TheDeamon - the contention is not that Russians connected to the government hacked the voting process itself, but that they were involved in targeted propaganda with the aim of affecting the election outcome.
That foreign governments seek out, and sometimes find ways to insert themselves into the electoral process of other nations is hardly shocking. That other governments would be attempting to do so with what arguably still remains the singularly most powerful nation on the planet is almost a given.
So it's about on par with the yawn I gave in response to many, if not most, of the Snowden leaks regarding the U.S. performing intelligence gathering on foreign nationals and our own allies. Officially, everyone involved had to denounce the practice. Unofficially they were being a bit smug over the U.S. getting caught with its pants down, but otherwise unsurprised. What happened isn't anything different from operations they have underway themselves, just with varying degrees of success, due to resource disparities. If you don't think the French, Brits, and Germans are spying on the United States,
and also trying to influence our internal politics, you're incredibly naive.
Also unofficially, it probably triggered some "thank yous" in screwed up international terms, as it is a high-order compliment within that realm to discover someone considers you to be "worth spying on." So call it a "reverse stalker effect" in this case. In the international scene, you WANT a legion of "stalkers," however at the same time, you don't want to
see them either, so obviously, when ones gets caught out, you naturally denounce them and call them creepy in public. You then send them a gift card later.
The only difference is this time the Russians were "nearly" caught in the act, and we're seeing a more overt display of their involvement as a consequence. So yes, the apathetic response is generally because for anyone who bothers to pay much attention to the realm of government spooks it basically is literally "business as usual."
That all the US intelligence agencies basically agree on the actions that took place, but seemingly only disagree on the degree of certainty with which they can link the actions directly to the Kremlin, is pretty convincing.
It's no longer a question of what they will find - they have already found sufficient evidence to characterize the conclusions with the term "high confidence", which is spook speak for "pretty darned sure", supposedly.
Because U.S. Intelligence has such a sterling record on getting things right. Like Bill Clinton going on record in 1998 convinced there were WMD's in Iraq? An intelligence position that remained in place clear through the 2003 invasion, even though the Intel community was starting to question the veracity of their long held estimates by then? It wasn't that the Bush(43) Admin was "cherry picking" data, they were working off of
over 12 years worth of Intel Data built up during the Clinton and Bush(41) Administrations. Both prior administration had "high confidence" that there were WMD's in Iraq. It's the entire justification for Iraq having been under sanctions and subject to UN led inspections.
So, US intelligence agencies as a group confidently believe that an adversarial foreign power at the very least attempted to negatively affect the electoral chances of a major party candidate for president (not to mention the downstream effects) yet strangely, almost no US citizens on this board give this more than a passing yawn..? Your electoral system was just attacked by a foreign power - basically, the underpinning of your whole democracy has been attacked - and nobody can muster even a peep of resistance?
See above, the Intel Community having "high confidence" in something still doesn't mean something is true. And even if it is, it isn't news to the informed, so it doesn't really change anything other than knowing that the person Russia wanted to win seems to have won the election.
But Russia providing shadowy assistance still isn't the same thing as claiming the Trump Campaign was knowingly coordinating with the Russians.
And even going back to the infamous Trump quote where he "spoke to the Russians" his request was for an "after the fact" thing, regarding emails that we've been told no longer existed as of the time Trump made the statement. Meaning that if the Russians did produce them(they didn't), that they had hacked the servers in question months/years before... Not because Donald Trump asked them to.
...unless of course you're going to claim that those e-mails do still exist and that the Clinton's are holding them back, in defiance of court orders to produce them, because of (insert reason here). In which case I think ANOTHER discussion is perhaps in order?
