Russia intervened to help Trump win election: intelligence officials

Of course this is terribly preliminary and *not* sourced; the CIA as an organization hasn’t made the claim, just a subset of analysts. But who knows.

Best as I can figure, the reasoning behind the conclusion seems to be that Russian hackers managed to hack both the Democrat and the Republican email systems, but only released info damaging to the Democrats. Unless the Republicans didn’t actually have any juicy scandalous stuff in *their* emails (and, honestly, what are the chances of *that*), then, if true, it does point strongly towards an anti-Dem motivation.

But even if this is all true, it’s not really tampering with the voting itself, but rather a form of pro-Trump (or at least anti-Hillary) propaganda. People still voted how they voted, and the votes were still counted (or not) based on the built-in American systems. But if the Russian government can be proven to have actually done dirty tricks to aid Trump, that will not aid his first four years to go well.

And that, I think, is a better explanation than “Putin likes Trump,” or “Trump is Putins puppet.” Rather, the goal here was to actually get caught successfully tampering with the election. This would help to screw up the image of American democracy not only here but around the world, and for years to come