Andrew Higgins, Moscow bureau chief for the venerable New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” snuck in two glaring admissions about the recently-released intelligence report concerning Russian “hacking”:
But the absence of any concrete evidence in the report of meddling by the Kremlin [emphasis added] was met with a storm of mockery on Saturday by Russian politicians and commentators, who took to social media to ridicule the report as a potpourri of baseless conjecture.
Now, surely Higgins didn’t intentionally (and so casually) cite the report’s lack of evidence as if it were fact. Or did he? He continues:
The report provides no new evidence [emphasis added] to support assertions that Moscow meddled covertly through hacking and other actions to boost the electoral chances of Donald J. Trump and undermine his rival, Hillary Clinton, but rests instead on what it describes as Moscow’s long record of trying to influence America’s political system.
Amazingly, Higgins doubled down on the lack of evidence in the intelligence findings. (Should he be dusting off his resume?) The National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy further explains the report — one that doesn’t even mention John Podesta’s name.
The three intelligence agencies’ report pointedly declines to tell us what specific information gives them such “high confidence” that they know the operation of Vladimir Putin’s mind. They plead that the nature of their work does not allow for that: To tell us how they know what they purport to know would compromise intelligence methods and sources. Fair enough. The problem, though, is that if you’re essentially going to say, ‘Trust us,’ you have to have proven yourself trustworthy over time.
Doesn’t the left remember WMDs? Maryland website designer
