If you thought the mischaracterization of the Benghazi attack was an underhanded way to influence the 2012 election, fasten your seat belt. President Obama has a new one up his sleeve. He is so desperate to stop Vladimir Putin from releasing Hillary Clinton's deleted emails that Russia may have hacked that he is literally threatening a cyberwar against Russia if Moscow publishes them.

Wait a minute.

Now we have the spectacle of a president threatening war to keep secret emails sent by his own secretary of state on an illegal private server. He does so, not in the interest of national security, but to stop Republicans from winning the election. Not since Henry Kissinger urged South Vietnam to reject Lyndon Johnson's peace offer so Nixon could win in 1968, has there been so blatant an attempt to manipulate questions of war and peace to influence an election.

In this column, I have warned repeatedly that I believe that Putin is about to release all of Clinton's deleted emails through WikiLeaks.

This release would be devastating. It would immediately rebut Clinton's oft-repeated claim that she did not endanger national security by using her private server for classified emails. Now, Russia might show up with all of the emails -- with no redactions -- proving that her server was, indeed, hacked and that our worst enemy got all of them.

Now, as Election Day approaches, the evidence mounts that Putin may, in fact, release the 33,000 deleted emails. Democrats are blaming Russia for the hacks on former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and on campaign manager John Podesta. And, now, NBC News reports, "The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election.

"Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging 'clandestine' cyber operation designed to harass and 'embarrass' the Kremlin leadership."

Domestically, the Democrats are trying to spread the notion, through their media allies, that Trump and Putin are an item, despite the fact that it was Bill Clinton who got hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Russian corporations, allegedly to get his wife to approve the sale of uranium to Moscow.

Their hope is that the issue of hacking and of Russian intervention in the U.S. election will overshadow either the content of the deleted emails or the fact that they ended up in Russian hands.

Are there any lengths to which Obama won't go to influence the election? And this brinksmanship with Russia comes at a time when Hillary Clinton is accusing Donald Trump of being trigger happy with nuclear weapons. Well, President Obama has just triggered the most serious confrontation with Russia since the Cuban missile crisis in order to win an election.

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