The Eighth Week of Trump – The Russians are Coming

Editorial, The Week in Review – Analysis, Commentary, Opinion

12.31.2016

I saw a meme on Facebook today. It highlighted the weirdness of the political mood in the United States today. It suggested that a large segment of the population who voted for the T-Rump, Donald Trump, trust Vladimir Putin, and the Russians more than they do the intelligence agency charged with keeping our country safe.

It is a bizarre development. Polling suggests that at least 35% of people who voted for T-Rump, which is about twenty-one million people, or 6.5% of the total population of the country, believe that Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, and current strong-man dictator of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is more trustworthy, and more interested in the wellbeing of Americans that the CIA.

Even some sitting members of congress have taken up this line of reasoning, as have many high level republican operatives working with or for the burgeoning T-Rump administration.

I never thought presidential leadership could be so persuasive. Out of a desire to publicly back the president elect, millions of people who voted for him and dozens of high level party officials who hope to work with or for him, have abandoned decades of cultural conditioning in order to embrace the line of reasoning that suggests Russia is a better friend to us than our own intelligence services.

The world has slipped its moorings.

This week a report was issued jointly by the FBI and the CIA, indicating the degree to which the Russians attacked our cybernetic security infrastructure, hacking into banks, political party offices, targeted individuals, and even state run utilities.

Those two agencies gave an official report about the people involved the techniques they used and even spoke to their motivation. President Obama leveled far reaching sanctions against members of the Russian government. They ordered the removal of thirty-five diplomats from the country.

Many members of the T-Rump team are upset about this. They are accusing President Obama of trying to interfere with the incoming administration. Many other analysts on both sides of the political divide have suggested that the President did T-Rump a favor. He took action, putting T-Rump in the position of being able to negotiate a new more favorable position for the Russians in the months and years to come.

President Obama took some ground away from them, T-Rump can parcel it back out if the Russians behave. But his team is not seeing it that way. They continue to malign the CIA, suggesting that the CIA is just playing politics, complaining about President Obama, while exchanges friendly tweets and letters with the Russians.

It is bizarre.

In moves that smack of rank partisanship, the T-Rump people continue to focus their suspicion on one intelligence agency, the CIA, suggesting that this agency is responsible for the false reports and faulty analysis blaming the Russians. This is a deliberate move, and every time they make this intimation someone needs to be there to stop them. It is not the CIA making these allegations; it is the CIA, the FBI and ten other agencies, along with seven other analytics that are responsible for this consensus report.

The conundrum I am experiencing is this. I want to support the position of the Obama Administration, I want to support the reports provided by our intelligence services, but I do not want to be placed into a partisan fight where on the one hand the Russians are the bad guys, and on the other hand we have to trust the CIA.

The CIA has in fact furnished bad information to the people of the united states in the past. The CIA, or its operatives, have broken United States laws, international laws, committed crimes against humanity and many times in their past.

We cannot allow ourselves to occupy a place where the disjunction is CIA goo, Russia bad. That will not help us in the long run.

We must, as in all cases, rely on a preponderance of the evidence, sound analytics, and good information. All of that speaks to the Russians, and that is enough. We need to follow that story down to the smallest bits, until we find out just how much the T-Rump campaign was actually working with the Russian’s all along. I suspect they were, and the evidence for that is out there.

Let that investigation begin with Ivanka Trump and her friendship with Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend.

Lets go there.