Obama Orders Review Of Russian Hacking But It's Really Nothing New

Today, President Obama ordered the intelligence agencies to conduct a full scale investigation into Russia’s attempt to influence the most recent election by hacking into the emails of Democratic and former national security officials and then leaking that material at opportune times during the campaign. The review will be completed before Obama leaves office but it is unclear whether the results will actually be made public. Now that Trump has won the election even some Republicans in Congress seem to want to get on board with the probe, including John McCain and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

It was long past time for Obama to do this and there is a certain belief that he did not broach this subject during the election campaign for fear of influencing this result, something that James Comey should have done as well. And while I think this kind of investigation is important, especially if we are to stop this kind of thing from happening in the future, it is kind of hard to blame the Russians for this activity. After all, this is the kind of thing America has been doing to foreign countries pretty much my entire lifetime, in one form or another, as has Russia. Of course, it would be a whole different story if the investigation proved that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians. Eventually, and it may be a long time later, but eventually, there is always some blowback from these kinds of activities. And there will probably be a time further down the road, where Putin will feel the effects of the blowback from his own foreign adventures. The only thing new about the attempts to influence this election is that the US was the target this time.