Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla, thinks Russia had it in for then-candidate Hillary Clinton, but its greater threat was to American trust in its elections.
“I do believe Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. I think that strings back to her calls for the Russian people to revolt against Putin,” he said in a CNN interview on Saturday, referring to Clinton’s comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin while the former New York senator served as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
But Gaetz agreed with a caller that one goal of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election was to sow discord and undermine the election’s overall results.
“The Russians win when we allow our intelligence community to be politicized. When we allow political opposition research to function as a basis for a warrant to spy on American citizens,” he said. “That not only calls into question our democracy and our political process, but also the critical intelligence tools we need to combat Russia’s malign influence around the world.”
Gaetz, a member of the Armed Services and Judiciary Committees, said he was not surprised about the breadth of the Russian meddling unveiled in the more than 400-page report by special counsel Robert Mueller about his investigation because of the briefings he’s received in Congress.
“We get a lot of briefs not only about what Russia has done but what they will do. I’m very concerned about the integrity of the vote and the ballot and that’s why we’ve got to secure our cyberdefenses,” he said. “The Mueller report doesn’t create a new set of revelations among the Intelligence Committee, Armed Services Committee, Judiciary Committee, about how Russia engages. As a matter of fact, the Judiciary Committee took a trip to the Balkans and we learned a lot of these things on the ground there.”
