It wasn't just Donald Trump who dismissed and rejected charges that Russian spies hacked the election last year.
Now we know that pretty much the entire Republican party team did so, too – from the Republican congressional leadership down to GOP Secretaries of State in the states whose local electoral systems were under attack. They blithely served as Vladimir Putin's defense team, even as President Obama's national security aides were uncovering a vast Russian conspiracy to undermine America's electoral process.
That's just one conclusion from a blockbuster investigative piece published Friday by the Washington Post, telling the inside story of the Obama administration's effort to grapple with the evolving Russian hack-and-leak effort in 2016.
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What we learn from the Post is that it wasn't just the U.S Conspiracy-Theorist-in-Chief, Donald Trump, who denied, deflected and ridiculed charges that Russia was a secret supporter of his (perhaps unwitting, perhaps not) electoral team.
We learn that, in August, when the Obama administration quietly approached Capitol Hill to seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders about the growing evidence of Russian involvement, CIA Director John Brennan couldn't even get top Republicans to meet with him. We learn that when a caravan of top U.S national security officials finally sat down with members of Congress, the GOP – led by Senator Mitch McConnell – flatly refused to cooperate. We learn that when Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, contacted people in charge of elections in various states whose election data had been possibly compromised, the Republicans in those states blew him off.
And we learn that Denis McDonough, Obama's chief of staff, toyed with the idea of a bipartisan commission to take on the Russia spy effort, the White House concluded that it would be impossible to get the GOP on board.
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