US election: who carried the day?

The CIA, the FBI and the NSA hardly ever agree, but on this they do:

Col. Putin, KGB, “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election” to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency…”

Hard evidence to support this claim is forthcoming next week. However, a preview is already available. Russian spies hacked the Democratic National Committee, stole materials compromising Mrs Clinton and leaked them to WikiLeaks and DCLeaks.

Trump himself doesn’t dispute this. He tacitly acknowledges that the Democratic Party’s e-mail servers have indeed been breached. However, he claims that the cyberattacks had “absolutely no effect” on the outcome.

Since my conservative American friends ascribe divine powers to the Donald, I’m not surprised he knows the unknowable: how millions of voters may or may not have been affected by a steady flow of anti-Hillary revelations in the run-up to the vote.

The Donald knows: no matter how many of Hillary’s indiscretions had been pasted all over the papers as a direct result of the Russian thefts, not a single voter swung away from Hillary as a result.

The Democrats “got beaten very badly in the election”, says Trump, and US intelligence conducts a “witch hunt” against him. Since Hillary won the popular vote, I’d question the ‘very badly’ part. However, Trump may well be right that the intelligence community doesn’t like him.

Can’t say I blame the spooks. After all, hardly a day goes by that Trump doesn’t make derisory comments about American intelligence agencies. To be fair, their record vis-à-vis Russia in particular is indeed far from exemplary.

Not to cut too fine a point, US intelligence has failed to predict or understand most major events in Soviet and post-Soviet history. A few examples, out of many: it

• Dismissed Soviet defectors who had predicted the Nazi-Soviet Pact a year before it happened.
• Didn’t predict the post-war Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
• Didn’t think the Soviets would invade Hungary in 1956.
• Took Khrushchev’s bogus de-Stalinisation as real.
• Had no inkling about the Soviet missiles in Cuba until they were installed.
• Grossly overestimated the Soviet lead in missile technology in the 1960s.
• Didn’t understand the nature of Eastern European ‘communism with a human face’.
• Didn’t realise that the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’ was largely just a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.
• Didn’t anticipate Putin’s annexation of the Crimea and attack on the Ukraine.

However, some of their reports have been correct, and this one probably is – electronic meddling leaves traces, easy for modern counterintelligence to track down.

Nor is there any doubt, at least for anyone who follows the Russian housetrained press, that Putin’s KGB junta favoured Trump over Hillary.

Vindicating both Newton’s Third Law and Pavlov’s theories, the few remaining unofficial publications enthused about Hillary, which defies reason. A more ill-suited candidate for US presidency is hard to imagine and impossible to recall.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Trump should get a free ride if hard evidence bears out the claim that the government of a country openly hostile to America has affected the US presidential election.

He explains that the DNC was only hacked because it was “poorly defended”. That’s like saying that a rape victim has only herself to blame because she walked alone after dark and wore a short skirt.

According to Trump, people are talking about the hacking only because they wanted Hillary to win. And as to Russia, “only stupid people, or fools, would think that it [having good relations] is bad!”

These typically crass statements are both wrong and as tasteless as one expects from a man who thinks Trump Tower is elegant and, which is worse, wears his ties six inches too long.

True, only fools would think that good relations with Russia are bad in principle. However, only Russian agents, witting or unwitting, would think such relations are good no matter what Russia does.

Does Trump think America should watch nonchalantly as Putin helps himself to chunks of Eastern Europe? Makes nuclear threats to America? Or, as in this case, flagrantly subverts American politics, something that historically has always been regarded as an act of war – irrespective of whether or not the subversion succeeded?

There are several possible courses of action now, depending on the answer to the question of whether or not Trump is indeed in cahoots with Russia.

If he had struck a deal with Putin, promising a quid pro quo, he was a Russian agent during the election and continues to be one now. That means, no matter how much or justifiably one detests Hillary, the election should be regarded as invalid and Hillary sworn in on 20 January.

If no collusion on Trump’s part can be proved, he should become president. If his subsequent actions then show a clear and unreasonable pro-Putin bias, that should be treated as prima facie evidence of collusion and Trump should be impeached, with VP Mike Pence becoming president.

If no such scenario plays out, I sincerely hope the Donald will go on to become as great a president as my conservative American friends claim he will with a passion approaching idolatry. But forgive me for feeling wary at the moment.