The Senate Intelligence Committee announced Dec. 18 that it’s opening an investigation into the campaign of Jill Stein, who ran as Green Party candidate for U.S. president in 2016, claiming the move is part of its witch hunt into whether “collusion with Russians” determined the outcome of the election.
The attack on the Green Party comes as the fishing expedition being led by special counsel Robert Mueller goes on and on. Mueller, a former head of Washington’s FBI political police, has been given far-reaching powers to target President Donald Trump and those around him, looking for evidence of “collusion” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Stein was a thorn in the side of Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who claimed Stein was taking votes away from her. The Green Party, a so-called independent smaller capitalist party, was on the ballot in 44 states in 2016. Stein, a Massachusetts physician, received 1 percent of the vote.
The Senate committee said it’s investigating Stein because she attended and spoke at a 2015 dinner in Moscow to celebrate Russia Today, a state-owned media company. Stein was seated at the head table with Putin and Michael Flynn, who was Trump’s first White House national security adviser until being ousted from his job after 24 days. Flynn recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with the Russian ambassador as part of the transition team after Trump had won the election and is now cooperating with prosecutor Mueller.
RT, which has operated in the U.S. since 2005, does slavishly slant its “news” to fit Moscow’s political needs. But that isn’t the reason the U.S. Justice Department ordered it to register as an agent of a foreign power in November. That attack on freedom of the press and workers’ rights was engineered for Washington’s own political reasons.
“Miss Stein did attend that infamous dinner,” Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN, in motivating this harassment probe. “We have seen reports that Stein … [was] very complimentary of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which we know was one of the pawns being used by the Russians.”
The Democrats would like to see Stein take a hit. They believe that all those that stood against Clinton as well as Trump should have been prevented from doing so — including the Socialist Workers Party. The editors of the New York Times ran a piece in the Oct. 29, 2016, issue, a few days before the election, urging readers disgusted with both the Democratic and Republican candidates not to vote for the SWP, “at least this time,” and to hold their nose and vote for Clinton.
In announcing the investigation of Stein’s campaign, Republican Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters Dec. 18 that the committee was “just starting” to dig into Stein.
It’s hard to figure why Stein decided to fly to Moscow to speak at a love-fest for RT, but any charge that her campaign was a secret plot by Putin is a canard.