https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-trump-administration-finally-takes-action-against-russian-election-meddling--even-as-it-tries-to-deny-it/2020/09/11/f554a758-f45c-11ea-b796-2dd09962649c_story.html
THERE APPEAR to be two minds in the Trump administration: one that acknowledges Russia is a hostile geopolitical foe; and that of President Trump and his most craven flunkies, who seek to help the Kremlin escape blame and punishment for its persistent wrongdoing.
The first occasionally wins out, as was the case on Thursday, when the Treasury Department placed
sanctions on Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament. The department concluded that Mr. Derkach “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services.” In the past two years, “Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day,” Treasury stated.
What Treasury did not mention is that Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani
worked with Mr. Derkach to smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden based on the fact that Mr. Biden’s son was once on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company. The smear effort
continues with the ongoing Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee investigation led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who denies the by-now obvious conclusion that hyping Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theories right before the election advances a Russian disinformation plot.
Sadly, there may be many senior members of the Trump administration who approach protecting the country with a similar level of partisan blindness. A bombshell
whistleblower complaint emerged Wednesday from the Department of Homeland Security, claiming that leaders of the powerful federal agency pressed persistently to cook intelligence reports so they aligned with Mr. Trump’s political views rather than reality. In his complaint, Brian Murphy, the former chief of intelligence and analysis at DHS,
alleges that top officials demanded misleading information on immigration, on Russian interference in U.S. elections and on antifa, three issues on which Mr. Trump is particularly sensitive — and particularly insistent on denying the facts.
Mr. Murphy claims that acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf, under orders from national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien,
told him in May “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.” Then, in July, Mr. Murphy alleges Mr. Wolf ordered him to hold up an intelligence notification on Russian disinformation attempts because it “made the President look bad.” After Mr. Murphy refused, he claims, he was sidelined from the completion of the notification, which, after editing, put “the actions of Russia on par with those of Iran and China in a manner that is misleading and inconsistent with the actual intelligence data.”
DHS spokesman Alexei Woltornist denied Mr. Murphy’s claims and invited investigations into the matter. Good; the entire department, from Mr. Wolf down, should cooperate fully with the internal and external reviews that should follow — including congressional probes, to which the Trump administration has routinely refused to disclose documents or give testimony. This would be an investigation that could result in uncovering actual wrongdoing, not just muddy the waters in advance of a presidential election.
