Thread by @karolcummins

Former intel chief’s argument that Putin did indeed sway the 2016 vote

James Clapper memoir: “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence.”

The book begins and ends with a brutal appraisal of Trump & the Russian plot to put him in power.
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📌All the intelligence at Clapper’s disposal suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, had made that possible.

Clapper, old Cold Warrior that he was, saw his world turned upside down.
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Suddenly truth, as Clapper understood the term, was out; “alternative facts” were in; and America’s old enemy had a far too cozy relationship with its new commander in chief.
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So this previously reluctant public figure decided as a private citizen to speak out with a vengeance, appearing regularly on CNN and with Trey Brown he has written a memoir: “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence.”
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The book begins and ends with a bitter appraisal of Trump and the Russian plot to put him in power.
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📌📌“I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as ‘fake news,’ ”
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Clapper writes. “I know that the Intelligence Community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable.”

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Clapper worked mainly monitoring communications — is quite sincere. And now he feels free to say about the 2016 elections what he did not say when he testified multiple times before Congress as director of national intelligence:
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“Of course the Russian efforts affected the outcome.

📌Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win.

📌To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense, and credulity to the breaking point.
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📌U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win
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📌Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election.

📌I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.”
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Clapper calls Trump’s “aggressive indifference” to the intelligence community’s detailed presentation of Russian activities is, in his view, damning enough in terms of the issue of collusion.
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“Allegations of collusion and the results of the election were secondary to the profound threat Russia posed — and poses — to our system,” Clapper writes, and he does a fair job explaining why in his book.
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📌Clapper begins with Putin’s conviction that the United States somehow bore responsibility for undermining his party’s victory in Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections, which were followed by protests and widespread charges of fraud.
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📌Why Putin hates Hillary

📌Behind the allegations of a Russian hack of the DNC is the Kremlin leader's fury at Clinton for challenging the fairness of Russian elections.
politico.com/story/2016/07/…

Clapper admits that in other cases — many other cases — the United States did try to influence elections and change regimes.

He cites a report by Carnegie Mellon researcher Dov Levin indicating ...
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U.S. efforts to interfere in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000.

But Clapper says, “Simplistically, I always viewed us as the ‘good guys,’ with at least noble intentions.”
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Putin certainly did not view the Americans as the good guys, and after 2011 he bore a special animus toward then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had expressed “serious concerns” about the conduct of those parliamentary elections.
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Putin “is not one to forgive or forget a grudge — ever,” writes Clapper.

📌“So when Clinton announced her candidacy for president in 2015, Putin remembered.”
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By then, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its bloody quasi-war in Ukraine and its role in shooting down a Malaysian airliner there had earned Moscow isolation and sanctions, but candidate Trump seemed more than willing to forget and forgive.
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📌📌Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russia stance on Ukraine
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📌📌#MH17📌📌

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1083822806037491712?s=2

Clapper and his colleagues had watched with interest and then horror, and reacted with agonizing caution to what the Russians were doing over the spring and summer of 2016.
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‼️Origin:

TrumpRussia Investigation

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1131968905499488256?s=21

Then, in November, the results came in, and in December President Barack Obama asked for a comprehensive report.
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In early January 2017, less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Clapper and his colleagues presented the president-elect with the sum total of what they had discovered about the Russian influence campaign.

DNI Report January 6, 2017 (UNCLAS)
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Senate Report 12/17/18

New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and sweep

The report is the first to analyze the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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📌📌The classified version of the report was far more detailed than the sanitized versions released to members of Congress and the public.
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“I remember just how staggering the assessment felt the first time I read it through from start to finish, and just how specific our conclusions and evidence were,” Clapper writes.
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“We showed unambiguously that Putin had ordered the campaign to influence the election, that the campaign was multifaceted...”
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And that Russia had used cyber espionage against US political organizations and publicly disclosed the data they collected through WikiLeaks, DCLeaks, and the Guccifer 2.0 persona.
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📌We documented Russian cyber intrusions into state and local voter rolls.

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📌📌We described Russia’s pervasive propaganda efforts through RT [satellite television], Sputnik, and the social media trolls, and how the entire operation had begun with attempts to undermine US democracy and demean Secretary Clinton,
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📌Then how the Kremlin shifted to promoting Trump when Russia assessed he was a viable candidate who would serve their strategic goals. . . .
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📌The Russian government had done all of this at minimal cost and without significant damage to their own interests, and they had no incentive to stop.”
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This DNI report was NOT the now-famous “dossier” compiled by a former British spy about prostitutes and conniving oligarchs, which Clapper calls “pseudo-intelligence” — this was solid stuff.

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It’s curious how the intel community considered the Steel Dossier as only raw HUMINT, while GOP & RW media went into an enormous disinfo campaign designed to disparage the “dirty Dossier” allegedly tainted with HRC ‘cooties.’

Trump set out to discredit the whole report before he’d so much as seen it, claiming that it was all a plot by the Democrats to explain away their loss and casting doubts on the reliability — and abilities — of the intelligence community as a whole.
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📌📌Clapper grew up with the conviction that the very essence of intelligence work is the collection of carefully analyzed “truths,” conveyed in confidence, however unpleasant the conclusions might be for policymakers and politicians.

@threadreaderapp unroll please & TY.