Donald Trump was briefed today on the intelligence community’s findings on Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election, and it does not take a cybersecurity expert to find that his statement on the matter doesn’t perfectly line up with the report, also released today, from the Director of National Intelligence.
The report, among other things, pins election tampering squarely on Russia and Vladimir Putin himself, discusses the various methods used, including leaked documents and paid Internet trolls, and … oh yeah, it says that no assessment was made on whether or not Russia’s efforts affected the outcome of the election. (Though they did conclude that vote tallying was not compromised.) You know, because saying anything with certainty—one way or the other—on that would be pretty misleading, since there’s really no way to know why people voted how they voted.
You know who’s not afraid to make wildly misleading statements? The president-elect of the United States, whose statement on his briefing included: “While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.”
That middle part, about there being “absolutely no effect” on who won the election, is a flat out lie—not because Trump’s win definitely was due to Russian interference, but because everyone knows very well that there’s nothing “absolute” about whether or not it was. Claiming to know with certainty, “absolutely” is lying, no matter what Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker says. We will just plain never know what would’ve happened without Russia’s actions, but given the paltry number of votes that put Trump over the top in key swing states, ruling out a different outcome absolutely seems disingenuous.
It is comforting to know that the integrity of our voting system was deemed to be intact, but that hardly means that individual voters weren’t swayed by a massive foreign propaganda campaign. Then, there’s also the strange fact that Trump claims the RNC’s defenses warded off a hack of their own, and while that may be true, the DNI report says “Republican-affiliated” targets were compromised, though the information stolen from them has yet to materialize in the form of Russian interference in U.S. affairs.
(image via Blue Coat Photos)
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