As news that the CIA had solid evidence that Russia did indeed meddle in our election, possibly to the point of influencing the results, it also came out that our Senate Majority Leader was actively working to prevent that information from coming out. He basically said that he d accuse the White House of playing partisan politics if they went public and challenged Russia.Our intelligence community actually identified individual people, with connections to the Russian government, who gave Wikileaks thousands of emails hacked from both the DNC and John Podesta, Hillary s campaign chairman. They re part of a bigger Russian plot to harm Hillary, and get Trump elected, according to the intelligence community: Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton s chances. Sounds conspiracy-theorish, doesn t it? This kind of thing is the stuff that the right-wing conspiracy theorists spin out of nothing. The only difference is that our intelligence officials actually know this is happening, rather than the conspiracy theorists making up their own info in the face of official truth.There is a legitimate concern about making the strain on our relationship with Russia worse than it is. However, that s not what McConnell seemed worried about back in September when this information first began coming to light. At the time, the White House had been looking for broad, bipartisan support from Congressional leaders in coming out with the information. They were worried about looking like they were, in fact, playing politics.McConnell, however, decided to threaten the White House with that accusation regardless: The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics. He did not want this information getting out, although why is anybody s guess. We know that the RNC was hacked as well, but whatever those hacks discovered was never released: We now have high confidence that they hacked the D.N.C. and the R.N.C., and conspicuously released no documents  from the Republican organization, one senior administration official said, referring to the Russians. Why? It raises all sorts of questions, including whether McConnell had an idea about that and was afraid of the GOP looking like they were actively working with Russia to secure a Trump presidency. With this information, McConnell looks almost like a Russian pawn, whether he actually is or not.Featured image by Win McNamee via Getty Images