First, former CIA chief Michael Morell endorsed Hillary Clinton in a lengthy New York Times op-ed. Now, former CIA operative and GOP advisor Evan McMullin is being touted as a legitimate alternative to Donald Trump for conservative voters.
McMullin, a 40-year-old who spent more than a decade as an undercover CIA operative, is being pushed by a group of Republican insiders as the never-Trump choice for GOP voters.
The long-shot candidate has deep ties to the GOP establishment through his work as a former policy adviser to the House Republican Conference.
McMullin, who will run as an independent, officially announced his candidacy Monday.
“It’s never too late to do the right thing, and America deserves much better than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton can offer us,” he said in a statement published by the New York Times. “I humbly offer myself as a leader who can give millions of disaffected Americans a conservative choice for president.”
The candidate has little chance of actually winning the presidency, which makes it clear his bid is aimed at simply making sure Trump doesn’t either.
As The New York Times pointed out of McMullin, who is a Mormon: “If Mr. McMullin is competitive nowhere else but Utah, he still could nonetheless have an impact on the race: Mr. Trump cannot win the presidency without holding the states that Mr. Romney won, his aides have concluded.”
If you believe McMullin’s bid is anything other than an attempt to make Trump loose Utah, which the candidate’s aides say is vital to campaign success, consider this assessment via Reuters:
McMullin has never held public office and is unknown to American voters. In addition to also lacking a quick source of campaign cash, he will face immediate hurdles to try to get his name on enough ballot papers to make himself a serious candidate.
Texas, for example, requires third-party candidates to get more than 79,000 signatures from residents who did not vote in either the Republican or Democrat primary. And the deadline for that was in early May.
Deadlines to get on the ballots have also lapsed for the large states of North Carolina, Illinois and Florida.
The best McMullin could likely hope for would be to simply play spoiler to Trump in a handful of states, eating away at the New York real estate developer’s ability to win states that are generally reliably Republican.
The former CIA operative’s fledgling campaign has the backing of Better for America, an anti-Trump group headed by Mitt Romney friend John Kingston.
So what gives?
It probably has something to do with Russia. Trump has hinted at a willingness to work with the nation’s Cold War foe to avoid extreme tension and maybe even foster cooperation to eliminate an Islamic terror problem that’s a threat to both the U.S. and Russia.
Trump’s tough statements on the problems Islamic extremism creates throughout the world are, in fact, in line with Russian foreign policies which seem to favor backing dictatorships when the only other option is destabilization which hands countries over to militant Islam.
Clinton psychotically put it in a conversation about U.S. actions to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, “We came, we saw, he died.”
It sounded like a celebration because it was. His death meant Libya would descend into chaos.
Putin, meanwhile, said: “They showed to the whole world how he (Gaddafi) was killed; there was blood all over. Is that what they call a democracy?”
ISIS has now filled the power vacuum left in Libya by the U.S. actions under Clinton’s watch.
And as ISIS has grown in power in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East destabilized by the brand of U.S. interventionism championed by the Clinton State Department, they’ve begun attacking Americans on U.S. soil with alarming regularity.
But Clinton and her CIA backers don’t mind. ISIS is a monster they created and one they believe they can control. As for the American lives lost to ISIS-inspired attacks, they might ask “what difference does it make?”
They want Americans to believe Russia is a far bigger threat than the terrorists the U.S. continues arming.
Here’s how that ties back to Kingston and his anti-Trump CIA candidate.
If you remember, Romney is no fan of Russia either. In 2012, he referred to the country as “our number one geopolitical foe.”
Clinton’s hawkish position on Russia is more in tune with that line of thinking than Trump’s.
She actually said Russian President Vladimir Putin is as bad as Hitler.
As commentator Paul Craig Roberts, an economist who served as assistant secretary of treasury under President Reagan, said, that means we can expect some fireworks if she’s elected.
“When you go that far out on a limb, you really kind of have to go the rest of the way,” he said in an interview at Infowars.com. “I don’t’ think there is any candidate that we can end up with as president that would be more likely to go to war with Russia than Hillary.”
Trump’s rapport with the Russian president is so much better, meanwhile, that Morell went so far as to accuse him of being a stooge for Putin.
Putin has expressed public support for Trump, calling him “the absolute leader in the presidential race.”
Of Clinton, Putin suggested a war between the U.S. and Russia could break out pending her election.
So what would be so bad about improving relations between the U.S. and Russia under a Trump administration?
Nothing for the average Russian or American.
But for people heavily invested in defense spending and investment, it could be catastrophic on a number of fronts.
Trump/Putin cooperation might not “spread democracy”—as if that’s happened yet, anyhow— but it could reduce the amount of jihadist-led turmoil in key regions throughout the world. That’s because both leaders have taken hard stances against anything resembling Islamic extremism.
So, the Trump/Clinton election is sort of a pick your devil scenario: Let extremists run rampant or allow secular dictators to regain control of some regions.
Neither outcome is ideal.
But the former is much better for people involved with companies heavily invested in defense and the big banks that move around their money.
Can you guess who they are?
