DNI Makes False Claims About Russian Interference

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

BYRON TAU and ERIC TUCKER at AP:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.

...

CLAIM: “The intelligence community had one assessment: that Russia did not have the intent and capability to try to impact the outcome of the U.S. election leading up to Election Day. The same assessment was made after the election.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.

The documents Gabbard released do not support her claim. She cites a handful of emails from 2016 in which officials conclude Russia had no intention of manipulating the U.S. vote count through cyberattacks on voting systems.

President Barack Obama’s administration never alleged voting infrastructure was tampered with. Rather, officials have said, Russian operatives hacked emails of prominent Democrats that were subsequently released through WikiLeaks and launched a covert social media campaign to sow discord and inflame U.S. public opinion. More than two dozen Russians were indicted in 2018 in connection with those efforts.

Republican-led investigations in Congress have affirmed that conclusion, and the emails that Gabbard released do not contradict that finding.

...

CLAIM: “There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community’s assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.

There was no shift.

The emails Gabbard released show that a Department of Homeland Security official in August 2016 told then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.”

The public assessment the Obama administration made public in January 2017 reached the same conclusion: “DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

Change Elections

Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

Bruce Mehlman:

Voters in the U.S. and around the world are unhappy with the direction of their countries and keep voting to “throw the bums out”. In the U.S. there were just 3 change elections (where the party controlling the House, Senate and/or White House changed) out of the 10 held in the 1960’s & 70s. In the 80’s & 90’s it happened 4 times in 10 elections. This century? 11 out of 13 elections.

Blowing Up the Federal Debt

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Sahil Kapur at NBC:

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which he signed into law this month, will add $3.4 trillion to the U.S. national debt over the next decade, according to a report the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published Monday.

The report found that the law, which Republicans passed along party lines, will also “increase by 10 million the number of people without health insurance” by 2034.

The budget office scrutinized the final version of the bill after Republicans made a series of last-minute changes to cobble together the votes needed in the Senate; it passed 51-50. That revised version subsequently passed the House on a vote of 218-214. Trump enacted it on July 4.

The package extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts while providing tax deductions for tips and overtime pay for the next four years. It includes hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending for the military and to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda. And it pays for some of that with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP benefits (which help low-income families purchase groceries) and clean energy funding.

The analysis found that the law’s net spending cuts of $1.1 trillion are outstripped by the $4.5 trillion in decreased revenue, compared with if the measure had not passed.

The Scopes Trial

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Scopes "monkey trial" verdict. James C. Foster at the Free Speech Center:

The Scopes “monkey trial” was the moniker journalist H. L. Mencken applied to the 1925 prosecution of a criminal action brought by the state of Tennessee against high school teacher John T. Scopes for violating the state’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools.

In the case Scopes v. State (1925), Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but, on appeal, the Supreme Court of Tennessee, pointing to a technicality in the issuance of the fine, overturned Scopes’s conviction, while finding the Butler Act constitutional.

The trial involved A Civic Biology, a textbook by biologist George William Hunter. Today few people remember that the book's discussion of evolution was explicitly racist:

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

And in light of subsequent events, its discussion of eugenics sounds chilling:

Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.

ODNI Misleads About Russian Influence Operations

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are  prominent influencers.

Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump.

Democrats denounced the effort as politically motivated, error-ridden and in contradiction with previous reviews of the assessment.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Ms. Gabbard’s accusation of treason “baseless.”

Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the work, and concluded that during the 2016 election, the Russians conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While they extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.

The Obama administration assessment never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes. 

Russia also conducted influence operations to change public opinion. That included using fake social media posts to sow division among Americans and leaking documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Multiple reviews, including a Republican-led Senate report, backed the findings of American spy agencies in late 2016 that Russia was trying to influence the election by damaging Ms. Clinton’s campaign and bolstering Mr. Trump.

Among the Republican senators on the Intelligence Committee that produced the various reports on Russian influence operations was Marco Rubio of Florida, now the secretary of state.

The new report by Ms. Gabbard’s staff conflates those two activities by the Russians and tries to suggest that the Obama administration forced the intelligence community to alter its conclusions.

Polarization and Confidence in Institutions

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

 Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Americans' average confidence in major U.S. institutions is unchanged since last year, with a near-record-low 28% of U.S. adults expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in nine institutions tracked consistently since 1979. This is the fourth consecutive year of sub-30% averages, but this overall stability belies significant shifts in partisans’ confidence after Donald Trump replaced Joe Biden as president.

On average across these nine institutions, Democrats’ confidence, at 26%, has decreased by five percentage points and sits at a new low, while Republicans’ 37% reflects an increase of nine points and is the highest reading since 2020. Partisans’ confidence levels diverge the most on the presidency and the police, with Republicans much more confident than Democrats in each.

More generally, of 18 key U.S. institutions included in this year’s survey, just three earn majority-level confidence from Americans — small business, the military and science.

Colbert: Good Night, and Good Luck

Politicians have various ways of exerting pressure on the mass media.

Brian Stelter and Dan Heching, CNN:

In a shocking move, CBS is ending “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” next year, and apparently exiting the late-night television business altogether.

The network, citing financial pressures, said the cancellation will take effect in May 2026, the normal end of the broadcast TV season.

The decision is particularly surprising because “The Late Show” is typically the highest-rated show in late-night. And the timing is bound to raise questions because it comes just two weeks after the parent company of CBS, Paramount, settled a lawsuit lodged by President Trump against CBS News.

The settlement – and Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance Media – spurred speculation about Colbert’s future at CBS. Colbert, after all, is one of the staunchest critics of Trump on television.

Colbert alluded to the online worrying about his fate when he returned from vacation on Monday night. He condemned the Paramount settlement on air, likening it to a “big fat bribe,” and he joked that his new mustache would protect him from the corporation: “Okay, okay, but how are they going to put pressure on Stephen Colbert… if they can’t find him?”