Donald Trump’s Refusal to Believe 17 US Intelligence Agencies Is Putting Americans’ Lives at Risk
On nearly every issue imaginable, Donald Trump has at one point or another taken both sides. Nearly every issue except those having to do with Russia and Vladimir Putin. And Trump’s latest tweet, posted Wednesday morning, shows that the president-elect is more interested in supporting the provably false position that Russia had nothing to do with hacking in the U.S., including the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s emails, and working to get Trump elected.
Donald Trump is making it clearer by the day that the unanimous view of America’s 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, who have spent years, decades, and billions of dollars tracking Russia’s every move, is no match for the disgraced editor of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. He made that crystal clear in this morning’s tweet:
Sure, maybe “a 14 year old could have hacked” John Podesta’s emails. But blaming the DNC for being hacked? That’s low and unworthy of the Office of the President, which will in just 16 days bear his name.
Worse, believing Assange, who insists the hacked emails of the DNC and Podesta didn’t come from Russian operatives tied to Putin rather than believing, again, America’s intelligence agencies shows that Trump (1) has no critical thinking skills and cannot be trusted to make decisions on facts and evidence, (2) will run the government from his gut, (3) will continue to alienate the institutions he needs to do his job, (“I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” for example,) putting Americans’ lives in danger.
On Monday, August 6, 2001, then-President George W. Bush, on vacation in Crawford, Texas, received a CIA-prepared President’s Daily Brief titled, “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.”
He chose to ignore it.
36 days later, on September 11, 2001, America was attacked by Osama bin Laden. 2996 people were killed, 6000 more were injured, $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage occurred, and taxpayers and businesses spent $3 trillion in costs. Not quantified: the pain and suffering of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world, the thousands of children who grew up without one or both of their parents, the businesses that were wiped out, the damaged health of the 9/11 responders, the sheer agony and terror caused by the attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that remain in the souls of Americans to this day.