President Trump's 'Russia hoax' turns out to be real

WASHINGTON - The hackers, he suggested, may have been Chinese. Or some 400-pound guy sitting in his bed. Again and again, he insisted, Russian interference was a hoax - a fiction created by Democrats as an excuse for losing an election they should have won.

When Donald Trump finally acknowledged publicly that Russians had hacked Democratic emails and interfered in the 2016 presidential election, the then-president elect immediately regretted it. He confided to advisers that he did not believe the intelligence. The last thing Trump wanted to do was to endorse the notion that his victory may have been caused by any force other than his own strategy, message and charisma.
"Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!" Trump tweeted last Feb. 26.
But Trump's own Justice Department has concluded otherwise. A 37-page federal indictment released Friday afternoon spells out in exhaustive detail a three-year Russian plot to disrupt America's democracy and boost Trump's campaign, dealing a fatal blow to one of the president's favorite talking points.
A "Russia hoax" this was not.
The indictment - signed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and announced by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, both of whom Trump has at times mused about wanting to fire - reveals that the scope of Russia's alleged efforts to help Trump defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was extraordinary.
Even Trump seemed to partly concede the point on Friday, acknowledging Russia's election interference while still minimizing its impact.

Source :    thedickinsonpress

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