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An election de-classified!

Whether or not Vladimir Putin has his back to the wall, Thursday’s de-classified assessment by the USA’s National Security Adviser,…

An election de-classified!

Donald Trump (Photo: AFP)

Whether or not Vladimir Putin has his back to the wall, Thursday’s de-classified assessment by the USA’s National Security Adviser, CIA, and FBI is the severest indictment yet of Russia’s “interference” in the US elections. Exactly a fortnight ahead of the ceremonial inaugural, the findings, embedded in a concerted collation of empirical evidence and not international suspicions, cannot but embarrass Mr Donald Trump and the team that he has put in place. The findings will almost certainly hang over the head of the incoming administration. Ergo, the timing of the long-awaited report is crucial; any essay towards mending of fences by the former Cold War warriors must seem a contrived exercise in geostrategy. 

The subtext of the report does suggest that a shared opposition to Hillary Clinton is the trans-Atlantic thread that binds the Kremlin with the Oval Office. Indeed, the leadership afforded by Mr Trump to the four-year renewal of democracy must now be open to question, if the core of the report is any indication ~ “We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

In the net, US constitutional development is under a cloud, if not suitably debunked. Markedly, for the past 48 hours both the Kremlin and Trump Towers in New York have been muted in their response to the startling data in verily the public domain. The report has suitably binned the contention of the President-elect's transition team that Russia did not prefer him in the 2016 election, as well as Trump’s insistence that “the culprits behind the hacks of Democratic political figures are fundamentally unknowable”. Never before has the US intelligence apparatus publicly assessed a foreign power that is said to have interfered in an election for the benefit of an incoming President. America’s new team and its leader have now been jolted at the threshold, indeed a double whammy.

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The concert of Intelligence powers have furnished a report that serves to reinforce Barack Obama's cache of sanctions, most importantly the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation against the cyber-attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary’s campaign in an attempt to influence the election in favour of the Republican candidate. As Mr Trump steps into the White House, it is the quadrilateral equation in foreign policy that will be on test ~ America’s relations with Russia, China, and Taiwan. Arguably, the President is on a sticky wicket. The international contours were clearer during the years of the Cold War. 

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