“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” said President Barack Obama in 2012, mocking Mitt Romney for eyeing Russia as a top geopolitical threat.
The line drew a chorus of laughter from liberals at the time, and Democratic Party leaders from John Kerry to Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton latched onto it in an effort to undercut Romney’s foreign policy chops.
Fast forward five years and the Center for American Progress Action Fund announced today the launch of its “Moscow Project,” predicated on the claim that “Russia’s actions are a significant and ongoing cause for concern.”
Who’s laughing now?
In fact, today, CAP Action is encouraging amateur internet sleuths to literally annotate the infamous “dossier” published by Buzzfeed in January with evidence regarding Donald Trump’s connections to Russia. “By scouring the internet for credible, publicly available information,” the project’s website says, “you can help us dig deeper and create a central repository for supporting or disproving the allegations in the dossier.”
Users simply “create an account, highlight a portion of the dossier’s text, and add a comment that includes corroborating evidence.”
Ironically, the project is lead by Max Bergmann, who was a senior advisor at the State Department when Secretary John Kerry mocked Romney for “[blurting] out the preposterous notion that Russia is our number one political/geopolitical foe.”
In a leaked email to John Podesta, CAP Action President Neera Tanden memorably referred to Hillary Clinton’s instincts as “suboptimal.” Given Clinton and her party’s instincts on Russia, that assessment should probably be expanded to include the entire political Left.
Now, the Moscow Project website is calling Russia’s interference in the presidential election “an unprecedented attack on American democracy.”
Who could have seen that coming?
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
