Kevin McCarthy said in 2016 “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” You can add Ron Johnson to that list. Johnson got back on the 7th advocating the lifting of sanctions and now he’s become Putin’s mouthpiece on election meddling. RollCall:
“I’ve been pretty upfront that the election interference — as serious as that was, and unacceptable — is not the greatest threat to our democracy,” Sen. Ron Johnson said in an interview with the Washington Examiner published over the weekend. “We’ve blown it way out of proportion.”
“We need to really honestly assess what actually happened, what effect did it have, and what effect are our sanctions actually having, positively and negatively,” the Republican from Wisconsin said.
Johnson elaborated on his position in a Monday interview with WOSH-AM radio, in which he said there were more serious threats.
“We’ve had briefings on this — it’s very difficult to really meddle in our elections. It just is. These are locally run, it’s almost impossible to change the vote tally. My concern would be violating the voter files, but we have those issues anyway and there are plenty of controls on that,” he said. “You know from a standpoint of using social media we spent a couple of billion dollars on the last election, they maybe spent a couple hundred thousand.”
He’s got a brilliant career awaiting him on Fox News, the way he mish mashes facts and confuses issues. Nobody has ever said anything about changing the vote tally. The charges being investigated are that the Russians, using psychometric techniques developed by Cambridge Analytica and data purchased from Facebook created bots that presented themselves as neighbors in key states and spread anti-Hillary propaganda.
What is he even talking about “voter files?” Read his last sentence about the money spent on the election. The man is more incoherent than Rudy Giuliani and that’s saying a mouthful.
My God, is this what the dumbing down of America has let to, a United States Senator who prattles on like this? And it gets worse. Johnson says we’ve been interfering with the Russians’ elections.
Johnson said that during the trip, the Republican lawmakers decried the release of emails stolen from Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. The Russians denied the charges, and then accused the Americans of interfering in Russian politics and elections in neighboring countries.
“We would bring it up, and they would push back with all the ways we interfere with their politics in terms of funding of NGOs, and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America,” Johnson said. “We pushed back hard. I think they’re certainly on notice that there should be no meddling in 2018.”
Johnson chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. After this, look for him to guide Red October right into port.
