According to our intelligence services, one of the most important tools the Russians used to influence our election was RT (Russia Today), the Russian government funded TV news station, which the intelligence agencies thought was so important they devoted seven pages to it in their 25 page report on Russian election meddling.

Oddly enough, the hosts of RT are uniformly liberal progressives, unlike their conservative Russian government sponsors. In fact, during the entire campaign RT’s top prime time host was Thom Hartmann, who also has a daily radio program run on hundreds of stations across the nation including our own KPFZ 88.1 in Lakeport.

Hartmann’s hour-long show was run on RT twice every weekday, so they could hit prime time slots on both the east and west coast. Hartmann originally backed Sanders, but as soon as Hillary won the primary he fully supported her and stepped-up his daily assaults on Trump.

There were no Trump supporters among RT hosts, but there were plenty of Trump critics, the only Trump supporters featured were guests. So for at least two hours a day RT viewers got solid support for Hillary, and all day long they heard relentless attacks on Trump during the last five months of the campaign.

The fact the RT was completely biased in favor of Hillary was never mentioned by the mainstream media (MSM), and it was also never mentioned in the intelligence agency report, where instead they claimed RT was disrupting our elections by giving air time to third party candidates and by running stories on how easy it was to hack our electronic voting machine systems!

So the Russians did interfere with our election by giving Hillary support on a daily basis with no support whatsoever for Trump. This fact has been completely ignored, along with the fact that our intelligence agencies complained that the Russians were publicly pointing out the weaknesses of our election cyber security at the same time the Russians were supposedly hacking into those systems.

There are an endless number of reasons to be appalled by the presidency of Donald Trump, but every claim coming from democrats, intelligence agencies or news media about Russian election meddling should be viewed with intense skepticism, as the DNC, MSM and CIA’s lack of honesty and competence is the one thing that is indisputable.

Philip Murphy lives in Finley, Calif.