Greenwald: CIA Election ‘Interference’ More Dangerous Than Russian ‘Mischief’

Appearing Monday on The Hill’s Rising, The Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald argued that the U.S. intelligence community’s “interference” in the 2020 presidential election is far worse than the “mischief” undertaken by the government of Russia.

A partial transcript is as follows:

KRYSTAL BALL: Weigh in on this latest “Bernie is the new Russian asset.” What do you make of these latest developments?

GLENN GREENWALD: On the one hand, I think it’s completely moronic the idea that the theme or narrative they’ve settled on is not necessarily they say generously that Vladimir Putin wants Bernie Sanders to be president, he simply wants to nominate the weakest candidate he can find so that Donald Trump has the best chance of winning re-election as though he’s some kind of Russia Nate Silver sitting around of graphs of districts or something. It’s so completely idiotic, the idea that he’s sitting in Moscow presiding over a very complicated country and analyzing the Democratic nomination and picking which candidate he wants to win.

What makes it even worse is it’s all being done through the now standard, very familiar anonymous leaks from the intelligence community that’s unaccompanied either by evidence or any specificity about what this supposed support entails. It really is domestic intelligence interference in our election. It’s interference by the CIA and by homeland security and by related agencies in our domestic election, which is infinitely more threatening to our democracy than whatever mischief Russian agencies are primitively doing on Facebook and Twitter.