FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have backed a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the presidency, the Washington Post reports.
“Comey’s support for the CIA’s conclusion suggests that the leaders of the three agencies are in agreement on Russian intentions, contrary to suggestions by some lawmakers that the FBI disagreed with the CIA.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) told CNN that it was “terrific” that voters got more truthful information about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, regardless of whether the hackers were Russian.
Said Rohrabacher: “The hackers, whether or not they’re Russian hackers, I don’t know. I know the CIA and the FBI disagree as to who the hackers are. But whether they’re Russian hackers or any other hackers, the only information that we were getting from hackers was accurate information, was truthful. And that’s not gonna turn the tide. If the American people have been given more truthful information, that’s terrific.”
North Carolina legislators wrapped up their work on a pair of controversial bills that would deprive the incoming governor of a substantial part of his power to make appointments, and reshuffle the regulation of lobbyists, ethics complaints and elections, the Raleigh News & Observer reports.
Outgoing Gov. Pat McCrory (R) has already signed one of the bills.
House Republicans, responding to criticism that repealing the Affordable Care Act would leave millions without health insurance, said that their goal in replacing President Obama’s health law was to guarantee “universal access” to health care and coverage, not necessarily to ensure that everyone actually has insurance, the New York Times reports.
Said a top GOP staffer: “Our goal here is to make sure that everybody can buy coverage or find coverage if they choose to.”
Hillary Clinton attributed her defeat to a convergence of two “unprecedented” events: the release of a letter by FBI director James Comey, 10 days before the election, and what she called an “attack against our country” by Russian president Vladimir Putin, the New York Times reports.
“A few days after the election, she did talk about the impact of Mr. Comey’s letter in a conference call with supporters. But speaking in Manhattan on Thursday to a group of her campaign donors, many of whom are still despondent over her defeat, she was particularly pointed about the role of Russia.”
“The Russians, she said, sought to ‘undermine our democracy’ through cyberattacks on Democratic targets. She said the hacking into the Democratic National Committee and into the emails of her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, were a result of Mr. Putin’s ‘personal beef’ against her, pointing to her accusation that Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections were rigged.”
Rick Klein: “The outgoing president’s traditional pre-holidays news conference fills a press void, since there’s nothing similar from the president-elect, still. It also sets a critical tone for the balance of the transition. The non-aggression pact between Obama and President-elect Donald Trump got called off this week, owing to revelations surrounding the extent of Russian interference with the election. Now, the White House is pressuring Trump to acknowledge Vladimir Putin’s involvement, Hillary Clinton is blaming Putin, Trump is mocking Josh Earnest at rallies, and Trump aides are talking again about Clinton’s email arrangement.”
“Does Obama return to a high-minded tone about the importance of an orderly transition? Does he endorse efforts to get intelligence briefings for members of the Electoral College? Does he effectively declare war on Putin, or Trump, or both?”
“Do you think the Russians interfered with the outcome of the U.S. election or was it God?”
— Franklin Graham, on Twitter.
“Donald Trump’s barnstorming tour across the states that won him the White House continues to feature far more taunts of triumph than notes of healing after a bruising election,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
“Thursday’s rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, found the president-elect calling for the mostly white crowd to cheer for African-Americans who were ‘smart’ to heed his message and therefore ‘didn’t come out to vote’ for his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”
Said Trump: “That was the big thing, so thank you to the African-American community.”
First Read: “Out of all of the recent developments in the news about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race — the CIA’s conclusion that it was done to help Donald Trump, the NBC report that Vladimir Putin was personally involved — the biggest has been Trump’s reaction.”
“First, he criticized the CIA… Second, Trump questioned — falsely — why it took the Obama administration so long to act on the claims of Russian interference…. And this morning, he’s re-litigating the information that came from the WikiLeaks dumps.”
“Does he think it delegitimizes his win? Does he truly have affinity for Russia and Putin? Does he not accept intelligence that’s contrary to his worldview? This Russia story is big news. But the biggest news of all has been the reaction from the president-elect.”
CNN: Russian hacking activity continues unabated.
John Podesta: “What takes this from baffling to downright infuriating is that at nearly the exact same time that no one at the FBI could be bothered to drive 10 minutes to raise the alarm at DNC headquarters, two agents accompanied by attorneys from the Justice Department were in Denver visiting a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server.”
“This trip was part of what FBI Director James B. Comey described as a ‘painstaking’ investigation of Clinton’s emails, ‘requiring thousands of hours of effort’ from dozens of agents who conducted at least 80 interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. Of course, as Comey himself concluded, in the end, there was no case; it was not even a close call.”
“Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI.”
The Cook Political Report compiles 56 interesting observations about the 2016 presidential election.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton carried the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, and 2.1 percentage points. But while she narrowly improved on President Obama’s margin in non-swing states (4.1% vs. 4.0%), she vastly underperformed in the 13 swing states that actually mattered: Obama’s 3.6-percent margin in those states morphed into a 1.8-percent Trump lead.
Trump won the White House by winning 76 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods Market. This 54-percent gap is the widest ever recorded. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, it was 19 percent; when George W. Bush was elected in 2000, it was 31 percent; and when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was 43 percent.
President Obama told NPR that the United States will respond to Russian cyberattacks that the intelligence community has concluded were part of an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Said Obama: “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action. And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “Mr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it’s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.”
“Many Americans are not overly concerned about Mr. Trump’s authoritarian inclinations because they trust our system of constitutional checks and balances to constrain him. Yet the institutional safeguards protecting our democracy may be less effective than we think.”
Politico: “The call for a deep and detailed accounting of how Clinton lost a race that she and her donors were absolutely certain she’d win didn’t begin immediately after the election — there was too much shock over her defeat by Donald Trump, and overwhelming grief. Her initial conference call with top backers, which came just days after the outcome, focused primarily on FBI Director Jim Comey’s late campaign-season intervention.”
“But in the weeks since, the wealthy Democrats who helped pump over $1 billion into Clinton’s losing effort have been urging their local finance staffers, state party officials, and campaign aides to provide a more thorough explanation of what went wrong. With no dispassionate, centralized analysis of how Clinton failed so spectacularly, they insist, how can they be expected to keep contributing to the party?”
“At the start of the week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) seemed bent on opposing the nomination of Rex Tillerson for secretary of state,” the Washington Post reports.
“By the end of it, Rubio had heard directly from former vice president Richard B. Cheney… With that, one more controversial proposal by Trump at risk of running aground had found new hope for smoother waters. In this case, the intervention of a high-powered gaggle of establishment Republican leaders — none of them long-standing allies of Trump — appears to be leading the effort to save Tillerson’s nomination.”
North Carolina Republicans clashed fiercely with Gov.-elect Roy Cooper (D) “as the House and Senate voted to sharply limit his appointment powers – and Cooper vowed to sue them over any law he deems unconstitutional,” the Raleigh News & Observer reports.
“The legislature is holding a hastily called special session to restructure many aspects of state government after Cooper, the state’s attorney general and a Democrat, defeated Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in November.”
Said Cooper: “Most people might think that this is a partisan power grab. But this is more ominous.”
“Final votes on the most controversial bills are scheduled for Friday, when the legislature could adjourn for the year. Then the bills would go to McCrory, who hasn’t said if he’ll sign or veto them before he leaves office at the end of the month.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.