Fox News hosts and Trump pushed the idea that an IT staffer for House Democrats took data from Democrats. Trump’s Justice Department says it’s not true.
Awan’s guilty plea is a letdown for conservatives, who had become convinced that Awan was involved in something much more nefarious than bank fraud.
.. Led by reporting from the Daily Caller News Foundation, Republicans suspected that Awan was somehow involved in data leaks to either Russia or Pakistan. In July 2017, Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera and Sean Hannity speculated that Awan had used his access to Democratic servers to leak the emails from Democratic National Committee leader Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz that were published by WikiLeaks in 2016.
.. Far from spying, the Washington Post reported investigators “instead found that the workers were using one congressional server as if it were their home computer, storing personal information such as children’s homework and family photos,” according to an official.
.. Nevertheless, Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Luke Rosiak said that the Awan story was proof that “Congress was hacked.”
“It basically destroys that Russian narrative just because it shows that they [Democrats] didn’t actually care about cyber-security and they haven’t responded to this,” Rosiak said in April on Fox Business.
.. That conspiracy appeals to President Trump’s supporters because, like the rival conspiracy that the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, it would theoretically mean that Russian hackers weren’t behind the email hacks after all.
.. after interviews with 40 witnesses and reviews of the House Democratic Caucus’s server they came up empty.
Chaos? What chaos? No chaos here!
Meanwhile, Kushner is leaking to the White House interns that the Trump campaign was TOO INCOMPETENT TO COLLUDE WITH ANYONE (Kushner continues to be both a particle and a wave; his collusion cat is always dead, though), and then the interns told a reporter. This is a fine defense and not a sign of chaos or panic on anyone’s part.
.. And a lawsuit is alleging that the Trump White House was behind the bogus story on Fox News (retracted, with ZERO resignations) that Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich was murdered for being the real source behind WikiLeaks.
The conservative mind has become diseased
But this failure of decency is also politically symbolic. Who is the politician who legitimized conspiracy thinking at the highest level? Who raised the possibility that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Who hinted that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the deathof Vince Foster, or that unnamed liberals might have killed Justice Antonin Scalia? Who not only questioned President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but raised the prospect of the murder of a Hawaiian state official in a coverup? “How amazing,” Trump tweeted in 2013, “the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”
We have a president charged with maintaining public health who asserts that the vaccination schedule is a dangerous scam of greedy doctors. We have a president charged with representing all Americans who has falsely accused thousands of Muslims of celebrating in the streets following the 9/11 attacks.
.. In this mental environment, alleging a Rich-related conspiracy was predictable. This is a concrete example of the mainstreaming of destructive craziness.Those conservatives who believe that the confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is sufficient justification for the Trump presidency are ignoring Trump’s psychic and moral destruction of the conservative movement and the Republican Party... He is shaping conservatism in his image and ensuring an eventual defeat more complete, and an eventual exile more prolonged, than Democrats could have dreamed... The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased. The movement has been seized by a kind of discrediting madness, in which conspiracy delusions figure prominently... Conspiracy theories often involve a kind of dehumanization. Human tragedy is made secondary — something to be exploited rather than mourned. The narrative of conspiracy takes precedence over the meaning of a life and the suffering of a family. A human being is made into an ideological prop and used on someone else’s stage... A conspiratorial approach to politics is fully consistent with other forms of dehumanization — of migrants, refugees and “the other” more generally. Men and women are reduced to types and presented as threats. They also become props in an ideological drama. They are presented as representatives of a plot involving invasion and infiltration, rather than being viewed as individuals seeking opportunity or fleeing oppression and violence.
The Facts of the Seth Rich Murder That Don’t Support Conspiracy Theories
The conspiracy is based on a true event — the terrible and unsolved murder of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer. Early the morning on July 10, an unidentified assailant shot Rich in the back. The police haven’t solved the crime, and their current best theory is that the attack occurred as part of a botched or interrupted robbery. Rich’s valuables, however, were still on his body, and the police (so far as we know) have no leads…
For the theory to be true, its believers have to demonstrate that Rich leaked to WikiLeaks, that someone in the DNC (or the Clinton camp) in turn had Rich murdered, that the D.C. police are intentionally slow-walking the investigation, that the major intelligence agencies (namely the CIA, FBI, and NSA) are together either deliberately concocting a story about Russian interference or too stupid to recognize an inside job, and finally, that the remainder of official Washington is either oblivious to or colluding with conspirators who’ve damaged relations with Russia in hopes of bringing down a president. Oh, and did I mention that the family of the slain young man is also either in on the conspiracy or unaware of its existence?