McCain Begins The Process Of Unravelling Putin's Role In Trump's Ascension

Not that it’s more bizarre than other Trump decisions— even if they’re really Mike Pence, the de facto president, decisions, but “Trump’s” announcement yesterday that he’s appointing 73 year old Dan Coats director of national intelligence, succeeding James Clapper. Coats was always a satellite of Indiana laughingstock Dan Quayle, first as a staffer in Quayle’s congressional office, then as Quayle’s replacement when Quayle ascended to the Senate and then as the appointed Senate replacement when Quayle was picked by George H.W. Bush as a running mate. In 1998 Coats retired from the Senate to become a lobbyist, a very rich lobbyist with a reputation for sleaze. In 2010 he decided to run for the Senate again, served 6 unremarkable years, accomplished nothing whatsoever and announced he was retiring.

The best thing anyone can say about the tired, low energy Coats is that he’s “respected” by his fellow crooked senators on both sides of the aisle. There’s a rumor that Pence was able to slip Coats into the job when Chris Christie turned it down. Coats— who is pro-torture and gang ho about domestic spying— isn’t remotely capable of doing the job and he’s the ideal man from the perspective of Trump-supporter Vladimir Putin.



Earlier Thursday, McCain began in earnest his war against Trump’s willful ignorance about national security and intelligence. As Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCAin invited Clapper plus Mike Rogers, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, and Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre II to testify about Russian interference in the U.S. election that put Trump in the White House. These are the takeaways from today’s hearing:

1. Intelligence officials think Russians definitely meddled in the U.S. campaign

Russians hacked into party databases and candidate emails, and tried to spread propaganda and fake news. Basically, they tried everything they could to meddle in the presidential campaign, intelligence officials said Thursday. (The CIA and the FBI agree that Russia wanted to help Trump win.)

Why did they do all this? We have to take a 30,000-foot view to answer that question.

“The Russians are bent on establishing a presence in the Western hemisphere” for a variety of reasons, Clapper said. He said they want to gain military allies, sell equipment, set up air bases and, crucially, set up intelligence-gathering facilities.

And intelligence officials think Russia is getting more and more aggressive in trying to extend its reach to our side of the world; its hacking into Democratic emails is Exhibit A.

2. Russia's leaders authorized some of the hacking

The three intelligence officers released a statement before the hearing. One key line in it read that only “Russia's senior-most officials” could have authorized the hacking of the Democratic Party's emails.

The leaks arguably had an impact on Democrats at a critical moment in their campaign: You'll recall that some of those emails were leaked on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in the summer and resulted in the resignation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

This assertion that Russia's top leaders signed off on this directly flies in the face of Trump's insistence on repeatedly giving Russian President Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt. Shortly before the new year, Trump praised Putin for not retaliating to President Obama's sanctions on Russia for the hacking.

Most recently, Trump promoted a theory by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that Russia had nothing to do with the hack — taking him at his word, despite the findings of his own intelligence community.

Clapper dismissed that idea outright on Thursday, and The Post's nonpartisan fact-checking team said Assange's claims that Russia wasn't involved are a “distortion of the facts.”

… 3. There's no way to know the electoral effect of Russia's supposed meddling

No one alleging Russian hacking has insinuated that it propelled Trump to victory, and intelligence officials repeated that Thursday.

Clapper: “We have no way of gauging the impact, certainly the intelligence community can’t gauge the impact, it had on choices the electorate made.”

Of course, the fact that those lines could be drawn between Russia's hacking and Trump's win seems to be Trump's main beef with all this. After all, he won three key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — by less than 1 percent. Absent those very narrow wins, we'd probably have spent the past two months talking about President-elect Hillary Clinton's massive popular vote victory. The idea that WikiLeaks revelations could have shifted even a fraction of votes in those key states — and that Russia could have been behind those revelations — is obviously a very, very sensitive one for the president-elect.

4. Intelligence leaders feel the need to defend themselves from attacks like Trump's

The quote that will probably make the most headlines from this hearing comes from Clapper, who said that skepticism of intelligence is healthy (“the intelligence community is not perfect”) but that “I think there is a difference between skepticism and disparagement.”

He went on to say: “I don’t think the intelligence community gets the credit it’s due for what it does day in and day out to keep this nation secure.”

Clapper, nor anyone else testifying at Thursday's hearing, didn't directly point fingers at the president elect. But Trump was definitely the elephant in the room.

5. Some Senate Republicans are ready to get tough on Russia, regardless of whether Trump is on board

It's probably not a coincidence that this hearing was held just two days after the new Congress was sworn in.

McCain has been vocal about his desire to thoroughly investigate Russian efforts to affect U.S. politics since The Post reported that the CIA thinks Russia tried to sway the election for Trump.

Crucially, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has given his approval to some of the investigations.

Another vocal hawk, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), said in the hearing that he wants to “throw rocks” at Russia.

McCain, along with Senate Democrats, also wants to up the ante by putting together a special investigative committee, not unlike House Republicans' two-year investigation of the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya. It remains to be seen whether GOP leaders will sign off on a full-blown separate investigation. But in the meantime, expect plenty of day-long hearings like what we just saw Thursday.

6. We'll know more about what the intelligence community thinks next week

Intelligence officials said they plan to make public sometime next week an unclassified version of a report that Obama and Trump are receiving on Russian interference in the campaign.

This Russian hacking thing has been tearing the progressive community apart, as though it is impossible for some to acknowledge that the U.S. Intelligence community is inherently evil while accepting that the Russian Intelligence community is also inherently evil. The naiveté in the debate is astounding. Being open to the facts of Russian hacking doesn’t somehow make Clinton a less horrible candidate, doesn’t make Debbie Wassermann Schultz one tiny bit less of a criminal, doesn’t glorify the policies and tactics of the CIA. I doubt the full, true story of Putin’s role in the placement of Trump in the White House will ever be definitively known but McCain and other senators from both parties are completely right to try to get to the bottom of it. They’d be remiss in their duty if they didn’t. The convergence of naive Bernie supporters and Team Trump in ideologically denying Putin’s role is nothing short of astounding. A little poll I ran on Twitter Thursday; it was too close to call:

Until a nonpartisan investigation gets all the facts out— no, I don’t really expect it to happen— we’ll have nothing to go by but our gut instincts, fed by propaganda from, I hate to say it, both sides.