With less than a month to go for the new President to step into the portals of the White House, the plot over the elections in November has thickened almost to the point of a trans-Atlantic scandal.

The seat of authority in the United States of America has asserted that Vladimir Putin and no less had a direct role in what they call the “hacking of the US election”.

Pressure has thus been ratcheted up on the Russian President, currently embroiled in the relentless strife in Syria and most recently the strained relations with Turkey after the assassination of the Russian ambassador.

In the twilight weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has advanced a robust warning that America will retaliate for the Russian cyber attacks during the presidential election. For Donald Trump, the road from Trump Towers in New York to the Oval Office in Washington DC has been paved with dubious intentions and spurious methods and the incumbent will have to contend with allegations of what Mr Obama calls a “range of Russian attacks”.

The allegations, embedded in the emperical evidence of the Obama administration, are much too serious to be countered with characteristically acerbic bluster. The credibility of his victory has palpably been eroded at the threshold.

The Kremlin is yet to react to the outgoing President’s forthright denunciation of the conduct of elections in the fountain-head of democracy ~ “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action. And we will ~ at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicised; some of it may not be.”

The CIA has concluded that the Russian cyber attacks, including the hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee, were intended to influence the election in Trump’s favour.

The fact that his election has been endorsed by the National Electoral College ~ a constitutional necessity ~ does not lessen the enormity of the charges. Developments over the past week have reaffirmed the Kremlin’s stake in the American election. Rightly have Senators, representing both the Republicans and the Democrats, called for a Congressional enquiry after Trump’s office debunked the CIA’s findings.

Of course, a critical point of reference is the delayed response of the White House, indeed a month after Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Indeed, the Intelligence network had on 7 October warned of Russia’s meddling ~ a month before polling day. Small wonder that Trump has seized the opportunity to query: “If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?”

He may be right in terms of the timeline, but the reversal of the historical Cold War postures has denuded the US election 2016.