As part of his hapless national address last week on election conspiracy theories, Donald Trump focused much of his energies on allegations that China directly interfered with the 2020 presidential race. Five days later, a reporter asked the president whether he intended to impose consequences on China for its alleged actions.
The Republican practically shrugged with indifference, saying the developments “took place a long time ago,” and that Beijing “is maybe a little bit different today than it was then.” Trump added, “We do things to them, too.”
In other words, last week, the president demanded Americans’ attention for a prime-time address about an issue he claimed to take very seriously, to the point that he literally used the word “crisis” to describe the extent of our electoral system’s vulnerability to foreign attack. This week, asked about possible follow-through, Trump didn’t seem to much care about his own allegations of Chinese election meddling.
That, however, wasn’t the only problem. The New York Times reported:
President Trump’s prime-time speech last Thursday was intended to shore up his tenacious lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him and leaned heavily on recycled claims that the Chinese government tried to tip the scales against him.
But a trove of intelligence documents that Mr. Trump declassified in hopes that they would bolster his assertions arguably made a stronger case that a different country — Russia — had meddled in the race.
During his roughly 25-minute speech, Trump encouraged the public to examine declassified intelligence the White House had posted to its website. What the president and his team didn’t seem to appreciate is that journalists would take him up on the offer, and as The Washington Post’s David Ignatius put it, media professionals noticed that the newly disclosed documents “undermine many” of Trump’s own arguments.
The Republican referenced Russia just once, in passing, during his remarks, in contrast to his 24 references to China. But according to the declassified materials posted to the White House website, it’s Trump’s pals in Moscow who mattered most, given the scope of their efforts to influence U.S. elections.
Indeed, one of the key elements of Trump’s 2016 Russia scandal was the overwhelming volume of U.S. intelligence that showed Putin’s regime having launched an intelligence operation to target the presidential race to put the Republican ticket in the White House. Trump, the beneficiary of that Russian interference, dismissed his own country’s findings as a “hoax.”
Four years later, there was comparable evidence that showed Russia taking similar steps to keep Trump in the White House. “We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia establishment,” one of the documents explained. “For example, it is directing or encouraging proxies to spread claims about Vice President Biden. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media.”
The Times’ report added, “A U.S. intelligence community analysis from March 2021 found that proxies linked to Russian intelligence had promoted false stories about the Biden family ‘to U.S. media organizations, U.S. officials and prominent U.S. individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.’”
The incumbent American president didn’t feel the need to acknowledge any of this in his 25-minute national address on foreign election interference — or to mention it even once.
To be sure, many of the core revelations weren’t altogether new. There were multiple reports at the time about Russian efforts to help boost the GOP ticket, and Trump’s document dump simply shed fresh light on facts that had already been exposed.
But it’s notable nevertheless that the president gave China a pass this week, after giving Russia a different kind of pass last week, by conveniently choosing to ignore the efforts on his behalf.
Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine wrote a striking piece for MS NOW, published over the weekend, that helped summarize the best way to interpret Trump’s address.
“Amazingly, Russia was barely mentioned in the speech, even though Russia has consistently been the most aggressive foreign meddler in our elections over the past decade,” King wrote. “In 2016, Russia not only propagated reams of disinformation designed to divide Americans and sow distrust in our institutions but actually hacked the Democrats and selectively released data designed to denigrate Hillary Clinton and promote Trump. As the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Marco Rubio (yes, the same Marco Rubio holding several roles in the current administration), unanimously concluded, the Russians’ unmistakable intention was to elect Donald Trump. The only hoax involving this episode is the assertion that it is a hoax.”
It’s worth keeping all of this in mind the next time Trump talks about foreign election interference, or tries to pretend his Russia scandal isn’t real.
The post The White House’s declassified intelligence exposes inconvenient truths for Trump appeared first on MS NOW.
