Not wanting to be left out of the giant farce that is the "The Russians did it" narrative, Republican senator from North Carolina Lindsey Graham told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that not only did Russia hack the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, but they also hacked into his very own personal presidential campaign account.
As PlanetFreeWill.com's Joseph Jankowski reports, according to Graham, he was informed by the FBI in August that his campaign vendor was hacked sometime in June. “I do believe that the Russians hacked into the DNC. I do believe they hacked into Podesta’s email account. They hacked into my campaign account,” Graham told Blitzer.
Lindsey Graham: Russians hacked into my campaign account. https://t.co/AWRHIWxOhS
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 14, 2016
Then in pure hypocritical neocon fashion, Graham goes on to accuse Russia of “(destabilizing) democracy all over the world,” and that their interference in democracy “is not just about pulling for Trump.”
The sitting senator added:
It’s bigger than that. They’re trying to break the backs of democracies. They’re doing worse things in other countries. They’re trying to get us to fight among ourselves and here’s what we should do: We should tell the Russians in no uncertain terms, you interfered in our elections, we don’t care why, we’re going to hit you and hit you hard. I’m going to introduce sanctions that will be bipartisan that names Putin as an individual, his inner circle, for not only hacking into our political systems, but destabilizing democracies throughout the world.
This is the first time that Graham has ever mentioned that his presidential campaign was hacked.
The senator’s revelation came to light shortly before NBC News reported that that U.S. intelligence officials believe with “a high level of confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election.
Citing two senior officials with direct access to the information, NBC reports that “new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.”
Putin’s objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a “vendetta” against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to “split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,” the official said.
According to officials who spoke to NBC, “As part of contingency planning for potential retaliation against Russia, U.S. intelligence agencies have stepped up their probing into (Putin’s) personal financial empire.”
The latest twist in the Russian interfence narrative comes after a list of unsubstantiated stories in the old media which claim to only find “possible linkages” and provide reports on the ‘belief’ that Moscow screwed Clinton over in the election.
As Zero Hedge notes:
Perhaps because the official narrative has so far been unable to gather traction with the previous “shotgun approach” in which just “Russia” was accused of handing the election to Trump, four short days before the Electoral College vote, the narrative has changed and it now involves the very pinnacle of Russia’s government: the president himself.
Lindsey Grahm explained Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that he does not believe that Putin swayed the election in any way and that Hillary Clinton lost because “she wasn’t an agent of change.”
Craig Murray, a former UK ambassador and close associate to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, told The Daily Mail in an exclusive report published on Wednesday that he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers – and not hacked by Russia.
Acting as a WikiLeaks envoy, Murray says he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the DNC and Podesta email sources in September.
“Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,” Murray told Dailymail.com. “The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”
The former UK ambassador’s account contradicts the narrative of how the emails were published that is being pushed by U.S. intelligence sources cited in the old media.
Similar intelligence was also revealed by Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox News Judge Andrew Napolitano, who told Stewart Varney the US intelligence community leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks, not the Russians.