Picking 75-year-old former U.S. Sen. Dan Coats (R-Id.) for Director of National Security, 72-year-old President Donald Trump go what he deserved, someone without much intel or national security experience. Now Coats carries the water for the left, warning the media about “blinking red lights” with regard to continued Russian meddling in the United States. When Trump met July 16 at the Helsinki summit with 65-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin, he refused to say whether or not Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. When asked whether or not Russian meddled, Trump said, “I don’t know why they would.” One day later, Trump clarified that he meant to say “wouldn’t,” not would. Whatever Trump said, he hasn’t had much trust in the intelligence community since they told former President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Trump’s trust in the intel community plummeted when he found out that he was being wiretapped by former President Barack Obama’s FBI, Department of Justice [DOJ] and National Security Agency [NSA]. Coats now becomes part of the chorus criticizing Trump for not buying the intel community’s assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Once former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinto was done blaming former FBI Director James Comey, she turned her blame to Russia. She told Trump in the last presidential debate in Las Vegas he was a “Putin puppet,” the same narrative that exists today. Hillary did her utmost to tie Trump to the Kremlin, eventually prevailing on Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein who appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller Special Counsel May 17, 2017 to determine whether or not Trump colluded with the Kremlin.
Rosenstein’s July 13 indictments of 12 Russian GRU military intelligence operatives gave Coats all he needed to keep the red lights blinking about Russian meddling in U.S. affairs. Whether admitted to or not, Russia and the U.S. have always been in each other’s business since the dark days of the Cold War. If you listened to Putin interviewed July 16 by Fox News Chris Wallace, you’d conclude Russia did nothing unusual hacking the Democratic National Committee email server and private email account of former Hillary Campaign Chairman John D. Podesta. Russia hacks reported by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks July 6, 2016 showed that former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sabotaged the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Those same hacks showed that interim DNC chairwoman Donna Braziles gave Hillary CNN debate questions in advance.
Contradicting Trump on continued Russian meddling, Coats thinks he’s just doing his job. “I was just doing my job,” Coats told the Aspen Security Forum yesterday, defending his public rebuke of Trump. “As I expressed to the president on my third visit to the Oval Office as his adviser, I said: ‘Mr. President, there will be time I have to bring news that you don’t want to hear. But know that it will to the best extent unvarnished non-politicized, and the best our incredible intelligence community can produce,’” said Coats, laying it on too thick for the president. Coats himself has no intel experience. When he tries to sell Trump on “our incredible intelligence community,” Trump knows how they botched the Iraq War. Trump also knows how Obama’s intel community investigated Trump under dubious “probable cause,” using Hillary’s paid opposition research AKA “the dossier.”
Coats walks on thin ice publicly rebuking the president, especially because as Director of National Intelligence [DNI] he gets programmed by the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and other sources, the same ones that got it wrong on Iraq. When Coats talks about blinking red lights regarding ongoing Russian meddling, he’s making sweeping statements without asking a basic question: Where does the meddling show up? With all the talk about nine intel agencies insisting that the Russia meddled in the 2016 election, where’s the evidence? If you ask Hillary, she might blame her loss on the Russians. On another day, it’s on James Comey. Or yet another on some other conspiracy. Saying the Russian meddled does not prove that it had any effect on voters. Trump doesn’t accept the intel community, implying that Putin helped Trump win the election against Hillary.
Today;s knee-jerk response in media, on Capitol Hill and in all anti-Trump circles is that Russia’s propaganda and disinformation threatens U.S. democracy. That kind of group-think, faulty thinking is so preposterous that it defies imagination. When you really examine what Coats says, he’s saying that Russian magicians can somehow brainwash American citizens at will. “It was important to make a stand on behalf o the intelligence community, and on behalf of the American people,” said Coats. Coats knows so little about disinformation, propaganda and brainwashing, he’s exactly the wrong person to head the DNI. Trump needs someone who’s not a black-or-white thinker, who knows nuance. Both the U.S. and Russian Federation have active global information campaigns designed to sway the thinking of U.S. and Russian citizens. Beyond that, there’s zero evidence that meddling works.
