If emails that didn’t leave the personal server of an acting cabinet official are worth years of investigation, shouldn’t an effort to hack not just emails but the outcome of the election be worth checking out?
Two House Democrats called Wednesday for the creation of a bipartisan national commission — modeled after the one that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks– to investigate foreign interference in the 2016 election.
However, just because something seems reasonable doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. In fact, reasonableness might be the best way to filter out anything that has a fighting chance over the next four years.
President-elect Trump said Wednesday he still rejects, as he did during the campaign, the publicly stated conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community that the Russian government “directed” cyber attacks against political organizations as part of an effort to “interfere with the U.S. election process.” …
Trump’s unyielding view would seem to make it less likely there will be any sort of public probe.
Funny. I think if you had asked President Obama what he thought about the value of eight separate investigations into Benghazi, he might not have been wildly enthusiastic. But then, no one asked.
Only this time the candidate who benefited from these attacks appears to have the say over whether or not the acknowledged crime gets investigated. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the way that investigations are supposed to work.
Democrats aren’t alone in calling for investigations. On the Republican side, two of Trump’s former opponents have raised their hands.
A number of Republicans, including Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have also said they believe the issue needs to be investigated.
There’s also a call to unclassify some of the material that led to 17 different agencies pointing their fingers Putin-ward after looking into the incidents of hacking. Still, it’s unlikely that anything will happen in the little sliver of the current Congress that remains—and the next time these folks sit down, it will be with Vlad’s pal at the helm.
Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, today blasted Trump for refusing to accept the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies about the Russian hacking and said his new remarks “carry water for the Kremlin.”
That’s not true. Trump’s bringing champagne … unless Putin would prefer vodka.