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.

Russia and Trump's election

Charlie Dunlap at Lawfare writes about the factually very important question, Why the Mueller Indictment Doesn't Allege the Russians Swung the Election 02/22/2018.

He also extensively cites a Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) study by Duncan Watts and David Rothschild, Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media. 12/05/2017.

Dunlap bases his argument on his reading of how the indictment involving 13 Russians was rolled out:

In announcing that 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were being charged for “seeking to interfere in the United States political system,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made it clear that the indictment contained “no allegation … that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.” Could a future indictment show that? Maybe, but I think that’s unlikely. Here’s why.

I doubt that Rosenstein would make a point of discussing the outcome of the election if he really expected that some future indictment would claim the results were compromised. If Rosenstein knows now that there is such evidence, when that fact does comes out it — as it inevitably would — it would hardly be flattering to him or the Mueller investigation itself. [my emphasis]

That's a bit of "Kremlinology" style speculation, but a reasonable one. Which he explains in further detail.

It's important to remember that collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence is not only difficult to prove. And, as I understand it, the crime involved would not be technically called "collusion," but rather violations of US election law, illegal conspiracy, or illegal acts (like money-laundering) committed in their pursuit or in covering them up. And Dunlap reminds us that such collusion "a very distinct issue from whether the Russians successfully tainted the election."

Watts and Rothschild argue "that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself."

The Hillary Clinton campaign immediately adopted the position that Russian interference was to blame for their loss due to tiny margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Hillary hardliners like Neera Tanden still make that argument, often posing it in the negative, e.g., how can you argue that Russian interference didn't affect the outcome?

Which, of course, isn't the same as offering coherent arguments and factual evidence that Russian actions did decisively affect the outcome. For the reasons advanced by Dunlap, Watts, Rothschild and others, it's not an argument that can be convincingly made based on what is currently in the public record.

But it also is in a real sense irrelevant to what needs to be done investigating what happened in 2016 and and taking appropriate precautions this year and in the future. Dunlap includes his piece, "America still needs to do whatever it takes to preserve the sanctity of the electoral process against the Russians or any other foreigners 'seeking to interfere in the United States political system.'"

"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.

Russia's effect on the 2016 election, or is it on the "American mind," or what?

Wired posted a story about the effect of the Russian intervention on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, Did Russia Affect The 2016 Election? It's Now Undeniable 02/16/2018.

And the story fits with the headline. Referring to the Special Counsel's indictments announced Friday, it says, "this information makes it increasingly difficult to say that the Kremlin's effort to impact the American mind did not succeed."

The author is Molly McKew. Her author information at the bottom of the piece identifies her as "an expert on information warfare and the narrative architect at New Media Frontier. She advised Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat in 2014-15."

Wait. If she's an American citizen, she presumably had to register as a foreign agent to perform those advisory tasks. And aren't those countries over around Russia somewhere? Aren't we supposed to be suspicious of foreign agents talking about American politics? And doesn't that go for countries like Georgia and Moldovo that Americans can't find on the map? Or is it only Russia?

That's not just gratuitous snark, given the how she makes her argument. (Full disclosure: I'm married to an Austrian citizen.) McKew seems to think that Russia's 2016 mischief was ferociously effective in swaying American opinions. Of course there's nothing inherently sinister in itself about someone doing a legal consulting gig for a foreign government. Disclosure like the ones quoted above is important, because they can indicate a possible personal financial stake in taking certain positions. Which doesn't in itself imply corruption or bad faith. In this case, Mikheil Saakashvili was President of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukraine war of 2008. The Bush Administration and the following Obama Administration was sympathetic to Georgia in the conflict with Russia. But readers may be excused for assuming that if Saakashvilli was hiring an "information warfare" specialist in 2009, he wouldn't have looked for someone inclined to take a detached, scholarly position on Russia in international relations.

Vlad Filat was arrested in 2015 in connection with "the disappearance of $1bn (£646m) from three Moldovan banks. ... The missing money is equivalent to an eighth of the ex-Soviet republic's entire GDP. Moldova is one of Europe's poorest countries." (Moldova ex-PM Vlad Filat held over $1bn bank scam BBC News 11/19/2015)

It's worth noting here that the wording in the information warfare specialist's is careful throughout in strongly hinting that Russia's intervention in the 2016 election determined the result without making the explicit claim. Note in the first quote above, she argues that Russia made an effort "to impact the American mind."

The tweet at the top of McKew's Twitter page at this writing is this one:

The West is already at war whether it wants to be or not. Here's how to fight Putin's global imperialist insurgency. https://t.co/3ePvy8Wjbh

— Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) January 2, 2017

Jeet Heer in The New Republic commented on the article of hers she links in that post (A “New Cold War” Against Russia Is a Terrible Idea 01/04/2017):

Molly K. McKew, who has been an advisor to the government of Georgian President Saakashvili and to former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat, argues in Politico Magazine that Russia is already at war with the U.S. According to McKew, Russia sees the U.S. as “the main enemy” and is working to undermine the American-dominated global order. Thus, McKew hopes Trump will come to his senses and treat Russia as the nation’s primary threat. In other words, McKew is calling for a return to the bipolar view of global politics that held sway during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, when Americans thought every issue was a question of the free world versus “godless communism.” McKew is admirably forthright in stating her desire ...

Tweeting about Russia's "global imperialist insurgency" does sound like something straight out of 1955.

The argument McKew tries to make in the Wired article has the same problem that arguments to date about Russia having affected the election results share. Which is that while Russian interference that violate American laws is something to be taken very seriously, democratic elections involve so many factors that determining exactly what factors were decisive is difficult to say with precision. And given that the election result depended on pretty tiny margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, describing very precise effects i those three states would be necessary to make the argument. As McKew herself says near the end:

Persuasion and influence via social media cannot be estimated in linear terms; it requires looking at network effects. It is about the impact of a complex media environment with many layers, inputs, voices, amplifiers, and personalities. All of these elements change over time and interact with each other.

So anyone trying to tell you there was little impact on political views from the tools the Russians used doesn't know. Because none of us knows. No one has looked. Social media companies don't want us to know, and they obfuscate and drag their feet rather than disclosing information. The analytical tools to quantify the impact don’t readily exist. But we know what we see, and what we heard—and the narratives pushed by the Russian information operation made it to all of our ears and eyes. [my emphasis]

In this clip, Hillary Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden says that "we just don't know" if the Russian actions decisively affected the election outcome, though she clearly wants to imply very strongly that it did, Tanden: New Indictment Undercuts Legitimacy Of Trump's Election The Beat With Ari Melber/MSNBC:

Part of the reason that the Russia-Russia-Russia thread has been so central to Democratic criticism of Trump is that the Clinton campaign immediately after the election adopted it as an excuse. Ari Melmer starting around 1:00 in that clip asks her if she thinks the information in the public sphere so far affects "the legitimacy of Donald Trump as President." This is a different question than whether it decided the election or makes his election illegitimate. She responds, "It's hard to say, in my view, that didn't affect 70,000 votes" [referring presumably to the narrow margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan] followed immediately by "we just don't know." I don't want to split the hairs too finely here. But that's what I meant by Tanden implying that the Russian actions decided the election without actually saying so. In fact, she immediately follows with, "And, in my view, that does call into question the legitimacy of this election."

She's saying something like, prove to me that they didn't, despite saying explicitly that "we just don't know" whether they did or not.

There is clearly a lot more to come to public light, and some of it might provide evidence that suggests more strongly than what we have now that Russian intervention affected the outcome of the election.

Undoubtedly, the Clinton campaign and establishment Democrats generally would like to be able that it was Russian tricks that decided the election rather than any defects in Electable Hillary's own campaign. Establishment Dems have gotten very good at making excuses to continue using approaches that lose.

But the facts of illegal Russian interference are important and need to be fully clarified. And that doesn't depend at all on whether it can be shown to have affected the outcome of the election. It may still very well turn out to be business dealings with Russian entities that are the most important source of criminality and vulnerability of the Trumps to Russian government pressures. And problems in Trump's business dealings, including while he has been President, won't necessarily be restricted to Russian entities.

Friday in the Trump-Russia scandal

I've been saying since the 2016 election that it would be nearly impossible to determine that the Russian intervention was decisive in throwing the election to Trump, short of finding direct manipulation of voting machines or Russians doing get-out-the-vote operations in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. With one possible exception, I haven't seen anything yet to change my mind on that, even with today's indictments in the Trump-Russia case.

Even hardcore Hillary loyalists can't settle on whether Valdimir Putin, Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, or James Comey is most responsible for Trump's win. I'm sticking with James Comey, myself.

Whether the Trump people get nailed legally on actually conspiring with Russians on election activities remains to be seen. Although it's looking more likely all the time. As much trouble as major Trump players have taken to conceal contact with Russian players, it's hard to believe that they're not trying to hide some underlying bad acts. But I would still guess that the biggest scandal will turn out to be corrupt business dealings with Russian companies and oligarchs and mobsters of various sorts.

And I would say the most serious hits to American democracy have come from all-American players, notably the massive voter-suppression efforts that the Republicans have been running all over the country. Nobody suspects Putin of rigging the Florida election results in 2000. But the damage that Kathleen Harris and Jeb Bush did in that operation is well known and the consequences for democracy in the US were enormous.

Marcy Wheeler is still on the case, too. Like her take Rick Gates possibly flipping for the Special Counsel, The Gates Flip and the 404(b) Delay Emptywheel 02/15/2018.

James Risen is doing a series of articles for The Intercept on the Trump-Russia case, starting with the provocatively titled Is Donald Trump a Traitor? 02/16/2018. James Risen doesn't exactly have a reputation as a stenographer to the powerful and The Intercept can't be reasonably accused of lacking in critical skepticism on the Trump-Russia allegations. He writes:

Most pundits in Washington now recoil at any suggestion that the Trump-Russia story is really about treason. They all want to say it’s about something else – what, they aren’t quite sure. They are afraid to use serious words. They are in the business of breaking down the Trump-Russia narrative into a long series of bite-sized, incremental stories in which the gravity of the overall case often gets lost. They seem to think that treason is too much of a conversation-stopper, that it interrupts the flow of cable television and Twitter. God forbid you might upset the right wing! (And the left wing, for that matter.)

This initial article in the series gives a useful recap of the state of the scandal based on what's currently in the public record. He updated it with a reference to Friday's indictments:

In fact, evidence of the connections between Trump’s bid for the White House and Russian ambitions to manipulate the 2016 U.S. election keeps piling up. Throughout late 2016 and early 2017, a series of reports from the U.S. intelligence community and other government agencies underlined and reinforced nearly every element of the Russian hacking narrative, including the Russian preference for Trump. The reports were notable in part because their findings exposed the agencies to criticism from Trump and his supporters and put them at odds with Trump’s public dismissals of reported Russian attempts to help him get elected, which he has called “fake news.”

In addition, a series of details has emerged through unofficial channels that seems to corroborate these authorized assessments. A classified NSA document obtained by The Intercept last year states that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, played a role in the Russian hack of the 2016 American election. In August, a Russian hacker confessed to hacking the Democratic National Committee under the supervision of an officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, who has separately been accused of spying for the U.S. And Dutch intelligence service AIVD has reportedly given the FBI significant inside information about the Russian hack of the Democratic Party.

On February 16, just hours after this column was published, the special counsel announced indictments of 13 Russians and three Russian entities for meddling in the U.S. election. The special counsel accused them of intervening to help Trump and damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. The indictments mark the first time Mueller has brought charges against any Russians in his ongoing probe.

Note on the Nunes memo

Phillip Carter writes about the Nunes memo in Survival at All Costs Slate 02/03/2018. The memo was drafted by a Congressional staff person, Kashyap Patel, and Carter treats him as the author in his article:

Patel attacks the secret surveillance warrant on three basic fronts. First, and most significantly, Patel argues that the FBI’s secret surveillance application omitted “material and relevant information” regarding the credibility of the infamous dossier prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Second, Patel writes that this highly controversial Steele dossier formed “an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application.” The implication is that there might not have been any counterintelligence investigation into Trump (and therefore no Mueller inquiry today) had it not been for this fake and politically contrived dossier. However, it’s worth noting that the Nunes/Patel memo undermines this point by stating in its last paragraph that the investigation of Trump’s campaign began before the Steele dossier was prepared, based on information from Papadopoulos and other sources. Third, Patel notes a number of potential conflicts of interest for senior Justice Department officials or lower level investigators and argues these biases tainted the secret surveillance application and should have been disclosed to the court in the warrant application. [my emphasis]

As Carter notes, without seeing the source documents, "it’s hard to judge the truth of the Nunes/Patel memo" in all of its details.

But the point about George Papadopoulos and his loose mouth in May 2016 being a spur to the FBI investigation of Russian connections to the Trump campaign. The New York Times reported in How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt 12/30/2017:

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Mr. Papadopoulos played a critical role in this drama and reveal a Russian operation that was more aggressive and widespread than previously known. They add to an emerging portrait, gradually filled in over the past year in revelations by federal investigators, journalists and lawmakers, of Russians with government contacts trying to establish secret channels at various levels of the Trump campaign.

It has been a Republican talking point that it was the "Steele dossier" that set off the investigation, a piece of oppo research that was partially funded by the Democrats. The idea is that they would try to claim that the entire investigation was the fruit of a poisonous tree, or rather a Democratic Party/"Deep State" conspiracy.

I'll quote again from Marcy Wheeler's (Reasons Why Dems Have Been Fucking Stupid on the Steele Dossier: A Long Essay Emptywheel 10/25/2017):

I have no doubt Russia tampered with the election, and if the full truth comes out I think it will be more damning than people now imagine.

But the Democrats have really really really fucked things up with their failures to maintain better ethical distance between the candidate [Hillary Clinton] and the [Steele] dossier, and between the party and the FBI sharing. They’ve made things worse by waiting so long to reveal this, rather that pitching it as normal sleazy political oppo research a year ago.

The case of Russian preference for Trump is solid. The evidence his top aides were happy to serve as Russian agents is strong.

But rather than let FBI make the case for that, Democrats instead tried to make their own case, and they did in such a way as to make the very solid case against Trump dependent on their defense of the dosser, rather than on better backed claims released since then.

Boy it seems sadly familiar, Democrats committing own goals like this. And all that’s before where the lawfare on this dossier is going to go. [my emphasis]

The Democrats were careless in how they used the Steele memo, so prior to the Times' story on what kicked off the investigation, the Republican claim that the Steele dossier sparked off the FBI investigation had more bite as a propaganda claim.

I'm struck that the Phillip Carter piece does not explain why the release of the Nunes memo may cause actual harm beyond the basic fact that it involved releasing classified information the intelligence community did not want released. Glenn Greenwald is obviously skeptical that such harm is involved in the release:

The FBI, and many Democrats, insisted vehemently that release of the Nunes Memo would endanger national security. Now that we've all read it, is there anyone who believes that this argument was even remotely true or honest?

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 3, 2018

But Marcy does get specific in a new post, The Harm Releasing the Nunes Memo Caused Emptywheel 02/03/2018, pointing to ways in which the information in it could gives clues about sources and methods applied to the Carter Page investigation.For instance, "The memo tells Carter Page — and any co-conspirators both within the Trump camp and overseas — precisely when the surveillance on Page started and what it consists of." It could also make allied intelligence agencies less likely to share information with the US. Marcy hopes that another implication that bugs the intelligence agencies may actually be beneficial, "I also assume — and hope — that this disclosure ends the 40 year drought on the release of information, which the original drafters of FISA envisioned would be appropriate in certain circumstances. I think this the one salutary benefit of this memo; it makes it more likely that FISA will work the way it is supposed to going forward." She means in particular that it may mean more formal disclosure to individuals who have been targeted by FISA warrants.

Unfortunately, the Democrats and (in this case) John McCain are focusing too much on sputtering outrage that anyone would dare question the total integrity of our holy intelligence services (Matthew Nussbaum, The Nunes memo and Putin’s long game Politico 02/03/2018):

“The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a statement Friday. “Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”

Russia-Russia-Russia (again)

The Russia-Trump scandal rolls on. It is and continues to be a defining element of the Trump Presidency.

I continue to maintain that it's possible and necessary to keep several things in mind simultaneously.

1. Nuclear war is a imminent risk that literally has the possibility of destroying the human race. I've always been concerned to hear the climate crisis described as the most serious risk to the future of humanity. And it is a gigantic risk for humanity, in many ways. But nuclear war is the more immediate one. And one in which irreparable damage can been done in a matter of minutes and hours rather than decades and centuries.

2. The US and Russia have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The two countries need to be cooperating to reduce their own stockpiles and to promote international nuclear arms reduction. It's inevitable that in some way, other issues in bilateral relations will affect arms control. But both countries should make real efforts to decouple the nuclear negotiations from other issues.

3. The US and Russia routinely interfere in each other's politics in ways legitimate and illegitimate. And that will continue. Both countries have a legitimate national interest in minimizing such interference. But it's worthwhile for everyone to keep the rhetoric of moralistic outrage within sensible limits. Even if the Other Side does not.

4. Putin's government is a rightwing, authoritarian, oligarchic regime. And apart from any illegal interference in elections in other countries, diplomatically and by example it promotes such regimes in Europe and the United States. But that doesn't mean that everything the Russian government does in internal or foreign policy is unworthy of practical evaluation by observers that aren't also flaming rightwingers.

5. The evidence we have so far about Russian interference in the 2016 election is serious. Much of what is in the public record may be circumstantial. But some of it, like Donald Trump, Jr. expressing obvious willingness to accept oppo research material directly from a shady Russian source, is fairly explicit. It needs to be seriously investigated, as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller seems to be doing.

6. Many Republicans and some on the antiwar left are still insisting that there is no evidence of Russian hacking in the 2016 election. I'm still saying now what I I've been saying at least since January of last year, when the formal report was released by the Director of National Intelligence. The FBI, the CIA and the NSA are all saying that it's very likely that the Russian government did so. And with a slightly lower level of confidence on the part of the NSA, that Russia passed the DNC material to Wikileaks. That needs to be taken seriously. The public should not take it on faith. Either a serious Congressional review, which is unlikely to happen with Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress, or one by some sort of genuinely independent commission needs to be done so that the public can have better confidence in those findings.

7. The neoliberal shock-therapy economics pushed onto post-Soviet Russia first by Old Man Bush's Administration and then by the Clinton Administration was a serious failure, unless you're an oligarch who came out on top. Including massive involvement in Russian internal politics. Time cover 07/15/1996:

8. The Clinton Administration and the Cheney-Bush Administration were both reckless in the eastward expansion of NATO. That doesn't mean that the expansion could be easily rolled back, even if the major NATO members wanted to do so. Russia's military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine are understandable in real-political terms as a response to NATO expansion. That does not mean that the Russian motives were pure, or that the West has to formally accept the formal annexation of the Crimea, other portions of Ukraine, and parts of Georgia. But it doesn't mean that Western policymakers need to be realistic in understanding what military threats those may pose for NATO. Including recognizing how destruction Western regime-change temptations in other countries have often been.

9. The Democrats have a mixed record on how they've handled the Trump-Russia issue. They are very right to insist that it be taken seriously. They haven't always been as careful as they should have about taking public postures that appeared to go well beyond the information in the public record. Take this exchange with Hillary Clinton in one of the Presidential debates, Trump to Clinton: 'No, You're the Puppet' Bloomberg Politics 10/19/2016:

At this time, what was in the public record were the DNC Wikileaks releases and this Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security 10/07/2016:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government. The USIC and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assess that it would be extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion. This assessment is based on the decentralized nature of our election system in this country and the number of protections state and local election officials have in place. States ensure that voting machines are not connected to the Internet, and there are numerous checks and balances as well as extensive oversight at multiple levels built into our election process.

This was serious. But not as specific as the January 2017 DNI public report.

Trump had made a public comment saying he hoped Russia had access to Clinton's emails the Republicans were claiming showed misconduct on her part. We know now that this statement came after the notorious Trump Tower meeting of Don Jr. with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But that was not in the public record at the time of that debate.

Hillary also used the phrase "17 intelligence agencies" that she said agreed on the finding quoted above. When I heard that in the debate, my first thought was, "We have 17 intelligence agencies?" I also didn't recall it being reported that way and wondered if she weren't gilding the lily there. We the DNI issued the January 2017 public report, it was very explicit that the findings were based on the work of the three agencies that would be expected to focus on counterintelligence efforts: the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA. If we count the Office of the DNI, that adds up to four intelligence agencies, not 17.

In retrospect, it's hard not to wonder if Hillary hadn't received some more substantial information on Trump's dealings with Russia. But it's hard to believe that her charge in October 2016 that Trump was a "puppet" of Vladimir Putin was credible to anyone but the most uncritically partisan Democrats.

10. The mainstream media have indulged in some of the same kind of carelessness. Rachel Maddow has spent the last year smirking and cracking smug jokes about Trump and the Russians and spinning unflattering scenarios about the possible implications of each new bit on news on Trump-Russia that are sometimes long on imagination and short on analysis. Going for sensationalism is a big and understandable temptation. But it makes the real picture harder to understand rather than easier.

11. Focusing on Russia trying to interfere with the 2016 election is a necessary and important thing. Trying to argue that the Russians were responsible for Trump's Electoral College win is a much more speculative matter, one that is almost impossible to prove. Any realistic analysis has to take into account other major factors, particular low turnout of the core Obama voters in some key states.

On the other hand, McClatchy reported last month, "The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency." (Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump 01/18/2018). The NRA did spend significant amounts supporting Trump:

... the NRA reported spending a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Trump – triple what the group devoted to backing Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Most of that was money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.

Two people with close connections to the powerful gun lobby said its total election spending actually approached or exceeded $70 million. The reporting gap could be explained by the fact that independent groups are not required to reveal how much they spend on Internet ads or field operations, including get-out-the-vote efforts. [my emphasis]

There are no legal charges against the NRA over this. If, and I stress if, it turns out that they did take money illegally from Russia and they used it for get-out-the-vote operations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, then we could talk in more concrete terms about direct effects on the outcomes. I hope the way I'm describing this indicates what a long shot possibility I think that is.

11. There are people who would like to use the Trump-Russia scandal to promote agendas that have more to do with ginning up wars than protecting American elections. Professional warmongers like Max Boot and Butcher's-Bill Kristol are unlikely to be opposing Trump because they think he's too likely to start wars. Unfortunately, some leading Democrats are using the scandal to try to pose as tougher on foreign policy than the Republicans without offering a peace vision of what a new direction in foreign policy could be.

12. It's possible and useful to counter that hawkish agenda without echoing Republican talking points about there being "no proof" of the Trump-Russia connection.

13. The circumstantial evidence makes it possible that there will be instances exposed of high-level Trump campaign co-operation with Russian emissaries, some of which will be shown to be seriously illegal. Obstructing justice in the official investigation, lying to the FBI, lying to Congress, lying to the FBI are serious crimes in the themselves. But those crimes could also be strong circumstantial evidence of underlying bad acts and/or crimes. But the most serious Trump-Russia connections could also very likely be in the Trump Organization's financial and business dealing with Russian entities rather than campaign collusion as such.

This interview with Russian expert Stephen Cohen cautions about careless accusations. I think Cohen tends to downplay the seriousness of the evidence on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and Trump's vulnerability to blackmail or manipulation by the Putin government. But he's worth listening to. Russiagate is Dangerous, Will Washington Get the Memo? 02/02/2018:

Why the Republicans don't want to know about Russian intervention in the 2016 elections

Will Bunch reminds us that not only do the Republicans want to spare themselves the partisan embarrassment of what a thorough investigation of alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 election because it would remind everyone of how the Russians preferred Donald "Make American Great Again" Trump. Looking at election system vulnerabilities would inevitably bring suggestions for election system security that would make the Republicans' efforts to suppress black and Latino voting much more difficult than they are finding it to be right now. From Can America handle the truth of the tarnished 2016 election? Philadelphia Inquirer 09/03/2017:

American elections are easy to mess with because America’s election system is terrible — Russian hacking or no Russian hacking. Voters went to the polls in 2016 after years of efforts by mostly GOP-led state governments to make it hard for citizens — but especially non-white citizens, college students or the elderly — to cast ballots. Consider Wisconsin, the state where Trump pulled arguably his biggest upset, winning by only 22,748 votes. Critics have said Wisconsin’s turnout fell sharply because of its voter ID law (although maybe not by 200,000, as one study claimed.) Voters in the Badger State were also badgered with “fake news” — some of it undoubtedly from Russia. It’s hard to tell an array of innocent computer glitches and malfunctions from criminal hacking.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or political scientist to figure out what needs to be done. In the long run, we need massive election reform — including a new and improved Voting Rights Act that would pinpoint the most pernicious voter ID laws, an Election Day federal holiday, and same-day voter registration. We need a voting system that leaves a real paper trail that can be routinely audited and easily investigated when there are allegations of vote tampering. And, as the Times article makes clear, we need a more thorough investigation of computer hacking and other problems that occurred in 2016 — regardless of the possibility that we might learn the unthinkable.

The law and a lawless President

Slate reports that it has increased its coverage of the issues around the Trump-Russia scandal. Jed Handelsman Shugerman brings up an important consideration on the Presidential pardon power in this situation, Trump Can’t Escape the States 07/21/2017:

The bottom line is that the only significant barriers to self-pardons are politics (impeachment) and federalism (state powers).

Presidential pardons can’t apply to state prosecutions. That means state attorneys general, especially New York’s Eric Schneiderman, Washington, D.C.’s Karl Racine, and Delaware’s Matthew Denn should think about canceling their summer vacation plans. (Yes, Delaware. Go Google “quo warranto,” see this old post, or better yet continue reading.) And maybe they should open up some office space for Mueller and his A-Team when he inevitably gets fired for getting closer and closer to hard evidence of serious crimes.

The president cannot pardon people for state crimes. Even if Trump pardons, say, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a state prosecutor can bring charges under state law anytime. Similarly, Trump can be prosecuted under state law. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general concluded in 1974 that a sitting president can’t be indicted, but there is no constitutional text or precedent for such a conclusion - and it was obviously an interpretation that benefited Nixon. I think this is an open question. [my emphasis]

This also means, though, that if Trump pardons people, if they still face state charges, they would be able to take the Fifth before Congressional or other federal investigators.

Dahlia Lithwick, whose column is always worth reading, writes about how we need to remember that Lawyers Aren’t Wizards 07/21/2017. The political remedy (political in the broad sense) of impeachment is a ccritical backstop if the President successfully evades normal legal processes.

Please don’t get me wrong. I continue to believe the law and lawyers will eventually save us all, or at least die trying. But the real answer to the myriad legal and constitutional questions Trump raises with each exhale is, of course, that the legalities don’t matter because he doesn’t care, and he either fires, berates, or isolates the lawyers around him who do care. This is asymmetrical warfare insofar as the people who continue to think in terms of the rule of law mistakenly believe that there might be legal solutions.

The Framers erected an edifice of law intended to constrain power, and the president believes that framework is made of spun sugar and cobwebs. The United States is a nation built upon, as John Adams told us, “a government of laws and not of men.” The Trump administration adheres to no law, and whatever men or women keep faith with the law rather than him are discredited as biased against the president. This only goes one way [from Trump's perspective]: Norms are for losers, and laws are for poor people. And now Trump has his dream team of mob lawyers and mad dogs hard at work proving that the only lawyer without a disabling conflict of interest is the one pledging fealty to him. [my emphasis in bold]

Pointing to the Republicans' painfully obvious resistance so far to opposing Trump in the Russia scandal, which will surely soon turn into a tangle of related business scandals, she comes up with a beautifully concise statement about how an abstract ideological belief in the rule of law can facilitate people who intend to undermine it:

This is a problem that requires our focused long-term attention to money in politics, partisan gerrymandering, and voter suppression. And this is, in the end, a problem only because Americans — myself included — are prey to a form of magical thinking about law and the Constitution. The Framers believed the law would fix it, and that makes it easy to hope that the lawyers will fix it. The lawyers became the wizards, and the Constitution became a book of spells, and the best thing a citizen could hope to do is make a donation to a group of lawyers who could perform the right incantations, fondle the correct talisman, and save democracy. [my emphasis]