Olga Lautman Substack

07/23/2025

Trump’s latest threat to weaponize the intelligence community—not to defend the United States, but to exonerate Russia and persecute the Obama administration is not a political stunt or solely to deflect from Epstein. It is a full-scale assault on truth, national security, and the very institutions that exposed a hostile foreign attack on our democracy.

And it comes at a moment when Trump has been actively disarming the United States from within. He has systematically dismantled the task forces charged with protecting the nation from foreign interference, domestic extremism, Russian hybrid warfare, cyberattacks, and disinformation. Units within the DOJ and DHS tasked with defending against these threats have been quietly defunded, dissolved, or stripped of their authority. The FBI’s election threat task force? Disbanded. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center? Gutted.

And, in an authoritarian-style assault on political opposition, Trump has turned the machinery of government against those who protected the country from a foreign attack: a Kremlin-orchestrated operation that began as early as 2008 and culminated in the successful interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, engineered specifically to install Trump in the White House.

And let me be clear: the attack was real. It was not a “hoax,” a “witch hunt,” or some partisan fabrication. It was a multi-faceted, sustained assault by Russia—designed to install Trump and implode the United States from within, a goal deeply rooted in Soviet strategy.

Tragically, much of the media, lacking experience or institutional knowledge of Russian intelligence operations, allowed the narrative to be hijacked and reframed as a partisan dispute. What should have been treated as a five-alarm national security emergency was instead reduced to a political food fight. The framing mattered. It poisoned public understanding and obscured the fact that by 2016, the United States had become roughly the 28th country where Russia had interfered in an election—a pattern of aggressive destabilization that had been unfolding for decades across Europe, Africa, and Latin America.