When a member of Duma is so comfortable with the notion of Russia having stolen the US presidential election that he says it aloud, the joke really has gone too far. Whether it's just a kind of boast about Russian capabilities, or a troll about US intelligence lack of capability, it's not actually funny.
It's especially not funny when it's clear that Russia has been very active in trying to influence events here through social media, even using Facebook to arrange anti-refugee and anti-immigration rallies right in the US, that Russian-backed "news" outlets RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik had been part of a propaganda campaign, and that it's possible that UN facilities in New York had been used for some of the operation.
This is quite a lot of activity going on, with one apparently goal--influence in favor of Trump. There's evidence of Russian meddling in elections in Europe as well, so why not the US as well?
This is why it frustrates me that Rep. Devin Nunes and friends are trying to undercut the Steele Dossier and disrupt the investigation into the Russian hack of the DNC (and really, the election) by trying to discredit it. It just doesn't seem like a good-faith supposition that the real problem with the oppo research dug up in the dossier makes Trump look bad and could have been seeded with disinfo by the Russians for that very effect. The point of oppo is to get factual, damaging information, and this dossier has enough of it. There's not really any reason to believe Trump was not Putin's preference.
After all, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been a continuation of Obama's foreign policy, at best. But with Trump, they could count on a disruption--and possibly even plan a reset of US/Russian relations. Trump, after all, having been able to elide, omit, deny, anything to do with Russia at all publically, however fallaciously, would easily be able to ignore the enormity of the electoral interference on the most obvious of biases--
It benefited him, so it didn't matter. See? Disruption in action.
The problem with disruption though, is sometimes it is not actually...legal. This is a problem for the Trump campaign, because the evidence is piling up that unauthorized people associated were engaging in effecting foreign policy. (Those adoptions? Those sanctions.) And one person who seems particularly in the midst of this dealing was Jared Kushner, who Trump lawyers rather wanted out of the White House, by now.
But he remains, despite several uncomfortable disclosures. I feel like this is probably something that will end up...disrupted...at some juncture, not without a number of "Please, Daddy"'s on Ivanka's part.
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