If this sounds like something out of an HBO comedy show, it is because it is directly following the script of the hit series VEEP which Hillary Clinton has said that she is a big fan of.

US officials are discussing whether to impose sanctions against Russia in the wake of a WikiLeaks release of DNC files that exposed a complex scheme between Hillary Clinton’s campaign, top DNC officials and major corporate media outlets to subvert the 2016 Democratic primary process in an effort to undercut the electoral chances of insurgent progressive firebrand Bernie Sanders.

The revelations, which struck on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, led to an immediate uproar by the public who long believed that the DNC had been putting its thumb on the scale to benefit the former Secretary of State but in the aftermath of the leak it appears the Clinton campaign has benefitted from the revelations of potential electoral fraud after concocting an outlandish theory out of a poorly written Cold War spy novel – "it was the Russians!"

This charge was first leveled by Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, but were quickly adopted by the former Secretary of State herself who said that "we know it was the Russians" with constant references to so-called evidence that still has not seen the light of day.

RT’s Gayane Chichakyan explains that the so-called evidence of “Russian hacking” of the DNC servers, itself far from ironclad, does not actually extend to the WikiLeaks documents but instead is traced to a separate, much smaller leak by somebody identifying themselves as "Guccifer 2.0" who has posted documents with metadata intact on an easily traceable WordPress website that hardly appears to be the work of a Russian intelligence agency or any professional spy organization for that matter.

​The Democratic Party does acknowledge that it has been subjected to hacking efforts by multiple actors including both governmental actors and cyber lone-wolves while additionally claiming that it has been aware that its system was breached "by the Russians" for over a year – itself a questionable claim, if Russia were behind it, because the documents trace to several months ago and it seems unlikely that they would not have first removed known hackers before sending each other incriminating emails.

Also, given that the DNC server was described to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as having more holes than "Swiss cheese" and with the Party itself confirming that it was victim to multiple additional system penetrations with information released in at least two separate formats, the evidence to support the allegations that Russia is WikiLeaks’ source does not actually exist.

Instead, the media has conflated the fact that somebody who is presumably of Russian origin hacked the DNC roughly a year ago with entirely separate matter of the leak of information to WikiLeaks without actually developing an evidentiary chain between these two incidents.

Of course, this narrative is not only from a Russian spy novel, it was also precisely what occurred on the HBO comedy series Veep when fictitious President Selina Meyer falsely accused China of hacking her Twitter account and called for sanctions against Beijing to explain away a racy Tweet that the technologically challenged character had inadvertently posted. Hillary is reportedly a fan of the series.