By Britt Nelson

Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff

Welcome to the world-famous Democratic Roadkill Café in Philly. This week two new menu items have been added: Bernie’s seasoned three-bean soup with bacon and Schultz’s strip steaks with hot sauce and a dash of disgust.

Monday night’s Democratic National Convention speakers included First Lady Michelle Obama who spoke about being an African American living in a house built by slaves, Sen. Elizabeth Warren who bashed Republican challenger Donald Trump non-stop, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders who conceded to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sadly begging his supporters to vote for Clinton.

But who would have thought that another email controversy involving Democrats would erupt just before their national convention got underway in Philadelphia?

Instead of involving candidate Clinton directly, this email flap surrounds the top leadership of the Democratic National Committee — mainly chairwoman and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as well as six members of the DNC staff. The internal emails sent or received by Schultz and the others were uncovered and released by Wikileaks, a non-profit group based in Switzerland dedicated to releasing secretive information from governments and other groups to the public, using an army of hackers, insiders and network breaching experts.

Was this a planned release timed by Wikileaks? Yes.

The hacked DNC emails, according to news reports, appear to show a bias toward Clinton and against her closest competitor Sanders, who has repeatedly claimed the DNC was “rigged” against him during the primary elections that ended in June. The DNC as well as the Republican National Committee are intended to be natural toward their candidates and should not favor one candidate over another. My, oh my, how far the DNC has drifted away from that lofty mission.

In a CBS interview on Sunday, Clinton denied any knowledge of the released emails or any collusion between her campaign and the DNC.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Clinton told Scott Pelley of CBS News. How familiar does that denial sound? Deny everything, admit to nothing. Maintain plausible deniability at all times.

However, the DNC has issued an apology to Sanders, and Schultz will resign her office at the conclusion of the convention, but news reports claim she will immediately join the Clinton campaign for President. This scheme was the plan all along: that Schultz would quit the DNC chairmanship and join the Clinton campaign team. This apology and resignation is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, hopefully to ease concerns about the anti-Sanders emails and to get on with the presidential race like nothing happened. But it did happen. They all got caught, and they felt the Bern.

The Clinton campaign on Monday issued statements claiming Russians were behind the email release in order to help Trump, something he denies. Democrats have to blame someone other than themselves for the disgusting emails, some of which attacked the Jewish religion of Clinton’s closest competitor, saying Sanders might be an “atheist” which Christian voters would not like.

“She (Schultz) worked very hard to rig the system,” Trump said during a recent campaign stop.

The Russian Involvement Theory

As with other powerful U.S. political organizations, the DNC is a prime cyber warfare target. Internet security firm FireEye (PDF report) has investigated cyber attacks on the DNC, and they have noticed that the perpetrators work strictly during working hours in Russia, and they take breaks on national holidays. This attack pattern would suggest state-sponsored hackers, a strategy practiced by the United States, China, Russia, etc.

The electronic files turned over to Wikileaks contain a signature in Cyrillic, which could be construed as a taunt. Internet security firm Crowdstrike, which has investigated cyber attacks on the White House, reports that hacker crews Cozy Bear and Apt 29 are known to work with Russian government agencies, and they may be behind recent hacks of the DNC.

Finally, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has commented that American presidential candidates are certainly prime targets for state-sponsored cyber warfare. Director Clapper gained notoriety during the Edward Snowden scandal that exposed the vast and asinine U.S. espionage apparatus.

That the Kremlin wages cyber warfare against the U.S. is not news, particularly when the White House does it on a larger scale. The Costa Rica Star has previously reported on the findings of network security firm Kaspersky Labs, which found a collection of global servers used by the Equation Group, a hacking crew ostensibly working for the U.S. National Security Agency. It so happens that the Equation Group has utilized servers located in many countries, including Costa Rica, to distribute malware that can help the NSA carry out espionage, often on U.S. citizens living overseas.

The DNC Has Been Berned

On Monday morning and during a breakfast with Sanders’ supporters, Schultz was soundly booed, which led to her being pulled from opening the convention to avoid another embarrassment. Instead, Democratic Baltimore Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake, of recent Freddie Gray fame, was tapped at the moment to gavel-in the convention. She the is secretary of the DNC, but she did not speak.

The release of these emails by Wikileaks could certainly form the basis of a class-action lawsuit against the DNC filed by campaign donors of Sanders, who can request that their campaign donations be returned, citing fraud and misrepresentation by the DNC. The plaintiffs would have good standing to force the DNC to reimburse millions of dollars in donations.

News reports say the FBI has also been called in to investigate the Wikileaks emails and their source, but this too may be smoke and mirrors: If the FBI is investigating these issues, then Clinton and DNC staffers cannot comment because it is under investigation. Does this sound familiar?

During the primary election season, Sanders led Trump by a substantial margin in head-to-head election polls , a fact now overlooked by establishment Democrats wanting to elect their candidate Clinton. Several polls now show that in head-to-head matchups Trump is leading Clinton nationwide by up to four percentage points.

Fallout from the Wikileaks emails has yet to settle, but it’s clear the DNC favored Clinton over Sanders and tjat the primaries were “rigged” as Sanders had claimed. But Sanders, much to the chagrin of his supporters, sold out to the establishment Democrats and endorsed Clinton.

The DNC convention continues through Thursday night, when Clinton will officially accept her party’s nomination for President of the United States. Wikileaks says more Clinton related emails are forthcoming. What additional revelations will they contain?

About the author

Britt Nelson relocated to Costa Rica in 2011 from Florida, where he served as news editor for thePalatka Daily News, a newspaper owned by the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group (NYT-RNG) for 20 years.

Nelson served the NYT-RNG for 18 years in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida as a correspondent, reporter, staff writer, senior staff writer training new reporters, copy editor, page designer, editorial writer, editorial page editor and editorial board member.