Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online critiques a top Trump administration official.
Do Trump intelligence officials speak with each other? Does Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, read the reports generated by the Central Intelligence Agency?
There is good reason to wonder. …
… I contended that the Trump administration’s decision to revive this episode, while titillating for the MAGA political base, was self-sabotage. That is mainly because, after months of scrutiny, the Trump CIA has reaffirmed the ICA’s conclusions that (1) Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election and (2) did so in order to denigrate Hillary Clinton — i.e., Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin anticipated that Clinton would be elected and hoped to make her a less effective president, which would be in Russia’s interest as America’s geopolitical rival.
The public position of President Trump and his most ardent supporters — the position that Gabbard reiterates — is that Russiagate was a total hoax, a complete fabrication by Democrats, without a shred of truth to it, concocted to undermine his presidency. This has always been a foolish stance.
Russia habitually tries to influence American politics, including electoral politics, just as our government has for decades intruded in the politics of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. (In fact, the Obama administration’s support of the revolt that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected, pro-Russian regime in 2013–14 motivated both Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2016 denigration of Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state.) Russia’s efforts in this regard, and specifically in 2016, have been laughably ineffective; that doesn’t mean they haven’t happened at all.
The Democrats’ caterwauling that Russia stole the 2016 election from Clinton was nonsense. It has long been widely recognized for what it was: a fever dream by which Democrats sought to avoid conceding the true cause of the party’s loss — its nomination of a deeply unpopular, scandal-scarred, politically flat-footed candidate.
The post Warning against learning wrong lessons from Russiagate first appeared on John Locke Foundation.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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