Sanders called for abolishing the CIA

[Tracy Riddle]

Another reason why he won't be President. But the tone of the article is OMG! SO RADICAL! WHAT KIND OF CRAZEE PERSON DOESN'T THINK THE CIA IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR FREEDOMS? ::
[URL="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-cia-219451"]
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/be...cia-219451[/URL]

In his most recent debate with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders befuddled some viewers with an arcane reference to a 1953 U.S.-backed coup in Iran, which Sanders called an example of America's history of "overthrowing governments."
It turns out that the Vermont senator has railed against that coup assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency against Iran's primeMinister, Mohammad Mosaddegh since he was a young radical activist in the mid-1970s.

One big difference between then and now: Forty years ago, Sanders didn't just complain about CIA interventions abroad; he called for abolishing the spy agency altogether.
The CIA is "a dangerous institution that has got to go," Sanders told an audience in Vermont in October 1974. He described the agency as a tool of American corporate interests that repeatedly toppled democratically elected leaders including, he said, Iran's Mosaddegh. The agency was accountable to no one, he fumed, "except right-wing lunatics who us it to prop up fascist dictatorships."
At the time, the 33-year-old socialist was running for U.S. Senate on the ticket of the Liberty Union Party, an anti-war group that likened the draft to "a modern form of slavery" and called for reducing the U.S. military in favor of local militias and the Coast Guard.
While Sanders' extreme leftist past is well known, many of his specific views from the 1970s and '80s remain unfamiliar even to Democratic insiders. And while those views have mellowed considerably over time, Sanders' unexpectedly strong performance in the presidential race has party leaders increasingly alarmed that Republicans would make devastating use of his early career should he win the Democratic nomination.
For now, it's Democratic allies of Hillary Clinton who are on the attack. "Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength," said Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff to CIA director Leon Panetta and now advises Clinton's campaign. "If this is a window into Sanders' thinking, it reinforces the conclusion that he's not qualified to be commander in chief."
Sanders allies bristle at questions about his views from four decades ago, saying they have little to do with his current candidacy.
"I think people should look at his 25-year congressional career," said one person who worked for Sanders in the House of Representatives, and whose employment circumstances prohibit him from speaking on the record. "You don't have to look at some speech from the early '70s to know where he is on issues. There's a very clear congressional record. I think he should be measured and judged on that."

A Sanders campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.Though extreme even by the standards of that time, Sanders' call to eliminate the CIA came amid widespread fury at an agency many Americans believed was running amok. Shortly after Sanders' comments, a special congressional panel known as the Church Committee published a series of damning reports on agency abuses like assassination attempts against foreign leaders and illegal domestic spying on Vietnam War protesters.
If the government couldn't rein in the CIA, the committee concluded, "covert action should be abandoned as an instrument of foreign policy."
Sanders' call for the CIA's demise came during a Senate candidates forum also attended by a rival: Patrick Leahy, who is now Vermont's senior senator. Leahy, then a young state's attorney, took the more moderate view that the CIA should be limited to intelligence gathering. (Leahy won that election but Sanders won audience cheers on the question, according to a Bennington Banner account.)
Sanders lashed out at the CIA for years to come. In a 1989 C-SPAN interview, he argued that every "revolution for the poor people" in Latin or Central America had been "overthrown by the CIA" or some other arm of the U.S. government.
But after his election to Congress in 1990, Sanders toned down his anti-CIA rhetoric and shifted his focus from morality to the size and opacity of U.S. intelligence budgets.
In May of 1996, for instance, Sanders offered an amendment to cut the intelligence budget by 10 percent. Speaking on the House floor, he asked whether colleagues who had voted to cut social spending "now have the courage to take on the very powerful intelligence community."

"While I disagree strongly with the amendment of the gentleman from Vermont, I do respect ... his tenacity in his annual concern about the spending of intelligence," replied the Republican then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Larry Combest of Texas.Since the the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Sanders has turned that tenacity against the swift expansion of power for U.S. intelligence agencies. He was among just 66 House members who voted against the 2001 PATRIOT Act; he also opposed last year's USA Freedom Act which undid parts of the PATRIOT Act on the grounds that it didn't go far enough.
Sanders has said that Edward Snowden's leak of National Security Agency secrets was "extremely important" for revealing "the degree to which the NSA has abused its authority and violated our constitutional rights." And he voted against the 2013 confirmation of CIA director John Brennan, questioning Brennan's ability to protect civil liberties amid the agency's "use of drones and other methods."
Although those positions put Sanders to the left of all but the most liberal Democrats in Washington, he has come a long way from his days with the Liberty Union Party, on whose ticket he made four unsuccessful runs for office twice each for Senate and for governor between 1971 and 1977.
Like so many young liberals of that era, Sanders was galvanized in his 20s by the Vietnam War, which drew him to Liberty Union, founded by a group of Vermont activists in 1970. "Opposition to the war in Vietnam was the focus point that brought us together," said one founder, Peter Diamondstone, who knew Sanders well.
Sanders himself applied for conscientious objector status during the war. ("As a college student in the 1960s he was a pacifist," his campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told ABC News in August. "[He] isn't now.)
Some anti-war groups of the time, including most famously the Weathermen, waged domestic terrorism in the name of ending the war. Liberty Union rejected violent tactics, a position Sanders echoed in one June 1976 public appearance while also implying that government infiltrators might be staging bombings in order to discredit anti-war groups.
"Anybody that thinks change is going to come because of bombings or terrorist activity is either extremely stupid, crazy, or an agent of the U.S. government," Sanders said.
The party was radical in other ways. A 1971 document listing Liberty Union's "principles" called the draft a "modern form of slavery" that produced "cannon fodder" for "the imperialist policy of the U.S."
The principles document also called for a much smaller military. "A return to the system of local citizen militias and Coast Guard would provide our nation with ample protection and also protect us from the imperialist impulses of our leaders," it declared.
Sanders left Liberty Union in 1977, calling it ineffectual.Today, Diamondstone complains that Sanders has acquired some of the imperialist tendencies he used to denounce. He's not alone: Sanders has angered many socialist allies since coming to Congress by backing U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and the Balkans.
Though he doesn't remember much about Sanders' views of the CIA, Diamondstone did recall debating the U.S. military budget with him. "We argued about, should we reduce the military budget by 50 percent or should we get rid of it altogether? I wanted to get rid of it," Diamondstone said.
In that argument, Sanders proved to be a relative moderate. Sanders, Diamondstone said, was content with cutting Pentagon spending by just 50 percent.
The former Sanders aide cautioned against trying to draw too many lessons from the distant past.
After all, he said, in 1964, "Hillary Clinton was a proud Barry Goldwater supporter."

[Albert Doyle]

And Hillary is calling herself a progressive.


There is no real democracy in America because if there was Hillary would be instantly disqualified because she responded to a German CIA rendition torture victim, who had been accidentally kidnapped and tortured in Europe by CIA, that "It was his problem" and that he had no claim against the American government.


America is a fraud because this issue was deliberately kept off the air by the media and even Sanders doesn't point it out.

[Peter Lemkin]

Another reason why he won't be President. But the tone of the article is OMG! SO RADICAL! WHAT KIND OF CRAZEE PERSON DOESN'T THINK THE CIA IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR FREEDOMS? ::
[URL="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-cia-219451"]
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/be...cia-219451[/URL]

In his most recent debate with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders befuddled some viewers with an arcane reference to a 1953 U.S.-backed coup in Iran, which Sanders called an example of America's history of "overthrowing governments."
It turns out that the Vermont senator has railed against that coup assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency against Iran's primeMinister, Mohammad Mosaddegh since he was a young radical activist in the mid-1970s.

One big difference between then and now: Forty years ago, Sanders didn't just complain about CIA interventions abroad; he called for abolishing the spy agency altogether.
The CIA is "a dangerous institution that has got to go," Sanders told an audience in Vermont in October 1974. He described the agency as a tool of American corporate interests that repeatedly toppled democratically elected leaders including, he said, Iran's Mosaddegh. The agency was accountable to no one, he fumed, "except right-wing lunatics who us it to prop up fascist dictatorships."
At the time, the 33-year-old socialist was running for U.S. Senate on the ticket of the Liberty Union Party, an anti-war group that likened the draft to "a modern form of slavery" and called for reducing the U.S. military in favor of local militias and the Coast Guard.
While Sanders' extreme leftist past is well known, many of his specific views from the 1970s and '80s remain unfamiliar even to Democratic insiders. And while those views have mellowed considerably over time, Sanders' unexpectedly strong performance in the presidential race has party leaders increasingly alarmed that Republicans would make devastating use of his early career should he win the Democratic nomination.
For now, it's Democratic allies of Hillary Clinton who are on the attack. "Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength," said Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff to CIA director Leon Panetta and now advises Clinton's campaign. "If this is a window into Sanders' thinking, it reinforces the conclusion that he's not qualified to be commander in chief."
Sanders allies bristle at questions about his views from four decades ago, saying they have little to do with his current candidacy.
"I think people should look at his 25-year congressional career," said one person who worked for Sanders in the House of Representatives, and whose employment circumstances prohibit him from speaking on the record. "You don't have to look at some speech from the early '70s to know where he is on issues. There's a very clear congressional record. I think he should be measured and judged on that."

A Sanders campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.Though extreme even by the standards of that time, Sanders' call to eliminate the CIA came amid widespread fury at an agency many Americans believed was running amok. Shortly after Sanders' comments, a special congressional panel known as the Church Committee published a series of damning reports on agency abuses like assassination attempts against foreign leaders and illegal domestic spying on Vietnam War protesters.
If the government couldn't rein in the CIA, the committee concluded, "covert action should be abandoned as an instrument of foreign policy."
Sanders' call for the CIA's demise came during a Senate candidates forum also attended by a rival: Patrick Leahy, who is now Vermont's senior senator. Leahy, then a young state's attorney, took the more moderate view that the CIA should be limited to intelligence gathering. (Leahy won that election but Sanders won audience cheers on the question, according to a Bennington Banner account.)
Sanders lashed out at the CIA for years to come. In a 1989 C-SPAN interview, he argued that every "revolution for the poor people" in Latin or Central America had been "overthrown by the CIA" or some other arm of the U.S. government.
But after his election to Congress in 1990, Sanders toned down his anti-CIA rhetoric and shifted his focus from morality to the size and opacity of U.S. intelligence budgets.
In May of 1996, for instance, Sanders offered an amendment to cut the intelligence budget by 10 percent. Speaking on the House floor, he asked whether colleagues who had voted to cut social spending "now have the courage to take on the very powerful intelligence community."

"While I disagree strongly with the amendment of the gentleman from Vermont, I do respect ... his tenacity in his annual concern about the spending of intelligence," replied the Republican then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Larry Combest of Texas.Since the the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Sanders has turned that tenacity against the swift expansion of power for U.S. intelligence agencies. He was among just 66 House members who voted against the 2001 PATRIOT Act; he also opposed last year's USA Freedom Act which undid parts of the PATRIOT Act on the grounds that it didn't go far enough.
Sanders has said that Edward Snowden's leak of National Security Agency secrets was "extremely important" for revealing "the degree to which the NSA has abused its authority and violated our constitutional rights." And he voted against the 2013 confirmation of CIA director John Brennan, questioning Brennan's ability to protect civil liberties amid the agency's "use of drones and other methods."
Although those positions put Sanders to the left of all but the most liberal Democrats in Washington, he has come a long way from his days with the Liberty Union Party, on whose ticket he made four unsuccessful runs for office twice each for Senate and for governor between 1971 and 1977.
Like so many young liberals of that era, Sanders was galvanized in his 20s by the Vietnam War, which drew him to Liberty Union, founded by a group of Vermont activists in 1970. "Opposition to the war in Vietnam was the focus point that brought us together," said one founder, Peter Diamondstone, who knew Sanders well.
Sanders himself applied for conscientious objector status during the war. ("As a college student in the 1960s he was a pacifist," his campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told ABC News in August. "[He] isn't now.)
Some anti-war groups of the time, including most famously the Weathermen, waged domestic terrorism in the name of ending the war. Liberty Union rejected violent tactics, a position Sanders echoed in one June 1976 public appearance while also implying that government infiltrators might be staging bombings in order to discredit anti-war groups.
"Anybody that thinks change is going to come because of bombings or terrorist activity is either extremely stupid, crazy, or an agent of the U.S. government," Sanders said.
The party was radical in other ways. A 1971 document listing Liberty Union's "principles" called the draft a "modern form of slavery" that produced "cannon fodder" for "the imperialist policy of the U.S."
The principles document also called for a much smaller military. "A return to the system of local citizen militias and Coast Guard would provide our nation with ample protection and also protect us from the imperialist impulses of our leaders," it declared.
Sanders left Liberty Union in 1977, calling it ineffectual.Today, Diamondstone complains that Sanders has acquired some of the imperialist tendencies he used to denounce. He's not alone: Sanders has angered many socialist allies since coming to Congress by backing U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and the Balkans.
Though he doesn't remember much about Sanders' views of the CIA, Diamondstone did recall debating the U.S. military budget with him. "We argued about, should we reduce the military budget by 50 percent or should we get rid of it altogether? I wanted to get rid of it," Diamondstone said.
In that argument, Sanders proved to be a relative moderate. Sanders, Diamondstone said, was content with cutting Pentagon spending by just 50 percent.
The former Sanders aide cautioned against trying to draw too many lessons from the distant past.
After all, he said, in 1964, "Hillary Clinton was a proud Barry Goldwater supporter."

Anyone who called for the end or defunding of the CIA can't be all bad!!!!...in fact, far from it. While he seems to have become less radical than in his youth, compared to the 'others' he is still way, way more progressive - and a light-year further than Obama ever was. That said, the powers that really rule the nation would NEVER allow someone who was anti-CIA or anti-covert operations to ever rule them.....they'd find a way before, during or after the election [which they largely control] of getting rid of that person - politically or just getting rid of them - as in dead [of course it would be made to look like an accident].

[Drew Phipps]

Remember too that JFK called for the "smashing of the CIA into 1000 pieces." I suspect that if the CIA would restrict itself to the gathering of intelligence, as Truman intended, they would only need 1/2 their current budget, and the moral cesspools that they drag America into by virtue of "regime change" would be a thing of the past.

[Magda Hassan]

Well, Hilary sure ain't offering this or anything remotely like it. Just more of the same. I would love to vote for Bernie but cannot. Even though I think the rest of the world should be able to vote in US elections since the US thinks it owns it all anyway. Go Bernie!

[David Guyatt]

Well, Hilary sure ain't offering this or anything remotely like it. Just more of the same. I would love to vote for Bernie but cannot. Even though I think the rest of the world should be able to vote in US elections since the US thinks it owns it all

And because the rest of the world suffers the consequences of US foreign policy and interventionism...:tampfeet::

[Peter Lemkin]

Well, Hilary sure ain't offering this or anything remotely like it. Just more of the same. I would love to vote for Bernie but cannot. Even though I think the rest of the world should be able to vote in US elections since the US thinks it owns it all

And because the rest of the world suffers the consequences of US foreign policy and interventionism...:tampfeet::

Well, if it makes you feel any better....WE [Americans] don't get to vote either.....after specially 'selected' candidates are put up for the false final two party vote, the fix is in before anyone votes...

Harvey Wasserman, I wanted to talk to you now about voting machines
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: and your concern over the years that electronic voting could be used to steal elections. Are you still concerned about this?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, electronic voting was used to steal the presidential election right here in Ohio in 2004. John Kerry was the rightful winner in 2004 over George W. Bush. The secretary of state at the time, J. Kenneth Blackwell, and the governor, Robert Taft, used their power of electronic vote count to flip the vote to George W. Bush from John Kerry.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: We watched itI grew up here, Amy. We watched it, totally, right up close and personal. We did the accounting. I work with a political scientist named Bob Fitrakis. We're about to come out with another book, The Strip & Flip of the 2016 Selection. They are stripping the voter rollsand Greg Palast, the great investigative reporter, is doing great on thisremoving African Americans, Hispanics, people who might incline to vote progressive, and theyso thatin 2004, they stripped 300,000 people from the voter rolls here in the urban areas. Bush only won by less than 120 [thousand].
And this year, about 80 percent of the vote nationally will be cast on electronic voting machines. There is no verifiability. In six key swing statesFlorida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Arizonayou have Republican governors and Republican secretaries of state, and no method of verifying the electronic vote count. At midnight or whenever it is on election night, those two guys can go in there with an IT person and flip the outcome of an electronically counted vote within about 60 seconds. So all this millions and millions of dollars, people out campaigning and so on, can be negated by an electronic vote flip late at night on election night, and there is no way to verify what's happened.
AMY GOODMAN: They didn't do this with President Obama in 2008.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: They did. He had too many votes; he was too far out. They couldn'tit would have taken them too many, to flip too many states. [inaudible] believe Obama won by well over 10 million votes. The lastthe final vote count was inofficial, was in 7 or 8 million.
AMY GOODMAN: But what gives you this idea?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Because we've seen it happen. When you compare exit polls, which are generally accurate to within 1 percent, with the electronic outcome, there are huge variations. And we have documented many dozens of different things that they have done over the years to flip electronic votes.
AMY GOODMAN: How does e-voting, electronic voting, work? And who controls the controls on it?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, that's the key. The electronic voting machines are owned by private corporations, which are Republican in orientation, generally. And the courts have ruled that the source code on these electronic voting machines is proprietary. So, even the governments that buy or lease these machines have no access to a final verification process. Even Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify." And we know that the vote count was flipped in 2004. We know it was flipped in Volusia County in 2000.
AMY GOODMAN: Where is Volusia County?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: In Florida, when Al Gore basically was the rightful winner, and George W. Bush won the election. I mean, the only great
AMY GOODMAN: And they were electronic voting machines?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: In Volusia County, they were, yes. In the southern part of Florida, they used butterfly ballots, as you'll recall. The only good thing we can say about George W. Bush is the American people never actually elected him president. And we're looking now at 2016, at an election that will be very easily flipped, in those six key swing states and elsewhere.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is the answer?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: We have to have universal, hand-counted paper ballots. And Bernie Sanders has endorsed that. We have to have automatic voter registration, where people can monitor the registration rolls, because people are being stripped from the registration rolls, mostly, of course, African-American and Hispanic. But this year, we're not going to get that. And this year, it's going to be very, very difficult, in a close election, to monitor exactly what happens, because these are black boxes. We have a wonderful actress named Bev Harris, who's been working with Greg Palast and others, who has shown, in black box voting, that the public has no real access, no verification process for the electronic votes. And so we're going through this huge charade here of a national campaign, primaries and then a general election, where hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent, and on election night, in 60 seconds, the actual outcome can be flipped electronically in key swing states with no verification whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN: If there are electronic voting machines everywhere, which there are now, right?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Pretty much, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you think they can be protected, people can be sure that their vote is counted, that they cast, even using electronic voting machines?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: They can't be. You cannot verify an electronic voting machine. They are privately owned by private corporations, and the proprietary software prevents the public from getting access to the actual vote count. We're going into a national election, and not just the presidency, but Senate seats, House seats. We believe three Senate seats in 2014 were stolenin North Carolina, Colorado and Alaskathat the Republicans do not have a legitimate 54-seat, or whatever it is, majority in the Senate. And this will happen again. It's not just the presidency. And we've beenwe have written seven books about this, Bob Fitrakis and I, from our experience here in Ohio in 2004. And again, we have a Republican governor, Republican secretary of state, no verifiability on the electronic vote count. It will be arbitrary, when push comes to shove, onmidnight, 1:00 on election nightwhat the outcome will be.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think just Republicans would do it?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Oh, no, Democrats definitely do it. I havewe have strong questions about Rahm Emanuel being re-elected in Chicago, for example. We have no doubt that Scott Walker stole his re-election in Wisconsin.
AMY GOODMAN: Based on what?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Based on the miraculous discovery of several thousand votes in a so-called glitched computer voting machine that gave him a victory where it was clearly a defeat. You know, this is stuff that's been going on a long time. These methods were perfected more or less overseas by the CIA and other covert and overt operations. They came back. It started in 1988 with George H.W. Bush using electronic voting machines in New Hampshire to beat Bob Dole in the 1988 primary. And we have seen since then the use of electronic voting machines all across the country to flip elections after they have stripped the voter rolls. And, you know
AMY GOODMAN: When you say "stripping the voter rolls," you mean?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes, well, Greg Palast has reported on this. In Florida 2000, 90,000 mostly black and Hispanic voters were stripped out of the voter rolls before the election, in a vote count that was won by 600 votes. And in Ohio 2004, 300,000 voters in primarily urban areas were stripped off the voter rolls. People showed up to vote in the same precinctas did I, by the waythey wereI was denied my absentee ballot, and we had a federal lawsuit on this, which we won and went nowhere after that.
But the reality is that we are voting in black boxes and that the governors and secretaries of state of these key swing statesbut wherever you have a governor and secretary of state from the same party, be they Democrat or Republican, they have the power, under the electronic voting system, to flip the outcome of an election, with no verifiability, because the courts have ruled that these privately owned voting machines have proprietary software. It's a nightmare. And it's not democracy. I mean, Bernie Sanders has shown that the electionthat the campaign finance is rigged, that the economy is rigged. Why wouldn't they take the very small next step to rig the electronic voting machines?

[Peter Lemkin]

Media Blackout As Thousands of Bernie Sanders Supporters March in 45 Cities

Nathan Wellman | February 27, 2016

---

Ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries, a nationwide march has swept across the nation for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. Organizers have reported that at least 40 cities are holding demonstrations, and perhaps as many as 70.
Thousands of cheering Bernie supporters have packed metropolitan sidewalks and streets, further cementing the rallying cry that the Bernie phenomenon is more than a Presidential campaign. It's a passionate political movement that demands revolution. Despite everything they've battled so far, the Sanders campaign is thriving.
The insane reality that a candidate like Bernie can rouse thousands to take to the streets for him and yet still be treated by the media and the DNC like some kind of long-shot underdog only further proves the deliberate nature of their attempted sabotage of his campaign.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton's campaign hasn't been able to muster enough supporters for a march of any kind for the entire election season.
A Bernie Sanders supporter in Chicago shows off her sign.

Supporters have taken to Twitter with the hashtag #MarchForBernie, which has instantly started trending. Many of them are using the social media platform to directly call out the media for spending all of their time covering the latest terrible thing Donald Trump has blurted rather than a nationwide organized march of thousands of Americans against corruption and inequality.
As of this writing, a Google search for #MarchforBernie only brings up a few local sites talking about how the march will affect traffic.
Pittsburgh's local news had this to say about the march:
"Routes that run along Bigelow Boulevard and Fifth Avenue could be detoured or experience standing delays as the estimated 2,000 people march from the University of Pittsburgh to Market Square. Some bus stops may be temporarily discontinued, the Port Authority of Allegheny County said in a press release."
Given the massive nature of these demonstrations, "traffic" will soon be the least of the establishment's worries.

[Magda Hassan]

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound?

[Lauren Johnson]

At best, Sanders will be another Jimmy Carter, i.e. a useful idiot. Most likely, his role is to foster the illusion of democracy and a hard fought political contest in which he graciously climbs on the Hillary bus to hell.