by Kevin D. Freeman, Several years ago, I had the opportunity to have a private meeting with a senior staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). It took a while to get the meeting and finally only happened after I briefed the Committee Chairman who promised to look into my concerns. Basically, I was there several years ago with an “out of the box” view on how our elections might be “hacked” by Russia, China, or others. I carried with me the evidence of what had taken place in September 2008, just before the historic election that placed then Senator Obama into the White House. I later turned the unclassified findings into a NY Times bestseller. This was built on the research conducted for the SOLIC group within DoD. Before the meeting, I had been told that my research regarding purposed attacks on our nation’s financial system had been suppressed because “it didn’t fit the Administration’s narrative.” I guess the Administration didn’t want to publicize that someone may have purposed to attack the stock market just before an election. When you realize that stock market returns just prior to an election are highly correlated with election results, it becomes clear that manipulating the stock market could impact who became President. Here are the three key questions:

1. Can markets be manipulated? Yes.
2. Do stock market results influence elections? Yes.
3. Are there actors (nation states or individuals) with both the capacity to manipulate markets in the short term and also the desire to influence a Presidential election? Yes.

So, one might have expected that when I sat down with the senior staffer of the HPSCI (House Intel Committee), he would not only have been interested in understanding what I was sharing but also eager to address it. After all, we are told that “free and fair elections are a bedrock of our system.” So where was the concern in 2009 when I was warning that financial terrorism may have influenced the market collapse and that the market collapse may have influenced the election? A “deep throat” type contact in the Pentagon told me that the Administration was purposely squelching any such thinking. This was later corroborated by research from Bill Gertz, perhaps the best Intel/Defense reporter in Washington. With the Intel staffer, I began my meeting with the following words: “I know the IC (intelligence community) can sometimes be politicized.” A few simple words. The response, before I could share any thoughts, was extraordinarily vitriolic. I was BLASTED, yelled at, and provided more than a few choice words. You would have thought that I had said something exceptional rude about this staffer’s wife, mother, and baby daughters. He explained for the next 15 minutes how obviously stupid and wrong I was. The IC is “above reproach” I was told. There are no politics. Period. My colleague David Hemenway (also a former Hill staffer) and I were dumbfounded. After his tirade, the staffer got up and walked out, explaining that he was too busy to spend any more time with people like us. [Interestingly, we saw the same guy hanging around in the halls just a few minutes later not appearing busy at all.] Never mind that I had flown at personal expense to Washington just for that meeting. Or that top analysts wanted my issues addressed.

Now, when I heard the “Benghazi attack was caused by an obscure YouTube video” narrative, I was further convinced that the IC was being used for political purposes. The idea of a narrative is anathema to honorable intelligence. You look for the facts first. You don’t cherry-pick the facts to support a pre-conceived narrative. In no way do I want to besmirch the truly fine men and women who have laid their lives and careers on the line to protect America. But I am VERY CONCERNED that politicians choose to manipulate intelligence in order to manipulate the American people. There were charges of this against Bush/Cheney. Is it not fair to have similar concerns about Obama/Biden? You can imagine my frustration that all of a sudden, the Administration is concerned about Russia hacking the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. Certainly there are serious issues here.

Keep in mind that I have done extensive research into Putin and Russian attempts to conduct cyber-economic warfare. I am by no means a Putin apologist, having contributed recently to the book “Putin’s Reset: The Bear is Back and How America Must Respond.” But there seemed little interest in the admitted reality that Putin attempted to destabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing crisis of 2008. Did that impact the stock market? Did it impact the election? YES and YES. But we weren’t allowed to thoroughly research this because it might undermine the narrative. Can you imagine if the Bush Administration had put out that narrative (that Putin helped crash our stock market to put Obama into office)? It seems more than a bit hypocritical for the Obama team to now be making the case they are making after ignoring the research my team brought forward. And, can we really compare the seriousness of hacking Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails on “spirit cooking” with a direct effort to take down the American economy and crash the stock market?

Please know that there can now be no doubt that Russia was involved in hacking the DNC. Others may have done the same. And, the evidence does seem to suggest that Putin desired a Trump win, using propaganda to support his candidacy. While not the direct providers to Wikileaks, we can now assume that there were Russian fingerprints. It does not appear, however, that Russia actually hacked the voting process or manipulated reported results in any way (despite the false narrative that they did). That’s the one piece of good news. And, don’t forget that I had been warning about Russia and Putin to the Administration for years but it all fell on deaf ears. By the way, in this context, doesn’t Hillary Clinton’s use of a home-brew server for so much of her business as Secretary of State seem ludicrous if not criminal for someone who should know better? If Russia would hack the DNC, how much more valuable to hack the Secretary of State. It seems as if she was more intent on keeping information safe from the Freedom of Information Act than she was from enemies of the United States. More From Global Economic Warfare: