Donald Trump admitted something we all knew today. Then he admitted it.



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"Russia, Russia, Russia! That's all you heard at the beginning of this witch hunt hoax … And now, Russia has disappeared because I have nothing to do with Russia who helped me get elected. It was a crime that did not exist. "

Trump did not coordinate Russian efforts to elect her. Yes! True!

Or at least, damn close to what Robert Mueller found. According to the report of the special council, we know that Mueller and his team found "insufficient evidence" to suggest the existence of a criminal plot between Russia and the Trump campaign. And we know – according to the Mueller report and the unanimous badysis of the intelligence community in 2017, that the Russians have actively sought to interfere in the 2016 election to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. They did it because they thought Trump would be better than Clinton for the issues that interested them.

These are facts. These are also things that Trump has challenged in the past.

In July 2018, alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump said about Russian interference: "I have great confidence in my intelligence services, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful today to deny his denial ". (This sentiment was echoed by – wait for it – Putin, who said: "Russia has never interfered in domestic affairs and will not interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States, including the elections.")

Both before and after this summit, Trump repeated – and retweeted – a similar claim: That it is not entirely clear that Russia was the main actor of the campaign. 39 and electoral interference of 2016 and that, even if it was the case, he won just and square.

That's why Trump's tweet was so worthy of interest. The President finally acknowledges that all those who can know say what they have said for most of the last two years: Russia has sought to help Trump win in 2016 by interfering – in online and offline – in the elections!

This moment, however, was short-lived. When Trump left the White House to travel to the Colorado Air Force Academy to deliver a keynote address Thursday, he stopped to answer reporters' questions. Not surprisingly, he was asked about his admission that Russia had helped him win the elections. And he said this:

"Russia did not help me get elected, you know who elected me, you know who elected me, I elected myself." Russia did not help me not helped at all. "

It is worth taking a step back to see that no one – neither Mueller nor the intelligence community – says that Trump won only because Russia intervened in the elections in order to achieve this result. There is evidence that two counties in Florida were hacked by the Russians in the 2016 election, but there is no evidence that a real vote has been affected. And it's very hard to deny that the broadcast of hacked emails from the chairman of the National Democratic Committee and Clinton President, John Podesta, played a role in the 2016 election he It is impossible to quantify exactly the magnitude (or the weakness) of this effect.

This means that you can not claim that Trump would have lost if Russia had not hacked the DNC and posted these emails via WikiLeaks. And it also means that you can not declare that Trump would definitely have won either. We simply do not know. And we will never know.

(Keep in mind that Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for their interference in the 2016 elections).

So, when Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to the president, said things like "we did not need WikiLeaks … we got Wisconsin," she (and the president, who said pretty much the same thing) did not understand anything.

The question is not whether Trump needed Russia to win or not. As I just said, we will probably never know if the President needed it or not. But what we know without the shadow of a doubt is that the emails appeared on WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign were the direct result of Russia seeking to meddle in the elections in hopes of helping Trump and to harm Clinton. MADE.

Trump's inability to admit that it had an impact far beyond simply proving that he never lets the facts hinder the smooth running of a story. This means that the United States will almost certainly be less prepared for future attempts at electoral interference by Russia and other ill-intentioned foreign powers. And it's scary.

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