The Questions Donald Trump Needs to Answer About Russia - by Joy-Ann Reid
The U.S. government has made it clear that Russia worked to get Donald Trump elected, but there are still some very troubling questions for our president-elect.
JOY-ANN REID
01.07.17 3:39 PM ET
The U.S. government has made it clear that Russia worked to get Donald Trump elected, but there are still some very troubling questions for our president-elect.
JOY-ANN REID
01.07.17 3:39 PM ET
Just call him “Moscow Don” …
Donald Trump’s strange responses to increasingly detailed evidence that Russian intelligence services hacked into the email accounts of both Democratic and state and federal government targets during the 2016 election should cause alarm across party lines.
His odd exhortation last week for the country to just “move on to bigger and better things” got worse this week, with his bland reaction to meeting with top intelligence officials, who went to Trump Tower to tell him in no uncertain terms what the rest of us already know: that Russia actively sought to interfere in the election by deploying hackers to steal Democrats’ emails, both to undermine Hillary Clinton should she become president, or to elect Donald Trump.
For his part, Trump seemed only capable of focusing on reasserting the legitimacy of his election, clinging to the lack of a finding that Russians hacked into actual voting machines. But that was never the point. The point was that Russia deployed cybercriminals, who fed stolen emails to Wikileaks, and deployed trolls who spread made up, damaging news stories, including through the Russian propaganda arm RT and through American conspiracy theory peddlers like Infowars and random sites online, specifically to help him. And while he is not portrayed as an accomplice to the Russian operation in the intelligence report, the fact is, Trump actively pitched and sold the products of the Russian hackers and trolls and Wikileaks. He did so every day of the campaign, sometimes even going beyond the content and exaggerating it to his own benefit.
It’s left unsaid in the intelligence report, but the truth is, the Russian operation could not have succeeded without the help of Donald J. Trump. He alone among the Republican primary candidates, during the period of active hacking and email theft, was willing – no, eager – to use the looted material for the benefit of his campaign.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/07/the-questions-donald-trump-needs-to-answer-about-russia.html
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