When a commenter belittled Russian interference in the 2016 election, Democracy returned to provide the evidence of Russia’s active and considerable interference in the election of 2016. The election of Trump was a major coup for Putin.

Democracy wrote:

“Whatever meager influence Russian may have had …”

I suppose this is an improvement over “The fact remains that there is no evidence for Russian involvement in the U.S. election at all.”

This, written at a time when there was — IN FACT – LOTS of evidence of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, from virtually every intelligence agency in the United States government:

US Intelligence news release on October 7, 2016:  

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-press-releases-2016/1423-joint-dhs-odni-election-security-statement

Reuters:  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of Director of National Intelligence agree that Russia was behind hacks into Democratic Party organizations and operatives ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. There is also agreement, according to U.S. officials, that Russia sought to intervene in the election to help Trump, a Republican, defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-cyber-idUSKBN14H1SR

There are some people who apply the Trumpian tactic on Michael Cohen to this information, suggesting that because, at certain times in the past, some of these agencies have had credibility issues.

Except, here, private cybersecurity experts have confirmed the information. As The Daily Beast reported in 2017,

“it was a respected computer security company called Crowdstrike that examined the servers, and publicly revealed Russian’s involvement in the DNC hacks last year. It backed up the claim with specific technical information far more useful than anything in the DHS report. Crowdstrike competitors, including Symantec and FireEye, have examined the forensic data from the DNC hack themeselves, and endorsed Crowdstrike’s conclusion that two particular hacking groups were the culprits: ‘Fancy Bear’ and ‘The Dukes.’

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/06/how-the-u-s-enabled-russian-hack-truthers.html

Here’s how Thomas Rid, formerly at the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, and now the Director of the Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, and who studies and writes about technology and cyber warfare, puts it:

“the evidence is so rich that there are only two reasons not to accept it — one, because you don’t understand the technical details, or because you don’t want to understand it for political reasons… It’s really not controversial that we’re looking at a major Russian campaign.”

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum summarized the whole sordid affair well:

“the outline of the case is no mystery…Democratic and Republican Party servers were hacked by foreign agents, yet the Moscow-friendly folks at Wikileaks somehow only obtained the contents of Democratic servers…Meanwhile, Donald Trump ran a campaign that seemed almost designed to please Russian President Vladimir Putin…The campaign then rewrote the Republican platform in ways sure to please Putin. Trump selected as his principal foreign-policy adviser a retired general previously paid by Russia’s English-language propaganda network, RT…Trump himself publicly urged the Russians to do more hacking of his opponent’s email…Trump endorsed Putin’s war aims in Syria…He suggested he would not honor NATO commitments against Russia…He condoned the invasion and annexation of Crimea…Do Americans really need secret information from the CIA to discern the pattern here?”

Yet there DO appear to be SOME people who still try to play off the Russian ratf*cking as some kind of climate-change-like “hoax.”

Some of them even think that they’re “smart.”

But, hey, I got some news.