It is the opinion of professionals at all U.S. intelligence agencies — from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Defense Intelligence Agency to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — that Russia actively interfered with the 2016 presidential election.
“The U.S. intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” the agencies reported in a joint statement in October. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
And by “Russia’s senior-most officials,” they mean Vladimir Putin.
Private cybersecurity experts who have examined the available evidence have come to the same conclusion, yet some remain unconvinced. For example, it remains the opinion of President-elect Donald Trump that such claims are nonsense. Despite being briefed on the still-classified evidence, he dismisses the multi-agency conclusions of our intelligence professionals, arguing that their finding was driven by political pressure from the Obama administration, not by the evidence.
In fact, Trump continues to claim, as he did this week in his Person of the Year interview with Time, that the hacking could have been perpetrated by almost anyone with a computer, an Internet connection and some mad skills. “I have a son, he’s 10 years old,” as Trump explained in a debate. “He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable.”
Let me put this gently: A 70-year-old astonished by the computer wizardry of a 10-year-old might not be the most sophisticated judge of the evidence in such a case. Furthermore, Trump’s reluctance to accept the evidence is understandable simply as a matter of human nature. He’s trying to claim a mandate for vast political change, which is already complicated by the fact that he lost the popular vote by some 2.7 million votes. The likelihood that he came to power with help from Putin and his government might tarnish that victory further and raise a whole lot of other uncomfortable questions.
So for argument’s sake, let’s label the assertion of Russian interference as “unproved.” Is an unproved but substantial allegation of direct interference in U.S. elections by an unfriendly power something that should just be swept under the rug and forgotten, as if it never happened?
As Sen. Marco Rubio has pointed out, anybody who approaches the question in partisan terms is playing a dangerous game. “Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us,” Rubio warned his fellow Republicans.
“Do we really want to be a country where foreign leaders or foreign intelligence agencies can blackmail our elected officials and say to them that unless you do what we want you to do, we’re gonna release emails from your campaign manager, your wife, your daughter, your son, and we’re gonna embarrass you,” Rubio warned. “Is that what we want?”
I don’t think that’s what we want.
Of course, we should also allow for the possibility that Trump is right. But if U.S. security and intelligence professionals were indeed strong-armed by the Obama administration into producing this finding, doesn’t that lead us to the same place? If Trump honestly believes that’s what happened, then the president-elect ought to insist on a full bipartisan probe to identify and fire those who exerted such pressure and who caved to such pressure.
We’ll see if that happens.
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