Russia's attempted interference in the 2016 US Presidential election is a serious concern. And, as I've been saying all year, should be carefully investigated and the facts put before the American public.
But Russian propaganda bots aren't going to be any "smoking gun" that would expose criminal acts of collusion by the Trump campaign. The financial connections look far more promising as a source of such legal problems, and the most promising route to uncovering any actual acts of collusion on the campaign. I'm speculating, of course, based on what we know in the public record so far.
But I've always worried that the Democrats were taking a careless approach to the Russian election-interference issue, too carelessly trying to blame Russian interference for Hillary's loss and treating any contact with Russians, or involvement with Russian business, or even agree with Russia's position on an issue as
per se a sign of a sinister association or allegiance.
In researching the events of 1917 in Russia in connection with the posts I'm doing around the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia, one of the intriguing historical issues I've focused on is the "German gold" issues, i.e., the claim that the Bolshevik Party was being heavily financed by the German Kaiser and even acting on his behalf. I'll deal with that issue in a later post. But the accusation involves companies allegedly used by to launder the funds from the German Treasury to the Bolsheviks. It's a fascinating piece of historical forensic accounting.
The record-keeping on international financial transactions is much more elaborate today than in 1917. But so are the possibilities of setting up shell companies and money-laundering operations. Which can be difficult enough for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to unravel. And even more difficult to boil down to clear and coherent claims that will be effective for use in real-time political debates.
I was reminded of these difficulties by a couple of different kinds of story recently. Julia Ioffe, who has done some of the most level-headed reporting and commentary on the Russia election interference, writes about
The History of Russian Involvement in America's Race Wars Atlantic 10/21/2017. She describes briefly how the Soviet Union incorporated racial discrimination in America into their international propaganda. And she makes it very clear that they were for the most part using real events and problems:
This came at a critical time for time for the United States. After World War II, the U.S. was a new global power locked in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As the United States tried to convince countries to join its sphere by taking up democracy and liberal values, the U.S. government was competing with the Soviets in parts of the world where images of white cops turning fire hoses and attack dogs on black protesters did not sit well—especially considering that this was coinciding with the wave African countries declaring independence from white colonial rulers. “Here at the United Nations I can see clearly the harm that the riots in Little Rock are doing to our foreign relations,” Henry Cabot Lodge, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote to President Eisenhower in 1957. “More than two-thirds of the world is non-white and the reactions of the representatives of these people is easy to see. I suspect that we lost several votes on the Chinese communist item because of Little Rock.”
“The Russian objective then was to disrupt U.S. international relations and undermine U.S. power in the world, and undermine the appeal of U.S. democracy to other countries,” says [historian Mary] Dudziak, and Lodge was reflecting a central concern at the State Department at the time: The Soviet propaganda was working. American diplomats were reporting back both their chagrin and the difficulty of preaching democracy when images of the violence around the civil rights movement were reported all over the world, and amplified by Soviet or communist propaganda. On a trip to Latin America, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife were met with protestors chanting, “Little Rock! Little Rock!” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained that “this situation was ruining our foreign policy. The effect of this in Asia and Africa will be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians.” Ultimately, he prevailed on Eisenhower to insert a passage into his national address on Little Rock that directly addressed the discrepancy that Soviet propaganda was highlighting—and spinning as American hypocrisy. Whenever the Soviet Union was criticized for its human rights abuses, the rebuttal became, “And you lynch Negroes.”
This is standard fare in international diplomacy and politics. If Country A criticizes Country B over some human rights issue or violation of international law, Country B can always find something to throw back in Country A's face along the same lines.
And it's also common as dirt in politics to refer to what people in other countries are thinking and saying about an issue. Our Allies will think we're unreliable! Credibility in the world! Our example to the world! The US narrative that we should be the lighthouse to the world, the city on the hill, the model for the Free World, that everybody in the world wants to be like America, is such a well-established framing for political rhetoric in the US that worrying about foreign opinion is an everyday concern in foreign affairs and thus in domestic politics.
At the same time, being sucked by an unfriendly power is considered not only dastardly, but evidence of un-Americanism and acting on behalf of a foreign power. Segregationists have always argued that civil rights advocates were Communists and therefore agents of a foreign power, particularly as long as the Soviet Union still existed. And I assume that may be what motivated these tweets from Rebecca Pierce in response to Ioffe's article:
I didn't have that impression that's what Ioffe was trying to do in that article. But it also struck me in reading it that it could easily be misused by others in that way. Maybe too easy.
A different kind of foreign involvement story is also in the news this week. More on Hillary and the uranium: John Solomon and Alison Spann,
FBI watched, then acted as Russian spy moved closer to Hillary Clinton The Hill 10/22/17. The story says explicitly, "There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal. But there’s definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department."
Of course they were. That's what all countries do. Unless they have too few resources to attempt it. I thought as I was reading this, the story does remind us once again that the Clintons should have been more scrupulous in their conduct of the Clinton Foundation to avoid an appearance of improper influence at work.
But Clinton pseudoscandals have been a minor industry since the
New York Times broke its first Whitewater story. And the mainstream media continue to eat them up even decades later. And the Republicans don't even need the appearance of wrongdoing to rave about new Clinton pseudoscandals. So, no surprise here: Olivia Beavers,
House GOP leaders open probe into FBI's handling of Clinton investigation The Hill 10/24/17
Digby Parton looks at this latest Republican ploy in
Latest weird right-wing trick: The Russians were actually helping Hillary! Salon 10/24/2017. The Reps were encouraged by a new report this week that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is looking into possible failure to register as a foreign agent by a lobbying firm considered to by close to the Democrats:
Needless to say, the right-wing media went nuts at this news. This was the hook they've been waiting for. For months they've been pushing a narrative that has Hillary Clinton as the real beneficiary of Russian manipulation, and this is supposed to be proof that connects all the dots. Rush Limbaugh has cooked up a massive conspiracy featuring President Barack Obama, Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Russians over that uranium sale from years ago that's going to blow the lid off everything. (If you can make heads or tails out of what Limbaugh says happened or will happen, take a drink. You need it.)
This uranium story is all over the alternative-facts media, particularly Fox News, with breathless accounts of nefarious Clinton illegality and corruption. According to Rush and others, congressional investigators are on it.
A New York Times story on Monday indicated that the three congressional committees that were supposed to be looking into Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, are hitting a wall. Partisan infighting and GOP lack of focus and interest are pointing toward the conclusion that nothing will be done about any of it. If Mueller's investigation comes up with something concrete, maybe they'll take another look -- but if anyone was expecting the U.S. Congress to be even slightly concerned about the propaganda campaign, the hacking or the attempts to break into actual voting systems, they're going to be disappointed. The Republicans don't give a damn about any of that and they are running the show. [my emphasis]
The respectable posturing by Republican figures like Shrub Bush and Bob Corker is entertaining. But until the Republicans start taking Trump's misconduct seriously enough to investigate the Russian interference in the election and Trump's own questionable behavior as possibly impeachable offenses, it's hard to take them seriously.
