The Electoral College and the CIA
- Charlie Biscotto
- Dec 11, 2016
- 2 min read
Responding to a CIA assessment that the Russian government was actively working to aid Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency, the President Elect's transition team made one decidedly false statement and another statement of dubious merit.
The decidedly false statement was that his "election ended long ago with one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history." If I were being pedantic, I would point out that the Electoral College has not yet voted, which means that the election did not end long ago if the Electoral College is his metric. But even if we assume that the first part of the sentence were true and all electors will act in good faith with their party preference, the rest of the sentence is still patently untrue. Only three elections in the last eleven have featured winning candidates with fewer electoral votes (George W. Bush twice and Jimmy Carter). That places him in the bottom third of Electoral College vote winners even in recent history.
Previously, RNC Chair and Trump Chief of Staff-in-waiting Reince Priebus was fact-checked for asserting that Trump's victory was a "landslide." A landslide is a difficult term to define, and the Politifact article linked above explores that in depth, but any statement that compares Trump's electoral to historical results is definitively wrong. The evolution of this lie (moving from asserting something that is hard to define to making a similar statement that is demonstrably untrue) is something I expect to be a hallmark of the Trump administration, making vigilance in calling out the initial lie all the more important.
Moving on from this, Trump's team asserted in this same statement that the CIA "said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," a reference to events in the lead-up to the Iraq War. There is surely plenty of blame to go around for the pretenses that took us to war in Iraq, and there are plenty who will assert that the war was the correct decision despite the lack of WMD's. However, to blame the CIA for the entire thing is laughable.
In a 2015 article for Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald relayed former CIA officer Ben Bonk's version of events, wherein he was repeatedly pressured by Bush administration officials to find the conclusions they had already reached. Worse still, those officials pressed Bonk and other senior analysts to pursue links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, "the hawks turned to less-qualified analysts to look into Saddam’s WMDs. No 'red teams'—groups intended to challenge conclusions of the other side—were used. The analysts were told their job was to prove the extent of the production and locate where the weapons were hidden."
The CIA was set up to fail, and any intelligence suggesting Iraq lacked WMD's was kept from reaching George W. Bush's desk.
Donald Trump lied about his own victory and discredited the American intelligence apparatus all in one fell swoop, all while turning down repeated opportunities to engage with and learn from that very apparatus. Despite this, a bipartisan group of Senators is planning to investigate the claims, noting that international espionage "cannot be a partisan issue."