© Marshall H. Cohen, Saban Center at BrookingsThen Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Haim Saban at the 2006 Saban Forum.
Now that everyone in the mainstream media and the intelligence establishment are blaming Russia for allegedly tilting the election in Donald Trump's favor, it is important to review a key element of this charge: that the Wikileaks emails released from the Democratic National Committee, allegedly by Russian hackers acting with the blessing of Vladimir Putin, were a sinister intervention, and equivalent to the Nixon team's 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate.
This charge needs to be met head-on, in one respect.
However the emails wound up in our laps through the fall, they were a great revelation to the American public. They exposed the workings of a political party, and at times its corrupt workings; they showed how the party was rigged against Bernie Sanders and in favor of big donors.
These revelations about how our political system operates were not themselves shocking: they were what smart people suspected.
What was shocking was the naked confirmation of the corruption. Seeing the political deals in flagrante was important. If a newspaper had managed to publish these emails on its own, documenting these practices, its reporters would be in line for the Pulitzer Prize. Whoever got into those emails did us a tremendous public service.
Let's remember some of the things we learned from those emails. For a year, Bernie Sanders repeatedly challenged Hillary Clinton to release the secret speeches she gave, for munificent fees, to Goldman, Sachs and other corporate groups. She never did.
Wikileaks did release those speeches in October. They showed that Clinton wanted the U.S. to "covertly" intervene in Syria. "We used to be much better at this than we are now," she said.
Comment: Can we stop talking about moderate rebels now?