But when it came to proving the Russians guilty of this alleged hack, again Clapper came up with nothing. Instead, he promised the missing proof would be made available later with release of a declassified report.
Clapper at the Thursday hearing said the classified version of the new report, to be provided Friday to president-elect Donald Trump, the administration and perhaps the Senate committee, will remain secret, though he promised to "push the envelope" to include as much detail as possible in the publicly available redacted version. So much for that: Released late today after Trump met with top intel officials, including Clapper, for a briefing, that report again offered no proof of any hacking.
Remember, Clapper is a career Washington intelligence bureaucrat who helped put over the WMD fraud that led the country into the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and who lied to Congress when asked about whether the NSA he directed was spying on Americans' communications.
This man's word is not exactly his bond.
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UPDATE (1/7/2016): In a surprisingly good analysis of the publicly released intelligence report on the alleded Russian campaign to undermine US democracy, hack the DNC server and help elect Donald Trump, Scott Shane of the NY Times on Saturday writes:
"What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack...Instead the message from the agencies essentially amounts to 'trust us.' There is no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepte communications between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow' propaganda machinery...
"The absence of any proof is especially surprising in light of promises on Thursday from ...Clapper, that he would 'push the envelope' to try to make more information public....But Susan Hennessey, a former intelligence agency lawyer who is now managing editor of the online journal Lawfare, writes: 'The unclassified report is underwhelming at best. There is essentially no new information for those who have been paying attention..."
"This report is unlikely to change the minds of skeptics who, like the president-elect, remember the intelligence agencies' faulty assessments on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and fear being misled again."
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Another sign that even the completed classified report on Russian election manipulation will be yet another dud is word that "US officials" say it will contain "no major new bombshell disclosures" regarding Russian hacking. Does anyone besides me hear the sound of someone attempting to lower expectations?
Already the outline of a climb-down is starting to take shape. After for months insisting that the intelligence agencies had "all the evidence" to prove a Russian hack of the DNC's and Podesta's emails, despite Wikileaks' and founder Julian Assange's insistence that their source was a leaker, not a hacker, and was someone not connected with Russia or the Russian government in any way, the story now has become that the Russians hacked the DNC and Podesta, but then used a "third party" to funnel the purloined emails to Wikileaks, perhaps without Wikileaks knowing the Russians' role.
Clearly the first version of the CIA's and Clapper's story has collapsed.
We'll have to see now whether this Russian hacking story 2.0 holds up better than a typical Microsoft Word security patch.
My view on all this is that it is a tempest in a teapot. It's not that Russia is a fine upstanding example of a country that minds its own business, any more than the US is such a nation. Maybe there will even be proof sometime showing there was a Russian hack of the DNC. But I'd say if Russia can so easily undermine a presidential election in what we're always told is the world's oldest, greatest and strongest democracy, we have bigger problems than just getting hacked. If Americans can be suckered by fake news that, as Sen. Tim Kaine (Clinton's running mate in November), said, "most fourth graders would find incredible," we're in big trouble too. Besides, recall that peddling fake news and meddling in elections is the US government's stock-in-trade around the world, and has been for decades -- including inside of post-Communist Russia.
The big story to me is that the DNC "hacked the election" by subverting the democratic process of nominating a candidate to run as the party's nominee for president, even to the extent of using friendly news organizations to publish trashy hit pieces on Clinton's dogged opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (a form of peddling fake news). Polls consistently showed through the primary months beginning in January (and right through Nov. for that matter) that Sanders was more popular than Hillary Clinton and more importantly, that he had a better chance than she did of trouncing any of the potential Republican candidates, including Trump. Clinton was already under investigation by the FBI for her violation of the Freedom of Information Act and of State Department secrecy rules regarding classified information with her use of a home server to handle her State Department communications, and she was also being battered by pressures to reveal what she had said for $250,000 a pop to private groups of Wall Street bank executives. All of this made her a very dangerous person to put at the top of the party's ticket, but the party establishment didn't want a firebrand critic of the corpratocracy like Sanders, so they went down and dirty for the hugely compromised and politically tin-eared Clinton.
The emails that blew all that corruption into the public's awareness were accurate and they were devastating. How they became public is not the important issue, though. It is the reality that the DNC destroyed the integrity of the party's primaries, and that Clinton gave those obscenely obsequious banker speeches that should outrage us.
Instead of facing up to that reality and resigning wholesale from the DNC, or being forced out, Democratic Party leaders, with the help of the outgoing Obama administration and its political appointees in the intelligence agencies (all of whom are about to be swept out of office by the new Trump administration in a few weeks), have been working desperately to change the narrative to one of Russian perfidy, Trump illegitimacy, and their own blamelessness in blowing the election so disastrously.
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