Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Russia is interfering in the election and it’s trying to help Donald Trump win.”
Just four months out from a presidential contest that sees Joe Biden behind in the polls, and with Democrats looking like they are in disarray — fighting openly over whether to jettison the declining octogenarian from the top of the ticket in an election where they claim democracy hangs in the balance — the intelligence community has come out and once again put its thumb on the scale against former President Trump.
Last week the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an “election security update” assessing that Russia “remains the primary threat to our elections,” and that “Russian influence actors are planning to covertly use social media to amplify narratives to sway U.S. public opinion in U.S. swing states and diminish U.S. support for Ukraine.”
The IC says it is beginning to see Russia target “specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives, and denigrate specific politicians.”
In a briefing to the media, an ODNI official indirectly indicated that Russia’s purported social media-driven interference aimed to elect Trump.
“We have not observed a shift in Russia’s preferences for the presidential race from past elections, given the role the U.S. is playing with regard to Ukraine and broader policy toward Russia,” the official said.
So the national security state is once again interfering in our domestic politics to the detriment of Trump and the benefit of Democrats – “Trump is Putin’s man,” The Regime is saying.
This coming from a security state that has lost all credibility when it makes these proclamations based on how hyper-politicized and weaponized it has become, against Donald Trump and his supporters.
Recall, the Russian collusion hoax was a fraudulent narrative pushed on the American people to delegitimize and undermine the Trump presidency, punish those in Trump’s orbit by process, justify surveilling them – while generating damaging leaks — and of course smearing Trump’s supporters as traitors;
the efforts to show that Russian trolls’ crude social media posts and paltry ad buys somehow had any impact on U.S. elections whatsoever were completely unconvincing – with one academic study showing there was “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior” among those exposed to the efforts who were overwhelmingly Republicans;
and the assessment that Russia wanted Trump to win in 2016 was disingenuously framed as an assessment of the entire intelligence community when it wasn’t. The assessment was shown to be lacking in analytical rigor as well. In reality, it was a political product pushed by a CIA Director, John Brennan, who hated Donald Trump, drafted in part by a CIA official who had donated to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, to sabotage his presidency – a sabotage effort that emanated from the Obama administration.
The intelligence community loathed Donald Trump in no small part because of his criticism of it, and because of his anti-establishment national security and foreign policy agenda that threatened the power and privilege of those at the security state’s helm.
Now they are interfering to damage him again.
This purported intelligence community assessment – an intelligence community that is supposed to stay out of domestic politics – leverages the prestige of the national security apparatus to damage Trump; pre-delegitimizes an election that on paper it looks like he is poised to win; and also creates a predicate for both massive social media censorship once again – to defend us from malign foreign actors – and perhaps surveillance of those in Trump’s orbit and again political leaks from that surveillance. It threatens to once against cast a cloud over a Trump presidency.
One need not even comment about the fact the Trump administration constrained and was tough on a Russian regime – checking its bellicose activities – while under Biden that regime, now closer than ever to our Chinese and Iranian adversaries, invaded Ukraine.
The fact of the matter is that because the national security apparatus has never been held accountable for its past meddling in our elections and assaults on the civil liberties of Americans, we can expect perpetual domestic interference in our elections – and remember, this is the intelligence community springing to action alongside a law enforcement apparatus also being wielded as an arm of the Democrat Party to silence, break, bankrupt, and jail Donald Trump.
This is a dangerous disgrace to our nation.
Foreign nations of course will try to create dissent in America, influence Americans in their preferred directions, and with malign intent.
We have grappled with those threats historically, including during the Cold War.
Far more disturbing is when our own authorities tasked with defending us against foreign adversaries wield their power to influence our domestic politics – as our adversaries operate against their own populations.
We are far closer to being destroyed from within than without today – and from the very people who claim to be defending “our democracy.”
