On August 18, 2020, a bipartisan Senate committee released a report detailing Russian interference in the 2016 election. This came as a shock to Americans all over the country, as in a nearly 1,000 page report, the Senate concluded that Moscow “engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” With the 2020 elections coming up, this sounds an alarm for possible interference in the current election. Election tampering is dangerous to any democracy, and is something that the government should work together to solve. However, friction between parties is stagnating progress on the problem, even though it poses an issue to America as a whole.
The report comes as a welcome affirmation of the U.S. intelligence community’s findings, as they have come under fire from President Trump. Its findings that Russia engaged in a campaign to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and boost Trump’s campaign come as a contradiction to a House GOP report in 2018, which disagreed with the conclusion that Russia had interfered to support Trump’s claims. This is another example of how even supposedly impartial members of a committee may sway the results based on political leaning, as this bipartisan report and one done in 2017 both contradicted the GOP report.
This report has broad implications for the 2020 election, as intelligence officials warn that Moscow may continue its interference to the current election. However, the message is struggling to go through in a strongly partisan atmosphere in Washington. American intelligence agencies released a public assessment on August 7th, warning that Russia was continuing to interfere with the 2020 election. Political friction has complicated the problem, as the Trump campaign says that China poses a greater threat, in contradiction to intelligence officials, who say Russia is a far more immediate and graver threat.
Further hampering the American government’s response to the problem are the highly charged partisan politics in Washington. Despite the fact that the report was written by a bipartisan committee, the White House has called into doubt the findings of the report. Divided along partisan lines, argument continues over whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, as can be seen with the Republican and Democratic appendices to the report.
The Republican appendix states, “After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion.”
However, the Democratic appendix states, “The committee’s bipartisan report unambiguously shows that members of the Trump campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected. … Paul Manafort, while he was chairman of the Trump campaign, was secretly communicating with a Russian intelligence officer with whom he discussed campaign strategy and reportedly shared internal polling data. … This is what collusion looks like.”
The starkly different assessments here are only one example of how partisan politics is hindering the effort to solve the problem. With vastly different political agendas abundant, as Democrats attempt to expose collusion to hurt Trump’s 2020 chances, and Republicans attempting to disprove collusion to support Trump, the actual problem of tampering is largely without a long term solution.
With only a few months left until the election, foreign countries are ramping up their efforts to harm the integrity of the 2020 election. While the Trump campaign is taking steps to address this issue, including sanctions and public announcements, their response is sadly lacking, and at times even downplays the Russian threat. National Security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said on “Face the Nation” that he did not know about any Russian meddling in the 2020 election, despite senior intelligence and law enforcement officials repeatedly issuing warnings about Russian interference in the 2020 vote. This signals that the White House is downplaying the threat, instead of sounding the alarm and taking steps to stop it, as it should. It also suggests that the White House is at odds with American intelligence agencies, which are essential to solving the problem.
Our politics needs to stop getting in the way of solving problems, and we need to secure the integrity of our elections. With Americans caught up in a fierce race, the issue which poses a fundamental threat to America is going largely unnoticed, and harshly partisan views are causing the government to be inefficient at one of the most important jobs it has: keeping the integrity of our democracy. The solution comes not from denial, which many seem focused on, but from accepting that the problem exists, and taking steps to solve it.