Did Putin Really Want Trump to Win?

I have long believed that Putin had a distinct preference for Hillary in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Here’s what I wrote a year ago:

Putin’s  got a lot going with Hillary. His pals donated more than a hundred million dollars to the Clinton Family Foundation while she was secretary of state, and they gained ownership of twenty percent of America’s uranium supply.  If Putin were really trying to elect Trump, he’d be leaking the details of that relationship. But no, the big story broke more than a year ago in the New York Times, and isn’t one of the major themes of the WikiLeaks archives.

Ergo, those who think WikiLeaks is part of a Russian deception—and I’m quite prepared to believe that—have to explain why the most devastating information about Hillary comes from the Democrats’ favorite daily newspaper.

That’s why I said “if I were Putin, I’d support Hillary.” He owns a piece of her, after all, between the millions to the Clinton Foundation, the half million for Bill’s speech, and the effective control over our uranium. Whereas, so far as we know, he doesn’t have anything going with Trump et. al.

Nonetheless, the Dems insist that there’s real collusion between Russia and the Trump crowd, starting with General Mike Flynn, the first national security adviser in this administration. Indeed, this collusion, despite a lack of any proof, was long taken to be an established fact. And why? Because it was repeated so often, and it was often said that some number of U.S. intelligence agencies—some claimed there were seventeen of them–supposedly confirmed Russian meddling in the election on behalf of Trump.

I cannot even begin to remember how many times I heard such claims, often from serious people. I still have not seen any evidence, and such evidence as I have seen, especially in recent days, points to Russian collusion with Hillary and the Dems. Which is what I expected all along. After all, anti-American rhetoric has long been a virtual monopoly of the left, and one of the many unanswered questions in the collusion matter is how the left could so suddenly pivot from “let’s make a deal with our old enemies” to “damn the Russians.”

It sure looks like a classic KGB operation, in which the Kremlin supports an anti-American movement to spread confusion in their enemies’ homeland.

The leading disinformation agent in this campaign is Rep. Adam Schiff from the People’s Republic of California, and his favorite target is Gen. Flynn. I was on public tv with him, the subject being the book I co-authored with Gen. Flynn. Schiff was full of faux shock at Flynn’s “softness” on Russia. It was obvious Schiff had not read the book, in which Flynn described Putin as “an enemy.”

That is surely not softness. It’s adherence to the party line, whatever the facts. Which Schiff isn’t much interested in. He finds it very concerning that President Trump wanted to hear testimony from an FBI agent who had penetrated Russian nuclear operations, for example. I’m more inclined to praise the president and I’m eager to learn what the FBI agent learned.

Aren’t you? We might also learn who Vladimir Putin actually favored in the American elections last year. And why.