Thread by @frodofied

These pundits though.

Complaining that Clinton and her supporters seem unable "to get over it."

As if all we lost was a baseball game or something.

And not a one of them has a reasonable response when you lay it all out:

- The Benghazi Committee which existed for the sole purpose of trying to keep Hillary Clinton from considering a run for the Democratic nomination.

Period.

In early 2014 Clinton killing every possible Republican candidate in the polls.

She had been extremely popular and successful Secretary of State--by most Republicans own admission.

They knew what their chances we're absent a scandal to throw over her head. Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz led the Republicans on a 30 month innuendo filled disaster.

There was nothing coincidental about anything that happened from May 2014 onwards.

Not even "the discovery" of a private email server that everyone had already known about, that Clinton had used during her time as SOS.

Nope, not even this. The Republicans had known about and held back the announcement of the Server for months, and don't believe bullshit to the contrary.

They brought it public to coincide with Clinton's announcement of a second run for the White House.

It was planned.

They worked in tandem w/ writers (& editors?) at the @nytimes to make sure that anytime HRC experienced a surge in popularity an 'anonymous' leak would come out warning the public that the committee had found something damning. Enter @nytimes to print it all.

After months of hammering her nonstop Clinton faced off against the committee during 11 hours of testimony and annihilated the committee from top down.

But the damage had already been done.

The Select Committee on Benghazi released their final report in June of 2016.

It found nothing that any of the previous investigations hadn't.

The Committee was disbanded merely a month after the election having accomplished it's only real goal: to cast a shadow on Clinton's character and candidacy.

-- The media's long & storied relationship w/ @HillaryClinton had always been more adversarial then anything else, but from 2015 it took on a particularly acidic quality.

The media's role cannot be summed up, however, up as it was central to every effort to bring her down.

The examples of journalistic malpractice in which so many engaged altered the course of the campaign.

Studies have since shown that Clinton received far more negative media attention then almost all the other candidates combined, from both parties.

-- As early as June of 2015 Russian efforts to undermine Clinton and the Democrats were already being discussed on social media. Their efforts to bolster Donald Trump were also becoming clearer, as was a connection between both parties and WikiLeaks.

This group worked in tandem to support and promote the candidacy of Clinton's primary opponent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whenever possible.

Contrary to popular belief they considered Sanders to be the far less formidable candidate.

Helping him, helped them.

For his part, Sanders, who never expected to have much of an impact, by the end of summer 2015 saw an opening, and went for the juggular.

The narrative he promoted about Clinton gradually shifted from "We are friends who will run a positive campaign." To "She is corrupt.

The party is corrupt and only I can save it."

And what Sanders would not say out loud himself, his supporters would.

It was a shitstorm of slander, misinformation and outright lies which was again supported at every level of media coverage.

Recognizing he was losing handily but unwilling to admit that to his staff or supporters Sanders would decide to dig in and over time suggest and imply that the whole prime had been rigged.

It wasn't of course. At least not for her.

For some Clinton supporters, watching a seemingly less nuanced & successful repeat of 2008 develop was disheartening. And the fact that Sanders, who had never been a Democrat but was now running in the Primary though not AS.a Dem, made it feel rigged as well. But not for her.

In the end, Clinton would beat Sanders by four million votes.

It wasn't even close.

It never had been.

But having weathered mos of terrible coverage because of the server, constant Benghazi Committee leaks, WikiLeaks DNC Hack, and the emails themselves there was no respite.

Worse, there was barely time to acknowledge let alone celebrate the extraordinary thing that Clinton, her campaign staff led by @RobbyMook, and her supporters had just pulled off.

For the first time in American history a woman was a major party nominee for the Presidency.

Again, the media, who, eight years earlier had hailed the historic nature of Obama's candidacy seemed to only begrudgingly discuss Clinton's achievement.

Want a real wake-up call?

Review the coverage of Clinton's truly historic win to that of Trump's primary win.

Pundits sat wide-eyed and speechless, in awe, that yet another rich white guy had won the nomination 0f a party that had only ever elected rich white guys. Their shock seemed strange and forced given all the help the media' had given him along the way.

The die was now cast.

-- Russia's army of social bots, literally software programmes that, act as real people to post, respond to, argue with, and gaslight all over social media, we're probably deployed sometime in 2014. Russia had been using them successfully for awhile. There impact was substantial.

No one can say now how instrumental these Bots were in causing and or promoting the deep schism that developed on the left after 2015, but personally I think it was greatly instrumental.

For as long as 3 years Russian's bots scanned and trolled Facebook and Twitter.

In that time they shared an uncountable number of negative stories about Clinton and the Democratic Party while also promoting Trump & white nationalism.

It was constant.
It was repetitious.
It was effective.

And almost no one knew it was happening until it was too late.

At the height of it's campaign to push Brexit Russia was deploying upwards of 200,000 bots a day in the UK.

Though the final numbers for the United States are not yet known one can imagine the numbers to have been substantially higher.

Think about that.

Apologies. I am unable to plug my phone in presently and my battery is nearly dead. I will finish this later tonight. #Resist

"We're going to win something important later on and they (Russia) won't be opposed to what we're doing."

- Donald Trump (2014, FoxNews)

Those paying attention will notice a recurring number that keeps asserting itself:

2
0
1
4

It's not a coincidence.

It just isn't.

In the summer of 2014 then House Speaker John Boehner (R), obstensibly out of frustration with what he regarded as stonewalling by the Obama administration in terms of cooperation with the four ongoing Benghazi investigations, called for the formation of a special committee.

At the time this probably seemed like a reasonable assertion, but Boehner had been steadfast in his belief that the four concurrent ongoing investigations were adequate. A select committee he argued would cost too much, and take too long.

He was right on both counts.

It was no particular action or inaction by the Obama administration that changed his mind, instead it was pressure from his Republican colleagues who recognized the significant impact such a committee could have on the next Presidential election.

More specifically the negative impact it could have on the candidacy of the probable Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Though Clinton had not announced her intentions to run, by mid-2014 there wasn't a soul in Washington who didn't expect her to.

At the time @HillaryClinton was still very popular, burning in the afterglow of her tenure as Secretary of State for her one-time rivals administration.

Obama had made the decision much earlier that he wanted Clinton to be his successor, and had been hinting so for some time.

Republicans had long feared facing Clinton head to head in a general election. Though publicly many Republicans would mock Clinton's chances, most feared her. She was obviously smarter than most of them, and, though not known as a great orator, was better than given credit for.

She was also, arguably, the most formidable debater on the Hill, and perhaps the most formidable in a generation. Many of these Republican Congressmen had faced off with her during various hearings on the Hill and it rarely turned out well for any of them.

*cannot be summed up in a few tweets, that was meant to say...

On May 2 2014 Speaker Boehner announced he was calling for the formation of a Special Committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks. On May 8 the House voted mostly along party lines, with 7 Democrats joining the Republican majority to approve the creation of the SC.

While there was certainly sincere concern on the part of some Republican lawmakers, it seemed oddly out proportion to the event given that this was neither the first such attack on a US Embassy or consulate, nor the by far the most serious.

One question not being considered by many is what role, if any, did Russia play in either encouraging the formation of the Special Committee or supporting it once it was established?

Circumstantially it appears like plenty.

In the weeks and months leading up to the decision to call for an SC Congressional Republicans were fed a constant stream of misinformation through WikiLeaks and other sources, most notably the Russian "news agency's" Russia Today.

And we now know that Russian intelligence service hackers known collectively as Guccifer 2.0 altered early release documents to make them appear more intriguing than they actually we're:

businessinsider.com/guccifer-2-0-d…

It's important when thinking about this to understand that Guccifer is a real, identified human being named Marcel Lehel. Lehal was eventually tracked down in Romanian prison and extracted to the United States. It was Guccifer who otiginally hacked Sid Blunenthal's AOL account.

This hack occured in early 2013 & exposed the existence of the controversial Blumenthal memos, but it also exposed something else: Hillary Clinton's use of a private email address & server. Again, this is March or April of 2013.

Guccifer told the world, Washington already knew.

So, how big a deal was the fact that Clinton used a private email address and server?

It was so big that everyone completely ignored it and forgot about it until Gowdy's Special Committee needed a new angle and decided to exploit.

That's how important it was.

It should be noted the Guccifer 2.0 (Russian intelligence) and RT along with WikiLeaks were significant purveyors of misinformation and lies in regards to the server and the emails from March 2015 through the duration of the campaign.

An attack on the Marine barracks at US Embassy in Beirut under president Reagan killed 63 people, 17 of whom were Americans.

Democratic reactions to the tragedy never reached anything approaching partisan.

We were all Americans.

Whether Russia had any impact on the decision to undertake another Benghazi investigation is irrelevant. That they helped develop, push, invent, and exaggerate various elements of the story is undoubted. Russian bots would troll/push it on social media for the next 2 1/2 years.

For their part, Republicans proved themselves more than able to outplay the Democrats and also outplay a more than willing media, the latter of which would, unwittingly or not, become the publicity arm of the Republican party for the duration of the campaign.

The are several reasons why the media so willingly (and obviously) played the Republican stooge for so (too) long.

Though I have detailed a few of those reasons earlier I will list them again here in greater detail.

1. Serious talk of another Clinton run began even before her 2012 exit from State. Though Clinton still demurred when asked about the chances she would run, there was no shortage of encouragement from her peers, celebrities, and foreign policy experts during her SOS goodbye tour.

Even President Obama was "joking" about it publicly throughout the period. These comments were his first public signal of who he wished to succeed him. Biden was, it has been said, annoyed and angered by Obama's aggressive public support for a Clinton run.

Again, it is important to remember that Clinton's approval during this time--and given what happened in the last few years--were routinely higher than any politician in Washington, even Obama.

Yes, Hillary Clinton was not only popular, she was often the most popular.

People started thinking about 2016 before the foregone conclusion of 2012 had played itself out, and by the middle of 2013 Clinton's popularity, and the many calls for her to undertake a second run for the Democratic nomination, were enough to cause panic in many Republicans.

It is fair to say that Clinton enjoyed her longest period of neutral to positive media attention from 2008 - 2013. Even conservative outlets were uncharacteristically willing to sometimes give Clinton her due, or at least give her the benefit of the doubt.

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