Donald Trump has spent the last 48 hours pooh-poohing the nearly irrefutable evidence that Russian interests hacked their way into American computers in hopes of influencing the presidential election. Even for those of us who have gotten used to Trump burying his head in the sand, this is staggering. What could possibly convince him to ignore such overwhelming technical evidence? Well, an interview with a top foreign policy adviser to the president-elect may have given us one clue. To hear him talk, Trump apparently believes that the Obama administration did it.
John Bolton, a foreign policy adviser to three Republican presidents, is best known for his brief and tumultuous stint as the American ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. By most accounts, he is in the driver’s seat to become Deputy Secretary of State in the Trump administration. But any chance of him being anywhere near the State Department should have ended when he stopped by Fox News on Sunday afternoon. Watch here.
Bolton told host Eric Shawn that if Russia or any other foreign power meddled with our election, it would be “a direct assault on the Constitution”–one that would demand “very grave consequences.” That being said, however, he wasn’t entirely convinced that the Kremlin was behind it. Indeed, he said that “just viewing this from the outside,” he couldn’t rule out the prospect that the hacks on the DNC and RNC were “a false flag operation.”
Bolton apparently thinks that since the CIA found Russian cyber fingerprints on the election hacks, it couldn’t possibly be from Russia. How does Bolton explain this contortion and distortion of logic? Well, he thinks that in order to believe the Kremlin really did those hacks, you’d have to believe that it sent a “smart intelligence service” to burrow into Hillary Clinton’s server, but a “dumb intelligence service” to hack into the party servers.
It’s not often that you see a Fox News anchor shocked by an utterly wingnutty and stupid comment from a Republican. But Shawn was rightly dumbfounded. He couldn’t believe that he’d just heard what he’d thought he’d heard–that Bolton accused “someone here in this administration of trying to throw something?” Bolton replied that he couldn’t be entirely sure, but didn’t think a false flag could be ruled out given how “intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration.”
Shawn didn’t let him get away with it. He wondered if Bolton seriously believed that intelligence officials would deliberately pull a stunt “that would potentially damage the very issue of our republic.” Bolton continued blathering about how it was hard to believe a competent intelligence service would leave fingerprints on a hack, and claimed it was all the more reason for an independent investigation.
So there you have it. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Russians diddled with our election, the president-elect isn’t taking it seriously because a senior adviser is feeding him “advice” that sounds like something you’d hear from Alex Jones or James Tracy rather than a halfway competent foreign policy professional. We knew that Trump is having a hard time assembling a national security team because just about everyone worth getting is a never-Trumper. But this is embarrassing, even by Trump standards.
In a sane world, Bolton may have committed political suicide with this interview. Just an hour before this breathakingly loony interview, Senator Rand Paul declared that he cannot and will not support Bolton if he is nominated for any State Department post. That announcement not only doomed any chance of Bolton passing Senate Foreign Relations Committee muster, but also put his prospects of clearing the full Senate on life support. After all, if two more Republicans defect and all the Democrats vote no as well, a prospective Bolton nomination would go down in flames.
But after this, there is no defensible reason for any Republican with, in Paul fils’ words, a “sane worldview” to vote for Bolton. A raving conspiracy theorist has no business serving as an adviser in any self-respecting democracy. Period. Bolton and what is left of his credibility must be stripped, and promptly, if Trump is foolish enough to nominate him after this outrageous interview–and yes, the pun was intended.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
