Susan Hennessey and Matt Tait Go on a Political Witch Hunt
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2017
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In an interview with The New York Times before his intelligence briefing on Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election on Friday, President-elect Donald Trump called the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference a "political witch hunt." In that spirit, we brought Lawfare managing editor Susan Hennessey and former GCHQ information security specialist Matt Tait on the podcast to discuss evidence of Russian attempts to influence the presidential election and Trump's baffling response.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
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| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | When Donald Trump accuses the intelligence community of being politicized, |
| 0:37.0 | that strikes me as a preemptive strike to undermine the credibility of the report. |
| 0:43.0 | So he is actually in a sense politicizing the intelligence community by talking about them in these terms, |
| 0:50.0 | by talking about intelligence, as though it's a partisan talking point. |
| 0:54.0 | The reasons for doing that might be because this is uncomfortable. |
| 0:58.0 | He thinks that it costs the power over his inauguration and his election. |
| 1:02.0 | So a preemptive strike to undercut the intelligence assessment that's unfriendly to him. |
| 1:08.0 | That's incredibly short-sighted. |
| 1:10.0 | He's going to need to rely on the intelligence community in the future, |
| 1:14.0 | and so taking a shot at their credibility now strikes me as a little bit foolish. |
| 1:19.0 | It's also important to understand that when Donald Trump says the intelligence community is great, |
| 1:23.0 | intelligence community is quote unquote politicized, that's another way of saying the intelligence community is lying. |
| 1:29.0 | I'm Benjamin Wittes, and this is the LawFair podcast, January 7, 2017. |
| 1:36.0 | The Senate Armed Services Committee met this week for a political witch hunt, as Donald Trump called it. |
| 1:44.0 | It was a bipartisan show of confidence in the US intelligence community and its conclusions |
| 1:52.0 | that the Russians were behind the hack of the DNC and John Podesta. |
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