Trump Was Beneficiary, Not Victim, of 2016, 2020 Interference

What allies of Donald Trump claim happened was, in reality, a response to that Russian effort. Federal officials (the "national security state," if you prefer) discovered signs that Russia sought to influence the results and began investigating - including various points of contact between Russian actors and Trump's campaign.

Trump, eager to reinforce that he had won the presidency thanks to his excellence and not foreign help, immediately cast this probe as an effort to subvert him and his administration. He and his allies worked feverishly to offset new developments in the investigation with a narrative about nefarious "deep state" actors desperate to hobble him. This line of argument was investigated by the inspector general for the Justice Department and by a special counsel specifically tasked with proving that Trump was unfairly probed; in neither case was that idea substantiated.

That experience from 2016, though, helped national security officials develop a plan to prevent similar interference efforts in 2020.

In October 2020, there was suddenly another information dump: The New York Post (after Fox News passed) used information purportedly obtained from a laptop owned by Joe Biden's son Hunter to obliquely allege wrongdoing by the Democratic candidate. Social media companies briefly limited access to the story out of concern that it was another influence effort, but they soon reversed those limits.

For Trump allies and sympathizers, the narrative is generally that the feds tried to silence the laptop story, another example of the "national security state" meddling in an election. But there is no evidence that federal actors tried to muffle the story. Instead, social media executives have testified that their motivation was to "avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016" - giving oxygen to a foreign interference effort.

The information was sourced back to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had been actively involved in trying to dig up dirt on Joe Biden - including some offered by foreign actors - for more than a year. One of Giuliani's partners in that effort had been sanctioned as a Russian agent the previous month. A Time article published soon after the laptop story broke reported that information allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden was being offered for sale in Europe in 2019.

Regardless of its backstory, it was the laptop that was the effort to upend the election, not the response. The direct effort to affect the outcome of the race was not a function of what the federal government was doing; it was, instead, a function of what Giuliani was doing on behalf of his boss.

This shouldn't even be debateable after all we've learned of Russia's multi-source-confirmed and ongoing global efforts to interfere and subvert and delegitimize western style democracy specifically over the last decade. It would certainly be preferable if some of the leading elected politicians within the Republican party weren't parroting the identical disinformation as Putin does, especially when Russia's involved in an existential war with the people of Ukraine.

It doesn't get more insidious than those who've been shown the truth and presented with incontrovertible receipts continue to baselessly blame law enforcement and counterintelligence officials of this nation - adding false credence to our enemy's corrosive disinformation campaign. Those who continue down this path should be highlighted and spurned for the anti-America animus of their deceit, always trying to blame those responding to the false attacks and absolving the perpetrators by shamefully and continually shifting the blame.