Chicago Now: The Russians didn't meddle in our election but thankfully they showed us who did: Democrats

The following article was published on April 18, 2017. A link to the article can be found here.

By Bonnie McGrath

I really don't know what the Russians did, if anything, to get emails out of the DNC's computer--and Hillary campaign head John Podesta's computer--in order to turn them over to WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange.

But whoever did it, and for whatever reason, it was a public service. Those emails should be required reading for all. Because they show who really meddled in our election. Democrats did.

Democrats screwed the only guy who could have beaten Trump--Bernie--out of beating Trump. Bernie, the most popular politician in the country right now, would not have lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and possibly not Arizona, North Carolina and Iowa. Bernie would have won by a huge landslide. Even bigger than Trump's.

Because he had a message.

The WikiLeaks proved many startling things: that DNC people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile did everything they could strategically to beat Bernie, from surreptitiously feeding debate questions to Hillary before the debates, to using Bernie's religion against him to defeat him. Not to mention completely inappropriate collusion with the press.

The WikiLeaks proved that even Hillary's own staff knew that she had NO message that would resonate with the voters they needed. And the WikiLeaks pointed out how entrenched she and Bill were and how much they owed everyone around the world, including Russians. They got a lot of money for their foundation and for themselves from a lot of internationally scurrilous people.

There's a strange silence lately that could mean that there's no proof that the Russians did anything. The case of Seth Rich, a young man who worked for the DNC who was mysteriously shot dead on the street--but not robbed--after the first round of Wikileaks surfaced has not been solved.

And even Podesta admits he was inadvertently phished. And phishing is pretty easy for just about anyone who has a computer. You don't need professional hackers if you can fool someone into changing their password.

Or maybe the silence means that the democrats are like cats that swallowed the canary. Especially US House Rep. Mike Quigley, who's just returned from Cypress where the Lakeview local was intriguingly looking into something. Or other. Maybe proving that Russians really are the ones who gave us this valuable information?

Whatever happened, and whoever did it, and maybe some of us don't even care (and I'm willing to bet that the few people who even read the WikiLeaks certainly didn't change their vote), I do find election disruptor and FBI pinnacle James Comey's sure-fire reasoning for why the Russians did it quite fanciful: because they hated Hillary so much.

Maybe it's best that a country--like Russia--who hates our leader that much doesn't get a chance to act on that hate. Because all that would do in the end is get us into a big nuclear arms race with a big nuclear arms country. And who would really benefit from that?

The arms contractors.

Could that be why Washington seems so vested in proving that the Russians did it? To keep a fight going with Russia at full throttle to keep the contributions flowing full tilt boogie from that rich but always cash-needing, and in turn very-generous-to-congress industry?

Yes, the emails were private. And yes, they were stolen, if you will. But they impacted the public. They taught the public. They enlightened us once we were able to see them. They were never intended for public consumption, which is all the more reason we deserve to know the score.

Because in the end, every single email that was uncovered in the leaks impacts the life of every citizen. And not just US citizens, but every citizen in the world.

I'm glad we know the score. What we do going forward with that score will prove who our leaders really are: a throwback to the McCarthyites of the cold war era, enriching the arms makers and bending our minds with the need for bomb shelters? Or a country that really wants to work with our counterparts to build a better life for everyone in the world, including us?

We may be on the verge of finding out.