Midterms are in Putin’s crosshairs, ex-spy chief saysJames Clapper believes the Kremlin’s effort is active and even more complex than the 2016 meddling campaign.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/ ... ing-606330Not content with installing Donald Trump in the White House in 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now revising his sophisticated meddling operation in order to outflank U.S. security agencies and tip the scales in the upcoming congressional midterm races, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told POLITICO on Wednesday.Clapper made that assertion as part of a wide-ranging interview timed with the release of his memoirs about his 50-plus years in the U.S. intelligence community, “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence,” which he wrote with Trey Brown.
Clapper, 77, says he thinks the Kremlin, led personally by Putin, is already engaged in an ongoing and active influence effort that is even more elaborate than the one he believes was used during the 2016 campaign to swing the election. That’s based on his years of government service at the highest echelons of the security apparatus, he said in the interview, as well as information he has learned since leaving office Jan. 20, 2017, the day Trump was sworn in as president.
“I have no doubt that they are doing that now, and I think they’re going to do it in ways that are more subtle and harder to detect,” Clapper said of the Russian meddling effort. “I’m sure they went to school to critique what they did in the presidential election in 2016. I think they will find more ways to be subtle, and be a lot less noisy than they were the last time.”[snip]
“What I’m offering is what I would call informed opinion, because I didn’t do empirical research on voter decisions, either,” Clapper told POLITICO. “But when I looked at the evidence, the massive effort the Russians made and the multi-dimensional aspects of it — the number of people that the Russians reached, in many cases who were unknowing, and the fact that the election turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states — it just stretches logic and credulity to think that it didn't have impact.”“I feel, and this is just my opinion,” he said, “that they swung the election.”Notoriously averse to media interviews, Clapper made that point even more bluntly in the book, which was released Tuesday evening. “Of course the Russian efforts affected the outcome,” he wrote. “Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win.”Clapper stops short of saying there was active collusion between Trump campaign operatives, and Trump himself, and Russian agents and their proxies.
But Trump’s refusal to even acknowledge — and address — the issue, is of grave concern, he said, as is his support for positions friendly to Russia.[snip]
One of his most serious concerns, Clapper said, is that Russian cyberspooks could use a wealth of knowledge gained from their intrusions of state electoral systems in the 2016 campaign to affect the actual vote this time around. There is no indication that Moscow deleted, manipulated or outright stole state voter data, he said, and “as best we can tell, there was no interference with voter tallies.”
“That’s not to say that they won’t resort to that in the future,” he said. “I don’t think they reconnoitered our voting systems for nothing.”“In those cases where they reconnoitered voter registration rolls,” Clapper added, “my assumption was that they were just trying to get smart so that if they do it again, they will be a lot more subtle about it.”
[snip][end]
Whether or not no collusion, Agent Orange isn't properly defending his country against this foreign threat, and that in itself borders on treasonous.
Now, if I were the Russians meddling in 2018 elections, what soft spot would I go for, at least right now at this particular point, the primaries? Oh yeah, I would stoke and inflame tensions between progressives and moderates/centrists within the Dem party.
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