Clapper: Russia “turned” the election

I’m a Democrat, and it would be easier to accept my side’s version of unfolding events. It would certainly make my life easier when talking with my liberal friends. But facts are pesky things, and I’ve become increasingly aggravated by my own side. It seems the desire to win the 2016 election and Trump hatred has not only warped the Democratic political and media establishments, but exposed them for what they are.

Yes, Trump is intemperate, narcissistic, and the most unconventional president ever. But it appears that his opponents in our political and media establishments are far worse: they wanted to subvert democracy to save it from Trump; they wanted to thwart the will of Trump’s 63 million voters and not just undermine his presidency, but to concoct an investigation to impeach him and get him out of office.

Meanwhile, my fellow Democrats aren’t in a good spot: They are increasingly becoming the kind of low-information voters they despise and think are only on the other side. For instance, a 2017 poll showed that a majority of Democrats (52 percent) believed Russia tampered with vote tallies in the 2016 election to help elect Trump, despite no evidence. That is akin to 69 percent of Americans believing in September 2003 that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Further, many of my Democratic friends are in the dark about many of the smaller events and facts surrounding the Mueller investigation. They don’t know, for instance, that a federal judge, T. S. Ellis, rebuked Mueller for trying to target Trump. They don’t know that one of the Russian companies Mueller indicted for tampering in the 2016 election, Concord Catering, didn’t exist at the time of the election, and that when they showed up in court to contest the charges, Mueller was unprepared to proceed with the case.

This isn’t entirely ordinary Democrats’ fault, but that of the legacy media outlets they rely on for their news and analysis, which have let their audiences down completely. These media outlets (CNN, ABC, NBC, The New York Times, etc.) have devoted little or no time to many of the stories that “help” Trump or fail to advance the Russia collusion narrative. For instance, ABC, CBS, and NBC together spent a total of just 153 seconds covering Ellis’s rebuke of Mueller.