All the way back in May of 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee — a bipartisan panel, as all Congressional committees are, but then and now with more Republicans than Democrats — released a report that concluded that the federal government and the American public may never fully know the extent to which Russia was able to interfere with and possibly affect the outcome of the 2016 election.
That was a sobering realization, but one that was accompanied by at least some data: The Intelligence Committee found that Russians had been able to penetrate the cyber defenses of a number of individual states, and even gain enough access that they were able to change and delete user and polling data.
The Committee did not find that hackers actually deleted vote totals after the fact. Instead, they infiltrated the systems well in advance and altered or eliminated voter registration data — before would-be voters even made it to the polls.
But this is where it gets interesting. There was evidence of this activity in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — all swing states that Trump won by just about one percent each. That’s within the margin of error if, say, someone had removed enough eligible voters from the rolls so their votes weren’t counted. But how would the Russian hackers have known which states to go after? After all, it’s essentially statistically impossible for an underdog candidate to not just win every state necessary to pull off an exceedingly unlikely upset but do it by the same tiny margin of victory in each one.
Just enough to win, as it turns out. The odds are astronomical. The hackers could never have known which states to attack without more reliable information than just public polling available at the time. They would have to have had someone on the inside, so to speak, who could give them access to data that could only have come from inside a campai–
Oh yeah. That guy.
In fact, this is the part that the Senate Intelligence Committee didn’t know about when they were making their assessment of the security breach.
If this is part of what has got Adam Schiff fired up — something a whistleblower may have introduced evidence about that was then suppressed by the DOJ — then Trump better get some more qualified lawyers than the clowns he’s had representing him so far.
Featured image via screen capture
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