Editors at National Review Online attempt to separate truth from spin when discussing Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 American elections.
Trump and his national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, are claiming that former President Barack Obama led a “treasonous” conspiracy by promoting the fiction that Trump worked with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
The underlying truth is serious enough: Trump was the victim of one of the most insidious dirty tricks in American political history. The Clinton campaign used the bogus “Steele dossier” to manufacture the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative. Obama administration officials picked up this story and ran with it. …
… All of the above has been well known for eight years; even though Gabbard presents it as a shocking revelation, there is nothing new about Obama’s connection to the Trump-Russia collusion farce.
But Trump and Gabbard go further, treating the accurate portion of the Democratic narrative as though it too were a fiction. Russia did indeed try, however ineffectively, to interfere in the election. …
… The ICA was focused on something else: Russian cyber operations along the lines of hacking the DNC and churning out anti-Clinton campaign messaging.
Russia engaged in that latter kind of interference in 2016, as it has habitually meddled in American politics for decades. There was never, however, any evidence of Trump complicity in this interference.
The Mueller investigation, which Trump trumpets for its conclusion that he did not conspire with the Kremlin, also concluded that Russia meddled in the election, and prosecutors filed two indictments to that effect (although they knew, of course, that they would never have to prove those cases in court). U.S. intelligence agencies also conclude that Russia meddled, as did the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an investigation led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), now Trump’s secretary of state.
The faux suspicions of Trump-Russia collusion were thus tucked neatly into an overarching probe of Russian cyberespionage against the United States.
