Donald Trump would not be president today if it were not for the assist
that he received from the Kremlin.
Trump and his enablers keep insisting:
"The intelligence community's assessment is that the Russian meddling that took
place did not affect the outcome of the election."
"It didn't have a material effect on our election."
"It had no impact on the election."
"It is the universal conclusion of our intelligence communities that none of those efforts
had any effect on the outcome of the 2016 election."
False.
If you actually look at the U.S. intelligence community assessment,
they said, "We make no judgment of the impact of the Russian intervention."
In fact, if you talk to outside experts they will tell you it had a significant impact.
By one estimate, the Russians reached a 126 million people on Facebook alone.
And the kind of phony stories that they spread,
claiming, for example, that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump,
or that Hillary Clinton dealt arms to ISIS,
those kinds of fake news stories actually had more social engagement
reached more readers than legitimate stories in the last three months of the campaign.
And Facebook was just one platform that they used.
Twitter, for example, recently warned 1.4 million users
that they have interacted with Russian bots.
They penetrated voter rolls in at least 39 states.
And we know from what the Senate Intelligence Committee said
that in a small number of states, but possibly pivotal number of states,
they changed the voter rolls,
potentially disenfranchising Clinton voters,
who might have showed up at the polls
and found out they were not registered to vote.
All of these things add up very quickly in an election that
was decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states.
The Russians began leaking these massive dumps of stolen emails through WikiLeaks
on the eve of the Democratic convention.
And the storyline that emerged from those stolen emails
was that the DNC was biased against Bernie Sanders.
And then the next big tranche of documents was released, very significantly,
29 minutes after The Washington Post reported on the "Access Hollywood" video,
in which Donald Trump was heard bragging about grabbing women by their genitals.
And so, that last-minute intervention by the Russians via WikiLeaks was incredibly important,
which is why Donald Trump mentioned WikiLeaks a 164 times
in the last month of the campaign. He said,
"WikiLeaks. I love WikiLeaks."
If you realize that WikiLeaks equals Russian intelligence,
Donald Trump was thanking the Russians
for helping him to win the election.
Nobody would suggest that the Russian intervention
was the only factor behind the election outcome.
But if you talk to experts, like former FBI agent Clint Watts,
what he will tell you is that if it were not for the Russian intervention,
Donald Trump would not even have been within striking distance of Hillary Clinton.
I think we have great cause to fear for the security of our elections in 2018 and 2020.
Donald Trump, who benefited from the Russian intervention in 2016,
Donald Trump, who probably would not be president were it not for the Russian intervention,
shows very little interest in opposing the Russians.
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