Trump Wants Putin to Keep Meddling to Get Himself Reelected; The Daily Beast, July 19, 2018

Margaret Carlson, The Daily Beast; Trump Wants Putin to Keep Meddling to Get Himself Reelected

"From the gist of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments, Trump knows how sophisticated, how costly the Russian actions were, and how likely they are to take place again. Yet he’s made no moves to deny Putin a glide path to a sequel, no elevating election security to a priority as he did for the calamitous separating children at the border, which has all the money and attention in the world.

To the contrary, the White House hasn’t spearheaded anything close to the kind of Manhattan Project that protecting our democracy deserves, not even the cost-free appointment of an election czar, or a request to Silicon Valley to help. Small efforts to counter voting machine fraud, bots, fake news (the real kind) go along at a snail’s pace at the FBI and Homeland Security. Congress has allotted a mere $380 million, a pittance to the cause. It’s likely that Russia is putting more money into interfering in 2020 than the U.S. is putting in to stopping it."