Russia’s Involvement in the 2016 Election Is Growing by the Day

Now the NSA director admits Russia used Wikileaks to meddle in the campaign.

This Story Should Dominate the News Until Trump Is Sworn In

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By Charles P. Pierce

It’s shoveling sand against the tide to ask this question again, but why isn’t the fact that Russia played monkey-mischief with the recent presidential election—and the fact that we have no freaking idea how much the president-elect may owe to various financial institutions with connection to that kleptocratic regime—a much bigger story than it has been? Now, we’ve got the director of the National Security Agency chiming it. Via Quartz:

In response to a question, Michael S. Rogers, a Naval officer and NSA director since 2014, said on stage at a Wall Street Journal conference that Wikileaks was furthering a nation-state’s goals by publishing hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s presidential campaign weeks ahead of the election. “There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s minds, this was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect,” he said.

I am no fan of NSA shenanigans, and I am eternally grateful to Edward Snowden for letting us all know about at least some of the shenanigans in question. But I’m hard-pressed to see an ulterior motive for Rogers here. The budget and mission—for good and ill—of the intelligence community are a couple of the things in the American government that can safely be said not to be under existential threat from the incoming administration. Rogers isn’t protecting his turf or his budget because nobody’s coming after them.

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If he doesn’t trust Vladimir Putin, I don’t blame him. Neither do I, and I will remain an angry skeptic on the subject of an innocent Trump-Putin connection until the president-elect releases enough of his financial documents to convince me that he’s not in hock to the Russian oligarch or his bankers. The fact that Putin has been playing footsie with nationalist movements all over Europe doesn’t fill me with optimism, either. Christ, there’s even one starting up in Ireland now, although its official launch party in Dublin on Wednesday was canceled because the hotel it had booked for the launch bailed on it. From The Irish Times:

The National Party had circulated a short press release earlier this week informing media of an event due to take place at the five-star hotel situated across from Government Buildings at 3pm on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the Merrion said it has now cancelled the booking, but refused to give a reason for why this was done. The National Party claims that it wants to “remind the political elites and the general commentariat… of the extent to which the promise presented by the Proclamation of the Republic remains unfulfilled”. It cited the Irish economy’s “unsustainable debt”, the “unrestricted policy of immigration to the point of population displacement” and “the blood lust of extremist groups to remove the equal right to life of the unborn child” in its release.

How perilous a time this is for the world is only beginning to be understood.

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