Mr. Trump’s fact filter
At a time when our nation is facing a renewed effort by Russia to tamper with a major election, the Trump administration is hindering the flow of intelligence to Congress.
The cover story for this move is that it’s meant to stop leaks of information — an excuse that falls apart on even cursory examination.
The real reason? It doesn’t take a whole lot of speculation to conclude that President Donald Trump wants to limit Congress’, and the public’s, access to the facts and informed expert analysis, and control the narrative on foreign interference on his behalf in the presidential election. The question is whether it’s a matter of Mr. Trump’s ego, his political ambition, or something even more insidious.
It’s hardly a state secret that Mr. Trump is sensitive about the help he got from Russia in 2016 through a concerted propaganda and disinformation campaign on social media and the theft and leak of Democratic emails. Mr. Trump called the interference — well documented by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee — a hoax. He has spent the last three years trying to rewrite that history, even holding up military aid to try to extort the president of Ukraine into legitimizing a conspiracy theory that tied the interference to that country acting on behalf of his opponent.
Mr. Trump has similarly argued that his 3 million-vote loss to Hillary Clinton in the popular vote was the result of widespread fraud. Even a commission he created failed to find any such fraud.
Here’s why this matters: If the more than 20,000 false and misleading statements Mr. Trump has made since taking office, meticulously documented by The Washington Post, haven’t made this clear, it’s vital to remember that this president shares with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other autocrats past and present a disregard for facts, and a brazen predilection for lies and propaganda. Interestingly, Russia’s propaganda and his frequently coincide.
Now he has Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe — until recently an avid pro-trump House member — telling congressional leaders that now they will get briefings mainly in writing, rather than in person as the case has been. It’s to stop unspecified leaks, he says. Wait, written information can’t leak?
This threatens to force Congress to accept only what Mr. Ratcliffe (or, really, Mr. Trump) will spoon-feed it, with no opportunity for on-the-spot follow-up questions. So, even as Russia is ramping up efforts to get Mr. Trump re-elected, according to U.S. intelligence, Congress has good reason to suspect the information it will be left to rely upon is little more than Mr. Trump’s propaganda.
Congress must push back, with subpoenas if necessary. This is the American people’s government, not Mr. Trump’s, and the people’s representatives deserve to know what’s going on, especially when it comes to an attack on our democracy, digital though this aggression may be. For that they need the best facts and analysis available, not what’s left after they’re distilled through a political filter by a president whose statements have all the credibility of a Russian bot.