As part of its campaign of cultural terrorism, the left is trying to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration. Even if Martin Sheen can’t convince electors voting Monday to flout voters’ will and refuse to elect Donald Trump, congressional Democrats are hoping to paint Trump as somehow tainted. And their latest tack is to draw on suspicion of foreigners and paranoia about Russia.

Liberals have cast Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, as a stooge of Vladimir Putin because Tillerson ran Exxon, which does business in Russia. That effort was boosted by reliably anti-Russia saber-rattling senators like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who are bitter that their pet cause, the “moderate” Syrian rebels allied with al Qaeda, appear to be losing their war against Assad’s regime — an autocracy which is allied with Russia and Iran, but which protects a million Christians from jihadist persecution.

No Fair! You Cheated! We Want a Do-Over!

Key to the left’s line of argument is the assertion that Russia stole the election from its legitimate winner, Hillary Clinton, to install a president who would willingly do their bidding. (The New York Times’ Paul Krugman virtually accuses the FBI of colluding with Vladimir Putin.) What evidence is offered for this? The claim that Russian spies hacked the Democratic National Committee, and selectively released damaging, truthful information about the Clinton campaign via Wikileaks, which Russia hawks dismiss as a Putin puppet. President Obama gave credence to this theory in his most recent press conference.

Now the U.S. intelligence community is deeply divided about whether any of this is true. So far we are going on secret leaks to friendly reporters of ambiguous evidence. We have no solid proof that Russia’s hack of the DNC produced any of the information that Wikileaks reported; no evidence that if Putin was behind the leaks, his intention was to elect Donald Trump.

As longtime Putin critic (and former NSA officer) John Schindler argues, Putin could just as easily have believed, along with most Americans, that Clinton was unstoppable — and been trying to weaken and divide Americans in preparation for that. Some Democrats have claimed that Putin also hacked the Republican National Committee, but withheld that information in order to help Donald Trump — but they have offered no proof, and the RNC has denied it. Anyway, did it really take Russian computer geniuses to get into Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’ email account, whose password was — no kidding — “p@ssword”?

Isn’t it obvious that what’s going on is a last-ditch, reckless attempt to steal or cripple a presidency, on the part of desperate partisans — with no regard for the dignity of the office of the president?

Clinton Team’s Corruption, Bigotry Exposed

This digging for the source of Wikileaks’ reports leaves aside, of course, the fact that they were apparently 100 percent authentic, and that they revealed extensive corruption, donations to the Clinton Foundation from terror sponsor Qatar and rabidly Islamist Saudi Arabia, and a viciously anti-Catholic conspiracy to infiltrate and undermine that church. Never mind that, the Clinton dead-enders, are saying. The public wasn’t supposed to know those things, which means that revealing them amounted to foreign “hacking.” Does anyone believe that if Pakistan turned up damaging information about Donald Trump, that the Clinton campaign would have refused to use it?

Did a Disgruntled Sanders Supporter Give Wikileaks Those Emails?

Now we have testimony from someone who should know that the information Wikileaks provided American voters came not from a shadowy Russian hacker in some basement outside of Moscow — but a disgruntled Democratic Party staffer who had favored Bernie Sanders. The Daily Mail (U.K.) reports:

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers — and not hacked by Russia.

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

…

His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believed Russia hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump. …

Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorized access to the information.

‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’  Murray said. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

He said the leakers were motivated by ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.’

Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

We can’t know, and may never know, if Murray is telling the truth. All these stories come from the ghost-world of secret handoffs and undercover hacking. But on the strength of the wafer-thin evidence which the liberal media has run with that Putin somehow “hacked” our election, John Podesta is demanding that U.S. electors be briefed about Russian hacking before they vote for president on Monday. Isn’t it obvious that what’s going on is a last-ditch, reckless attempt to steal or cripple a presidency, on the part of desperate partisans — with no regard for the dignity of the office of the president? These are the same people who back in October were warning that Trump’s remarks about Clinton “stealing” the election undermined our democratic order. We now know how seriously to take their patriotic rhetoric.