It is the consensus view of the CIA assessment team that Russians did indeed hack the American presidential election process with the explicit attempt to increase the likelihood that Donald Trump would ascend to the White House.
This is sufficiently startling to justify in and of itself an intelligence briefing to those whose Constitutional duty is to protect us from harm of this sort: the Electoral College. Briefings behind closed doors to Congressional sub-committees neither accomplish very much (except the usual craven, partisan prevarication that we have already witnessed) nor face the danger head-on. The Founding Fathers gave us the power to deal with crises of this sort: the Constitution’s intent in creating the Electoral College was to remedy disasters-in-the-making by giving a judicious body the duty to carefully consider the consequences of the election itself.
On 19 December 2016, they must make their final decisions.
Of course, in this case the Electoral College would not even be defying the democratic will in denying Trump the White House (and, poignantly, the nuclear codes), as Hillary Rodham Clinton won the popular vote by an immense margin. But even if the Electoral College, in its collective wisdom, chose a compromise candidate, for example Mitt Romney, a sane man who won approximately sixty million votes in 2012, this would be well within their Constitutional duty. Their job is to keep the presidency in the hands of eminently qualified men and women, people who do not put American security into a cloud of monstrous uncertainty, if not actually in grave danger.
Donald Trump’s frightening relationship with Putin and the Russians goes beyond the clear evidence of hacking found by the US intelligence community. Having kept hidden his financial affairs, and made clear that he has no intention of selling his considerable assets and having them placed in a blind trust, we know nothing of his ongoing conflicts of interest with Russian business interests. His very odd choice for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, an oil executive with absolutely no diplomatic experience, has only one apparent, and frightening, credential: his long-standing relationship with Putin.
This is a stunning fact when honestly considered. US law proscribes even small donations from foreign nationals, yet we have proof that the Russians have substantively influenced our election, we have been denied access to Mr. Trump’s financial documents that could establish the lack of conflicts of interest with Russia, and the president-elect has appointed a man unqualified to be Secretary of State who has had a long-time relationship with the head of the Russian state.
Further, Mr. Trump did not hide this from us, even during the campaign. In July, for example, he said aloud to a group of startled reporters:
Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.
Quite apart from the litany of concerns Americans face in the run-up to the ascendance of this troubling candidate to the White House, this single concern — that we may have turned over our national sovereignty to one of our most powerful adversaries on the planet — requires that the intelligence community bare all in a confidential briefing of the Electoral College. They — and the American people — have the right to know just what we are dealing with before we hand over the keys to the White House to the 45th President of the United States. This briefing should be honest and unabashed. In a better world, we would hope that it would non-partisan.