Today’s arrest of “Reality Winner” confirms Russia rigged the election for Donald Trump

| 7:23 pm EDT June 5, 2017
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The public seems to be having a hard time figuring out how to digest today’s news that the Donald Trump administration has arrested a government contractor for leaking classified intel to the media. The story is a complex one, further complicated by the fact that the woman arrested today is named “Reality Winner” of all things. But once you get past that novelty, the real upshot of the story is that this is bad news for Trump.

The arrest makes sense: Donald Trump has spent months demanding that his administration do something about the people in the intel community who have been leaking secrets to the media. In that sense, today’s arrest of Reality Winner should give him a bit of satisfaction in the short term. But here’s the problem: by arresting this woman, the Trump administration just confirmed that the story published by The Intercept really is based on legitimate classified intel, and therefore is true.

Here’s the relevant information from that classified intel published earlier today by The Intercept: “Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.” (link).

So now we have confirmation from the NSA that the Russian government really did hack voter registration databases to rig the election. Whatever your opinion of The Intercept as a news outlet, and whether you were inclined to believe that what it published earlier today really was classified NSA intel, this evening’s subsequent arrest means that the leaked intel is real for sure. So now we know that the NSA knows that Russia rigged the election for Donald Trump. And this comes just two days before NSA Director Mike Rogers is set to testify before Congress. Follow Palmer Report on Facebook and Twitter.