very division and discord that Obama said the Russians aimed to sow. Thus is it the Democrats — not Trump — who are doing Putin’s bidding.

In fact, the Democrats’ de facto public-relations team, the mainstream U.S. media, participated in fomenting this unrest despite knowing better. CNN figures were even caught on hidden camera admitting that the Trump/Russia/collusion narrative was nonsense but that they were pushing it, anyway, driven by ulterior motives (video below. Warning: foul language).

Note that this reflects an old Russian game dating back to Soviet days. As late KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov stated in a 1980s interview (below), he and his KGB comrades sought to “demoralize” Americans — and all it took was a “little push.” They’d feed destructive propaganda to sympathetic but unwitting American entities who they knew would take the ball and run with it. And, today, these domestic dupes and dopes are still using this disinformation to run the US into the ground.

But much about the foreign meddling is left unsaid because it’s contrary to the media narrative. For example, when did the hacking of the elections start? If your answer is some month in 2016, sit in the corner. It has been going on for ages; in fact, Time reported in 2013 on the staggering problem of foreign hacking of the 2012 election, efforts of which the Russians also were likely a part. Why didn’t and don’t we hear much about it?

Because with Obama having won the 2012 contest, it wasn’t needed as a vehicle through which to attack the opposition and try to regain power.

Note also that since there was no leftist need for dishonesty in this matter back then, Time would also report the truth that China is a far bigger threat than Russia.

But most glossed over by the Trump/Putin/collusion boogeyman story is what the hacking actually exposed: Democrat deception.

Through Wikileaks we learned that the Democrats and media were colluding on a scale most never imagined, engaging in KGB-level deceitfulness. “As one lifelong, rank-and-file Democrat put it on a May [2017] edition of Face the Nation, the Democratic gripe boils down to, ‘If we hadn’t been caught lying, we’d be running the country right now,’” as I reported last year.

So this is reminiscent of the 2009 “Climategate” scandal — also allegedly Russian hackers’ handiwork — in which global-warming researcher emails were obtained that showed the scientists using deception to advance climate alarmism.

So assuming the 2016 hack is the Russians’ doing, we come to the Dirty Dozen idea. Of course we should try to secure our systems to prevent cyber-intrusion, but what about when foreign meddling leads to positive outcomes? Consider: Imagine that because a thug batters a man and puts him in the hospital, we learn that, at that very moment, the man was poised to transfer national-security secrets to a hostile power. We jail the criminal, but do we lament the secondary, unintended positive outcome of his immoral action? Religious people call this God using evil for good.

Lastly, Obama was president when the cyber-intrusion occurred, and it’s the Democrats’ systems — not the Republicans’ — that were hacked. So if an onus is to be placed on a president and a party here, where does it belong? Aren’t the Democrats just complaining about the consequences of their own incompetence? In fact, given that Obama’s FBI placed a spy in the Trump campaign, perhaps he couldn’t stop the Russians because he was more focused on stopping political opponents.

The bottom line is that this whole affair has exposed collusion, by the Democrat Party and media, to shape electoral outcomes. And, now, by peddling the trump/Russia/collusion narrative and causing unrest, these left-wing entities are undermining our nation further — and are playing right into Putin’s hands.

Photo of Robert Mueller: White House