Yates/Clapper Hearing (Part 1)

Sally Yates and James Clapper testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism yesterday.

Here is the full video. C-SPAN's transcription is available via the same link, but the speakers are not identified, which isn't very useful.
Here is the full transcript, via the Washington Post.

If you have the time to watch or read the whole thing, I definitely recommend it. It's over 3 hours long, but there's a lot of important stuff in there, and this is only the third public hearing on the Russian interference in our election. There are no public hearing scheduled for the foreseeable future (I'll talk more about that at the end). So we need to take what we can get. I think everyone would be better informed by watching/reading as much of this hearing as possible.

We didn't learn a ton of new things, but we got a lot of things that had been reported in the press on the record from the people who were actually there. First of all, it's important to look at Lindsey Graham's (the Republican chair of the committee) opening statement. Here's an excerpt:

PEOPLE WONDER WHAT ARE WE DOING, WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH? IN JANUARY, THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY UNANIMOUSLY SAID THAT THE RUSSIANS THROUGH THEIR INTELLIGENCE SERVICES TRIED TO INTERFERE IN THE 2016 AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, THAT IT WAS THE RUSSIANS WHO HACKED PODESTA PODESTA'S E-MAILS, IT WAS THE RUSSIANS WHO BROKE INTO THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE AND WAS RUSSIANS WHO HELPED EMPOWER WIKILEAKS. NO EVIDENCE THAT THE RUSSIANS CHANGED VOTING TALLIES, HOW PEOPLE WERE INFLUENCED BY WHAT HAPPENED, ONLY THEY KNOW AND GOD KNOWS, BUT I THINK EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD BE CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT THE RUSSIANS DID. FROM MY POINT OF VIEW, THERE'S NO DOUBT IN MY MIND IT WAS THE RUSSIANS INVOLVED IN ALL THE THINGS I JUST DESCRIBED. NOT SOME 400 POUND GUY SITTING ON A BED OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY.

Right. All this stuff about Michael Flynn is important, but the first and most important thing is that everyone recognize that America was the target of a massive cyberattack aimed at damaging and disrupting our democratic process.

Here's the unclassified report describing this attack that was released in January.

And here's an excerpt from Clapper's opening statement yesterday:

The Russians used cyber operations against both political parties, including hacking into servers used by the Democratic National Committee and releasing stolen data to WikiLeaks and other media outlets. Russia also collected on certain Republican Party- affiliated targets, but did not release any Republican-related data. The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first that President Putin directed and influenced campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump. These conclusions were reached based on the richness of the information gathered and analyzed and were thoroughly vetted and then approved by the directors of the three agencies and me.
These Russian activities and the result and assessment were briefed first to President Obama on the 5th of January, then to President-elect Trump at Trump Tower on the 6th and to the Congress via a series of five briefings from the 6th through the 13th of January. The classified version was profusely annotated, with footnotes drawn from thousands of pages of supporting material. The key judgments in the unclassified version published on the 6th of January were identical to the classified version.

The main takeaways from the opening statements were that everyone should be concerned about this. Graham also correctly noted that the Russians are opportunistic. In the long run, they don't have preferences for one party or another, one candidate or another. They simply want to sow as much chaos and distrust as possible.

The other main takeaway is that Donald Trump was brief 5 times on this intelligence and its conclusions. And yet, as recently as ten days ago, he said this:

If you don't catch a hacker, okay, in the act, it's very hard to say who did the hacking, It could have been China, could have been a lot of different groups.

It was the conclusion of the CIA, FBI, and NSA, with high confidence, that the Russians hacked the election. Trump was briefed five times. Why is he not sure who it was? Why is he not relying on the intelligence provided by the entire Federal apparatus?

This simple fact should also be alarming to Americans. The president is basically shrugging off the conclusions of multiple intelligence agencies.

Is he worried about delegitimizing his election win? He does seem to be very sensitive about that subject. But if that were the case, he might be suggesting there was no hack at all, or he might downplay the impact. Instead, he's admitting the influence occurred. He's just deflecting the blame from Russia. That's weird, right?

Anyway, I'm going to break up this post into a series, to make each point more digestible. But if you do nothing else, I recommend you read or listen to the opening statements. Trump, for whatever reason, wants you to ignore the findings and conclusions of our major intelligence agencies and the experts and elected officials who have all viewed this intelligence. Don't bury your head in the sand on this issue. It's too important.