CIA Director Sets The Record Straight: Russian Meddling ‘Did Not Affect Outcome Of Election’

Despite the political class and media elites’ best attempt to blame Russian interference for Hillary Clinton losing to President Trump, CIA Director Mike Pompeo says no such evidence exists. 

From the Daily Caller:

CIA Director Mike Pompeo contested allegations that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election skewed results in a Thursday appearance before the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” Pompeo flatly declared, adding that he could not think of anything more important for the U.S. intelligence community to do then ensure the integrity of elections.

[…]

Pompeo’s speech echoes the assessment of a January report from the U.S. intelligence community that “that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

In agreement with Pompeo is Mark Penn, former chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Penn says it’s impossible Russian Facebook ads won Donald Trump the White House. Penn uses basic math to dispel the notion that $100,000 of Russian ads would have had any impact of the election outcome.

WSJ reports:

Every day, Americans see hundreds of ads on TV and radio, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards and smartphones. North Americans post to Facebook something like a billion times a day, and during the election many of those messages were about politics. Facebook typically runs about $40 million worth of advertising a day in North America.

Then consider the scale of American presidential elections.

Hillary Clinton’s total campaign budget, including associated committees, was $1.4 billion. Mr. Trump and his allies had about $1 billion. Even a full $100,000 of Russian ads would have erased just 0.025% of Hillary’s financial advantage. In the last week of the campaign alone, Mrs. Clinton’s super PAC dumped $6 million in ads into Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

I have 40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian ad buy, mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate. Converting someone who voted for the other party last time is an enormously difficult task. Swing voters in states like Ohio or Florida are typically barraged with 50% or more of a campaign’s budget. Try watching TV in those states the week before an election and you will see how jammed the airwaves are.

The MSM’s ‘Russian hacking’ reporting has little to no credibility left. A media blackout ensued after the New York Times quietly issued a correction about their claims that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that the Russians ‘hacked’ the 2016 presidential election. The REAL number is only 4 agencies held such views.

Consortium News reports:

In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

It’s time for the political class and media elites to finally put the Russian interference hysteria to bed.

 

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