Last week, John McCain declared that Russia’s efforts to hack the presidential election amounted to “an act of war.” As outrageous as Russia’s behavior was, calling it an act of war sounded like a bit of a stretch. But McCain’s statement doesn’t look so outlandish anymore in light of the national intelligence community’s assessment of how the Kremlin tried to diddle with our election. The verdict? The hacking was done on the personal directive of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Just before the close of business on Friday, the FBI, CIA, and NSA detonated this piece of dynamite on Tumblr.
CNN’s Jake Tapper was on the air when the news broke. Watch here.
Read the report here in case the Director of National Intelligence’s site crashes. The intelligence community concluded that over the course of the presidential campaign, Russia ramped up its longstanding effort to “undermine the US-led liberal democratic order” to a new level. How?
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary (Hillary) Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect (Donald) Trump.”
Russia did this through time-tested means dating back to the Soviet era–combining cyberattacks with more overt efforts by “Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls.'” For instance, it accused the pro-Kremlin “news” network RT and the international news agency Sputnik of consistently attacking Hillary while painting Trump as the victim of unfair coverage from the American mainstream press.
It also identified one of those “third-party intermediaries” as WikiLeaks, stating “with high confidence” that Russian military intelligence funneled hacked information to WikiLeaks via the DCLeaks Website and the Guccifer persona.
At first, Russia aimed merely to influence the election. However, when it became increasingly likely that Hillary was going to win, the Kremlin was fully prepared to question the integrity of the election. It even went as far as preparing a hashtag campaign, “#DemocracyRIP,” in the event Hillary won.
Now why would Putin go as far as to engage in a deliberate and unprecedented attempt to interfere with our election? Well, according to the report, it was payback for massive protests that took place across Russia in the aftermath of the blatantly rigged elections of 2011.
“Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”
So because Putin believed that Hillary hurt his fee-fees, he threw a massive temper tantrum and ordered his government to do everything it could to snatch the presidency from Hillary. Hmmm, who does that remind you of?
Trump received the full, classified version of the intelligence assessment. Incredibly, he claimed that the hacking had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election whatsoever.” In truth, the report stated that the contributing agencies were not in a position to make such a judgment.
Trump’s statement doesn’t sit well with at least one Trump supporter. Former congressman Joe Walsh, who has slammed Trump up, down, and sideways for blowing off the evidence of Russian interference, has an idea how Trump should have responded.
What Trump should say now: "Its clear Russia interfered. It didn't sway the election. As Prez, I'll work to ensure it doesn't happen again."
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) January 6, 2017
This report, on the face of it, bolsters the case for sanctions against Russia–and also demands that the measures already announced by President Obama be strengthened.
Let there no longer be any doubt–Russia, on orders from Putin himself, tried to interfere with the very foundation of our democracy. The only acceptable response is to squeeze the Russian bear until it chokes.
(featured image courtesy DonkeyHotey, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
