This report from Reuters underscores the points I’ve been making:
The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.
While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA’s analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named.
which is why I think the next step in the process should be a bipartisan commission.
More from the article:
The CIA conclusion was a “judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the three officials said on Monday.
“(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.
Thin reed, weak tea, whatever.
Baloney.
The emails hacked by the Russians went to Wikileaks which made no bones about its desire to destroy Hillary. If you tell me you’re going to kill Person X, and I give you a gun, guess what? I want you to kill person X. That’s not hard to figure out.
And given that Donald is basically giving Putin a public handjob it’s silly to pretend there’s no quid pro quo. Donald denies there’s hacking and dismisses US intel out of hand and oh, gosh, who’d a thunk it, another Putin stooge is now SecState.
Manafort is Putin stooge, Flynn has done propaganda appearances with Putin pushing RT (Izvestia for a new age), and even Trump’s daughter has Kremlin ties. Add this to Trump’s refusal to detail his business involvement with Russia, and his rejection of any investifgation – even by his own party – and you have an exceedingly suspicious series of events, hardly either weak tea or a thin reed.
GOP Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the intel committee, just gave an interview in which he endorses the CIA’s accusations of Russian interference while professing some minimal doubt about their motive. He suggest Putin may only have been out to undercut democracy, rather than having deliberately helped Trump.
That in itself is hardly weak tea, David, that is malicious meddling in the politics of the world’s greatest democracy. It is absurd to pretend that the Putin-Wikileaks-Comey storyline had no impact on the outcome of a very close election – an election where Hillary in fact got close to 3 million more votes than the most corrupt, least qualified winning candidate in American history. Any major story at that point would have an impact, and one that was spun as FBI to reopen Hillary investigation is a pretty major story.
1) The last press conference Trump gave was the one where he explicitly asked Putin to hack Hillary’s email.
2) Unlike the GOP Senate, Trump rejects every accusation out of hand and refuses to support an investigation.
3) Trump attacks the veracity of the Us Intel community without offering a single databit to support his frankly treasonous position.
4) Trump taps Putin employee Manafort and Putin pal Tillerson, and does the latter despite warnings that it may mean a fight in the Senate.
5) Trump has business interests in Russia which he refuses to divulge.
6) Trump issues ‘policies’ (well, incoherent Twitter farts) that are entirely consistent with Putin’s policies: NATO is useless, let’s ignore Assad’s crimes against humanity, kill the TPP which (what a coincidence) is strongly disliked by Russia.
It requires blinders at this point to go on pretending this is no big deal. This is a very big deal. Putin clearly has Trump’s balls in his pocket, which means he has this country in his pocket. And if a tenth of this much slime and betrayal had come close to Hillary you’d be screaming from the rooftops, as would every Republican in this country.
Let’s assume that the Russian government was behind the hacking and it was done with the specific intention of throwing the election to Donald Trump.
What do you think should be done?
Michael,
Like everyone else, the Russians probably expected Clinton to win. So they targeted Clinton in order to weaken her. Keep in mind two of the major hacks occurred before Trump had secured the nomination. The fact that Trump actually won (to everyone’s surprise) was just icing on the cake from the Russian perspective. The decision to be so brazen about it was probably motivated by Clinton’s anti-Russian stance and promises by her and her surrogates to confront Russia militarily in Syria. The Russians don’t think in partisan terms – for them this isn’t about being pro one side or the other, it’s one method to fight back against what they see as 25 years of the US running roughshod over their interests and previous interference in Russian politics.
“It requires blinders at this point to go on pretending this is no big deal.”
What difference, at this point, does it make?