Yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union, John McCain warned that Russian hacking aimed at influencing the outcome of U.S. elections has the potential to “destroy democracy,” which seems like a pretty hysterical take on the dissemination of embarrassing emails in which Democratic insiders dissed Bernie Sanders and noted Hillary Clinton’s limitations as a candidate. Like Clinton, who last week describedthe email thefts as an attack on “our electoral system,” McCain conflates information that guides voters’ choices with the nullification of those choices.
The Arizona senator conceded that there is no evidence of direct Russian interference in the voting process and that it’s not clear whether electronic communications illegally obtained from computers used by the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, affected the results of the presidential contest. “I have seen no evidence that the voting machines were tampered with,” he said. “I have seen no evidence that the election would have been different.” Still, McCain said, “that doesn’t change the fact that the Russians…have been able to interfere with our electoral process.” And “if they are able to harm the electoral process, then they destroy democracy, which is based on free and fair elections.”
The problem is that one man’s interference with the electoral process is another man’s voter education. Leading news organizations concluded that much of the information revealed by the DNC and Podesta hacks, such as excerpts from Clinton’s highly paid but heretofore secret Wall Street speeches, concerned matters of legitimate public interest. As The New York Timesput it, “Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
Via Jacob Sullum