How Trump Enables Russian Election Interference

U.S. Intelligence Services have confirmed that Russia is again working to interfere in the 2020 elections and to once again throw the election to Trump.  Trump has already seriously degraded  America's standing in the world and frayed decades long alliance.  Vladimir Putin no doubt figures that four more years of Trump would leave America even weaker and unable to counter Russian ambitions not to mention perhaps spell the end of American democracy.  It goes without saying the the dimwitted, racist MAGA - and Republicans in general - are Putin's useful idiots.  I see "friends" on Facebook repeatedly share and re-post false information that I am sure they have never bothered to fact check in a manner that must leave Putin with a huge grin on his face.  Worse yet, however, are Trump's efforts to silence the Intelligence Services that might otherwise warn Americans of the Russian threat and Trump's complicity in the scheme.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this frightening reality.  Here are excerpts:

“The options faced by the intelligence community during Trump’s presidency have been stark: avoid infuriating the president but compromise the agencies’ ostensible independence, or assert that independence and find yourself replaced with a more sycophantic alternative.” So writes Robert Draper in a lengthy and devastating New York Times Magazine article about President Trump’s attempts to politicize intelligence — in particular by preventing the intelligence community from speaking honestly about Russian attacks on our elections.

Nothing better illustrates the intelligence community’s struggles to protect the United States under this administration than the statement about foreign election interference issued on Friday by William Evanina, a career law enforcement official who was chosen by Trump as director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.

This was a follow up to an anodyne statement Evanina had issued two weeks earlier warning that “Russia continues to spread disinformation in the U.S. that is designed to undermine confidence in our democratic process and denigrate what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment’ in America.” Democratic members of Congress who were briefed on the top-secret findings begged for intelligence officials to be more forthcoming with the public. Evanina was — but only up to a point.

His Friday statement acknowledged that “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden” and that “some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”

Yet even while admitting that Russia is once again mounting a covert campaign to help Trump, Evanina felt compelled to balance this inconvenient reality by also saying what Trump wants to hear: that China and Iran favor Biden’s election. This moral equivalence disguises the difference between Iranian and Chinese opposition to Trump — expressed primarily through public statements and actions — and the covert disinformation campaign waged by Russia with eager assistance from Trump’s aides and enablers. “Between China and Russia, only one of those two is trying to actively influence the outcome of the 2020 election, full stop,” a senior U.S. official told The Post.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who has been briefed on the intelligence findings, suggests that the intelligence community is still concealing the full extent of Russian interference. He wrote in a Post opinion column that “the sophisticated tactics and techniques described in [a State Department] report make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play,” and “there is much more” information — "much of it even more chilling” — that has yet to be released.

The New York Times Magazine reports that pressure from the White House forced a change in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) issued last year to remove a finding that Russia wanted to reelect Trump.

The Times article suggests that Dan Coats was fired as director of national intelligence because he wouldn’t make the changes in the NIE that Trump wanted. His successor, Vice Adm. Joseph Maguire, did so, but his tenure as acting DNI was cut short after one of his subordinates told the House Intelligence Community on Feb. 13 that Russia wanted Trump to win. Maguire has been replaced by one Trump sycophant after another — first acting DNI Richard Grenell and now former Republican representative John Ratcliffe of Texas.

We are all suffering from scandal fatigue, but this scandal cannot be ignored: Trump does not want the intelligence community to expose Russian attacks because he is their beneficiary. This is yet another example of how Trump undermines our democracy and subordinates our national security to his personal interests. It is hard to imagine a greater or more dangerous dereliction of duty. If Trump is not held accountable in November, the damage to our institutions may become irreversible.