Some thoughts on the Russian hacking of Democrat e-mails:
1. I'm not sure whether the CIA assessment is true or not. I wouldn't put it past Putin's government to attempt such an operation. But intelligence is an inherently murky field. Very rarely is there a "smoking gun" or direct evidence that leads to an unassailable conclusion. Usually there are only inferences based on evidence of uncertain provenance and reliability. And I wouldn't put it past Obama to manipulate intelligence for political purposes either. That said, for purposes of this post I will assume it's true that persons connected to Russian intelligence services, in concert with nominally independent actors like Wikileaks, hacked the computers and e-mail accounts of Democrat officials and leaked the contents of those e-mails to the press with the goal of weakening Hillary Clinton and boosting Donald Trump's chances in the recent presidential election.
2. The Trump campaign's official statement was juvenile and historically wrong: "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,' " The United States' intelligence community's assessment of Iraq's WMD program, which, by the way, was consistent with the estimates of every other major intelligence agency in the world, is irrelevant to the present issue. The implication of the Trump team's statement is that the CIA should close its doors since it can never again produce reliable intelligence untainted by its errors from fifteen years ago.
The Trump people's assessment of their man's showing in the electoral college is problematic to the point of being deceptive. Trump's unofficial vote count in the electoral college is 306. The vote won't be official until the electors actually meet on December 19 and one Texas elector has announced that he will cast his vote for an as yet unnamed alternative. 2016 is the 58th presidential election since the ratification of the Constitution. Technically Trump's vote total puts him in 22nd place among among all elected presidents. But of course the electoral college didn't even have 306 electors until 1872, when it expanded to 352. If you look at the elections since the electoral college was fixed at its present membership of 538, Trump's total is 10th out of 14, well below the median. If you go back as far as 1900, there are still only 8 out of 30 candidates who did worse than Trump.
3. Julian Assange's denials of Russian involvement are meaningless. From everything we know of him he is a man of uncommonly low character and completely untrustworthy. His statement might be true, but it would be pure coincidence.
4. Put in its most favorable light, what the Russians did amounts to one-sided investigative journalism, similar to what we've come to expect from the major news networks in the United States.
5. The e-mails were illegally obtained but none of the parties involved have disputed their authenticity. The information disclosed is apparently accurate. It is also embarrassing to the individuals involved, revealing them to be dissembling and hypocritical. This was useful information for voters to have so in that sense the Russians provided a service. For the sake of balance they should have hacked Republican e-mails as well, but I doubt that the private e-mails would have been any more damaging than the very public tweets that regularly spewed forth from Trump Tower.
6. The press is carrying the charges of Russian support for a Republican candidate uncritically. Similar allegations that the Soviet Union favored Democrat candidates were deemed to be McCarthyism and heralds of looming fascism.
7. The Obama administration did not disappoint in seeking to use the CIA assessment to advance an unrelated policy agenda. Specifically, according to the Chicago Tribune, "the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions." This, despite the fact that no evidence of Russian interference with the actual voting was produced.
8. The Democrats have finally found a reason to complain about Obama's timidity in responding to hostile foreign actions against the United States.
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