[quote] what proof do you have that we meddled in RUSSIAN elections that would provide cause for them to retaliate?
[quote] Again R398 - provide proof we meddled in the Russian presidential or other elections and that this is retaliation. You can't.
R394, R405, have you been living under a rock? There’s A LOT of proof. This is important history to know - because it partially explains the clusterfuck going on now. Even the people involved (Bill Clinton’s administration and the Harvard Institute for International Development, a.k.a. HIID, a think-tank funded by the federal gov’t) are not denying that they SWUNG the Russian election in 1996. Newsflash: Bill Clinton got his pal, Boris Yeltsin, RE-ELECTED for a 2nd term. Without Clinton’s election meddling - Yeltsin would have LOST that election.
Here’s a very detailed article in The Altlantic explaining everything and why the Ruskies can’t stand the Clintons - because of the Clintons’ election PUPPET, Boris Yeltsin. The Clinton administration broke all elections rules in order to saddle them with Yeltsin for a second time (despite the fact that he was clearly an inept, catastrophic president) - and the Russkies never forgave the Clintons for such under-handed manipulation.
[quote] The Atlantic, 2018: “20 years before Russia tried to swing an American presidential election, America tried to swing a presidential election in Russia. The year was 1996. Boris Yeltsin was seeking a 2nd term, and Bill Clinton desperately wanted to help. “I WANT this guy to win SO BAD” he told Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, “it hurts.” Clinton liked Yeltsin personally. He considered him Russia’s best hope for embracing democracy and capitalism. And he appreciated Yeltsin’s acquiescence during NATO’s march eastward, into the former Soviet bloc.
[quote] Unfortunately for Clinton, ordinary Russians appreciated their leader FAR LESS. Yeltsin’s “shock-therapy” economic reforms [during his first term] had reduced the government’s safety net, and produced a spike in unemployment and inflation. Between 1990 and 1994, the average life expectancy among Russian men had dropped by an astonishing 6 years. When Yeltsin began his re-election campaign in January 1996, his approval rating stood at [ONLY] 6%
[quote] So the Clinton administration SPRANG into action. It lobbied the International Monetary Fund [IMF] to give Russia a $10 billion loan, some of which Yeltsin distributed to woo voters. Upon arriving in a given city, he often announced, “My pockets are full.” [bold]Three American political consultants - including Richard Dresner, a veteran of Clinton’s campaigns in Arkansas - went to work on Yeltsin’s re-election bid. Every week, Dresner sent the White House the Yeltsin campaign’s INTERNAL polling. And before traveling to meet Yeltsin in April, Clinton asked Dresner what he should say in Moscow to boost his BUDDY’s campaign.[/bold]
[quote] It worked. In a stunning turnaround, Yeltsin - who had begun the campaign in LAST PLACE - defeated his … rival in the election’s final round by 13% points. Talbott declared that “a number of international observers have judged this to be a free and fair election.” But Michael Meadowcroft, a Brit who led the election-observer team of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, later claimed there had been widespread voter fraud, which he had been PRESSURED NOT to expose […] Thomas Graham, who served as the Chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the campaign, later conceded that Clinton officials knew the election wasn’t truly fair. “This was a classic case,” he ADMITTED, “of the ends [for the US] justifying the means.”
A lot of this information came to light when it turned out that the Clinton-endorsed Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) was not just meddling in foreign elections - but also STEALING money from US taxpayers (by pocketing some of the "budget").
