CIA claims that Russia helped Donald Trump win the election campaign.

President-Elect Donald Trump speaks in Michigan. Reuters. 

The CIA is claiming that Russian spies helped Donald Trump win the election. Reuters. The CIA told the Washington Post that they had identified Russians who had passed on hacked information from the DNC to Wikileaks. President Obama has ordered a review of the election and any attempts from Russia to be completed before Donald Trump takes office. Though the CIA believes the Russians helped Trump by leaking information from the DNC and Clinton campaigns, they did not say that Russia directly interfered with the election. Trump has denied these accusations and does not believe that the Russians were the ones that hacked the Democrats. 

My Comment:

My guess is that this whole story is "fake news" put out by the Washington Post and other outlets citing some CIA officer's opinion. Barack Obama probably has something to do with it as well, though he may have just been reacting to the Post report.. But as far as I am concerned there is no proof at all for these claims. I obviously don't have any access to the data the CIA had to come to this conclusion, but I still don't find this credible.

Why? Because there are other plausible sources for these hacks and leaks. The DNC leaks were probably the work of DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered shortly before the DNC leak happened. Julian Assange all but admitted that he was the source for those leaks:

You can't tell me that Julian Assange wasn't admitting that Seth Rich was one of his sources in the above video. I don't know if he was murdered for it (Rich not Assange, though to listen to the internet, Assange might not be around anymore either) or not, but I am convinced that Rich was one of the main sources of the leaks. Seth Rich was not a Russian agent and as far as I know he had no connections to Russia whatsoever.

But no matter what Seth Rich's connections to the DNC leaks were, the DNC leaks were not the only show in town. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, was also targeted and from what I understand he was legitimately hacked. He made a fundamental error and responded to a phishing attempt and lost control of his e-mail account. 

If Russia had any role in this at all, it would have been in the Podesta case. But I don't think there is any evidence that I have seen that the accusation that the Russian government did this is true. There are a lot of other people that wanted that information released, including many private citizens. Given the low tech approach used, anyone can conduct a phishing attack, I don't think the CIA can really claim that the Russians were the ones responsible for it. At the very least they should have some kind of proof, but so far I haven't seen any offered. 

Even if they do have proof they should not have gone to the press. Going to the Washington Post is going to have a hugely negative effect on Donald Trump's presidency. He already lost the popular vote (supposedly, I would like to know how many ineligible people voted before I believe that) and by suggesting Russian interference in the election, the CIA has just contributed to the "fake news" conspiracy theory that the Russians hacked the election. Nothing of the sort happened, but you wouldn't know that by casually looking at headlines the past day or so... 

So it seems to me that talking to the press is an effort by the CIA or elements in the CIA to undermine Donald Trump before he takes office. Why they would do such a thing is beyond me, but I am guessing it's because Trump isn't a neocon. He's not likely to support every effort the CIA is looking for and he is also likely to criticize their stance on Russia. That's a pretty terrible reason to undermine the president-elect, but I honestly don't have any other idea why they would do this.

I also have to say that the idea that the Clinton campaign was at a disadvantage because of leaks is a laughable one. How soon people "forget" what was once the talk of the nation. Seriously, while the Podesta and DNC leaks were damaging, surely their impact was mitigated by the obvious and damaging leaks that Donald Trump also suffered. The Trump tapes scandal almost completely derailed his campaign and I don't think they were released with his consent. And I know that the tax documents that were released by the New York Times, illegally I might add, hurt him as well. But nobody is claiming that the people that started those stories were foreign agents that interfered with the election...

And this is yet another attempt by the news media to avoid what was found in those leaks. The DNC leaks showed that the Democrats rigged the election in favor of Hillary Clinton. And the Podesta e-mails showed that the mainstream media was essentially working as an arm of the Clinton campaign. And that's not even mentioning all the weird "maybe it's nothing maybe it's something but all of it is bizarre" pizzagate stuff. None of that is being investigated right now (which is probably why pizzagate is spiraling out of control, there is nobody credible left to call off the dogs) but when some CIA puke says Russia may have helped Donald Trump indirectly, the sky is literally falling with reporters wanting to cover the story. 

Honestly, even if the Russians did hack the DNC and the Democrats, I am pretty ok with it. After all, if the DNC and the Clinton Campaign wasn't corrupt, they would have had nothing to fear from these leaks becoming public. But they did some pretty shady and unethical things and they paid the price for it. Whoever leaked or hacked them did the world a service. The people deserved to know what kind of person Hillary Clinton is and what her party was willing to do to get her elected. That's all that matters, and if it was the Russians that did it, then I will personally buy Vladimir Putin a beer should I ever get the opportunity...