If you’re one of those people who don’t trust the intelligence community when it says Russia ran an influence campaign against Hillary Clinton, I have some good news. We will soon know whether the spies are being straight with us.
In less than two weeks, Donald Trump is to become president and his nominee for CIA director is Republican Representative Mike Pompeo. Former Republican senator Dan Coats is Trump’s choice to be the next director of national intelligence. If the evidence supporting the unclassified report released Friday on the Russian hacking is flimsy, these three will know soon enough.
That report asserts that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized a cyber-espionage and propaganda campaign to discredit the Democratic presidential nominee — an explosive claim. But the report is silent on how the government knows all of this.
The report concludes that over time the Russians developed a preference for Trump. It says Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, gave WikiLeaks and other sites the e-mails hacked from Democratic officials. All of this is said to have been coordinated with an overt propaganda campaign enabled by the Kremlin television network RT and by Russian-funded online trolls.
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