I was dumbfounded to read the op-ed penned by my amiable colleague from Loudon, Rep. Michael Moffett (Monitor Forum, June 17).
Moffett is apparently disheartened because, in his view, “possible Russian election meddling” is “a manufactured issue, created without evidence by cynical politicos for the sole purpose of delegitimizing the president of the United States.” That sentiment puts him at odds with the heads of the three leading U.S. intelligence agencies who reported the Russian meddling, and with the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, former Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Evidently, either Moffett hasn’t read the declassified assessments of the U.S. intelligence agencies released on Oct. 7, 2016, and Jan. 6, or he believes these nonpartisan professional intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – have been run by “cynical politicos” interested only in undermining a sitting president to whom they report, or we shouldn’t worry about Russian interference in our elections because it’s just not that big a deal and besides, we do the same thing.
It’s worth looking at this issue as an example of how deeply polarized we have become as a nation, and then asking if we can’t find some common ground in acknowledging the “evidence” for and against some of the claims made in Moffett’s piece.
The first public release of declassified but official U.S. intelligence judgments on the evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election came on Oct. 7, 2016, in a one-page joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence. They wrote: “The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations. . . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process. . . . We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” (The “U.S. Intelligence Community” is made up of 17 separate agencies.)
The second release came on Jan. 6 after the election but before the inauguration of the new president. It was a five-page declassified version of a much more detailed “Intelligence Community Assessment” prepared for the DNI, based predominantly on classified data collected by the CIA, FBI and NSA, and titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.” You can find it easily on Google. Here’s an excerpt:
“We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Full disclosure: I voted for Clinton, but neither she nor Bernie Sanders would have been my preferred candidate. I believe she was a deeply flawed nominee who never connected with the bread-and-butter concerns of unemployed or underemployed working-class voters in the Rust Belt, and who lost the trust of many other voters when she apparently ordered the deletion of 30,000 “private” emails and then asked the public to trust that none of them involved State Department business.
Moffett seems to believe either that there is “no evidence” of Russian meddling in our election despite the intelligence assessments summarized above or that the CIA, FBI and NSA officials who documented that meddling (in both classified reports to American political leaders and declassified reports to the public) are “cynical politicos” whose only motive was to undermine the president-elect.
The “evidence” is in the classified intelligence reports, and I don’t know of any responsible national politician – Republican or Democrat – who has suggested that those reports were “created without evidence.” None of the agency heads whose combined judgments are reflected in the intelligence assessments can be dismissed as partisan political hacks.
Moffett is a veteran, and for that I honor him. But I doubt he would agree with then-candidate Trump that John McCain should be dissed because he was shot down over Hanoi, captured and ended up spending years in a North Vietnamese prison. McCain endured torture and refused early release, offered because he was the son of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific commander, because he didn’t want to be treated differently than other American POWs. When DNI James Clapper and NSA Director Mike Rogers testified about Russian meddling in our 2016 election before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 5, Sen. McCain observed that there is no national security interest “more vital to the U.S. than the ability to hold free and fair elections without foreign interference,” and that “every American should be alarmed by Russia’s attacks on our nation.”
A “non-story”? I don’t think so. You might well be right that “this issue would (not) still dominate the news had Hillary Clinton won last November,” but that’s because if she had won, she would not have taken to Twitter to protest on virtually a daily basis that “this Russia thing” is a hoax.
I’ll agree with you about one other thing: We are not likely to know whether there was coordination or collusion between members of the Trump campaign team and Russian agents until the Mueller investigation is concluded, and that is likely to “take many months.” In the meantime, as state representatives for Loudon and Canterbury, should we get back to focusing on state issues?
(Democrat Howard Moffett of Canterbury represents Merrimack District 9.)