Barely had we digested Emmanuel Macron’s Sunday victory in France’s presidential election – despite strenuous Russian hacking efforts to elect Marin Le Pen – than we were dealing with Monday’s U.S. Senate hearing on Russian efforts to rig the last election in America.
Macron’s election was particularly heartening since the French not only pushed aside Russia’s efforts but refuted the right-winger Le Pen, who’s been tied to anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim remarks.
And, at a time when Donald Trump’s election here seemed to signal a new global conservatism, the French vote not only rejected Le Pen but follows votes in Austria and the Netherlands that have frustrated right-wing politicians.
So Monday’s hearing in Washington was the latest effort to look into Russia’s continuing efforts to influence votes around the world.
James Clapper, former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified Monday. So did Susan Yates, the former acting U.S. attorney general, who was fired by Trump for refusing to validate Trump’s Muslim travel ban – an order that has since been rejected by three different judges.
Yates was there to confirm that she’d warned the White House that Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, was bad news. He’d gotten too close to Russian operatives, and he’d lied about it to the White House, and he’d made himself vulnerable to possible Russian blackmail.
Yates confirmed this – and yet, as everyone knows by now, it was another 18 days before Trump fired Flynn.
But that only reinforced questions about the biggest news of the day, which preceded the senate hearing – that President Obama, two days after Trump’s election, had warned Trump to stay away from Flynn, that he was a loose cannon.
And that warning was 95 days before Trump finally fired Flynn.
“Every American should be concerned about what the Russians did,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. Graham’s a Republican. “And it was [the Russians], and not some 400-pound guy sitting on a bed,” who did the hacking, he said.
The reference was to a remark made earlier by President Trump, who seems to be the last one in America willing to acknowledge Russia’s heavy-handed interference.
The question is: Why?
At Monday’s hearing, that answer was not yet apparent.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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