IS PUTIN TAKING SIDES?
THE NATION HAS BEEN HERE BEFORE: OPERATIVES APPARENTLY WORKING undercover for a paranoid President break into the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee months before the party convenes to select its presidential nominee. The breach is detected, and—at least in 1972, the first time this happened—the fuse is lit on a slow-building, world-shaking scandal named for the scene of the crime: Watergate.
Over the decades since, there have been efforts, never quite right, to dub this or that scandal the next Watergate. But now the sequel has clearly arrived, a heavily digitized remake that announced itself with a dirty trick worthy of Richard Nixon’s plumbers: the posting of nearly 20,000 DNC emails, some acutely embarrassing, on the see-it-here site WikiLeaks. It was the cyberwar equivalent of an armor-piercing shell, slipped into the exceedingly narrow space (just three days) between the close of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign sustained most of the initial damage, the dirty laundry of her party fluttering like confetti onto the blue convention floor. But Donald Trump isn’t likely to come away unscathed either, inasmuch as the suspected author of his nascent good fortune—the paranoid President who allegedly set this scandal in motion—resides in the Kremlin.
The digital fingerprints
