One of the stranger aspects of the 2016 U.S. election was the constant suggestions by the Democrats and various appendages of the country’s security apparatus that the election was being compromised by Russia through hacking and collusion with Wikileaks.
Now, the Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the election with the goal of electing Donald Trump – and not just to undermine the electoral system generally, as was previously suggested.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior US official during a briefing of senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
There was always a question as to why so many documents were released from the Democratic National Committee, but not from the Republican camp. The Republicans say that their systems were never compromised, but intelligence agencies now conclude they were hacked, but the documents were conspicuously never released.
Trump and his team have long dismissed any connection with the Kremlin, and the Democrats obsessing over such a connection during the election didn’t really do much for them in the end. Trump issued a statement calling out the CIA for their nonsense intel on Iraq, which we’d have to admit is a good call:
These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.
Considering the CIA’s long and storied history of interfering with foreign elections and supporting military coups, it’s probably an interesting feeling for them to see the boot potentially on the other foot.
On Friday, Barack Obama ordered a full review of the possibility of Russian state intervention in the election, in what will probably end up being one of his final orders for the security establishment.
We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned.
We’ll keep you posted.
Source: The New York Times.
Photo: Getty Images.
