Russia’s high crimes
The rightful arrest of the contractor alleged to have leaked a classified National Security Agency report on Russian hacking must not distract from the profoundly unnerving substance contained therein. Namely, that U.S. intelligence has evidence that individuals at the highest echelons of power in the Kremlin sought to undermine the very machinery of American democracy. This is news. And this is big. And Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says “the extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far” — meaning, worse than even these latest revelations indicate.
As evidence of Russian meddling has mounted in recent months, the nothing-to-see-here chorus — lead soloist, Donald Trump — has minimized the extent of the interference and downplayed any hint of direct links to the government in Moscow.
Sure, goes the typical deflection, maybe some people in Russia churned out fake news reports that smeared Hillary Clinton. And maybe others breached Democratic National Committee emails and those of Clinton’s campaign chair, then handed off a trove of damaging data to WikiLeaks.
But the apologists insist, parroting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s line, that the meddlers were almost surely private citizens — perhaps, Putin now admits, hackers with “patriotic leanings” — not agents of the Russian government.
In any event, they add as a final just-calm-down, nobody ever went so far as to meddle with the sacrosanct machinery of American democracy itself. All the asterisks are falling away. In the highly classified intelligence report revealed by The Intercept Tuesday — a report based on what Reality Winner is alleged to have illegally revealed — the NSA details what reporters describe as “a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure.”
This included a cyberattack on a U.S. voting software supplier and then, likely using the data obtained in that breach, attempts to infiltrate the networks of local election officials days before the November election.
It was all orchestrated by the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, the country’s largest foreign intelligence agency, reporting directly to the minister of defense and the president.
This is the conclusion of one NSA analysis. It is not, in any event, definitive proof.
But congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller cannot turn away from the chilling conclusion as they follow other evidence, they claim, wherever it leads, including probing all contacts between the Trump campaign and the mischief-makers.