Trump: Putin's Willing Accomplice in the Hacking Attacks

David Frum is not wild eyed liberal.  Indeed, he is a hardcore traditional conservative - or at least what a conservative used to be prior to the rise of the Christofascists, white supremacists and, of course, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer within the GOP.  Moreover, but faced with the choice between Trump and Der Fuhrer, Frum has never been a friend to Hillary Clinton.  Yet, in a piece in The Atlantic, Frum hits on an important aspect of the Russian hacking effort to throw the 2016 presidential election to Trump: Trump's willing complicity in exacerbating the impact of the leaked information and blowing the disclosures far out of proportion. Equally, disconcerting was Trump's reference to information on several occasions before the contents of the leaks had been publizied. Did he know what was coming in advance?  The Kremlin has confirmed communications with Trump's campaign during the election.  Did Trump cooperate in the hacking efforts?  Trump is claiming ignorance and down playing the need for a bipartisan investigation.  Frum suggests it may be because such an investigation might expose the full extent of Trump's complicity and prior knowledge.  Here are article highlights:

“It’s all just an attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump.” That’s the argument you hear from Trump supporters each time new information comes to light about how hard Russian spy services worked to damage Hillary Clinton. You heard it again on Thursday.

The Trump supporters are 100 percent right: The information is delegitimizing. The president-elect of the United States reportedly owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service. It’s hard to imagine a crisis of presidential legitimacy more extreme than that. But that’s no argument against airing this information. It’s precisely why the information must be aired.

Vladimir Putin took a fearful risk. If the Electoral College had taken a slightly different bounce on November 8, Putin would now be facing an enraged President-elect Hillary Clinton. Putin had every reason to expect that he probably would end up facing a President Clinton. Yet he took the gamble anyway, apparently doing something none of his Soviet predecessors had ever dared to do: mount a clandestine espionage and disinformation campaign on behalf of one candidate for U.S. president, and against another.

The word “clandestine” is the key term here. In every election, foreign governments have their preferred candidates. It was no secret in 2004 that America’s French and German allies hoped George W. Bush would lose, or that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt the same way about President Obama in 2012. Those allies made their wishes known through the familiar and lawful method of grumbling to sympathetic American journalists about the awfulness of the incumbent administration. What they did not do was organize their spy agencies to break the law of the United States. But that is evidently what Russia did—and it seems to have worked.

Obama pledged today that before he leaves office, the American people will learn more fully how the Russians did it.

This will be important to know. But there is something else important to keep in mind.  The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives.  . . . We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material.

Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump.

Many questions remain about how the Russian spy services did what they did. That includes Putin’s motives for ordering the operation. But on issues from Crimea to Syria to NATO to the breakup of the European Union, Trump’s publicly expressed views align with Putin’s wishes.

Over Trump’s motives for collaborating so full-throatedly with Russian espionage, there hangs a greater and more disturbing mystery—a mystery that Trump seems in no hurry to dispel. And maybe he is wise to leave the mystery in place: as delegitimizing as it is, it’s very possible the truth would be even worse.    

U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack

It seems that the information coming out about Russia's efforts to elect Donald Trump to the Oval Office only gets worse and worse and more frightening - at least to anyone who doesn't rely on Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, as their sole source of "news" and information.  One take away is that the next time you hear some Republican bloviating about their patriotism, (after vomiting) call them out and remind them that their party's president elect won the election likely thanks to the efforts of a hostile foreign enemy. Increasingly, Trump is seemingly the Manchurian candidate come to life and most Republicans could care less.  Their sole focus of GOP elected officials is to remain in power and the party base's fixation is on maintaining its white privilege and seeing its racism and bigotry supported.  They do not give a damn about the country over all much less foreign interference with America's electoral process.  A piece at NBC News looks at the increasingly alarming details of Russia's involvement - possibly, in my opinion with the Trump campaign's active cooperation.  Here are highlights:

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.

Ultimately, the CIA has assessed, the Russian government wanted to elect Donald Trump. The FBI and other agencies don't fully endorse that view, but few officials would dispute that the Russian operation was intended to harm Clinton's candidacy by leaking embarrassing emails about Democrats.

The latest intelligence said to show Putin's involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia.

The statement said officials believed that "only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." That was an intelligence judgment based on an understanding of the Russian system of government, which Putin controls with absolute authority.

Now the U.S has solid information tying Putin to the operation, the intelligence officials say. Their use of the term "high confidence" implies that the intelligence is nearly incontrovertible.

He wants to discredit American democracy and make us weaker in terms of leading the liberal democratic order. And most certainly he likes President-elect Trump's views on Russia," McFaul added. Clinton cast doubt on the integrity of Russia's elections.

A former CIA official who worked on Russia told NBC News that it's not clear the U.S. can embarrass Putin, given that many Russians are already familiar with allegations he has grown rich through corruption and has ordered the killings of political adversaries.

The former CIA official said the Obama administration may feel compelled to respond before it leaves office.  "This whole thing has heated up so much," he said. "I can very easily see them saying, `We can't just say wow, this was terrible and there's nothing we can do.'"

As for Comey's FBI being hesitant to admit the role Russia played, I hate to say it, but I believe that James Comey was part of the operation.  Why he still has a job is mind boggling.  He needs to be charged with interfering with the election, if not espionage, and subverting the Constitution.