Four years ago yesterday, the Washington Post published an article with the following headline:
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”How the Russian hackers got into the DNC’s network
The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign.
In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.
The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read.
“Time to move on and make America great again …” Sigh.
There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then. And the right and many anti-anti Trump types have said all that was overblown and the Deep State was wrong to pursue it etc. etc. The government should not have investigated their suspicions that Trump had worked with a foreign country to cheat in his election. They went too far.
But let’s not forget that it was just two years later that Trump was leveraging military equipment with an ally to get them to investigate his Joe Biden, an obvious abuse of power for which he was impeached. Again, a bridge too far to think that Trump was doing something so nefarious to cheat in his election.
And here we are four years later with Trump trying desperately to get his fellow Republicans to use whatever power they have to once again help him cheat in the election. This latest gambit with the 17 state Attorneys General and the aiding and abetting of the Republicans in congress has taken it up a notch.
No he hasn’t declared martial law and had the military force a new election as Michael Flynn and others are pushing. Yet. But what he’s already done is demonstrate over and over and over again that he is more than willing to take the office by any means necessary.
It would appear in retrospect that the Deep States suspicions were well founded. After all, he’s been repeatedly proving that he is a cheater ever since then.