Senate Intelligence Committee Knows Trump Is An Illegitimate President

There are 15 senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats. The chairman is Richard Burr (R-NC) and the vice-chair is Mark Warner, a conservative from Virginia. Almost every member is an establishment conservative. These are the rest of the members:

• James Risch (R-ID)
• Marco Rubio (R-FL)
• Susan Collins (R-ME)
• Roy Blunt (R-MO)
• Tom Cotton (R-AR)
• John Cornyn (R-TX)
• Ben Sasse (R-NE)
• Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
• Ron Wyden (D-OR)
• Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
• Angus King (I-ME)
• Kamala Harris (D-CA)
• Michael Bennet (D-CO)

The committee issued a report yesterday that, though annoyingly redacted, is going to send Trump into orbit if he ever finds out about it. The Republican's have the majority on the committee but the report found, that Russia's Internet Research Agency "sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin" and called on Trump to "reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election."

The 85-page report emphasized that the Russian activity against the U.S. electoral system has "increased, rather than decreased, after Election Day 2016"-- up "more than 200% on Instagram and more than 50% on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube." The Russians have especially attempted to exacerbate domestic tensions and increase Trump's election prospects by targeting African-Americans. The report: "By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans."

The bipartisan report says flatly that "Despite Moscow’s denials, the direction and financial involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as well as his close ties to high-level Russian government officials including President Vladimir Putin, point to significant Kremlin support, authorization, and direction of the IRA’ s operations and goals."

The Intel Committee is recommending that Congress consider new laws to block foreign interference in elections, such as requiring disclosure of who pays for election-related online advertising (just as TV stations do). The legislation already proposed to do that-- Lindsey Graham's Honest Ads Act-- has been blocked by Moscow Mitch.

The report confirms the findings of private researchers that African-American voters were targeted by the troll farm more frequently than any other group, in an apparent effort to suppress the vote and help Trump.

At a rally in Pennsylvania in December 2016, then President-elect Trump thanked black voters for failing to turn out for Clinton at the same rate they did for Obama.

"They didn't come out to vote for Hillary. They didn't come out. And that was a big," Trump said. "So thank you to the African-American community."

Two-thirds of the Internet Research Agency's Facebook ads were focused on race, the report found, adding that black voters were targeted with messages such as: "Don't Vote for Hillary Clinton," "Don't Vote At All," "Why Would We Be Voting," "Our Votes Don't Matter," and "A Vote for Jill Stein is Not a Wasted Vote."

While much of the report's analysis of how the Russians used social media in 2016 wasn't new, the document includes the first set of bipartisan recommendations to come out of a close look at what happened.

In addition to calling for new laws, the committee recommended that the executive branch "publicly reinforce the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election" and "establish an interagency task force to monitor foreign nations' use of social media platforms for democratic interference and develop a deterrence framework."

While the FBI and other agencies have sought to tackle the issue of foreign manipulation on social media, there has been no whole-of-government approach led from the White House, principally because President Trump has not wanted to focus on an issue that he feels undermines the legitimacy of his 2016 victory, officials have said.

Trump has never acknowledged the extent to which Russian intelligence services and their proxies intervened in the 2016 election, and at times he has denied that it happened.