David Corn: How Trump-Russia Denialism Led to Elon Musk's Dangerous Twittergate Fail

[Nevilledog]

https://link.motherjones.com/public/29896178

Russian denialism is the original sin of the Trump era. In 2016, Vladimir Putin attacked the US election. This has been documented by Democratic and Republican congressional investigations, Robert Mueller, the US intelligence committee, and independent cybersecurity experts. The assault was mounted to help Donald Trump win the presidency. And we saw it with our own eyes, as cyber-pilfered documents were released by WikiLeaks, first to derail the Democrats’ convention and then in the final weeks of the general election to hamper Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Yet Trump both denied Moscow’s assault was real—which aided and abetted the Russian operation by providing cover for it—and sought to benefit from it, as detailed in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report released two years ago when Republicans controlled the Senate. That report also shockingly revealed there was a “direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services” while Moscow was clandestinely endeavoring to elect Trump president.

Trump and his allies engaged in a profound betrayal of the United States to gain the White House, assisting an act of war mounted by a foreign adversary. As the Senate report put it, “The Trump campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian interference effort.” After Trump’s narrow victory, he and his comrades in the GOP and right-wing media continued to deny Putin’s attack—calling it a hoax—to hide his treachery and erase the dark stain on his presidency.

This effort begot numerous phony scandals—such as Spygate (the false claim that the Obama administration spied on Trump) and Ukraine-gate (the baseless assertion that Ukraine, not Russia, was somehow responsible for the hack of the Democratic Party servers)—and an obsessive focus on problems with the Steele dossier and its misuse by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant on one former Trump campaign adviser. Anything to deflect from the key issue: Trump reached the White House partly due to a clandestine Russian operation he had assisted and even encouraged. To a large extent, this grand disinformation campaign succeeded. The issue eventually receded and played little, if any role, in the 2020 election.

Why bring this up now? Because Trump-Russia denialism is at the heart of the right’s latest attempt to cook up another sham scandal to tar President Joe Biden and bolster Trump’s dangerous and fraudulent charge that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This campaign is being enabled by the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, and, worse, it is being exploited by Trump to call for the “termination” of the US Constitution.

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[Peregrine Took]

1. Excellent article. I love his crisp and easy to follow writing style. David Corn, that is.

[2naSalit]

2. K&R