Hacks & Hysteria
Congress is clearly going to look into the charges that Russia’s government tried to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, and it should. The public deserves better than media write-ups of leaked accounts of what the intelligence community is supposedly saying.
Such third-hand “news” is all there is right now: Liberal reporters’ take on what they’re being told by mainly Democratic sources about briefings from intel officials. Yes, Americans are owed more than the blanket skepticism coming from Team Trump — but also more than nonsensical “Putin decided our election” hysteria emanating from the left.
We’ve known for months that the US intel community is sure that the hackers of Democratic e-mail accounts were based in Russia, with “fingerprints” of non-government groups that often work with the Kremlin. Reporting also suggests that Russians also tried to hack the Republican National Committee — with the FBI saying it found no evidence they succeeded, but other agencies believing they did.
The intel community has now briefed key members of Congress on specific figures in the Russian government who it thinks were involved, and on the conclusion of at least some at the CIA and NSA that the release of Democratic but not Republican “dirt” proves that Vladimir Putin’s minions set out to boost Trump.
The most important point to make is that, even if all this is true, WikiLeaks didn’t decide the US election: The voters did — and precious few of them made up their minds because they learned that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and John Podesta had nasty things to say about Bernie Sanders.
This stuff was inside baseball — juicy gossip, not the Watergate tapes. It was Trump’s successful appeal on the issues (and Clinton’s failure) that won him the White House.
Hillary Clinton’s own e-mails (and those of her staff ) were indeed a big deal in many voters’ minds — but the outing of those was an all-American affair.
Note, too, that RNC e-mails couldn’t provide much real dirt, because the RNC wasn’t controlled by Trump supporters the way the Democratic National Committee was run by Clintonites. Indeed, the RNC (like the whole GOP establishment) plainly
wasn’t in Trump’s corner until he wrapped up the nomination — at which point, supporting him became the RNC’s job.
All that said, any foreign hack of a US political party is ugly business; that’s reason enough for Congress to investigate — especially when the Kremlin is now suspected of meddling in multiple other nations’ elections.
And any Russian wrongdoing here should also be a caution to the Trump administration as it sets out to try to work with Putin — an effort about which we share the grave concerns that Ralph Peters expresses on the opposite page.