For years, we were told to trust the process. Trust the intelligence community. Trust the experts who assured us that America's elections were the most secure in history and that anyone who questioned that was a conspiracy theorist, a threat to democracy, or worse.

Last week, we found out exactly how much that trust was worth.

On Thursday night, President Trump stood in the East Room and released a mountain of newly declassified intelligence—material that, by his own account, had never been shared with him while he sat in the Oval Office the first time, and never shared with the American people at all. The documents describe a Chinese Communist Party operation that acquired the personal data of 220 million American voters: names, addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations. Not a hack of some obscure database. The largest known compromise of U.S. voter information in history, gathered by a hostile foreign power with every incentive to use it.

And the people whose job it was to tell us? They didn't.

Buried in the documents is a message from an intelligence analyst describing how the president's Daily Brief was "deliberately massaged" to keep election-related material away from the president. An FBI official, in a separate exchange, casually described running what she called "a shadow government" inside the Bureau. These aren't Trump's words. They're the words of the officials themselves,........

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