Another day, another damning revelation implicating Russia in a massive hacking operation conducted in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election – this time, in a bright red Republican controlled state.
The Associated Press is reporting that, “A top Texas elections official says Russian hackers attempted to access voter registration rolls in Dallas County before November’s presidential election. County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole says the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in October alerted elections offices about some 600 IP addresses linked to Russian hackers.”
“Federal authorities have confirmed some of those attempts came from Russian IP addresses,” the report concludes. This news will continue to paint the President and his supporters into and ever-tightening corner.
Trump apologists have long been in a pickle. They’ve had to find ways to defend the President’s Russian links, both during the campaign and now in the Oval Office, without defending Russia itself.
The Obama Administration had evidence of Russian hacking as early as March of last year, but chose not go public with it for fear of influencing the election. Then in July of 2016, Wikileaks released hacked eMails from the Democratic National Committee, emails which Trump and his team happily used ad nauseam to attack Hillary Clinton. Wikileaks has long been known to be a front for, or at least a favored tool of, Russian Intelligence, and U.S. intelligence had already concluded that the Kremlin orchestrated the Wikileaks document dump soon after it happened.
The GOP is, as they’re quick to remind us every chance they get, the party of Reagan, the great Cold Warrior who vanquished Russia – then the Soviet Union – with his own two hands. Defending Putin and any cyber espionage operation conducted by Russia to attack our election just doesn’t jive with “America First” no matter how hard you spin it.
So they did what Trumpists do when the facts don’t support their position. They lied – to everyone, including themselves. Following Trump’s example, they acted like any hacking attempts – both those that we knew about, like Wikileaks, and those that we didn’t at the time – maybe came from Russia, but maybe didn’t. The Obama Administration, after all, had a favored candidate in the election, so who’s to say they didn’t make the Russia link up to defame Trump for so gleefully using the hacked eMails? Maybe it was China, or a fat guy in New Jersey. There’s just no way to know for sure, right?
Trump and co. kept repeating a version of this talking point through the November election, and well into the transition. But then, President-Elect Trump received a classified briefing from U.S. intelligence detailing the Russian hacking operation in January, just days before his inauguration. After the briefing, he finally, for the first time, begrudgingly admitted that Russia did, in fact, hack our election.
Trump supporters then had to move the goal posts. The new line of defense became, “So what if the Russians influenced the election by hacking the Democrats? It’s not like they hacked into voting machines or polling locations.”
Wrong.
Today’s revelation, taken together with news that broke Tuesday that election offices from 39 states reported hacking attempts from Russian servers of varying degrees of success, mark the end of that talking point’s life.
So where do they go form here? It doesn’t seem clear what the next turn will be. “Who knows if it was Russia?” became “who cares if it was Russia? They didn’t attacking voting data!”
It would appear Team Trump is coming to the end of this dead-end street of a defense, and maybe his Presidency.
