Democrats are incensed, appalled, outraged by the possibility that Soviet Russian President Vladimir Putin might have preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in last month’s presidential election, claiming that foreign governments have no right to interfere with our elections. But it wasn’t so long ago that Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, claimed that foreign leaders greatly preferred him to incumbent President George W Bush.

US row as Kerry claims foreign leaders’ support

by Julian Borger in Washington | Monday 8 March 2004 21.52 EST

The Democrats’ US presidential candidate, John Kerry, yesterday caused political uproar by claiming he had the private support of foreign leaders who wanted President George Bush beaten.

Speaking to supporters in Florida, the Massachusetts senator declared: “I’ve met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, ‘You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy.’ Things like that.”

The remarks provoked an instant rebuke from Mr Bush’s re-election campaign.

“Kerry’s foreign friends may prefer him as US president, but the election is in the hands of the American people,” Terry Holt, a campaign spokesman, said.

Mr Kerry’s claims risked playing into the hands of the Bush camp, which has privately sought to portray Mr Kerry as more at home with foreigners than with ordinary Americans. A White House official once told the New York Times that one of the Democrat’s drawbacks was that “he looks French”.

There’s more at the original. And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to claim that world leaders would prefer her as President over Donald Trump:

Clinton says foreign leaders want to endorse her to stop Trump

By Jonathan Swan – 03/13/16 10:03 PM EDT

Hillary Clinton says foreign leaders are privately reaching out to her to ask if they can endorse her to stop Donald Trump from becoming president of the United States.

“I am already receiving messages from leaders,” Clinton told an Ohio audience at a Democratic presidential town hall on Sunday night.

“I’m having foreign leaders ask if they can endorse me to stop Donald Trump.”

Clinton was responding to a question from a man in the audience who asked how she would beat Trump in a general election. The questioner, who said he was a son of immigrants who feared the Republican front-runner’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, asked the same question of Bernie Sanders earlier in the CNN town hall.

Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, said she didn’t want to “spill the beans right now, but suffice it to say, there are many arguments that we can use against him.”

“But one argument that I am uniquely qualified to bring, because of my service as secretary of State, is what [Trump’s] presidency would mean to our country and our standing in the world.”

CNN moderator Jake Tapper asked Clinton who the foreign leaders were who had been reaching and asking if they could endorse her to stop Trump.

“Some have done it publicly, actually,” Clinton replied, singling out Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

There’s more at the original.

So, the evidence says that the Democrats are not at all opposed to foreign leaders supporting American presidential candidates, as long as the candidates being supported are the Democrats.

Of course, endorsements are one thing, and actually taking action is another. In 2015, President Obama took action to try and prevent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election, though his apparent actions backfired.

It would seem, then, that our current President, who strongly condemned what is claimed to be Russian interference in our own election, has no problem with the United States interfering with other countries’ elections.

We have already noted that President Obama had to apologize for the National Security Agency tapping German Führer Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, something the Telegraph stated the President had known about for three years, and allowed to continue. So, clearly, the President has no objections to spying, either, on allies as well as adversaries.

But the Democrats have been successful in one thing: the story has been on whether the Russians hacked into the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, to try and influence the results of our election. Mr Podesta was the primary guest on NBC’s Meet the Press this morning, and while he was clearly reticent at answering host Chuck Todd’s questions about the failings of the Clinton campaign itself, he was very willing to talk about Russian hacking. What he never noted, what Mr Todd never asked him, and what the journalists’ roundtable discussion also avoided was the very obvious question: regardless of who hacked the e-mail accounts — and WikiLeaks, the hacker organization which released the e-mails, claimed that the Russian government was not the source — is that whatever damage the released e-mails caused the Clinton campaign was not because they were hacked, but the content of those e-mails. If there hadn’t been anything bad in there, they’d have caused no damage.

• In October, we learned due to the hacked e-mails that Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile obtained at least one of the questions for a Democratic primary debate to the Clinton campaign in advance.
• We learned that Mr Podesta had a frantic email exchange with Jennifer Palmieri in August 2015 over who should call the candidate to “sober her up some” at around 4:30 in the afternoon.¹
• Though it wasn’t a hack, but a State Department e-mail released thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch that Huma Abedin, Mrs Clinton’s personal aide, had to hand-hold her through important calls with foreign leaders and that Mrs Clinton was “often confused.”
• We learned, in the middle of October, that Jennifer Palmieri, Mrs Clinton’s campaign communications director, had nothing but disdain for evangelicals and Catholics.²
• Hacked DNC e-mails showed the DNC discussing using Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) being an atheist of Jewish heritage against him in the Democratic primaries.
• Several hacked DNC e-mails show that the Committee, which is supposed to have been neutral on serious candidates during the primaries, was actively trying to undermine Senator Sanders’ campaign. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign over the information.

This is the part that the Democrats wish us to forget, the content of the e-mails published by WikiLeaks. If the story is just Russian hacking, the left can use it to cast a cloud of illegitimacy over Mr Trump’s upcoming presidency, can try to imply — though President Obama said that this was not the case — that the vote tabulations themselves were manipulated, and can try to undermine everything that the incoming President tries to do. We must point out that the e-mails, whatever the source, revealed serious problems with Mrs Clinton, her staff, her honesty, and the whole campaign’s disdain for so many Americans. If the e-mails affected the outcome of the election, it was due to what was in them, and not who hacked them.
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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.
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¹ – A Google search for sober her up Wikileaks, conducted at 1:01 PM today, showed that plenty of conservative blogs wrote about this, but I had to go all the way to the sixth page of returns to find one from a professional media source, The Washington Post, and the article returned was one which tried to make the case that “sober her up” didn’t refer to Mrs Clinton being intoxicated on alcohol, but “could just as easily refer to mood — based on context, the emails come days before Clinton turned over her private email server to investigators — and not a literal status of inebriation.” The professional media were all over the story about 2000 Republican candidate George W Bush’s DUI conviction decades earlier, even though he had admitted that drinking had caused him problems, and that he had stopped drinking completely years earlier, but were wholly uninterested in a story about a Democratic candidate being smashed in the middle of the afternoon recently. The next time the Democrats claim that the media were biased, well, it’s true, they were, but they were biased to cover up for Mrs Clinton, not to harm her.
² – The linked article from The Washington Post also referred to a Post story from June, stating that “Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, gaining access to an entire database of opposition research.” Russian hacking was at least strongly suspected long before the election; this is not a new story.