by Josh Marshall
Over the weekend, several prominent news media figures announced themselves as Trump/Russia skeptics. Politico’s Blake Hounshell seemed to kick off the discussion with this essay. This isn’t “fake news” type skepticism. It’s much more focused and I think reasonable. These folks fully grant the extensive and multi-pronged Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election. That involved fake news, email hacking, and multiple approaches to Trump associates to gauge interest in working together. The skepticism is whether we’ll ever find a proven and explicit agreement between President Trump and Vladimir Putin or some other similarly high-level Russian official to collaborate in subverting the 2016 election. If not documented proof of such an agreement then at least well-attested evidence of the same.
Relatedly, they say that the Trump campaign just didn’t seem organized enough to manage a full-blown conspiracy (a frequent explanation from the Trumpers themselves) and that if they had Trump is too impulsive and intemperate not to have spilled the beans by now.
I wanted to respond to these claims and doubts both because I partly agree with them but also because I think this read is based on basic misunderstandings of the nature of offensive intelligence operations and, simply, human nature.***
No comments:
Post a Comment