Alrighty, I had hoped to avoid this topic, because it’s stupid, but here we are: The Left can talk about nothing else.
The argument is that Russia interfered in the US election, and that this interference threw the election to Trump. Therefore, electors pledged to Trump should switch their vote to Clinton.
I’m tempted to just say, “This is insanity,” but let’s go through it step by step.
The CIA apparently believes that the Russians (GRU) hacked both the DNC and the RNC, along with Podesta and didn’t release the RNC emails. This is the basis for their argument that Russia was push the election away from Clinton.
Emptywheel has the best summary of this. She notes that:
First, hackers presumed to be GRU did hack and release emails from Colin Powell and an Republican-related server. The Powell emails (including some that weren’t picked up in the press), in particular, were detrimental to both candidates. The Republican ones were, like a great deal of the Democratic ones, utterly meaningless from a news standpoint.
So, weak on its point. Also, while there are reasons to believe Russia was involved in the various hacks, there is no smoking gun that makes it certain, especially not that it was Russian STATE-sponsored actors.
But let’s assume it’s true: Russians hacked and made sure that certain information wound up public.
So far, I am unaware of a single email which has been found to have been fabricated or doctored. Not one. All the released information appears to have been true. The information was germane to the election; there was simple more truth available about Clinton than Trump.
(There have also been allegations of hacking voting machines. This may be, but there is no proof. I’ll wait for that, as well as proof that the interference was from outside the US.)
So, there are some reasons to believe Russia may have tried to influence the election by releasing true–and damaging–information about Clinton, but they also appear to have released info against the Republicans too. So…what?
More to the point, none of this is ironclad. Contrary to the wailing I see from many, the idea that intelligence agency assessments are always correct is laughable, as anyone who was alive for Iraq knows. Intelligence agencies not only get things wrong, they have axes to grind and slant intelligence to suit both their own ends and the ends of their masters (still Obama).
If I were a Trump voter, and a bunch of electors were to give the election to Clinton, based on evidence that is this uncertain and which–even if it is true–amounts to “telling the truth about Hillary and Democrats,” I would be furious, and I would consider it a violation of democratic norms: An overturning of a valid election result because elites didn’t like the result.
And while I’m not saying that they should, or that I would (nor that I wouldn’t), many will feel that violence is the only solution if the ballot box is not respected.
If faithless electors give the election to Clinton, there will be a LOT of violence as a result, and there might even be a civil war.
If you’re pushing for this, understand what you are pushing for. One reason we have democratic elections and referendums (Hello, People Who Want to Overturn Brexit!), is so that we don’t settle such things by violent means.
Trump won the election, and unless you have ironclad proof of real election tampering that had impact enough to throw the election (a.k.a. voting fraud, in auditable form), you should probably just live with it. Unless you really think he’s Hitler and going to set up concentration camps, in which case I can see no argument against using force yourself.
This is where Nazi/Fascist/Hitler/Camps rhetoric leaves you. Nothing is off the table.
Either decide you mean it, or calm down and take shit off the table that is going to get a lot of people dead or hurt unless you pull it off.
(Oh yes, and, as a number of wags have noted, the idea of the CIA in specific, or the US in general, whining about foreign influence leading to a right-wing government is hilarious on its face.)
Update: The article has the worst case scenario for Russian hacks (minus machines) that can be even slightly suggested by the evidence IN ORDER to show that overturning an election result still isn’t justified. This doesn’t include whether the Russian state was directly behind any or all information releases. Only hardcore proof of machine hacking could justify the above outlined.
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