Bill's Depressed, Comey's Confused, Democrats Blame Russia, Putin Says 'Not Me,' but We Know Hillary Did It All by Herself

President Obama is becoming more "hawkish" in his last days in office, and it makes sense if we remember that he's passing any trouble he causes on to his successor, President Trump. The most outlandish of Obama's hotshots, if we accept the NBC News version, is that "President Barack Obama reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in October that directly interfering with the US election could result in an "armed conflict." According to NBC News, Obama sent the message when he was using the red phone to contact Moscow directly ' -- the red phone is not an actual telephone, but instead sends a secure online message between the two countries. Part of Obama's October 31 message to Vladimir Putin was : "International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace. We will hold Russia to those standards." NBC reports that one of Obama's senior advisors allegedly told the President months ago that he should use the phrase "act of war" when it came to Russia's alleged meddling in the presidential election. Obama declined to use that term when the two leaders met at the September G-20 summit in China, instead telling Putin he should "cut it out," in reference to any election-hacking activities. NBC connects Russia's alleged hacking with the release of stolen emails from Democrats, but WikiLeaks -- the organization responsible for making much of the material public -- has denied Russia was behind the theft. As one commenter wrote online, Obama's "cut it out" surely "had Vlad shaking in his boots." So, Obama's escalation to warning Putin about "armed conflict" was a rachet up delivered on behalf of President Trump. And, it is truly characteristic of Barack Obama, who has blamed President Bush for all his self-made problems and is now passing the latest one on to President Trump. • • • DEMOCRATS IN DENIAL. Obama's use of the red phone is also characteristic of the Democrats' inability to admit defeat at the hands of Donald Trump on November 8 and move on. Instead, they are creating a fake national emergency by blaming Russia for their loss to Trump. But, as Newsmax points out, a December 14 poll shows that a majority of voters are sure that Russian cyberattacks had no effect on the presidential race. The finding came in a new Fox News poll -- on the issue of Russia's meddling in the election, 59% of voters believe Moscow's hacks did not make a difference, while 32% think they helped Trump. Indeed, the Fox poll shows that 59% of voters feel hopeful about the election outcome, while 37% feel angry, and 30% feel depressed by the results. • • • BILL CLINTON LASHES OUT. The Democrats' Head Honcho, Bill Clinton, must be one of the 30% who are depressed, because he told the editor of the Bedford-Pound Ridge Record Review at a local bookstore in a Westchester town that "James Comey cost her the election." And when the editor asked Bill if he thought Trump was smart, Clinton said : "He doesn't know much. One thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him." That is about as close as Bill Clinton can get to saying Trump ran the smarter campaign because Bill had reportedly been the sole voice urging the Clinton campaign to focus on white, working class Americans, and was the only one to stump for his wife among these voters. According to reports, Clinton’s campaign ignored Bill’s advice, telling him white males weren’t worth their time or effort. As Newsmax noted : "Big mistake." • • • DEMOCRATS BLAME COMEY FOR THEIR LOSS. As for FBI Director James Comey -- he is under pressure to justify the bombshell announcement that jolted the final days of the campaign. Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, still unable to accept the November 8 loss, have lashed out at Comey as the architect of Clinton’s defeat because of his October 28 letter to Congress. Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has accused Comey of being a “Republican operative” who helped Donald Trump win the White House. Several former FBI officials told TheHill they have heard Comey is now weighing a possible press appearance after Trump's inauguration on January 20 to tell his side of the story. The FBI declined to comment on TheHill report. Comey was initially in trouble with Republicans when he listed what legal experts read as the basis for an indictment but refused to recommend charges against Clinton in the first place, but then Democrats and internal critics went after him when he said his eleventh- hour disclosure unfairly damaged Clinton. • What everyone should remember is that Director Comey was thrust into the spotlight after Attorney General Loretta Lynch outraged America by meeting with Bill Clinton before the conclusion of the investigation this summer -- a meeting they described as social -- forcing her to announce that she would abide by whatever recommendation Comey made in the Clinton case. Comey then went public with the FBI’s reasoning in declining to recommend charges against Clinton, holding a detailed press conference announcing its conclusions and later appearing before Congress in an open session several times. Democrats -- who were happy with his non-indictment of Hillary -- were appalled by the fallout from his letter to Congress, arguing that Comey’s disclosure in the final days leading up to the election was a massive break from bureau policy that blocked Hillary’s path to the White House. They say that although the FBI announced two days before the election that the new emails would not change its conclusions in Clinton’s case, the damage was done. Hillary Clinton has since told donors that she believes Comey’s disclosure, “raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.” Comey has a reputation as a fiercely independent and principled lawman -- which some critics say has led him to operate outside important institutional norms. Others say Comey had no choice but to inform Congress of the existence of the emails -- because when he chose to go public with the details of the investigation’s findings last summer, he cornered himself into going public with the information that the FBI realized it might have more work to do. • • • THE SEARCH WARRANT. Comey may feel that pressure on him to speak out is mounting as more details have emerged about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the new emails. The search warrant used to go through the emails, unsealed Tuesday, confirmed that Comey delivered his letter to Congress two days before the warrant was granted -- meaning that investigators didn’t yet have details of what was in them. But, when FBI investigators found emails they thought might be pertinent as they sorted and scanned the header information of messages stored on a laptop seized as part of its investigation of disgraced former Representative Antohny Weiner, married to Huma Abedin, Hillary's closest aide, they found accounts used on the seized computer that correlated with those used by Clinton and her aides during her tenure at the State Department -- accounts that investigators had previously concluded had been used inappropriately. The FBI told a federal judge it believed that was sufficient to show there was probable cause that the computer contained classified information pertinent to the Clinton probe. • US District Judge P. Kevin Castel ruled Monday morning that the public had a right to see the warrant, which he said was secretly filed with the court on October 30. His order states : “The search warrant, the application for the search warrant, the affidavit in support of the application for the search warrant, and the search warrant return will be unsealed and posted on the Court's electronic case filing system subject to redactions. "Ordinarily, a person whose conduct is the subject of a criminal investigation but is not charged with a crime should not have his or her reputation sullied by the mere circumstance of an investigation," Judge Castel wrote. "But in this instance, the fact that the FBI investigated Clinton is hardly secret. She has little remaining privacy interest in the release of the documents identifying her as the subject of this investigation." The unsealed FBI search warrant request states that the search is related to the "criminal investigation" of Hillary Clinton's email server. That shoots down Hillary's insistence that the FBI was engaged in a simple "inquiry." • • • IF IT WASN'T COMEY, DEMOCRATS SAY MAYBE THE RUSSIANS MADE US LOSE. Democrats have seized on law enforcement conclusions that Russia interfered in the presidential election to demand a select committee investigation into Moscow’s meddling. While Democrats have been careful to cast calls for the probe as nonpartisan and focused on national security, the effort diverts attention from President-Elect Donald Trump’s agenda, and as the Democrats must know, it raises questions about the election’s integrity. Trump has described as “ridiculous” an assessment by the CIA concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed cyberattacks to help him defeat Hillary Clinton by selectively releasing hacked documents that embarrassed the Democrat’s campaign. The Trump team has made it clear they view calls for a select committee investigation as an effort to delegitimize Trump's win -- and as evidence of sour grapes on the part of Democrats. Incoming Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer has avoided the appearance of partisanship, seeking GOP support for a select panel -- and of course, GOP Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham fell in line with the Democrats, who are looking for political dividends after being swept in the election, losing the House, Senate and White House. Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, who recently served as scholar in residence in the office of retiring Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, said Democrats have concerns about whether the issue of Russia’s influence would receive as diligent review if investigated primarily by the Senate Intelligence Committee -- an option that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prefers -- instead of a select committee or independent commission. But, Baker adds that a select committee investigation, which would command more attention and resources than a regular panel probe, would likely have the ancillary benefit -- to Democrats -- of slowing Trump’s agenda in the first year. The push is also likely to be popular with a Democratic base demoralized by Clinton’s surprise loss. One Democratic aide, however, noted that Schumer’s careful effort to woo McCain and Graham over to his side is an example of the classic political strategy of divide and conquer. • American Thinker reports that the narrative that “Russia hacked the election” now has a powerful counter-possibility to contend with : "Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan (where he was a critic of the regime’s human rights abuses and was recalled), is claiming (in the UK Daily Mail) : "...he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington DC after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers' -- and not hacked by Russia." Neither of the leaks "came from the Russians," Murray said in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday, "The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks." His account directly contradicts the CIA-US Intelligence version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election. Murray's allegations will be disputed by those who have a political interest in delegitimizing the Trump presidency, and possibly by WikiLeaks, which would undoubtedly want to continue to take all the credit for releasing the emails. Zero Hedge agrees with Murray : "This confirms what the NSA executive -- who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a 'legend' within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) -- previously said : the leaker was from US intelligence services." Murray confirmed to Zero Hedge that it "was on the mark. I don’t know with certainty if this account is true. But it does not rely on anonymous sources, as does the story that Russia is responsible." • FBI Director James Comey is apparently not on board with the Russia story. In telephone conversations with Donald Trump, Comey assured President-Elect Trump there was no credible evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the recent US presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the e-mails of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Comey also told Trump that James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, agreed with this FBI assessment. Sources who were briefed on the Comey-Trump conversations say the only member of the US intelligence community who was ready to assert that the Russians sanctioned the hacking was John Brennan, the director of the CIA. And, the sourses pointed out that “Brennan takes his marching orders from President Obama.” • American Thinker says the Murray version "makes a lot more sense...than Russia intervening in an election all the 'smart' people knew could not be won by Trump, and seeing that just the right amount of leaking could install him as President. Recall that it was only 'right-wing nuts' who thought Trump could win. Why would Russia prefer Trump to Clinton, who has shown that she can be bribed to approve a Russian takeover of strategic American uranium resources?" • • • DEAR READERS, of course, neither Bill Clinton nor Hillary nor Barack Obama nor Michelle -- nor John Brennan -- will ever admit that Hillary ran a losing campaign. They will never criticize her for calling average Americans "a basket of deplorables," or for telling a campaign rally she would put "a lot of coal companies and miners out of business," or for rubbing elbows with high roller donors while she sent surrogates out to deal with real voters, or for ignoring Wisconsin and Michigan because she knew she had them in the bag, or for using a private unsecured email server that mishandled classified documents and also avoided public scrutiny of her pay-for-play scheme with Clinton Foundation donors. The list goes on and on. Hillary said it best when she told an audience she is not a "natural politician" like her husband and Obama. Hillary usually lies, but in that single, unique and unrepeated moment of self-awareness, she nailed it. Hillary Clinton lost all by herself. She didn't need any help from Jim Comey or the Russians.