COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Maybe it’s crazy

“Do you really believe that?”

The question came Monday afternoon from Roby Brock of Talk Business and Politics as I visited with him for his digital daily telecast.

I’d just explained that there is a circumstantial case arising that Russian spies hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer network and leaked those damaging emails to WikiLeaks.

Presumably the Russians, from Vladimir Putin down, aimed for a well-timed embarrassment of the Hillary Clinton campaign and a pro-Donald Trump manipulation of the American presidential race.

It’s quite true that Putin doesn’t like Clinton, nor she he. It goes back to her days as secretary of state.

Over the last several months, Trump has tweeted contradictory nonsense about Putin. Of course. The first and prevailing indictment of Trump is that he is bombastic and simplistic and really doesn’t ever quite know what he’s tweeting or talking about.

But he seems to have settled generally on a view that Putin is a strong and decisive leader whose style, at least, he admires and wishes to adapt for American purposes.

Separately, he has argued that the United States needs to stop bearing a disproportionate financial responsibility to prop up all its European NATO allies. That presumably extends even to letting Russia have them if it wants them.

Trump has dabbled business-wise in Moscow, such as staging his Miss Universe pageant there. His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has extensive Russian and Ukrainian business associations, as do a lot of people in this global economy that Trump professes to oppose.

Anyway, it comes down to that opening question: When you’ve invoked the notion of Russia trying to elect an American president, a Siberian candidate, you might say, even if merely to relate a percolating story that the New York Times and others seem to take seriously with credible reporting — and which now is the subject of an FBI investigation — then indeed the right question is whether you’re serious.

My answer, my handy journalistic cop-out: I don’t know. I’m just saying what they’re saying.

I rather suspect, though, that there are young people sitting in American jails on felony convictions based on circumstantial cases flimsier than what seems to be piling up on this novel-worthy narrative.

Weeks ago, the DNC server was infiltrated by what a privately hired software investigator declared to be Russian sources, “Russian intelligence-related” ones, owing to phrasing and codes that related their time of day in Russian time.

The DNC said at the time that it appeared the hackers had merely wanted and taken opposition research on Trump.

On Monday it was reported by Yahoo that, quite separately, something odd happened to the DNC staff members who had been sending emails and writing memos on an assignment to gather opposition research on Manafort, the Trump campaign manager with Russian and Ukrainian ties.

She signed on one day and got this pop-up message from Yahoo: “Important action required. We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”

That’ll do more to wake you up than a strong cup of coffee.

So now the FBI is on the case, saying it takes such charges seriously. It presumably will be telling us something official at some point.

It’s important, then, to emphasize what we don’t have any evidence of, circumstantial or otherwise.

We have no evidence that Putin ordered or availed himself of these hacks emanating from somewhere in his country.

We have no evidence that Putin or any Russian source provided the leaked emails to WikiLeaks, which, for the record, denies getting them from Russian sources and scoffs at the Clinton campaign’s nonsense.

We have no evidence that Trump and Manafort had anything to do with any of these machinations.

They, too, scoff. They call this speculation desperate and crazy.

And crazy might be that rare subject on which they offer some authority.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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