Story highlights Tim Naftali: Trump's defensiveness on the subject shows public needs to know more about Russian disinformation

Presidents can declassify any document, and Obama should use this authority before he leaves office, he says

The former director of the Richard Nixon Library, Timothy Naftali teaches history and public policy at NYU. The views expressed in this commentary are solely his.

(CNN) President-elect Trump's curious decision to take on the US intelligence community -- a community that will soon report to him -- over its assessment of Russian hacking and disinformation during the 2016 campaign has needlessly muddied the waters about a matter of national and international significance. "[T]here was absolutely no effect," said Trump after receiving a special highly-classified briefing, "on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines." But here's the problem: the intelligence community never publicly accused the Russians of tampering with voting machines or that the effort had decided the election. In any case, whether the hacking had any effect on a US domestic election is something that the intelligence community is not in the business of measuring.

Tim Naftali

It is often said that truth is the first casualty of war, which is bad enough, but it should not be the first casualty of a democratic election. There should be little doubt that the Russian disinformation campaign affected the presidential election. What we cannot know for certain is how significant or decisive it was as a factor. What should concern us more is that many Americans, including it appears the President-elect, believe strongly that it played no role at all.

This is not just a matter of getting our history right; it's a matter of being forearmed before the same organs of disinformation play games with other major elements or events in our country in the years to come. One of the lessons of the 2016 election should be that as citizens, we need all the help we can get to differentiate truth from fake news.

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In his moving Farewell Address, President Obama subtly acknowledged the problem of fake news, saying that "without some common baseline of facts...we're going to keep talking past each other." And he may believe that by instructing the intelligence community to release a public version of the highly classified report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that he has laid the foundation for a healthy national conversation about the reality of Moscow's assault on US sovereignty during the 2016 campaign. However, as the purveyors of fake news are gaining increasing power, the need for even more transparency is growing.

Although he has a little over a week in his term, our outgoing president remains the only person in a position to ensure a frank and accurate national discussion on Russian intervention in the 2016 election by making more documentation public.

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