I've made a living the past several years criticizing the CIA. The Agency is easy to criticize. Its analysts have missed most of the major trends and events throughout post World War II history, as documented in Tim Weiner's excellent book Legacy of Ashes. Its operatives have committed crimes against humanity, including torture and extraordinary rendition. And its leaders lie every time they open their mouths. "We don't torture prisoners." A lie. "We don't send prisoners to third countries to be tortured." A lie. You get the idea.
But now the CIA -- indeed, the whole "intelligence community" -- is telling us that the Russian government somehow hacked into "the election" or "the electoral process," apparently with the help of Wikileaks or other hackers, for the express purpose of aiding the Donald Trump campaign. The FBI apparently has come to a variation of the same conclusion, although the Washington Post says that the FBI is more circumspect about the accusation. Still, President Obama has ordered a governmental review of the allegations. And a bipartisan group in Congress, including senators Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), and John McCain (R-Ariz.), has announced hearings on the matter.
Let's get some history out of the way first. The CIA's first covert action program after its creation in 1947 was to work to swing the 1948 Italian elections to the (pro-American) conservatives. Testimony before the Church Committee, created in 1975 to investigate CIA crimes, showed that the CIA had given $1 million to Italian "centrist parties," and published forged letters to discredit the Italian Communist Party. And just ask anybody from Iran, the Dominican Republic, Chile, El Salvador, Greece, and a dozen other countries about what the CIA has done in their elections over the years. Meddling in elections is wrong. It's anti-democratic. The CIA shouldn't do it and, if this new CIA report is accurate, the Russians shouldn't be doing it either.
For the sake of argument, let's say that the Russians did indeed conduct a covert action operation to influence the election in Trump's favor. Where does that leave us? First, it means the election is (or ought to be) illegitimate. Russian intervention, coupled with the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, makes Trump look like a usurper. The Washington swells' admonitions that we should all "pull together" for the sake of the country make them look like quislings and are just as anti-democratic as Trump's election.
With that said, the Constitution doesn't include any mechanism whereby a newly-elected president can be removed because of interference in the election. We're likely stuck with Trump for the next four years or until he's impeached and removed from office for any number of reasons that already seem to be bubbling to the surface. In the meantime, though, we can resort to the courts to help get to the bottom of this mess. We can demand that the entire election be declared illegitimate. (It likely won't be, but it could force changes in the system that might guard against future election-related security breaches.) We can push our members of Congress to investigate the allegations, with witnesses being subpoenaed and forced to testify under oath and under penalty of perjury.
Whatever the American people decide to do in response to Russian interference, if there was Russian interference, one thing is clear -- we have to be a monkey on Trump's back every day for the remainder of his presidency. We must not let up.
Oh, and by the way -- the release of the CIA report, or information from the CIA report, is an act of espionage as defined by the Obama Justice Department: "Providing national security information to any person not entitled to receive it." I wonder who's going to be charged with that leak. Yeah, right.
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