Are you not doing as exactly as you are highlighting?

If there were underlying forces at work that were foreign would that not mean it wasn't fair and square?

Citizens United vs FEC[1] unfortunate decision in 2011 led to infusions of foreign funds[2] that outnumber what US citizens are legally allowed to contribute. Too much money and now foreign money that is the real problem, it reared it's ugly head in 2016 no matter who won.

We have to backtrack on Citizens United vs the FEC decision or else foreign countries and oligarchs will be deciding every election. If that becomes the norm, it was a good run for the United States but it will be ending.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-...

Also I tend to agree with Citizens United. Unions and Corporations should be allowed to express their views on a candidate.

If there is someone running for office and making a BS claim about steel workers, I would want steelworkers unions to have the right to advertise and inform me that it is BS.

Also if you get into issue based stuff, it becomes extremely overzealous to prevent unions and Corporations from being able to speak up during an election. Planned parenthood, for example, has a lot of misconceptions about it, they should have the right to do something about that.

I also understand the scope for abuse with citizens united, but I don't think curtailing first amendment rights is ever a good idea.

Probably worth noting that I'm not American, my opinion of this case is shaped by my listening to SCOTUS oral arguments of the case on YouTube many years ago.

Possibly, or political systems are ripe for misdirecting where funds originate now.

> Unions and Corporations should be allowed to express their views on a candidate.

Totally agree, the problem becomes when those are shell corporations or money funneled via foreign entities.

I am sure any sovereign nation would not want the majority of the money influencing their own people's choices from external sources to the country.

It just wouldn't be best for quality of life and making sure what is done is right for the country if the actual citizens have less say in the direction of it. So much money is in now that targeting and manipulation of votes from foreign wealth is the absolute norm, that is poisoning democracy and freedom, the very thing we want to protect and are sworn to uphold.

I don’t know if one could even account for all the third party spending.

Money is not speech, corporations are not people.

Any one who cares about free speech would advocate for restoring the Fairness Doctrine, so we know that angle is just rhetoric.

What does this even mean? It costs money to put advertisements in mass media. Either you believe everybody should be able to do that, or you believe that only some people should be able to address the public at large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

If The Young Turks do 3000 hours of pro Hillary content, which is watched and shared by millions, how do you propose they be regulated? If unions simply give them money instead, rather than buying ads on TV, is that now illegal?

If I am a billionaire and my fellow billionaires and I want to start a TV channel where we do 24 hour marathons promoting clean energy and encouraging voters to vote for candidates who will bring us clean energy, my right to do this is taken away?

Yeah, but how many of them are old enough to vote? :-P

Citizens United likely isn't the only fix that's needed, but it never should have been reversed regardless. That said, perhaps if CU was still around this analytics company would have never got off the ground to begin with.

One similar example of this is the recent German election - I believe AFD had like ~10% of the popular vote, but only won 5% of seats in the parliament.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_representation

In both countries there is a threshold (5% party votes) that a party must get to get party seats ... looking online in 2013 AFD (spit) got less than 5%, below the threshold, and got no seats, in the recent election they got above the threshold and were awarded 92 seats (14%) - seems to me that the system is working as designed.

But just because they got seats it doesn't mean that the other parties are required to stoop to form a government with them.

MMP is a far better system than the FPP system used in many other places, most people end up with someone they voted for representing them, unless they are in an extreme minority (<5%), and it's pretty immune to gerrymandering. Personally I'd argue for reducing the 5% threshold to the size of one seat so even more people are represented.

These are referred to as "minority" Governments.

You cannot divine now how many would-be Trump voters in blue states stayed home versus would-be Clinton voters in red states.

But who’s counting?

It’s more fun to argue about facebook, benghazi, email servers, value voters, likeability...

You are saying that the dollar amount spent decides every election. Do you really believe that democracy is nothing more than rule by whoever spends the most money?

Not entirely but is has a very big impact, are you saying that money spent in an election doesn't have an impact? We don't even know the true dollars spent anymore...

Follow up, do you want MORE foreign funds deciding elections for your nation over what citizens and national companies contribute?

This isn't just for elections either, this is for legislation after election... I don't believe anyone would want foreign money deciding their leaders, best interests and laws.

Again you assume that money directly decides who our leaders are. The best evidence says it works at least partially the other way around: the leaders most likely to win attract the most money. And as was pointed out already in this thread: the winning candidate in this election was the one with less financial backing.

Furthermore to the extent it is true that money influences elections, we need to solve that problem first - rather than suggesting, as you do, that our leaders ought to be "bought and paid for" by our own home-grown evil corporations and special-interest groups. What kind of improvement is that?

I'm not saying that's not part of it, but it's only part of it. There's plenty of other bad stuff about Facebook that people don't like: children experiencing isolation and depression; cyberbullying; addiction; shallow, empty interactions; clickbait mental junk food replacing content from actual friends... It goes on.

People voted for Trump, but that is hardly an indication of love. Consider that this prior election was between two of the most despised (and possibly incompetent) candidates in US presidential history.

If you don't want to repeat this fiasco stop supporting a divisive two party system. Yes, it was the internal mechanics of each party that picked candidates from the primaries opposed to actual voters. This has been proven with evidence for the Democrats and is likely true for the Republicans as well.

I wish we could move to a constitutional republic with a dose of direct democracy a bit like Switzerland.

Otherwise even with more parties we would see parties forming coalitions and continuing to sideline a significant minority of the population. See the anti-immigration parties being ignored in Western Europe for a good example.

among other things, the voting system itself ("first past the post") tends to encourage a duopoly.

I'd say that a lot of the articles are driven by the news medias hatred of facebook.

It used to be that facebook would drive upto 80% of the traffic on some news sites from shared articles between 2012-2017. Then when they started to tweak the news feed a lot of news sites found their traffic dying.

There are definite reasons to hate facebook, but news sites hate them for controlling their very existence, and lately pushing them into irrelevance.

Between facebook and google the views news sites receive from other sources are/were a rounding error, before we even start talking about advertising.

That everyone is attacking facebook now is good. From a purely tactical point of view killing it or strangling it with so much regulation they need to ask you 5 times if they can access your data for every picture you upload will be a huge net positive for humanity. I only wish the same happens to google asap.

$300m buys a lot of good will, and maybe some favirbale coverage.

Whether it actually moved the needle enough to elect Trump is open to debate, but that's not a "conspiracy theory". Even the very idea that their personal data can be exploited this way, against their will, via friends who were tricked, is unsettling. That's more than just being mad about the election. They do not want a service that can exploit them that way in their life.

Maybe Facebook has locked down the API, or maybe there's some other way to exploit it next round. People are realizing that trusting Facebook with their personal data was a bad idea to begin with and not in their best interests.

> "Your side won because... Facebook made you vote that way"

#deletefacebook doesn't mean that people think Facebook made people vote a certain way. It's about Facebook being a poor custodian of personal data and allowing it to be exploited to guide adversarial campaign efforts.

Guiding where to invest efforts and dollars in an election campaign is extremely strategically valuable intelligence. That's different from just changing people's minds.. it's where to push for more voter turnout, for example. So at a minimum Facebook helped identify the psychological profiles and locations of people who were prime targets -- thanks to just a handful of friends who were exploited.

Facebook privacy stories never get this kind of coverage. This story is everywhere right now, for political reasons.

People want to delete Facebook because of trust and that reasoning is perfectly sane. As far as the coverage is concerned, this is the same story with a Facebook flavour today.

Could you explain your justification for trotting such an irrelevant point? We can argue all day that everyone knows that Facebook does all this scary stuff (and the nearly tech-illiterate people I interact with have no clue about this sort of thing while being barely able to use Facebook) but I'm more curious as to where your main point comes from.

2) Can you recall a time when a Facebook privacy story ever received so much media and government interest?

There was a time when apps would blindly request a bunch of permissions. Users would blindly accept them. Devs would store tokens in the database. One shoddy exploit later on the application and an attacker had all their photos, friends' photos, and could post and comment on various things impersonating the user.

I can't imagine how much harvesting was done by popular Facebook apps and games in those days.

You've been making the unsubstantiated argument that the only reason people care about Facebook nowadays is because they're sore losers. If you're going to make a wide-reaching claim like that, I would love some citations.

On one hand, if something is simply business as usual, despite any misconceptions otherwise, then cries of whataboutism can be a bit misplaced.

On the other hand, if some sort of tide has shifted, and business as usual can become business of the past, then I think dismissing similar past offenses from others could make sense.

I have hard time attempting to evaluate this, to say the least...

The only real difference between what was done here and then was how it was represented to the users.

[0]: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

That is an incredibly important distinction. There is a vast gulf between "these people asked for my data and I consented to its use" and "these people surreptitiously collected my data for purposes other than those which they disclosed."

(1) The issue is not getting the data of the people who used the app, it's the millions of their friends who were included. This is what's being implied should be thought of as a "breach" (with the media trying its darndest to make it look like Trump himself downloaded all the data into a big CSV file while laughing)

(2) Regardless of the reason for the permission being asked, the resulting dataset was collected in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind.

This seems...insane.

Informed consent makes all the difference in cases like this. How can you feel that it's irrelevant whether data was obtained under fraudulent premises, versus with explicit consent?

It would be like saying 'It doesn't matter that company A had a real product with real traction and raised $10Mm, while company B lied to investors about the amount of user activity and raised $10Mm. The resulting funds raised was the same in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind'.

Now, I don't mean to imply that you believe the quote above, but what you said sounds _exactly_ that outlandish to me.

Very simply: None of the millions of friends were asked for their consent in either case. There was no consent requested or premise given, the data was simply "obtained" in both cases, by the same means.

> but what you said sounds _exactly_ that outlandish to me.

Maybe because it has nothing to do with what I wrote? Allow me to make up a statement that does. "Hey, Bob, can I have access to your account so I can understand you better to advance the Obama campaign? Ok, good. Oh, and Tom's your friend, so I get his information also. ....... Hey, Bob, can I have access to your account so I can understand you better to create a personality profile? Ok, good. Oh, and Tom's your friend, so I get his information also."

Now, you are Tom. You were not contacted in any way whatsoever. You were not presented with a reason for accessing your account in any way whatsoever. Your data was simply pulled, and that is why I equate the two. I am indeed quite sane.

I was looking at the situation from Bob's perspective, where I think we can agree that there is a significant difference in the two formats of collection.

this just seems like being reductive for convenience - stripping away context in the pursuit of finding some broad way to describe two things and propose some false equivalence.

They didn't collect it surreptitiously. They collected it openly, for purposes other than those which they disclosed. Which is an unethical but not uncommon, unfortunately.

In terms of ethics, the key difference is mentioned in your article:

The only difference, as far as we can discern, between the two campaigns' use of Facebook, is that in the case of Obama the users themselves agreed to share their data with the Obama campaign, as well as that of their friends. The users that downloaded the Cambridge app, meanwhile, were only told that the information would be used for academic purposes.

This is big. If a university researcher asks me a few questions and tells me that my answers will be used purely for research purposes, I am much more likely to engage than if a campaigner did the same. It would be unethical for a campaigner to present themselves as an academic in order to get more information.

Are you asking for evidence that the law was broken, or are you asking for the evidence that leads to the allegations? There's a significant difference in standard between the two.

There is also the question of whether foreigners were working on behalf of the campaign.

There are a number of allegations that should be explored. Do a search, and you'll find these reports fairly easily.

All candidates take such data from social media, and have done for the last 2 elections at least, but, Trump being not that popular with the Republican establishment/deep state either (him coming from outside to steal the party's favorites thunder and not 100% controllable by the party bureaucracy) only one side has enough media stronghold to hammer the other side 24/7. The other can at best spew its own BS on FOX.

I know plenty of people, truly well meaning individuals, who are not the dumb animals most outlets like to paint the Trump supporters as. They were just conned into it all, and I'm sure shady Facebook ads had a hand in it, but ultimately it was just trusting people suckered in by a television personality (or character, even).

If this election is the spark that eventually instills a sense of proper analytical reasoning skills in the United States at large, then I'll be satisified. And I say this as a person who, if I could vote in this country, would certainly have not have entertained the idea of Donald Trump at all.

Of course, it would be asinine to paint with broad strokes. But one can't disregard that it takes two to tango in exchanges of ideas and information.

Edit: my horrendous spelling

Thank you for enlightening me on why the previous user was so aggressive in his rebuke. I can see how, if somebody is happy with their choice, they may have felt slighted and assumed I implied that they, too, were conned.

I can appreciate that somebody's personal calculus is different from my own. However, those whom I have encountered that regret their decision articulate it in such terms that "con" really is the proper descriptor.

given trump's nature, it's unlikely one who isn't a fan will give much credence to such self-attestations.

for example a trump supporter may say they are "not a racist", but many see that trump supporters simply do not talk about race in the same way, so the expression doesn't mean much.

Were they conned?

The truth is if the US doesn't fix illegal immigration and put a general slowdown on legal immigration then conservatives are done for and their way of life is going to be slowly destroyed.

All indicators show first and second gen migrants overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

This doesn't matter to voters. They ought to pick whoever will best serve them. So in that sense, I would argue that yes, they were conned in some respects.

I think it's the opposite - the people are done for. The party will just shift its stances. In many respects it already has - Trump faces almost as much opposition within his own party as from the Democrats.

If Trump doesn't sort out immigration expect the US to shift closer in laws and accepted practices to the UK.

Now you've got me looking forward to how this all turns out even more! :)

If he doesn't then I see a shift to socially conservative (in the religious sense) but pro-welfare.

New immigrants in general are socially conservative. As are a big chunk of current Dem voters - my extended family are all catholic and vote Dems.

the premise that all/most immigrants "are liberals" (by apparent virtue of their immigrant-ness) is almost hilariously a stereotypical position to hold. i wonder what a gop explanation for why that is true would look like.

A little. But it's not one of the big three drivers -

The first is social welfare.

The second comes down to ideology - American conservatives have a unique brand of beliefs.

For example the value placed on:

- Freedom of speech - Firearms - Individual liberty over collective safety/feelings/effective policy

These traits are not shared by conservatives in the rest of the world. In the U.K. for example the majority of conservatives are happy with strict firearm control.

The third is personality - American conservatives are loud, proud, straight talking, and rough-edged - this rubs conservatives from other countries the wrong way.

That's the rub. The side that doesnt go with the trumpers keeps looking for justifications that dont boil down to "Those people innately agree with those policies after a reasoned and thoughtful approach to the problem."

That's because the beliefs they espouse are an anathema to their core understanding of a civil society, and the only way they can continue to humanize them is to pretend they were tricked or stupid.

Honestly, I pretty much feel the same way myself. If you earnestly understand the consequences of America's current president and you are still gung-ho, I find you to be lacking in about every important moral and ethical measure.

Meanwhile Candidate Trump said he thought they could get along and co-operate to defeat ISIS.

Personally, sitting thousands of miles away from the USA, candidate Clinton said everything that I'd never want to hear. Also Russia has been a great ally to my country for many years so culturally the russophobic impulse has never been there.

On Day 1, the banker lets you keep $30. He keeps this $30 for another 10 years. Then, he starts cutting your share by 2 pennies per week ($1 per year). It’s annoying but not too bad, but you don’t want to be covered in feces so you don’t push the button.

A decade later, you’ve only got $20. A decade after that, $10. Five years later, only $5 out of every $100.

At some point, it becomes strategic to push the button. Sure, your life sucks and having your tattered clothes covered in feces doesn’t help. But the banker in the bespoke suit is harmed more, and might rethink his allocation tomorrow.

And when you do push that button, the stinkier the feces, the better.

Source: that was my vote.

Say somebody told you that your coworker of similar skill level was earning twice as much as you, because they cheated somehow. You would get angry at them. If it then was revealed that no such thing happened, they have the same salary as you, would you still stay angry?

One candidate stole a primary, was under FBI investigation for most of the campaign, was chastised by the director but then given a pass, had a trove of emails leaked wherein she was called incompetent by her own team, and cheated in debates due to a highly inappropriate relationship with the media.

The other candidate was crucified in the press almost daily with a slew of controversial and crass, lewd statements, each of which was dissected, repeated and debated during the 24 hour news cycle as well as the late night talk shows.

Nobody wants Russia to spam American news. Nobody wants to filter through media coverage and wonder which one is fake or not.

People I think are looking for a bit more liability. Show me content truthfully, validate its source, don't change the order of my news feed, don't purposely remove some content and add others because you've learned my ad click habits.

Trump is trump, I don't think he's the reason for the outcry. He's mentioned in it, because it can be seen as an example, but people on all side of the political spectrum I think have issue with propaganda, and the power that lies to whom control the internet mass media. So Facebook is scary to all party, and I think only now do a majority of people have woken up to its potential destructive influence. It's not known to what extent that potential is, and the debates will probably focus on that. How much/little regulation is needed to mitigate its applications that can affect our free social democracy, while maximising our capitalist ambitions.

Yes I agree there are some real arguments for leaving, but most people were voting leave for reasons like the NHS getting an extra £350m a week, which turned out to be just spin. Maybe a company like CA was invoked to promote stories, and maybe they were funded by powerful people, but that’s not really a conspiracy.

Even now it’s still unclear on what is going to happen on some major issues, like what will happen to British citizens living in the EU.

Same happened in USSR, Yeltsin was accused in almost all of the above, and won - not so much despite of this, but to a large extent due to this. When the entire establishment gangs up against one, the normal human instinct is to support him. And the effect is so well-known that I'm actually suprised Trump's opponents acted this way.

But two, as you suggest, perhaps some people really do like him and what he represents. And maybe the "other side" would rather believe Trump voters were tricked then believe the alternative, that Trump voters really love Trump and what he represents.

The thing that posts like yours seem to silently imply is that if "the other side" would just accept Trump and his ideology, the country will be fine. But perhaps two peoples can become so divided that they would rather take up arms against each other then accept the ideology of the other group. This is the possibility that really scares people the most, and is something that no one wants to talk about.

Unfortunately the reaction has been incredibly childish.

And besides that, the allegations being made are extremely serious, an utter threat to democracy, and they are to be taken so independently of any other factors.

People did vote for Trump. Without someone twisting their arm.

But there is still merit to these other stories (even if the perspective that they got Trump elected is false).

Because if you're not, "People did vote for Trump. Without someone twisting their arm." is disingenuous, at best.

I'm saying that the people voted how they voted without the use of anything that seems outside of the norm.

We should investigate these data-driven ad campaigns if they do have that much influence over our democracy.

And we should investigate Russian meddling because it looks like there was a divisive propaganda campaign and a bunch of shady business deals.

And we should investigate the Trump campaign because it looks like there were a bunch of shady business deals with questionable ties.

My real point was that the fact that these things involve Trump shouldn't impact their seriousness. We know there are people trying to find dirt on Trump but that doesn't mean all of the angles they're looking at are purely about Trump.

But there are rules regarding how and how much can be spent on ads.

My initial post was to establish that we agree that ads work, the next issue is to establish whether campaign finance laws were broken, and if spending (foreign or otherwise) were not disclosed.

Also, as other's have pointed out, there are a lot of other problems with social media in general and Facebook in particular. Russian meddling in the election is the spark that is lighting the fire but the fuel was already there. (That last sentence optimistic to an extent that might not be warranted).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/do...

At the risk of engaging in a debate I don’t want to participate in, is this not building a strawman?

When I purchase a product after viewing a targeted advertisement for that product, no reasonable person would claim I’d been brainwashed. One might, however, claim I’d been influenced by the advertisement.

Your original post was nothing as it is now.

You are being grossly deceptive, and this is coming from a guy who loves to play devils advocate on hn

Please don't delude yourself or at least attempt to be honest. Races at the county and state level matter a lot. It matters that outside of a couple of states, the winner take all electoral system can have a significant impact on elections.

Yes, those are the rules that have been established, that both parties are privy to when developing their campaign strategy.

But let's not reduce that to "oh, one person won because people liked them more."

Both candidates entered a race to win the electoral college. The race was fair and one of them won. You can’t claim some moral victory by counting the popular vote, because every candidate would campaign very differently to contest a popular vote.

I think you’re correct about one thing though, it is an oversimplification to say that people liked him more. It would be more accurate to say that they thought he would be a better president.

Just think of what this whole story (Foreign meddling) says about these marginal voters in that case: That they were so easily swayed, that they decided to vote ostensibly against their own better judgement simply by being shown a series of ads to influence their emotions.

Something is very wrong with voter education if it's that easy to sway a certain influential population of voters.

Have you considered it might be happening to you, right now? How would you tell, if by definition we are talking about pressing unconscious psychological buttons?

You may be very well educated, but you've never the less the same monkey brain as everyone on this earth.

Your comment adds nothing but a personal attack on me where one is not warranted.

It's pretty difficult to make meaningful wide-ranging inferences about the voter populations this way.

In the months and weeks approaching election day, I was struck numerous times by the reality that each political faction was profoundly disconnected from the other, in media consumption silos so different that if you happened to drift from one conversation to another, it felt like crossing an ocean and entering a distant country.

And to me, it was obvious that this social rift had calcified during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow, amid the victory of the Obama presidency, left wing democrats simply felt as though their job was done, they could die happy, and anything else they imagined as natural was a foregone conclusion of the retirement they were set to sail into.

I don't think the media silos I noticed are the root of the problem. You cannot blame cartoons, talk radio and memes. I strongly believe that complacency, assumption and tone deaf, willful blindness among democratic party consituents led to the results we have watched unfold. I don't think it was New Media manipulation, and I don't think "fixing social media" will solve for the chaos we now see.

Hillary did cheat though. Her campaign directly collaborated with correct the record - last time I checked coordinating with a super pac was illegal. She also directly worked with the media to spread progaganda.

Thank god Trump won. Hillary would have been more of the same.

Also, it’s hilarious that we’ve all stopped caring about Citzens United now. Corporations influencing our elections is A-OK!

Also, this is a completely different claim, separate from the “Russia interferes with our election” claim.

If it is hacking polling stations or other illegal activities, that is pretty bad. But still the responsibility is on the harmed country to make that harder, detect it and show proof.

Of course it would make Trump appear illegitimate, but I don't think it should be unexpected by Russia. Can't really expect them to be silent and do nothing when they know Hillary has strong negative views (for good reason!) of their country.

Here's an analogy: We expect belligerents to kill each other's soldiers during war. It's the responsibility of each side to minimize their own losses. That doesn't mean that war isn't bad.

FREE JULIAN!

Also, I’m not alone in this, notable journalists such as Glenn Greenwald are also asking for evidence.

There is enough evidence to substantiate beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia deliberately interfered with the 2016 presidential election. It is hard to determine the degree with which that interference influenced voters.

If you want a timeline of events you can go here[0] or here[1], but something tells me you won't accept these...

[0]: https://www.politico.com/trump-russia-ties-scandal-guide/tim...

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/05/a...

More importanly: why should I care about Russians interfering with elections when we let corporations do that to a far greater extent?

I assume you don't mean in the P(A|B) > P(A) sense?

All: Please keep garden-variety partisan flamewars far away from this site, too.

"From in or around 2014 to the present, Defendants knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury) to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016."

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments."

Also the DNI report is too generic. They literally have screenshots of Russian news channels. This is bordering on cold war era style propaganda.

PS: thank you for taking the time and effort to have a conversation. I haven't seen anything convincing me that Russia meaningfully interfered in the election. And I'm wary to jump to conclusions since there are a lot of people who seem to be hell bent on undercutting the President using any means.

The indictment I provided is from the investigation headed by Robert Mueller, special counsel, former FBI director, and Republican. Dismissing it as "partisan activities" suggests either that you are extremely uninformed on this subject (in which case you should do your own research) or that you've already decided in advance to dismiss the results of a nonpartisan investigation.

Even the highly contested House Intelligence Committee report acknowledges that there was Russian interference in the election (they simply claim that there is no proof the Trump campaign was involved). There is a bipartisan consensus on this subject.