Hacked Macron Emails: French Government Warns Media to “Look the Other Way”

With the drama that surrounds the French Prime Minister’s race between centrist party leader Emmanuel Macron and National Front’s Marine Le Pen, comes the startling news that the French government has injected itself into the mix by warning the media not to cover or publish the thousands of Macron emails exposed by a hack of unknown origins.

Macron, who leads the centrist party was endorsed by the far-Left candidate AND the Right Establishment candidate after those two lost the election to Macron and Le Pen. In French politics, if two or more candidates receive a certain equal portion of the vote, they advance to a run-off vote a few weeks later that determines the ultimate victor.

The two main Party candidates lost in a dramatic election that saw many French citizens rejecting the politics-as-usual of the Establishment, much like what has occurred here in the United States.

However, like Trump, Le Pen has endured the Leftists’ negative press, television, radio, and print, and has also withstood the so-called Right party leaders calling on Le Pen to give up her fruitless run (sound familiar, George Will?). According to all the polls, Le Pen doesn’t stand a chance against Macron, with statistics placing her as much as 25 points behind the former French Prime Minister of Economy, Finance & Industry (sound familiar, GOP Establishment?).

The appearance of impropriety on the part of the French government is more a full-blown stark exposure of how big government will protect its own. Tens of thousands of emails have been hacked from the account of Macron and purport to confirm the existence of several off-shore accounts in Macron’s name.  This coming after an independent source weeks ago leaked information about the same subject matter.  When Le Pen’s campaign brought up the possible conflict, she was shouted down and told not to publicize “fake news.”

In fact, the media has been warned not to publish any information found or they could face criminal charges:

After 9 gigabytes of Macron-linked documents and emails were released on an anonymous pastebin website on Friday afternoon in what Macron’s campaign said was a “massive and coordinated” hacking attack, France – fearing a similar response to what happened with Hillary Clinton after 35,000 John Podesta emails were released one month before the US presidential election – cracked down on the distribution of the files, warning on Saturday it would be a “criminal offense” to republish the data, and warning the French media not to publish content from any of the hacked emails “to prevent the outcome of the vote being influenced.”

Quoted by Reuters, the French election commission said in a statement that “on the eve of the most important election for our institutions, the commission calls on everyone present on internet sites and social networks, primarily the media, but also all citizens, to show responsibility and not to pass on this content, so as not to distort the sincerity of the ballot.” Following a rushed meeting on Saturday morning, the commission which supervises the electoral process, said that the data been “fraudulently obtained and could be mixed with false information.” It is unclear, however, how it hopes to enforce any punitive claims, especially when much of the initial document distribution appears to have taken place offshore.

Domestically, in a similar reaction to the US media’s response to the Podesta emails, French TV news channels chose not to mention the hack, although the left-leading Liberation prominently featured the news on its website. Liberation author Cedric Mathiot wrote that the leak, and its timing, “wants to create chaos” adding that the information was distributed in an “unethical method.”

If all this sounds like the American election, you’re not far off from the truth. Just as Trump is battling the Establishment government leadership and running into a virtual GOP brick wall because of his counter-proposals to waste and inefficiency, he is the nightly pariah upon which the Establishment (both Right and Left) piles their manure in an attempt to sprout unrest.

And, as one can plainly see, it’s working. Let’s hope that Le Pen is elected and France enters the 21^st Century as yet another European miracle; one that demonstrates that the ancient cultures that brought us the Renaissance are not completely deaf, dumb and blind.

Source: ZeroHedge