Senate Intelligence Committee: Russia Did Interfere in 2016 Elections

Committee chairs Burr and Warner

Donald Trump continues to rant about "fake news" and to claim that the entire claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential elections is a "hoax."  Meanwhile, most of the fake news seems to have come from Trump himself, his rabid dog base, and/or Russian operatives masquerading as Americans.  As noted in an earlier post, Facebook ads by Russian operatives targeted swing states.  Meanwhile, as Salon reports, public confidence in the main stream news media is rising even as confidence in Trump is declining.    But most damning to Trump's lies and denials are the preliminary findings to date of the Senate Intelligence Committee released yesterday.  These findings flat out conform that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.  The only unanswered - or at least to date unrevealed - is whether Americans, particularly individuals from the Trump campaign colluded in the Russian effort.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post on this issue:

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday largely endorsed the findings of the intelligence community that Russia sought to sway the 2016 U.S. elections through a hacking and influence campaign, and they called for a “more aggressive, whole-of-government approach” to ensure future elections are not similarly compromised.

“There is consensus among members and staff that we trust the conclusions of the ICA,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee’s chairman, said at Wednesday news conference, referring to the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was behind hackings of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign director John Podesta’s email account and had attempted to exploit public opinion by sowing false information, much of it through fake social media accounts.

 

Burr also said that “the issue of collusion is still open” and would not be resolved until the committee’s work was done. He said that a deadline for the committee was the looming start of the 2018 primary season.

“You can’t walk away from this and believe that Russia’s not currently active,” he added.

Burr and Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the committee’s vice chairman, said the committee has interviewed more than 100 people and reviewed more than 100,000 documents, many of them from the intelligence community, President Trump’s inner circle and former members of the Obama administration. 

The committee has lately been focusing on the role social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter played in the dissemination of false or misleading ads and stories planted or otherwise backed by Russian operatives.

Warner said that the tech giants were beginning to take the issue of Russian meddling more seriously and that the committee was “seeing increasing levels of cooperation.”

The committee recently received over 3,000 advertisementsfrom Facebook detailing the content of ads Russia had purchased to appear on the platform during the election.

Burr added that the committee would not release the content of those ads, though he added that the committee would be “fine” with any of the social media companies choosing to release the content of documents and other information they had turned over to the committee themselves.

Expect Trump's rantings to increase as the evidence accumulates that Russia played a perhaps decisive vote in his election which has done immense harm to the nation both domestically and internationally.