Most of the Republicans will admit that Russia has interfered with the elections, but they will also say that it didn’t influence the outcome and that Trump would be president even without a foul play from Moscow. This might be true, but everything is pointing in a slightly different direction meaning that they did influence the results greatly.
The investigation that was conducted shows that the Kremlin was involved in 2016 elections, but Trump is still not persuaded, especially after Putin said to him that Russia did not influence the process. On the other hand, almost everyone will agree that they did interfere and depending on the fraction which they favor, the result of that influence is seen differently.
According to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, he is “1,000 percent certain that the Russians interfered in our election.” He continued by adding: “Russia didn’t beat Clinton. Trump beat Clinton.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who helped oversee the investigation while he was a director of the Central Intelligence Agency, also confirmed that Moscow was involved, only with a minimal impact.
Trump being Trump, said how Kremlin “will be pushing very hard for Democrats” when the 2018 midterm elections come. This is based on his claims that he was the toughest US president when it comes to international relations with Russia and that they definitely don’t want him to stay in the White House.
In election games, there is a huge number of factors in play, and it is hard to prove that Moscow’s influence had any meaningful impact. One thing that we need to say is that the intelligence community didn’t reach a conclusion, at least it wasn’t publicly delivered, that foul play didn’t tip the scale in Trump’s favor.
We could hear more than a few experts that claim how they really did manage to swing the elections and secure the victory for the current president. According to James Clapper who suggest that about 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan was enough for the win. He wrote, “I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by the massive effort by the Russians.”
Clapper is named as someone who doesn’t like Trump and supports Obama, but his point of view will be backed up by Kathleen Hall Jamieson who will publish a book that covers Russian interference and how it brought a win to Trump. “The Russian trolls and hackers created message imbalances, the former in social media, the latter in news,” that helped the Republican, she said in an interview on Sunday. “The use that the mainstream and conservative media made of the Russian hacking of the Democrats’ emails altered the news and debate agendas in ways that past election research would suggest were significant enough to change the outcome.”
It has been reported by NBC News that there was a large number of Russian trolls that launched and spread false news about Pope Francis support for Trump. This, according to research, also influenced some voters.
On the eve of the Democratic National Convention WikiLeaks published internal documents that were reportedly stolen by Russian hackers. Those documents proved that Clinton was favored by the Democratic National Committee against Bernie Sanders in the primaries. As a result, some supporters of Sanders decided not to vote while Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned.
Another interesting coincidence came right after Trump’s video where he talked about groping women when WikiLeaks published the first batch of emails from John Podesta’s account. At that moment, Podesta was Clinton’s campaign manager. Since this was released on a Friday afternoon, which definitely isn’t the best moment if you want media attention, it can be easily described as an intent to deflect attention from Trump misbehavior. Later on, this was connected with the Russian military intelligence unit.
All these issues that were geared against Clinton and her staff members forced her campaign to devote more attention to that than to actual elections. The question is, did this really help Trump to win?
Source: bloomberg.com
