Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. Former Editor-in-Chief of The Moscow News, he is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013.

Show me an American Neocon today and I will show you a pro-Clinton supporter. In fact, it is indicative of Hillary Clinton's particular brand of foreign policy that Republican hawks have fled the GOP standard to join ranks with the warmongering Democrats.

In order to guarantee another 4-8 years of US-led military aggression in the Middle East, and heightened tensions with Russia and China (all of which translates into lucrative defense spending), the Neocons have found it necessary to drag Russian President Vladimir Putin into the 2016 presidential race as a means of deflecting attention away from a devastating series of leaked emails, courtesy of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, that portray Clinton and her campaign team in less than glowing terms.

The latest Neocon to grease the wheels of Clinton's War & Wall Street political machine is Madeleine Albright, 79, the former US Secretary of State, who is perhaps most famous for two quotes, "What's the point of having this superb military... if we can't use it?" And second, when asked in a 1996 interview with the news program 60 Minutes if the price of UN sanctions against Iraq - which was half a million dead Iraqi children - was worth it, Albright unhesitatingly responded, "We think the price is worth it."

Albright opened her opinion piece in USA Today with a wicked curve ball: "Democrats have been renewing their call this week for the FBI to release more information on the connections among Donald Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government. But it is already clear that Russia's intervention in our election on Trump's side is the real scandal of 2016... "

Albright attempts to control the narrative, not to mention the history books, by instructing the reader that Russia's (unproven) intervention in the 2016 presidential election is the "real scandal" of the year, as opposed, of course, to Julian Assange's torturous, slow-drip outing of Hillary Clinton and her mind-boggling list of 'poor decision-making.'

"The Russian government has already hacked into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in an effort to create confusion and turn voters off from politics," Albright wrote, essentially telling Americans 'nothing to look at here, please move on.'

Nowhere does Albright question the contents of the emails. This deliberate and glaring oversight explains why Albright and her fellow Neocons found it so necessary to drag Russia into this scandal. The allegations contained in the WikiLeaks emails are so potentially damaging to Clinton's chances at the White House that they required a diversion as large as Russia to conceal them.

Yet, even the FBI admits there is no convincing evidence linking the leaked emails as an effort by Russia to boost Trump's victory chances on Nov.8th. And judging by the tarnished reputations of the Republican and Democratic contenders, it should come as no surprise that Russia has no clear favorite in this American dog race, which make the hacking charges against Moscow all the more ridiculous.

But all this misses the main point, indeed as it is cunningly designed to do. With all of the spin going on, can anybody still recall what the released Clinton emails revealed?

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Briefly, the leaked documents revealed that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had colluded with the Clinton campaign to ensure Hillary Clinton received the nomination ahead of other potential candidates, including the popular Bernie Sanders. That damning revelation led to the ouster of DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Russians clearly had nothing to do with that.

Second, the woman who replaced Schultz, Democratic strategist and former CNN contributor, Donna Brazile, was found to have tipped off the Clinton campaign on the content of two questions ahead of the final Clinton-Trump CNN-hosted debate. The jaw-dropping implications of that explosive finding, which could have tipped the scales in favor of Clinton, deserves nothing short of a Watergate-style investigation.

By the way, the Russians had nothing to do with that bit of insider intrigue, either.

But that's mere child's play compared to documents that show how Clinton, as the Secretary of State, severely mishandled the 2012 Benghazi attack, which was orchestrated by a radical Islamic group. US Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens was killed in the attack. In an interview with Democracy Now, Assange said Clinton was even responsible for arming Islamic State fighters in Syria in an apparent effort to bring down the government of President Bashar Assad.

Clinton's leaky emails point to "the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within Syria, including ISIS, that’s there in those emails," the WikiLeaks co-founder said. "There’s more than 1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection, that we have released, just about Libya alone," he added.

Nor did the Russians have anything to do with those decisions made by the Obama administration.

So why all the mindless media chatter about Russia?

There was yet another potential bit of 'collateral damage' in the ongoing WikiLeaks drama that has largely gone overlooked. Since it is preposterous to think that Russia would have any need or desire to influence the US elections, nor has there been a single piece of convincing evidence to support the claim, WikiLeaks somehow managed to get the leaked documents. Why not from a DNC insider? In fact, why not from Seth Rich, the director of voter expansion with DNC who would have had access to the incriminating emails?

We'll probably never know the answer to that question because Mr. Rich is no longer around to provide his testimony.

In the early hours of July 10th, Rich was shot multiple times in the back as he walked home alone from a Washington pub. Was Rich the victim of a robbery? If so, investigators were baffled as to why his wallet, credit cards, wrist watch and cellphone were not removed from his body.

Police Chief Cathy Lanier admitted at a press conference, “Right now, we have more questions than answers.”

Julian Assange, falling short of admitting Rich - as opposed to Russia - was the source of the leaked information, offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the individual(s) responsible for the premature death of Mr. Rich.

ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 9, 2016

Neverthless, Newsweek was just one of many media outlets that brushed off the incident as "yet another round of Clinton conspiracy theories, this one claiming that Rich was murdered—at dawn—as he was on his way to sing to the FBI about damning internal DNC emails."

Funny how the Western media regularly accuses foreign media of jumping on wild "conspiracy theories," yet they have no qualms saddling up their own highly dubious ideas about "Russian involvement" in the WikiLeaks.

Although it may be perfectly true that Mr. Rich died the victim of a robbery gone awry, there are still grounds to believe that he was the DNC whistleblower. Somehow the mainstream media, however, found it more expedient to pin the blame on a distant foreign power without a shred of evidence.

Indeed, Newsweek was apparently satisfied that it had performed due diligence by quoting an anonymous source that said: “There was no indication that any insider was involved in this... Every indication is this was a remote attack from a foreign government—the Russians."

When the Neocon defection began

When Donald Trump first announced he would scale back the size of America's global military footprint if elected president, neo-conservatives unleashed a collective howl of pain as they began fleeing en masse the ship of the Republican Party.

Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a top Neocon ideologue, signaled the defection when he said a Trump presidency would herald in a new age of American-style fascism.

Today, the tattered flag of the Neocons is flapping high above the Clinton camp, distant fires glowing, as they continue to spearhead a scathing attack on Trump just days before the election. What is the source for this great defection against their own party? Quite simply, the Neocons have no allegiance except to individuals - like George W. Bush and, yes, Barack Obama - who pledge to continue America's wars of expansion and empire.

Clinton's past record in Iraq, Libya and Syria strongly suggests she will lead the Neocons to more foreign pillage and plunder; Trump has pledged to bring home the troops in order to "Make America Great Again." Neocons are not big fans of infrastructure projects, like filling potholes and rebuilding schools.

Trump alienated the Republican warhorses when he pledged to pursue, like a real disciple of the conservative political creed, a foreign policy that does not send American men and women off to distant battlefields to be killed and maimed in senseless military adventures.

Assange ‘sorry for Clinton as a personality’ (John Pilger exclusive, courtesy of Dartmouth films) https://t.co/6Yw748WCnbpic.twitter.com/Abf0VFg6zy — RT (@RT_com) 3 ноября 2016 г.

The following passage by Joseph A. Mussomeli - in the Washington Post, of all places - really nailed it as to why the Neocons hate Donald Trump: "Our cadre of neoconservative foreign policy experts, unhumbled after marching us into a reckless war in Iraq and a poorly conceived one in Afghanistan, who applauded as we bombed Libya and bitterly resent our having failed to bomb Bashar al-Assad in Syria, are frightened... But what really troubles them is [Trump's] generally level-headed and unmessianic attitude toward foreign affairs... Clinton is just another neocon, though wrapped in sheep’s clothing — just as on some foreign policy issues Trump is little more than Bernie Sanders in wolf’s clothing."

Anne Applebaum, perennial anti-Russia scaremonger and notable Neocon, tossed a smoke grenade into the WikiLeaks scandal, attempting to obfuscate Julian Assange's work with groundless accusations: "Russia will continue to distribute and publish the material its hackers have already obtained from attacks on the Democratic National Committee, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, former NATO supreme commander Gen. Philip Breedlove and probably others. The point will be to discredit not just Hillary Clinton but also the U.S. democratic process and, again, the “elite” who supposedly run it."

Applebaum wants the distracted public to forget that the leaks already discredited Clinton. Moreover, the lesson between the lines of Applebaum's diatribe is that all the bad things Clinton has been connected with should be forgiven and forgotten because, well, big bad Russia allegedly had a hand in the mess.

Albright claimed that Russia seeks to "undermine Western leaders by making them seem corrupt or malicious." The reader may discern, based on what we already know about some Western leaders from Mr. Assange, the value of that statement for themselves.

So in closing, here we have the very same individuals that cheered when former Secretary of State Colin Powell shook a vial of fake anthrax in the UN General Assembly, spooking the world into believing Saddam Hussein was sitting on a hoard of WMDs, thereby triggering war against a sovereign state that has killed over 1 million Iraqis and counting, now would like us to believe Russia is behind the WiliLeaks emails that threaten to sink Clinton's rat-infested ship once and for all.

We would be fools to let them get away with such deliberate deception again.

@Robert_Bridge