Hacking Cough

Now that I'm back from CES, I'm able to do a bit of catching up on the news.  And it was gritted teetch that I listened to Trump's comments about the Intelligence Services report.  They were brazenly untrue -- and that isn't remotedlly a subjective opinion but something that can be stated as fact, since an overview of the report was released and we can actually see what it actually says.

For starters, there was Trump saying --

“While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat [sic] National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.” 

In fact -- fact -- the report states specifically and clearly that they didn NOT make an assessment on the effect of the Russian efforts to hack and manipulate the election.

Reinforcing that, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services committee in his testimony that he could not “gauge the impact [the hacks] had on the choices the electorate made.”

That's pretty clear.

And then there's Trump statement after his briefing about whether the RNC was hacked, as well as the Demoratic National Committee.  His statement falsely claimed -- ​

“There were attempts to hack the Republican National Committee, but the RNC had strong hacking defenses and the hackers were unsuccessful,”

In fact, the report says otherwise.  The report says that the RNC was hacked -- was -- but that the Russians only chose to release hacked-information about the Democrats.  Indeed, it was this fact (fact) that helped them draw the conclusion that the Russians were actively trying to influence the election for the Republicans.

But why bother with the truth when a lie -- sorry, lies -- support you better??.