It is happening again. It will continue to happen again. And the administration* and its pet majority in the U.S. Senate doesn’t give a damn whether it happens again or not. From The New York Times:

The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States. It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.

Whoa, there, Gray Lady. Slow your roll just a bit. It is true that the Russian ratfckers built up an infrastructure on the Intertoobz to amplify their mischief, and it’s true that this country’s tech giants were complicit in the construction and maintenance of that infrastructure. However, the ratfcking wouldn’t have been half as successful as it was if our mainstream media hadn’t a) lapped a lot of its product up like mother’s milk and b) cleared the decks for it by three decades of believing anything belched up from the netherworld as long as it was critical of the Clintons, an exercise which reached its apex with the But-Her-Emails hootenanny that ran for over two years. They built an echo chamber for sure, but they also hijacked one that already existed, and I guarantee you the head ratfckers knew that. They knew the ground on which they worked better than the people who prepare it did. And it’s happening again.

This story is at least a flare in the darkness. If and when the ratfckers strike—and they will, truth be damned—the story may be the provenance of the information, and not whatever the usual suspects over here can make of it. The whole Burisma head-fake is about constructing a defense against the president*’s obvious abuses of power as regards the Ukrainian government. Ratfckers hold hands around the world. At least we know that this time around.



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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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