Russian hackingTo Russia with love: Trump’s precarious path on hacking and intelligence
The key point in the debate over Russian hacking of the U.S. 2016 presidential election is that the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have drawn identical conclusions about Russian motives for hacking and propaganda during the 2016 race – to support a Trump victory. The CIA has been blunt in its most recent statement of foreign criminal hacking calculations: “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.” In response to the CIA and interconnected findings from several other sources, Trump has openly rejected this intelligence feedback. Despite the fluidity of what intelligence can and cannot do, the high confidence of the CIA should not be automatically ignored or discredited. The fact that Trump has continued to belittle the agency and its widely echoed findings indicates a president-elect who either does not pay attention to the intelligence product, or does not understand how intelligence operates.
There is little indication or even robust suggestion that Russia directly manipulated electronic voting machines and tampered with the vote count for the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, 8 November 2016.
So it remains debatable to what extent Russian intervention had boosted Trump’s popularity and worked to indirectly affect the overall election outcome. But a key point is that the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have drawn identical conclusions about Russian motives for hacking and propaganda during the 2016 race – to support a Trump victory.
It has also been widely reported that Russian security services allegedly penetrated the servers and computer systems of the Republican National Committee, but chose to hold back on releasing the stolen contents from these systems. One alarming and unresolved concern is whether the Russians calculated to hoard this stolen information to gain some form of future leverage against the RNC – or Trump himself.
Nonetheless, the CIA has been blunt in its most recent statement of foreign criminal hacking calculations: “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.”
This is more unequivocal than previous analyses of what might be driving ongoing and meddlesome behavior by Russia. It was linked to a more all-purpose interpretation that presumed a hostile Russian campaign of interference was to sabotage and discredit the U.S. democratic process itself.
In response to the CIA and interconnected findings from several other sources, Trump has openly rejected this intelligence feedback. Instead, alongside his persistent defense of Russia, Trump has slammed the professionalism of the CIA and pointed the finger elsewhere. The origin of the leaks, Trump said, could be “be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
In this sense, Trump’s deep-rooted skepticism of the intelligence agencies’ investigations appears two-fold.
Firstly, he seems to have picked a highly expedient pathway by implying that the intelligence professionals who analyzed the hacks were “politically driven..
This disturbing response, which threatens to split the intelligence sector, is a repeated claim for which he has delivered no comprehensive rationale. Perhaps as a precursor to the kind of tactics to be used by a Trump White House over the next four years, his team has instead attempted to muddy the waters and snub a major national security issue.
