Far and away, the most important story released in the last few days has gone near under the radar. Charlottesville was tied to Russia.
We know this only because the GOP Congressman representing the Charlottesville area, Rep. Tom Garrett (R-VA) announced that he would not seek re-election, even though he was only in his first term. Garret had a meeting a couple months ago with the head of the FBI. He asked the director a question going to the heart of Russian penetration into American politics.
He asked if Russian “meddling” had anything to do with the rally that resulted in one fatality, and a despicable reaction by our president.
The answer was; “Yes.”
Garrett asked if the information was classified; “No.”
Whomever had the information waited until that day to make the announcement to the Congressman, and we can only guess as to why he waited. My guess is Republican pressure, knowing that anything “Russian” hurts the Republican party.
The most important element of the story is not just that Russia had the ability to spurn on a rally, “Unite to March” or whatever variation any particular group called it. Just as important is Garret’s takeaway:
“This is what happens, Russian intermeddling is seeking to pit Americans against under Americans to undermine confidence in western style democracies, it’s done so in Baltic states, it’s done so in western Europe, it will continue to do so,” Garrett continued.
“They’re trying to make the world safer for kleptocrats and oligarchs and dictators like Putin and they use things like this racial divisive fight — which ignores the commonalities we as Americans have with each other, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion — this is the sort of thing they do,” he continued.
“As a member of Homeland Security, seriously that’s what scares me most,”
Well, Congressman, as an American, that is also what scares me. But, just as scary to me is the fact that we have a president so insecure, so racist, and so under Russia’s thumb that we haven’t had a real investigation into just what all Russia did in 2016, what they are doing in 2018, what they did that led to a fatality in 2017 and what the hell we’re going to do to stop all of it, stop even having Russian State TV make threats to our nation that we best be doing what they instruct, or suffer the repercussions?
THAT also scares me.
The video courtesy of CNN and Rawstory:
