“The Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections through the foreign influence.”
— FBI Director Christopher Wray
“It wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”
— Special counsel Robert Mueller
Apologists and flunkies for the administration — like Utah Rep. Chris Stewart — can spin and distract all they want. And they want to a lot.
But the simple fact is that, even if nothing anyone says is going to get those facts to stick to this president, Russian interference in our democracy was, is and will be a real danger that must be dealt with, at every level of government.
The assertion that the Mueller investigation found no evidence of cooperation between the president’s campaign and Russian meddlers is a bald-faced lie. About which, it is clear, too few Americans, and next to no Republicans, care.
Maybe more people will care if we stop arguing about the past, which can’t be changed anyway, and start looking to the future.
There is no reason to be confident that the Russians will always favor the Republican candidate. Vladimir Putin is not so full of himself that he thinks the goal of his cyber warfare against the West will always be to pick the winner of a certain election on the basis of who might be the most friendly to his plans. Over time, he and those who will come after him may be less interested in winning elections than in disrupting them.
They will see that they win, not by imposing order, but by sowing chaos.
Next time, Putin, or Kim, or Xi, might very well favor the Democrat. Or a third party contender. Or it might suit their needs to so foul up a campaign — or, worse, the counting of votes — that citizens won’t have any confidence at all in the election process or in the people put in charge by those elections.
It is not only the United States that the Russians have targeted, and will target. There is reason to believe that the slimy campaign of lies that pushed the Brexit referendum over the top was also the doing of the GRU. And that the Russians have been monkeying around in elections in Ukraine.
And it is not only the Russians we need to fear. Other nations, and groups, will see that spreading misinformation on social media is not only stunningly effective in influencing the outcome of, or the faith in, elections, but that it is also really, really cheap. For the Saudis, that may not matter. But for such underfunded bad actors as North Korea and ISIS, it is a boon.
We are now aware that foreign interference in our electoral process has gone beyond bots spreading lies on Facebook. A new report from the (Republican-controlled) Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russian hackers at least tried to enter the computerized election systems of all 50 states. There is no reason to suppose that they won’t keep at it. And, even if they never really change any vote tallies, the threat that they might, or might have, seriously undermines the very core of our democratic process.
So, of course, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to block proposed legislation to help our electoral systems protect themselves.
Every member of Congress should be hopping mad about what we know, what we don’t yet know and what we need to do but haven’t done.
The fact that they aren’t suggests that they are more afraid of the president than they are of a foreign adversary.
