Clapper's bombshell: Russia swung the election. What if he's right? Calls out GOP. (WaPo)
Long snip
The key point is this. Even if you put aside whatever the Trump campaign did or didn’t do to conspire with Russian sabotage, what’s left is this obvious fact: Trump and his GOP allies don’t want to know the full story of what Russia’s operation entailed in and of itself, because it doesn’t concern them in the least, and indeed they are engaged in an active effort to keep that story suppressed.
It keeps getting lost in the discussion, but one of the charges of both Mueller’s investigation and the probes run out of Congress has been to determine the full truth about the Russian effort separate and irrespective of whether there was any Trump campaign collusion with it. Trump himself has regularly dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. The GOP-run House Intelligence Committee probe laughably airbrushed Russia’s goal of helping Trump win out of its final conclusion, putting it at odds with both the intelligence community and Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans.
And this isn’t the only way in which Trump’s Republican allies are actively working to prevent the full truth from coming out. Their push for the release of highly sensitive Justice Department documents on the FBI informant that Trump and his allies have railed about — who contacted Trump campaign officials after the FBI established questionable contacts involving Russian hopes of corrupting the election — represents direct collaboration between Trump and Republicans to subvert Mueller’s investigation. This pressure resulted in an extraordinary capitulation by DOJ, in which officials agreed to make info they believe to be compromising available only to Republicans (though now Democrats will get a briefing as well).
Whatever you think of Clapper, he is pinpointing the core difficulty here. We want congressional oversight of our intelligence services, so the public can have confidence that their awesome powers are not being abused. But there comes a point at which legitimate oversight gets weaponized and perverted into its opposite — a bad-faith political effort to subvert legitimate law enforcement activity and prevent accountability and justice. In this case, what’s being subverted is an effort to determine the full extent of outside sabotage of an American presidential election, something that may have altered its outcome.
Whether Clapper is right in claiming that the outcome was indeed altered will probably forever remain an open question. But his assertion does highlight the fact that Trump and his GOP allies are actively trying to prevent that full story from coming out — and aren’t troubled in the least by the possibility that he might be right.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/05/24/james-clappers-bombshell-russia-swung-the-election-what-if-hes-right/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0b8917089fec
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