Why Is Our President Being Investigated?

Donald John Trump, the 45th and current president of the United States, campaigned for the presidential office in the 2016 election. Although he successfully won the presidential election, there is speculation that Russia acted to help Trump win. In February 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted the Democratic National Committee’s help desk and informed them that one their computers had been compromised by Russian hackers. Adhering to the FBI’s warning, the DNC had a technician scan their system, but nothing suspicious was found. However, when the FBI contacted the DNC a second time, stating that a computer under their possession was transmitting information to Russia, there was an oversight by their IT technicians that resulted in the DNC management not being made aware of the breach. This was one of two events that is seen as the beginning of the Russian hacking phenomen. The second event was when John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, received a Google security alert notifying him that someone had attempted to access his gmail account and that he had the option to reset his password. Podesta, having knowledge of the FBI’s first warning to the DNC, immediately forwarded the email to a help desk campaign staffer with the intention of finding out whether the alert was legitimate. The campaign staffer replied with a typo, resulting in Podesta believing the notification to be legitimate and resetting his password through the fraudulent page. This unfortunately gave the Russian hackers access to a decade of Podesta’s emails.

You may ask, how does this involve President Trump? Well, I am glad you asked. The hackers behind the Podesta incident were identified as DCLeaks, a group referred to as “hacktivists” that expose the influence of special interests on elected officials. DCLeaks also was discovered to be an alias for the Russian military intelligence. The emails exposed to the public by DCLeaks did not lean in the favor of the Clinton campaign, but rather the Trump campaign. The emails released were damaging to the Democratic Party and the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When Trump assumed his role as President of the United States–he and his cabinet immediately began to reject the idea that Russia had an influence on his election even though the CIA had concluded that Russia was involved in Trump’s win. Since then, the United States government, has publicly announced that they are, “..confident that Russia orchestrated the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” Also members of Trump’s own party have publicly announced that they believe Russia was involved in the 2016 election. President Trump has attempted multiple times to separate himself from relation to Russia, but that has proved to be difficult due to his financial connections to Russia through the Trump Organization. This is why our president is being investigated.