When Intelligence is Needed

I thought I'd put aside the coronavirus crisus for the moment and leave that to others have the focus on their fine words.  Instead, taking a detour into the land of Other News, it seemed proper to report on something that, though it won't come as a huge surprise to most people, is still worth knowing, and it hasn't gotten much attention on television.  And by "most," I mean that I haven't seen it mentioned there all day.  But perhaps I missed it.

As you may recall way back when, in another time and another era, the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating the question of Russian efforts in the 2016 election.  This is, of course, a bipartisan committee, an important fact to note -- and even more important to note is that the majority of members and committee chairman are all Republican.

Until now, the report from the Senate Intelligence Committee has been classified, but it finally was declassified yesterday.  And the study confirms the widespread assessment by the intelligence community that "Russia's 2016 election manipulation operation was specifically geared at helping Trump win."  Further, it also made clear that its study shows that the "Steele dossier" did not play any role in the intelligence community's findings.

Yes, yes, as I said, I know you likely knew this.  But it's always nice to not only have it official, from a bipartisan, Republican-led Senate committee, but also have some actual documents you can point to if needed with dealing with...how shall we call them?, "skeptics."

For more details, here's an article from Politico.  If you don't want to read the whole thing, you can just check out a very brief summary by reading it's title.  "Senate Intel report confirms Russia aimed to help Trump in 2016."  You can read the article here.

But better yet, if you'd prefer to bypass all news interpretation, this is the actual Senate Intelligence Committee report.

You can find Volume 1 here.

You can read Volume 2 here.