Priebus, Conway: Blame Dems for Poor Digital Security

Two of Donald Trump’s top advisors spoke out on the Sunday shows, dismissing Russia’s impact on the 2016 election and blaming Democrats for their failure to protect their sensitive digital information. In separate interviews, both Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway said that the hacking story was just another way for the left to weaken the president-elect’s clear mandate.

“Yes, we have bad actors around the world. We have had bad actors including the Russians,” Priebus said on Fox News Sunday. “But we also have a problem when we have a major political institution that allows foreign governments into their systems with hardly any defenses or training.”

Priebus said that the Democratic National Committee needed to take responsibility for their own vulnerable servers.

“Here’s what we have: We have the DNC as a sitting duck,” Priebus said. “If the DNC allows any foreign entity into their server and says ‘Here, here’s 50,000 emails, you can have them.’ Well, voila. Now you have the biggest dissemination of emails that you’ve ever seen in the history of America because of the revolving door at the DNC.”

Meanwhile, over on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Conway downplayed any effect the WikiLeaks emails might have had on the outcome of the election.

“Alleged attacks – alleged – and aspirations to interfere with our democracy, failed,” Conway said of the Russian hacks. “And they failed. And we know that, because Donald Trump won.”

Conway said Trump’s victory was a triumph for democracy, seeing as how the American public viewed Hillary Clinton.

“She was viewed by a higher number, over 60 percent, as not honest or trustworthy. That had nothing to do with Moscow,” Conway said. “We didn’t need WikiLeaks to convince the American people that they didn’t like her, didn’t trust her, didn’t find her to be honest. She did that all on her own. She got this party started by setting up an illegal server.”

This really brings up an interesting point. Remember back when WikiLeaks first started publishing all of these emails from John Podesta and the DNC? The media reported on them, yes, but they consistently told us that there was nothing special to be found. Save three or four tiny problems – the worst of which were drowned out by Trump’s Access Hollywood tape – the entire email trove was treated as “ho-hum” insider stuff that no one cared about.

Now we’re supposed to believe it tipped the election?

Emails were largely responsible for Hillary’s loss, but not the emails everyone’s talking about now. She sealed her fate with that basement server and her “extremely careless” approach to matters of national security. If Russia really went to all of this trouble to expose her, they probably wasted their effort. By the time the first emails were published on WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton had already been fully exposed.