I’m not one to go all conspiracy theory, but I just read something online that joggled my brain – and not in a good way. Over on a message board I frequent called “DataLounge”, someone just posed this question:
OKay, what? Did Republicans – meaning Senator Mitch McConnell – NOT confirm Merrick Garland to the United States Supreme Court because they knew the fix was in for the 2016 elections? Yes, that’s what this person is asking. And no, it wasn’t me.
So it made me think. And after I thought about it, I decided to look up the timeline of Russian influence in the 2016 election. And here we go:
- Russia started interfering in the 2016 election starting in 2015.
- Russian troll farms purchased ads to run on Facebook starting in June, 2015. (source)
- Russians hacked the DNC and maintained hacked access from July 2015 to June 2016. (source)
- SCOTUS Judge Antonin Scalia died in February, 2016 (source)
- Ten days after Scalia’s death, Senate Republicans told their leadership not to bring up any nomination by Obama. (source)
- President Obama nominated Merrick Garland in March, 2016. (source)
- In August, 2016, Senator McConnell said: “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'” (source)
Was the fix in? We knew about Russia hacking by that point. We knew about the influence in the election. We knew that Russians were trying to get Donald Trump elected.
But what we don’t know is, did Senator Mitch McConnell sell his country out? Did he commit treason by supporting Russian efforts in hacking so that he could deny a sitting president the right to fill a Supreme Court seat?
We don’t know. We know the timeline, and what it looks like. But we may never know the answer.