Donald Trump Is Still Wrong About Pretty Much Everything Related To Russia's Hacking
- Charlie Biscotto
- Jan 5, 2017
- 2 min read
Donald Trump continues to insult intelligence, both ours and the seventeen agencies that comprise America's intelligence community. We've already detailed some of his inexplicable misadventures with information here and here, so we'll try to keep this short.
Over the New Year's weekend, Donald Trump asserted his own intelligence on allegations that Russian hackers attempted to influence our elections: "And I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation." So there you have it, and to back up his claims that he knows a lot, he went on to promise to tell us exactly what he knows on "Tuesday or Wednesday."
Until his chosen press secretary (not the one who resigned within two days of his appointment amid allegations he had an affair with another campaign staffer) said that he didn't promise that. Well, he did. He literally promised that. But in Trump's post-truth America, that means he'll eventually sort of maybe address the original question, but don't get your hopes up.
Tuesday and Wednesday have come and gone without any news of note on the Russian hacking scandal, so the best we can assume, Trump's big reveal happened on Twitter between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning:
It would be strange, if not for the fact that the meeting was always scheduled for Friday. What is strange in this scenario is Donald Trump pretending that America's intelligence community is a burnt-out college senior begging their professor for three days, I repeat, THREE DAYS, to find thus far elusive proof of INTERNATIONAL ESPIONAGE AS AN ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS. Stranger still is the fact that Donald Trump continues to emasculate the very people he should depend on for information about the entire world during his tenure as president.
I almost forgot. He doesn't need those briefings because he's "like, a smart person." Hopefully he's at least getting good notes from Mike Pence. Sorry, digressing. Back to the Twitter.
Surely he's only citing Wikileaks founder and alleged sexual assaulter Julian Assange, a man whose organization's activities Trump deemed in 2010 to be worthy of capital punishment, as a source for his information because he wants to get one in on John Podesta. He doesn't like Podesta. It's a cheap shot, but it's also not as cheap as Trump often goes with his Tweetstorms (see: encouraging his followers to find a non-existent sex tape in retaliation for accusations he was racist, sexist, and generally not fun to be around). I'm sure he leaves it there...
To put this in as simple terms as possible: Donald Trump is taking Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange at their word, going so far as to praise Vladimir Putin for not retaliating to America's retaliation for the aforementioned hacks, all the while voicing public disbelief with American intelligence agencies and taking them to task for having the temerity to move meetings to the days they were already scheduled.
I guess we know why Mitt Romney wasn't chosen for State.