New indictments against Russian cyber-crime

John Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, issued a statement yesterday about new indictments against Russian officials over cyber-espionage, part of which involved a kind of propaganda (USDOJ press release 10/04/2018):

A short while ago, the Dutch Minister of Defense and the United Kingdom’s National Security Advisor held a joint press conference announcing a recent intelligence operation against several Russian agents conducting a clandestine mission in The Hague.

The Joint UK/Dutch intelligence operation led to four Russian GRU officers being caught red handed in The Hague, while they attempted to breach the cyber security of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW].

This GRU target and an additional laboratory in Switzerland that was their next target were analyzing the deadly Russian nerve-agent recovered in the UK following an assassination attempt, as well as other chemical agents that were used in Syria against innocent civilians. ...

Our indictment today charges some of the same Russian operatives caught in The Hague, along with their colleagues in Moscow, as part of a conspiracy to hack a variety of individuals and organizations, in the United States, Canada, and Europe, to obtain information or access that was then exploited for the benefit of the Russian government.

More specifically, this indictment alleges a conspiracy to use computer hacking to obtain non-public, personal health information about athletes and others in the files of anti-doping agencies and sporting federations in multiple countries, and to release that stolen information selectively, and sometimes misleadingly. All of this was done to undermine those organizations’ efforts to ensure the integrity of the Olympic and other games. Other targets of this conspiracy were the chemical weapons laboratory in The Hague and a nuclear power company here in America.

Three of the seven defendants charged in this case were previously charged in the indictment brought by the Office of Special Counsel in July of this year, which pertained to a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The current indictment did not arise out of the Special Counsel’s work. Nonetheless, these two indictments charge overlapping groups of conspirators. And they evince some of the same methods of computer intrusion and the same overarching Russian strategic goal: to pursue its interests through illegal influence and disinformation operations aimed at muddying or altering perceptions of the truth. [my emphasis]

The alleged cyber-attacks on weapons labs, the OPCW, and the nuclear power company are more in line with traditional espionage hard targets, targets that have some important national security role or could become targets for sabotage.

But probing the anti-doping agencies and sports federations to find potentially embarassing material to irritate other countries over the Olympics sounds more like an effort looking for propaganda material and/or facilitating Russian cheating at the Olympics. Obviously, releasing private individuals' medical records without their consent would be a bad act in itself. And poking around in those institutions could also potentially be used for blackmail or possibly help gain access to other systems with more obvious national security signficance.

Two things strike me in this press release. One is that while private acts of this kind are crimes that should be prosecuted, considering them individually as acts of war would be a blank check for every warmonger and mischief-maker with access to influence foreign and military policy. And what countries would we not be at war with by that standard? Even Micronesia has probably engaged in some kind of cyber-espionage on the US, who knows?

The other is that the goal of using information to make propaganda and misinformation around the Olympics strikes me as kind of a petty goal in the grand scheme of things. How that could function as political propaganda that might have any significan effect in US politics isn't at all clear.

Are Russian information operations against the US a war?

Molly McKew defines herself on her Twitter account @MollyMcKew as an "information warfare expert." She has a couple of articles I want to highlight here: Brett Kavanaugh and the Information Terrorists Treying to Reshape America Wired 10/03/2018, giving a summary of some important alt-right contemporary history, from Gamergate to QAnon; and, Putin’s Real Long Game Politico 01/01/2017, a piece from just after the 2016 election on Russian information operations.

McKew also advertises herself as a "Foreign Policy and Strategy Consultant." Wired's author bio notes, "She advised Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's government from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan prime minister Vlad Filat in 2014–15." The Politico description of her includes, "She is a registered agent for Georgian President Saakachvili’s government, which she advised from 2009-2013, and for former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat, who has been in prison since 2015." She begins her Politico piece by recalling "sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter." So it's not surprising that she is sharply focused on Russian online propaganda messaging.

I try to be cautious with terms like "information warfare" or "information terrorism." Because what is being described is generally less immediately fatal than bullets and bombs, which are involved in actual war and terrorism. What is usually called information warfare is otherwise known as "propaganda." It deserves to be taken seriously. But it's effects play out in different ways than shooting people with guns. It's a distinction worth preserving.

Cyber-warfare is a broader concept, and some caution is appropriate in what to include in it, as well. Spying, espionage, sabotaging vital infrastructure, disrupting military operations, all those can be understood as part of warfare. Whether a foreign power monkeying with the computers at a power plant should be considered an act of war that justifies the guns-and-bombs kind of military response is another question.

The Wired article is a longread that explains a process that the alt-right currently uses to spread outlandish conspiracy theories. She talks about the online networks the alt-right has developed as a "runaway narrative architecture":

Gamergate became Pizzagate became QAnon became entrenched modern narrative architecture ripe for exploitation. The cadre mobilized a movement of misogyny and white nationalism and intimidation — of angry boys who reveled in the chaos god of Roger Stone — and cultivated the narrative to make it acceptable to a wider lane of conservatives. This is triggering violence and identifiable forms of extremism that we can no longer ignore.

Free speech discussions often bring up the famous line by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes from a case called U.S. v. Schenck (1919). “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

Trevor Timm explains in It's Time to Stop Using the 'Fire in a Crowded Theater' Quote The Atlantic 11/02/2012:

In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" (emphasis mine).

The text of the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision is available online. As it happens, that ruling overturned a conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader for advocating political violence in the abstract.

Freedom of speech in US law does not give immunity to criminal conspiracies, whether the crime involved is stealing money or a mob boss ordering a hit on someone.

And we need to keep in mind that distinction when it comes to "information terrorism". Being a verbal scumbag is disgusting. But it's not the same as directing someone to commit an act of violence. Responsible people should also keep in mind the likely consequences of spreading inflammatory and/or crazy conspiracy theories on some of the human loose cannons out there. That doesn't mean we should minimize the irresponsibitlity of people like some of the political actors McKee describes in Wired. It does mean that a term like "information terrorism" should be used narrowly for direct incitement to violence or direct threats of violence. Not everything that makes people uncomfortable should be called "terrorism."

Also, if you're going to brag very publicly about hanging out with a "Georgian freedom fighter" at your residence in Washington DC, it might be prudent to exercise caution about encouraging expansive definitions of terrorism.

When it comes to foreign policy and the issue of Russian interference in elections via propaganda, McKee's January 2017 article was already engaging in threat inflation, one of the most damaging characteristics of US foreign policy since the Second World War:

What both administrations [Obama and Trump] fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.

I've always maintained that Russian interference in the US Presidential election in 2016 was a serious issue that needed to be seriously invetigated and countered. Much more information about that Russian effort is now in the public record than was the case when her Politico article was published.

But we also need to be realistic about it. Is there any way to reliably measure the influence of those notorious Russian bots? Not that I've seen. Direct intervention in the physical election systems is a more serious problem, but there is still no real evidence in the public record of which I'm aware that Russian hackers changed or erased votes or otherwise directly affected the voter count. But hacking election systems is illegal in itself. So are foreign donations to American political campaigns, and it appears that the NRA still has to account for its conduct in the matter of Russian money in the 2016 Presidential election. And, of course, there are numerous cases established by convictions in the Special Council's probe of Russian interference that involve inappropriate involvement by US political actors with foreign money adn actors.

But whether Russian bots amplifying Republicans smears and campaign themes rise to the level of those more concrete crimes is dubious. One Russian political intervention that might reasonably be judged as effective came in early 2016 in Europe. On New Year's Eve at the end of December, there were a number of sexual harassment of women in the German city of Cologne during the outdoor celebrations there in the plaza in front of the cathedral, many of them perpetrated by foreigners (Arabs and North Africans), and many cited by the police were asylum seekers. Germany and Austria and several Balkan countries were then still struggling with how to manage the ongoing wave of refugees that coming into Europe at the time in extremely high numbers compared to the years before and after. Russian information operations in 2015 promoted the notion that Germany would accept all comers, an action consistent with Putin's goal of weakening the EU by promoting tensions bewteen EU countries, in this case greatly assisted by the Hungarian government's handling of refugees.

The critics of Merkel's immigration policy of the moment seized on the Köln incident as an example of the dangers posed by her policy, thier message facilitated by the clumsy police public information operations after the event. Then in January, Russian state media seized on a routine news story of a 13-year-old girl named Lisa who had gone missing in Berlin and then turned up the next day. They actively spread the story that she had been kinapped by foreigners and raped for 30 hours, after which the police were said to have forced her to claim the sex was consensual in order to protect the Evil Foreigners. (Alice Bota, Das missbrauchte Mädchen Zeit Online 21.01.2016; Christine Kensche, „Der Fall zeigt, Lisa ist ein Missbrauchsopfer“ Welt 20.06.2017)

The Russian government used that story to promote the Putinist narrative that Europe was allowing itself to be overrun by dangerous foreigners. (Lisa's family is Russian-German.) Alice Bota quotes a commentator on Russian Channel One saying, "Underage girls are being raped, the police do nothing, the perpetrators go free. That is the new order in Germany." Presumabley because of the age of the girl, the circumstances of her disappearance were not immediately publicly explained. But Bota reports that the Berlin police did specifically and publicly said at the time she the girl was not raped.

The story was it spread in Europe, but did it have an effect in Germany and Austria? Bota gives no indication that it was. Russian propaganda was happy to magnify the Trump-style agitation against foreigners as rapists. But how much effect the magnification of such messages promoted by domestic xenophobes in the EU had is, as in the American election, hard to measure. Still, Kensche's 2017 report adds of the aftermath in Germany:

Fünf Männer attackieren die Flüchtlingsunterkunft gegenüber Lisas Schule. Ihre Cousine spricht am Rand einer NPD-Demonstration, die Partei hält eine Kundgebung gegen „Überfremdung“ ab. Hunderte Russlanddeutsche ziehen vor das Kanzleramt, auch NPD und Pegida mischen mit. Propagandaforscher erklären, Russland mache gezielt Stimmung gegen die Bundesrepublik.

[Five men attack the refugee housing opposite Lisa's school. Her cousin speaks on the fringes of a {far-right} NPD demonstration, the Party {NPD} holds a rally against "over-foreignization". Hundreds of Russian-Germans appear in from the Chancellor's office, and the NPD and {the far-right anti-immigrant group} Pegida join them. Propaganda researchers declare that Russia is making a targeted effort to turn the mood against Germany.]

The case caused some notable diplomatic tension between Russia and Germany. So it clearly had a real-world effect on politics.

In 2017, a fuller story emerged in court. It did involve a defendent identified as Ismet S., who presumably has some kind of immigrant background. When he was 18 and Lisa 13, they carried on a romance that included sleeping together once. He was convicted for the statutory rape and for child pornography.

McKew's Wired article gives a good description of the use of rape in political and ehtnic propaganda:

Through each iteration of this [online rightwing] network, rape has been a constant theme. Rape and pedophilia are potent triggers that elicit an intense emotional response from an audience. Rape has been used to fling charges of hypocrisy—almost always involving accusations against Bill Clinton or other Democrats. It has been used to highlight examples of "fake news" by pointing to the few cases where the media has promoted unsubstantiated rape allegations. It has been used in attempts to prove elite corruption by insisting that there is a secret cabal of elites who are pedophiles and predators. It has been used to normalize racism—referring to blacks and Muslims as serial rapists and to migrants as rapists and killers. And it has been used to justify misogyny by arguing that rape is "misunderstood."

McKew in the 2017 article paints the Russian influence operations as strikingly effective. But, compared to the concrete practices of bribery and injecting funds into foreign political groups, it's hard to argue that their propaganda bots are nearly as effective.

With direct manipulation of vote results, the kinds of measures that are needed to guard against that are largelyh the same as those needed to guard against voter suppression efforts. And the efforts to counter Russian propaganda are also part of the effort to combat general misinformation and "fake news" from domestic sources.

But even beyond information operations, McKew's depiction of US-Russia relatioships as "a war ... to be won, decisively — not a thing to be negotiated or bargained," is very much threat inflation. It's not a realistic way to see US-Russian relations. She even seems to be arguing that diplomacy is useless in dealing with Russia. She writes, "As Obama did, Trump has already made the first mistake in negotiating with the Russians: telling them that there is anything to negotiate." Which strikes me as a pretty nihilistic take on the subject.

Jonathan Chait frets about "the left" and Russiagate

You have to feel sorry for Jonathan Chait. The poor guy is stuck in some kind of time warp in which it's always August 1968. And the disgusting hippies are about to mess up Hubert Humphreys' Presidential prospects by rudely bashing their heads against the clubs being held politely by Mayor Daley's Gestapo police force.

Chait wants you to know the hippies love Russia. Beause they're Commies, or Putinists, or something. "Trump is the enemy of the left’s enemy," he writes in Why Are So Many Leftists Skeptical of the Russia Investigation? New York 07/29/2018.

Pssst... don't tell him that there was a big war in 1939-45 where the United States and Russia were formal allies, i.e., they actually were friends. It might give the poor guy an aneurysm.

Chait links to an April article of his own, Corruption, Not Russia, Is Trump’s Greatest Political Liability New York 04/01/2018, which he opens with this:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” declared Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States.” To the extent that Trump’s candidacy offered any positive appeal, as opposed to simple loathing for his opponent, this was it. He was a brilliant businessman, or at least starred in a television show as one, and he would set aside his lifelong pursuit of wealth to selflessly serve the greater good. This was the promise that pried just enough Obama voters away from Hillary Clinton in just enough upper-Midwest states to clinch the Electoral College.

So, Chait in April thought Trump won and Hillary lost in 2016 because he sold himselff successfully in the Midwest as a successful businessman. He added, "The Russia scandal is substantively important, but it is also convoluted and abstract and removed from any immediate impact on voters’ lived experience."

Cenk Uygar on The Young Turks' second hour on July 30 talks about two Russiagate skeptics who are part of his own TYT Network, Jimmie Dore and Kyle Kulinski, saying, "They are super upset that the Democratic Party is using this as an excuse for the loss [in 2016]. and trying to misdirect people in that way. I agree with them on that. I think the Democratic Party is over-focusing on it as a reason for Hillary Clinton's loss." He notes that he has some disagreements with Jimmie and Kyle "about to what degree Trump colluded with Russia and on what issues. But it's fair disagreement."

That is the kind of thing that happens when serious people take a serious issue seriously. We're also talking about a massive international espionage and influence opertion. If Chait would read a couple of John Le Carre novels, he might get the idea that such cases are messy and confusing and clouded by disinformation intentional and otherwise, and that serious journalists, analysts, and activists following the unfolding news will come to different conclusions and will be required from time to time to revise them as more facts become available.

And at least back in April, it looks like Chait thought that it was not the Russians who decided the election for Trump. And it's true that Hillary's campaign immediately after her 2016 loss started pushing the Russia-is-to-blame notion. In reality, the election result was overdetermined and we can't honestly say based on the information in the public record now that Russian influence was decisive.

In fact, he sounded then a lot like a Russiagate skeptic himself!

t should take very little work — and be a very big priority — for Democratic candidates to stitch all the administration’s misdeeds together into a tale of unchecked greed. For all the mystery still surrounding the Russia investigation, for instance, it is already clear that the narrative revolves around a lust (and desperation) for money. Having burned enough American banks throughout his career that he could not obtain capital through conventional, legitimate channels, Trump turned to Russian sources, who typically have an ulterior political motive. Just what these various sources got in return for their investment in Trump is a matter for Robert Mueller’s investigators to determine. But Trump’s interest in them is perfectly obvious.

But in his July 29 piece, he goes for ritual hippie-punching on Russiagate.

"The purest form of this sentiment on the far left is a vein of attacks that are almost indistinguishable from Republican rhetoric about the investigation," he writes. This is one of the laziest of stock political assumptions, that the far left is just like the far right. But for a mainstream reporter, it's perfectly respectable to express lazy assumptions - as long as the lazy assumption is part of the conventional wisdom.

This is cute: "Some of the skeptics complain that Democrats are emphasizing Russia too heavily, but this complaint confuses liberal journalists and activists with Democratic politicians, who are mostly concentrating their rhetoric on health care and other economic issues." Wait. Chait's April 1 argument sounds a lot like what he scolds the leftie skeptics for doing in the July 29 one.

Chait singles out three Russiagate "skeptics" who particularly bug him: Glenn Greenwald, Stephen Cohen, and Aaron Maté. And he lists some lesser offenders: Katherine Krueger, Seth Ackerman, Corey Robin, and Osita Nwanevu. I actually talked about recent comments by Ackerman and Robin a few days ago. I've commented on Cohen's position back in February (Russia-Russia-Russia (again) 02/02/2018), and posted a video featuring Maté (Russiagate and the left 02/19/2018). I posted a tweet by Greenwald in More warnings of the need for realism on the Trump-Russia issue 03/31/2018, which reflects his antiwar concerns in the Russiagate issue.

I haven't seen any reason to think that any of those commentators/reporters/scholars are engaged in bad faith arguments over Russiagate. And in all those cases, I have definite points of agreements with their cautionary warnings. I'm not so familiar with Krueger's or Nwanevu's work on the topic, so I'll leave them for another time.

This is Cenk Uygur's discussion with Kyle Kulinski on Russiagate, which is a far better airing of the how-seriously-should-we-take-Russiagate matter than anything we're likely to see from Jonathan Chait, RUSSIA DEBATE: Kyle Kulinski vs Cenk Uygur 02/07/2018:

Russiagate today

Here are several recent articles that bring out important considerations on the Trump-Russia scandal, i.e., "Russiagate":

• Julia Ioffe, The Spy Who Drove Me GQ 07/24/2018
• Gene Lyons, So Does That ‘R’ Stand For Republicans — Or Russians? National Memo 07/24/2018
• Corey Robin, The Question of Russia and the Left Jacobin 07/23/2018, responding to this Facebook post by Scott Horton 07/21/2018 (?) [Facebook's practice of not showing the date on the current day's post complicates getting the actual dates on posts like this; it's especially difficult with a Facebook poster so prolific as Scott Horton]
• Seth Ackerman, Russiagate Can’t End Well for the Left Jacobin 07/24/2018
• Micah Zenko, Democrats Will Regret Becoming the Anti-Russia Party Foreign Policy 07/24/2018

I've been posting since 2016 about the Trump-Russia scandal. I've always seen two distinct concerns looking at it from a progressive viewpoint. One is that it is a real problem. Based on what was in the public record by the time of the election, at a very minimum we had reports that the "intelligence community" thought Russia was hacking the American election campaign in some way. So that's something that should be taken seriously and deserved a real investigation of some kind, whether Congressional or a fact-finding commission of some kind.

The other is that it was disturbingly clear at the time of the election that advocates of a hawkish policy toward Russia, both the neocon and humanitarian-hawk varieties, were eager to use the scandal to discredit antiwar critics and websites like The Intercept, Truthdig, and Consortium News that have often done important investigative reporting (The Intercept) and provided important, well-infomred dissent from warmongering narratives.

One early alarm bell was the Washington Post's infamous story promoting "PropOrNot," a website promoting a McCarthyist-style list of sites allegedly serving as Russian propaganda outlets. The Editor's Note that was later posted at the beginning of the web version of the article is an embarrassing admission about the quality of the story itself: Craig Timberg, Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say 11/24/2018. See also Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton, Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group The Intercept 11/26/2018, and Adrian Chen, The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda New Yorker 12/01/2016.

The general principle of "just because your're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you" applies here, cutting both ways. Or maybe several different ways. Because, yes, Russia makes propaganda to screw with other countries' politics, including the US. Yes, the US also carries out similar operations, including against Russia. That doesn't mean that either side can or should ignore what the other side is doing it or should neglect to take measures to protect themselves. That's how international politics and international espionage works. And none of that means that people in any country shouldn't criticize such operations by their own country if they think it is problematic or wrong.

Another practical political problem in the United States is that the Clinton campaign immediately after the election seized on Russian interference as the reason Hillary Clinton lost to the Orange Clown. Of course, at various times, her loyalists have insisted that the reason was Jill Stein, that the reason was Bernie Sanders and the BernieBros, that the reason was James Comey. All without giving up the notion that Russian interference was the reason. Politics is politics. But aside from the fact that it was a deflection from some stunning mistakes by the Clinton campaign, the very slim but decisive margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin mean that it's nearly impossible to definitely say that any one of them was a unique cause of Clinton's loss. Plus, the very fact that she was a very sigificant majority of the popular vote nationally raises questions about how effective the Russian efforts may be.

The one thing I've heard that might plausibly turn out to be a decisive intervention - but also hasn't been shown to be so at this writing - is that if Russians worked through their NRA connections to finance and/or direct very targeted campaigns and get-out-the-vote operations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and/or Wisconsin on behalf of Trump. But that's also not something that can be justified based on what's currently in the public record.

The articles cited at the start of this post bring out aspects of the Trump-Russia issue that I find helpful in illustrating the various dilemmas for the press, political parties, and activists that we're seeing play out. Julia Ioffe's piece is an informative and entertaining account of her trying to figure out whether a talkative Uber driver she kept encountering at the Aspen security conference this year was a Russian agent of some sort. It's a reminder for people wondering about what kind of associations with Russians might be considered guilty ones. The lesson she draws from the experience sounds to me like a version of Obama's purported guidline for foreign policy, "Don't do stupid s**t." Most people involved in politics or familiar with basic ethics should have some sense of what kind of things it's okay to chat with strangers about and which not. And also to be on the lookout for people offering some kind of corner-cutting arrangements that might somehow be compromising or make thembody subject to blackmail of some kind.

For most people in the US and Europe, the risk of crossing paths with Russian agents is vanishingly small. But there are other kinds of "espionage" involving trade secrets, proprietary company information, legal confidentiality requirements, that do touch a large number of people. So while there are always borderline cases and gray areas, avoiding getting involved in foreign espionage isn't really that big of a challenge for most people it might touch.

A couple of fictional presentations involving espionage come to mind that actually are relevant to this. One is the recent, much-acclaimed TV series The Americans, which has generated many a fantasy about being seduced by Russian spies. Another is an older mini-series, Oppenheimer (1980), which stars Sam Waterston as J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhatten Project, who had his own issues with security matters.,

Marcy Wheeler describes a recent real world case in which she reported a source to the FBI that she "had come to believe had played a significant role in the Russian election attack on the US.": Putting a Face (Mine) to the Risks Posed by GOP Games on Mueller Investigation Emptywheel 07/03/2018.

Propaganda is a squishier matter. But I have to admit that in general, that doesn't look to me (mostly) like such a complicated thing, either. Now, it's very possible that with decades of political junkiedom behind me, I'm oversimplifying a bit here. But the same kind of critical thinking people should be applying to news coverage generally, or to scientific claims in the popular press, or to any kind of advertising, should be sufficient to protect most people from getting suckered by fake propaganda claims of any sort, foreign election interference included.

It makes sense for public institutions to fund sites like EU vs Disinfo. But they need to be read with a sensible critical eye, as well. The same applies to other publicly-funded news sites, some of which, like the BBC or Austria's ORF, have a solid reputation for independent reporting. And, of course, anyone trzying to understand the diplomacy and international politics of countries adversaries of one's own needs to make some effort to know and understand what the propaganda promoted by the Other Side is.

And, on the critical thinking topic, facts and arguments used in propaganda may be true. Propaganda consists of presentations meant to persuade. In international politics, facts don't normally simply speak for themselves. But the difference between fact and fiction is still important.

The other posts deal with various aspects of the politics of Russiagate. Gene Lyons gives a decent picture of the current state of the Republican politics of this. The Republican base and most of its officeholders don't actually seem to care if Russia is meddling with our election system, as long as it helps Republicans. I probably would have speculated that in November 2016. Now it's hard to avoid that conclusion. (Gene does brush up against the "17 intelligence agencies" problem, though.)

Corey Robin and Seth Ackerman focused on the ways that a careless use of the issue by Democrats can backfire. Corey is reacting n particular to a Facebook post by human rights attorney Scott Horton. Horton in the screenshot from Corey's post:

European intelligence analysts I have spoken with over the last month say that they have picked up clear data suggesting that Putin has authorized and put in play a major active measures campaign designed to split and disable the Democratic Party because he believes this is the surest way to keep Donald Trump in power and undercut any opposition to him. The method used, according to these sources, will generally follow what was done during the 2016 campaign, where one of the core strands of the Russian operation focused not so much on supporting Trump as it did on persuading key Democratic constituencies that it wasn't worth going to the polls to vote. This included general demonization of Hillary Clinton and other candidates as "establishment" or "organization" candidates, and repeating claims that the DNC had "rigged' the vote against Sanders (designed to persuade Sanders supporters not to vote or to vote for another Russia-backed surrogate, Jill Stein); alienating blacks and Hispanics, and persuading them that the Democratic candidates really did nothing for them, etc. The Russian operation will also aim, in the classic fashion, to pick Democratic candidates in the primary period who, for whatever reason, are seen as likely not electable. Some evidence of this is clearly at play now. The key thing to look for is not positive messaging supporting any particular policy program, but negative messaging attacking other Democrats. [my emphasis]

I'm not sure from what I've seen that the 2016 Russian election operation "focused not so much on supporting Trump as it did on persuading key Democratic constituencies that it wasn't worth going to the polls to vote." That argument doesn't support claims that Putin was specifically trying to get Trump elected, although Putin did say in the press conference at last week's Helsinki lovefest that he did prefer that Trump be elected. It may be a distinction without a difference. From the reporting I've seen, it does seem that Russian interference in the US in 2016 was more aimed at causing headaches for Hillary than determining the outcome.

But we should be careful about crediting Russia with superspy capabilities in something so difficult as fixing US votes to produce certain outcomes. The US voting systems need to be protected. But it's worth remembering that two of the CIA's most famous and successful regime change operations, Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, relied a lot on dumb luck. And we're still experiencing the long-term negative blowback from the former.

Horton amplifies his perspective in this post of 07/22/2018 (The Facebook embed function also doesn't show the posting date):



This fits more with a Russian approach of causing chaos. Although they have a specific goal of wrecking the EU. But Horton's presentation there blurs the very real distinction between rightwing anti-EU criticisms and strategies and the EU-critical position of parties like the German Left Party (DIE LINKE), the party of the politician Sarah Wagenknecht pictured there. Thre are real problems with the EU that neither the center-left or the center-right have addressed sufficiently. The best way for Putin to get his wish of seeing the EU break up is to continue with the extend-and-pretend solutions on which the EU currently relies in the long-range crises of the euro and of immigration.

Finally, Micah Zenko warns of the practical foreign policy risks of the Democrats treating Russia as a simple bogeyman:

When a political party increases its animus toward a foreign country—believing that this will enhance its own popularity—it introduces second-order effects that can manifest themselves years later. It creates a voting bloc of Americans who become socialized to hate a foreign government and, by extension, its citizens. It reduces the motivations and complexities of that government to a simplified caricature of anti-Americanism or just plain evil. More broadly, it engenders hostility between the United States and foreign countries, which makes cooperation over shared problems more difficult and rapprochement unimaginable.

Moreover, political parties attempting to out-tough each other has enabled some abysmal recent foreign-policy outcomes. The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which declared it “the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq,” was passed overwhelmingly in the House, passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, and signed by President Bill Clinton in just 32 days. That legislation was preceded, and followed, by both parties wildly exaggerating the threat that Saddam posed to the United States and its regional interests. Likewise, Trump’s confounding withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal—which Iran was adhering to—was politically cost-free to the president because Democrats and Republicans had demonized Iran to the point of simplistic malevolence for decades.

Actual foreign policy is important, too. We need a smart, practical, and peace-oriented foreign policy. And when it comes to Russia, a policy that addresses real problems and threats, from election interference to the Crimea, while also working to forward common interests like nuclear disarmament and sound climate policy. And one that recognizes that Russia is a power far weaker than the old Soviet Union and has no realistic possibilities to become one in any forseeable future. For the Democrats to blow that by following their own conservative instincts to present themselves as the tougher-than-the-Republicans party would be a real tragedy.

Why the Democrats still need to be careful about careless accusations of treason [deep sigh...]

Given the massive number of incidents, financial connections, guilty pleas, detailed indictments, intelligence reports, and stragely deferential policies toward Vladimir Putin's Russia involved in the Trump-Russia scandal, it is downright cautious to say that the information currently in the public record makes it highly probably that President Trump is not only compromised by the Russian government but may well be engaged in actual treason.

The Administration's clear (though barely this side of explicit) threat to turn former Ambassador Michael McFaul over to Russia authorities for prosecution or worse is only one of the most recent telling examples. (Ex-ambassador thanks Senate for resolution against Trump handing over officials The Hill 07/19/18)

Still, I would prefer to see the Democrats pushing hard for impeachment proceedings - which the timid Party establishment doesn't even want Democratic candidates to talk about in the 2018 campaigns - than try to shame Republicans into dissenting from Trump policies by escalating accusations of treson. Not that Democratic elected officials are combative enough even for that, in most cases!

Here's one reason Democrats and the left/center-left generally should be cautious and strategic with the treason rhetoric: Travis Gettys, Bernie Sanders’ campaign strategist Tad Devine turns up 16 times in evidence against Paul Manafort Raw Story 07/19/2018.

The headline will no doubt send a thrill up the leg of many a Hillary hardliner. The article is about the fact that Bernie's campaign "chief strategist" in the 2016 primary campaign "in contact" with Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and presumed Russian agent, Konstantin Kilimnik. There is no allegation of Devine in any way cooperating with an Russian election interference. According to the article, Devine had previously worked with Manafort on lobbying work for the Russian-friendly Ukrainian government of former President Viktor Yanukovych.

And, note bene, as they say in Latin:

The former campaign chairman for President Donald Trump and Devine worked together nearly a decade ago for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Kremlin Party of Regions, and the pair remained in contact until at least 2014.

According to the new court filing, Manafort and Devine communicated by email through June 2014, about five months before he joined the Sanders campaign that November.

Devine and Sanders had worked together on campaigns in the 1990s, and the Democratic strategist has also worked as a campaign aide to Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis. [my emphasis]

Some of the Hillary hardliners have tried pretty much since Election Day to use the Trump-Russia scandal to smear Sanders and Democratic progressives, as well.

So, if Bernie Sanders, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis can be smeared with a vague guilt-by-association with dubious actors, can we really be surprised that Trump's defenders think they convince his fans that Hillary Clinton is the real Russian agent? For just one odious example: Benny Johnson, Rand Paul: The Only Person We Know Coluded With the Russians The Daily Caller 07/18/2018.

It's not a recent thing, either. It's been a Republican taling point for a while.

Digby Parton that tactic in Latest weird right-wing trick: The Russians were actually helping Hillary! Salon 10/24/2017. The Reps were encouraged by a new report that 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]

Trump tossed it out himself in a 2016 in what I still say was a clumsy effort by Hillary to tie Trump to Russian collusion. Trump responded in a typical, "no, your're the poopy-head" mode (Trump to Clinton: 'No, You're the Puppet' Bloomberg Politics 10/19/2016):

And, sad to say, the Republicans are just better at this kind of sleaze-slinging than the Democrats are.

This is not to say that Democrats or the left shouldn't make fact-based criticims of left-leaning arguments that Russian election interference shouldn't be considered a serious matter.

It is to say that Democrats should avoid the temptation to use treason accusations ins a cheap-shot fashion against Trump and the Republicans. The politics of treason are complicated. And the politics of combatting treason should be, also.

Russiagate, again

"As it turns out, [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller can walk and chew gum at the same time," writes Digby Parton. (Beware, President Trump: Robert Mueller is just getting started Salon 03/01/2018)

All of us trying to pay attention to the Trump-Russia scandal by following the evidence are constantly challenged to be able to do the same thing. I wrote about this a month ago in Russia-Russia-Russia (again) 02/02/2018.

It's also very clear that establishment Democrats are now trying to smear progressives as Russian dupes. This might seem counter-intuive, since the Putin regime has the greatest ideological appeal to rightwing nationalists and white supremacists. But it's happening. Here's Hillary Clinton last fall: "And now that some of the potential 2020 candidates are starting to get public attention, they're getting hit, from both the left and the right, and sometimes, when it comes from the left, you're not sure if it's a Russian pretending to be an American on the left or not." (my emphasis) (Russia-gate, then and now 12/21/2017)

It was the Clinton campaign immediately after the election that took the position of blaming the results of the 2016 Presidential election on Russian interference. And, if anything, establishment Dems are even more insistent on that now. But if the Russian were not only determined to get Trump elected as President but succeeded in doing so, aren't the Hillaryites stepping on their own message by making the left particularly to blame for reflecting Russian propaganda?

But accusing opponents of being suckers for hostile foreign powers is a deeply-ingrained habit in American politics. In some cases, it's even been true. In the case of Russia, the accusation of collaboration and foreign sympathies usually fell onto the left and center-left. Jackson Lears in What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking London Review of Books 40:4 01/04/2018 describes the current round this way:

A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

It seems pretty clear from what's in the public record so far that the Russian government or people working for it hacked the DNC. But the Lears' assertion that the Democrats have been making a clumsy effort effort to suppress criticism - especially "when it comes from the left" in Hilary's words - as being tainted by Russian deception and/or sympathy.

If the corporate Dems weren't so intent of fighting the Democratic left - about the only case in which they show a real willingness to fight - they were drop the Russia-determined-the-election bit and instead treat the Russian collaboration in which the Trump campaign indulged to some degree as one part of the mind-blowing brand of corruption and lawlessness on which the Trump Administration operates. The Trump-Russia collaboration is serious. The Russian direct meddling in the election is serious despite the invalidity of claiming it affected the outcome. Illegal Russian campaign funding is serious. Obstruction of justice is serious. the over-the-top corruption of running the White House as the holding company for the Trump family business.

How many of those serious issues turn out in (further) criminal charges remain to be seen. Nor is the scope of the problems. The point is the real story on all of those things needs to be told on a reliable basis for the public record.

Al Jazeera's Inside Story has an episode discussing the current level of corruption in the Trump Administration, Conflicts of interest in the White House? 03/04/2018. YouTube now dutifully notes below its videos that "Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government." Something I've known from the time I first started hearing about Al Jazeera. But if you're worried a 30-minute video will hypnotize you with subliminal programming that will turn you into a Qatari cutout, I would recommend skipping the video.

Miriam Elder and Charlie Warzel make an important point in Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything Buzzfeed 02/28/2018, specifically relating to the social media bots that the Democratic are gnashing their teeth over:

The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund. ...

The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week. “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.” So, not bots.

We’ll likely never know the contents of the list for sure — because the researchers decline to divulge the identity of who they are monitoring. (The reasons they give for secrecy include worries that the accounts would then change their behavior and concerns over identifying accounts that are not, in fact, linked to Russian influence efforts, aka making a mistake.)

The action of bots - not just Russian ones = is also a legitimate concern. But for people trying to follow the evidence, retaining a critical perspective on the claims is important.

Jackson Lears takes an obviously different perspective that I'm using here. But he gives numerous reasons for a skeptical and critical approach to claims about Russian interference with reducing his point to a claim of a Deep State plot against Trump. I want to highlight one of his judgments here, "it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society." I worry that writing off the claims about Russian mischief and crimes around Trump and his Presidency campaign as a cynical power play by the "Deep State" risk validating the Republican/FOX News/Breitbart perspective that the whole thing is purely partisan politics. It's not. There are serious national security issues and concerns about the integrity of American elections involved. And those need to be clarified and adjudicated in the courts where appropriate.

The following section in Lears' piece feels to me uncomfortably close to saying that there is nothing especially heinous about the Trump Administration and his demagogic politics:

It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials. [my emphasis]

But I can't really argue with that particular comparison. The Cheney-Bush Administration practiced a horrifying degree of lawlessness, from the criminal invasion of Iraq, to the torture program, to the Valerie Plame exposure, and on and on and on. "Halliburton" became a political synonym for stunning levels of corruption. The Iraq Provisional Government, aka, Young Republicans Abroad, was a caricature of incompetence in government. Karl Rove became the poster boy for exceptionally sleazy authoritarian politics.

And the Obama Administration with its self-selected goal of creating Bipartisan harmony gave the Chenyites the one thing they couldn't give themselves: a subsequent Administration of the other party that would refuse to prosecute the most serious crimes of the previous Administration.

This is one point where I'm consciously out of step with the prevailing Democratic attitude, reflected also in the prevailing assumption of mainstream media, that legal action against former officeholders is inappropriate and inherently a symptom of authoritarianism. If people really did commit crimes, they should be prosecuted. The failure to prosecute the torture perpetrators of the Cheney-Bush Administration has always been my primary criticism of the Obama Administration. Purely political prosecutions are wrong and illegitimate. But where real and serious crimes were committed, the perpetrators should be held legally accountable. The idea, and too often the reality, of Presidential impunity before the law is a poisonous assumption, incomparable with democracy and the rule of law.

The foreign policy aspect of the anti-Russian rhetoric is also important. From a realist perspective, it should be possible for Russia and the United States to compete in some areas, even on an adversarial basis, and cooperate on others like nuclear arms control and climate change. Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time is also a very practical attitude in foreign policy.

The Democratic Party's position toward the Soviet Union suggests a concern that they are making similar mistakes to those the party made in the 1950s. John Kenneth Galbraith in his signature dry, ironic style describes that position in The Age of Uncertainty (1977). The Secretary of State under Eisenhower was John Foster Dulles. Galbraith recalls that Dulles successfully defined the Cold War as a semi-religious mission for the United States, "The Cold War was a moral crusade. It was also a religious crusade. And it came close to being a Christian crusade. There was more than a hint that a strong, even militant policy, so long as it avoided 'brute power,' would have the endorsement of Jesus." (This, by the way, is something to remember when anti-militarists point to Eisenhower as pragmatic advocate of peace.)

Galbraith proceeds to describe the Democratic opposition to Eisenhower's policies:

The nineteen-fifties in Washington were the years not of Eisenhower but of Dulles. The idea of the irrepressible conflict went virtually unchallenged. The questioning to which, in a democratic socie ty, every important action of the state should be subject was almost comple tely in abeyance. I saw this, in a minor way, at first hand. I was cochairman with Dean Acheson in the latter fifties of one of the subsidiary organs of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Advisory Council. Acheson was chairman for foreign policy, I for domestic policy. The Council was, by common agreement, the most liberal wing of the opposition - the leading edge. At our meetings [Truman's Secretary of State Dean] Acheson attacked Dulles lucidly, brilliantly and with resourceful invective for being too soft on the Soviets. The debate on his draft foreign policy resolutions consisted almost exclusively of efforts - by Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Herbert Lehman and other moderate members - to tone down his declarations of war. That was the opposition to Dulles. [my emphasis]

Establishment Democrats have already gone a long way down that same reckless road in the current situation.

They should be able to do better.

"Russiagate" Tuesday

The political scene in the United States at this moment is full of mutual accusations of being Russian stooges. The Democrats are accusing Trump and his team. (With considerable reason.) Trump and his supporters are accusing the Democrats of being Russian collaborators. (Essentially a continuation of his response to Hillary Clinton in one of the 2016 debates: "No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet.") Corporate Democrats are accusing progressives of being Russian dupes. Some progressive are accusing others of naively falling for warmongering propaganda. Others are trying to thread the needle more carefully.

There are people trying to look as realistically as possible at US-Russia relations with a broader view of the partisan and intra-partisan polemics of the day or the week. They are more likely to be on the Democratic side of the spectrum. But not exclusively.

Just as I was drafting this, I got a pop-up news alert that the Special Counsel has taken new "Russiagate"-related charges public, apparently not reported in the press until today. Josh Gerstein reports in New charges filed in Manafort-Gates case Politico 02/21/2018:

Last week, prosecutors told the court they'd received new evidence that Manafort took part in "a series of bank frauds and bank fraud conspiracies" in connection with a loan he sought in 2016. Mueller's team said Manafort obtained the loan using “doctored profit and loss statements” that overstated "by millions of dollars" the income of his consulting business.

The bank fraud allegations were disclosed in a bail-related court filing made public on Friday that did not contain any indication of what action, if any, Mueller's team planned to take over the alleged fraud.

Manafort and Gates have pleaded not guilty.

Among informed observers who have kept their heads and analytical abilities intact on the Trump-Russia issues, Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel is one of the most notable and evidently very careful. Today, she is writing about Jared Kushner's security clearance issues (Jared's Clearance and the Foreign Policy Version of Conspiracy to Defraud America 02/21/2018):

I’ve come to think of Kushner’s clearance process in similar terms to the way I’ve thought of the bail process Mueller has used with Paul Manafort and Rick Gates: While Gates ultimately did make bail, Manafort is still (!) almost four months after his arrest, struggling to show enough liquidity free of taint from his money laundering to alter his release conditions. The process of making bail (and having to serially beg to attend his kids’ soccer events) seems to have been one of the factors that brought Gates to the point of flipping, but along the way, he probably gave Mueller’s team far more leverage in plea negotiations, because they know how little Gates actually has to pay a defense attorney to oversee the flip (indeed, that may lie behind the confusion over Gates’ current legal representation).

Kushner’s liquidity problems are literally an order of magnitude greater than these men. But unlike them, he made the idiotic decision to work in the White House, and thereby to undergo the scrutiny of sworn statements laying out all the financial vulnerabilities and foreign entanglements that might make him susceptible to blackmail.

Which brings me back to my description of how Mueller is leveraging “conspiracy to defraud the United States” (what I will henceforward refer to as ConFraudUS*) charges to prosecute political influence peddling for which our regulatory system has completely collapsed. With the Internet Research Agency indictment, Mueller charged ConFraudUS because the trolls bypassed a campaign finance system that no longer works. With Manafort and Gates, Mueller charged ConFraudUS because they bypassed Foreign Agents Registration Act requirements that have never been enforced.

Marcy actually reads documents and vets them against other publicly available information and see them in a complex context. She not just claiming anyone who makes a non-hostile statement about Russia is a Kremlin stooge. (And I wonder how many people are aware of how seriously retro and dumb that kind of casual labeling people as Russian dupes really is.)

In both the stories just cited, shady business connections loom large. I still expect that business and dirty-money related issues are likely to be the most serious crimes revealed by this whole process. That's not at all to diminish the seriousness of obstruction of justice or conspiracy charges. But those latter two are likely to be much harder to prove in a legally decisive sense than a lot of Democrats prefer to believe.

Josh Marshall at TPM has also been doing a good job of reporting on the story but keeping his analysis within the bounds of what's in the public record. As I've noted on this blog a number of times, there is no shortage of journalists and partisan Democrats who are not that restrained in their judgments. In Why The Trump/Russia ‘Skeptics’ Are Wrong 02/21/2018, a respectful critique of Politico's editor-in-chief Blake Hounshell's Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic 02/18/2018. Josh makes this point, which is an important one:

I’m also skeptical that we’re ever going to find this kind of formal and explicit agreement between Trump and Putin (what Hounshell calls the “silver bullet”) to conspire together at the very highest levels. My skepticism springs from a few sources. One is my simple skepticism of all bad behavior – both my bane and salvation as a reporter. The other is that I’m just skeptical of things for which I have yet to see clear evidence.

This one, as well:

But the biggest problem with this skeptics argument is this idea that if that explicit and formal agreement doesn’t exist – the “smoking gun” as skeptic Blake Hounshell puts it – that there’s “nothing there.” This strikes me as entirely wrong, not only as a legal matter but far more as a civic matter. This is for many reasons but the principal one is that corrupt transactions are often tacit. You’re helping me. I’m helping you. It’s a good thing for both sides. No need to complicate it.

Russiagate and the left

Even the most legitimate of concerns in public affairs, like Russian interference in the 2016 election, has its politics. People engaged in politics in the US, and often elsewhere, have been threading various needles on the "Russiagate" activists.

For the audiences most engaged with the issues dealt with in the two interviews below, I should probably say interference in the 2016 US Presidential election by the rightwing oligarchic Russian regime of Vladimir Putin.

On The Real News features Aaron Maté interviews John Feffer about left perspectives on the Trump-Russia scandal, Do Russiagate Skeptics Go Too Far? 02/17/2018

In Does Hillary Clinton and Putin’s Beef Go Back To Fracking? TYT Politics 02/19/2018, Nomi Konst talks to filmmaker and anti-fracking activist Josh Fox about part of the oil angle on Russiagate:

Also a good interview. Nomi does say just after 17:40 that Putin's government's policy has been "to wage war with America on all fronts."

I would prefer to see people - everyone, not just progressives - to be more restrained in using "war" to describe what are actually adversarial acts that aren't actually war. Russia has not been waging war with the US on all fronts. That kind of threat inflation leads to bad results.