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.

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:

Russia-gate, then and now

The public status of the Russia-Russia-Russia scandal, aka, the Trump-Russia scandal, Russia-gate, in some ways is remarkably similar to what it was a year ago before Trump took office.

The NSA, the CIA and the FBI have all found that the Russian government leadership, i.e., Vladimir Putin, was behind the hacking of emails from the DNC. Qualified analysts outside the government have verified the plausibility of the claims. News about various meetings with Russian officials have now been publicly reported and acknowledged by participants, some of whom have been dishonest or remarkably reticent to talk about those meetings with law enforcement. As Digby Parton writes, "Trump's behavior" - and that of his campaign - "certainly appears to show what prosecutors call a 'consciousness of guilt.'" (More signs of guilt: Trump’s campaign was warned about Russia, and said nothing Salon 12/19/2017)

But lying about those meetings or Michael Flynn or failing to report business dealings with Russians that were required to be disclosed don't in themselves prove collusion. Although some of the emails that have made it into the public record] sound remarkably similar to what someone would say who was colluding.

But obviously, there are reasons disclosure laws affecting financial holdings and foreign contacts are there, including to avoid officials with high security clearances or major governmental responsibilities being subjected to pressure by a foreign government to commit illegal acts. The familiar saying that presumably emerged during the Watergate scandal that it's not the crime that gets you, it's the coverup, is misleading insofar as it might be taken to mean that laws broken in the process of a coverup aren't all that important in themselves.

The reports from the intelligence agencies on Russian election interference are serious. And they still deserve today as they did a year ago to be competently investigated by Congressional committees or independent commissions that will be able to access classified information that can't safely be released to the public. If the intelligence agencies were lying or incompetent in those reports, that needs to be known, too. That need is there today just as it was a year ago. Unfortunately, the Republican-led Congressional investigations aren't proceeding with the seriousness they deserve.

The Russia investigation is also likely to provide a lot of inconvenient details about the Trump family's business dealings, some of which could well be illegal though unrelated to collusion with Russia on the 2016 election interference.

But I've always been worried that warhawks of different varieties were jumping on the Russia-Russia-Russia bandwagon for purposes of promoting bad foreign policy rather than securing American elections.

And there were also people who wanted to use a Russia smear against people to the left of corporate Democrats, both within the Democratic Party and outside.

Hillary Clinton is at her best in this interview with Rachel Maddow, Hillary Clinton: President Donald Trump Opened Door To More Misogyny MSNBC 09/14/2017:

But I did a real double-take at just after the 5:00 point, where she is talking about potential female candidates for President in 2020: "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) Just a gratuitous dig at lefties as being Commies ... uh, Russians. Now, sure, the Russian government might want to stir up animosities of all sorts. But from what we know of the much-reported Russian attempts to muddle up Western elections, the bulk of the interventions are on the side of promoting rightwing nationalist parties and movements. But there's Hillary, talking about sexism from "the left and the right" and it's the left she suspects of being Rooskies. Corporate Democrats sometimes just can't help themselves.

Prior to 2000, we called this Red-baiting. But through the mysteries of language evolution, "red" in the United States now typically refers to Republicans, not to Communists or Socialists. Go figure.

But that kind of thing has always been a double-edged sword for the center-left, of which corporate Democrats are the most visible expression in American politics right now. In the first part of that interview (separate video), Hillary talks about the demands of some Republicans to open new investigations against her. Talk that seems to be getting louder. And Democrats have good reason to be very dubious about the investigation of Jill Stein of the Green Party for possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.


Jill Stein Denounces Probe over 'Collusion with Russians' The Real News 12/19/2017

This report features former Ambassador Michael McFaul on the Stein "collusion" issues, Senate Investigates 2016 Candidate Jill Stein's Campaign For Russian Ties Velshi & Ruhle/MSNBC 09/14/2017:

McFaul was US Ambassador to Russia 2012-14, so he has high-level experience diplomatic subtleties. But it's hard to imagine that he doesn't know he's really reaching in this interview to make Stein sound like a Russian colluder. His argument is that she has appeared voluntarily on RT and, while she was in Russia for the now-infamous RT celebration, she had some compliments for Russian foreign policy. Good grief! If the standard for "collusion" is expressing an opinion about US foreign policy while in a foreign country, at least half the tourists in other countries would be guilty of collusion. Unless I've missed Congress passing a law requiring US travelers abroad to clear every comment they make with political implications to be pre-screened by the State Department, this kind of criticism McFaul makes here is clearly off the tracks.

Cenk Uygur had a spot-on commentary about the Jill Stein collaboration accusation, including McFaul's version, in this Young Turks segment. He makes the very sensible point that the Democrats playing along with this is just the sort of thing that will help the Republicans undercut the Democrats' insistence that seriously investigating the Russian intervention in the 2016 election, including the role of Trump campaign staff who may have actively colluded with it. Jill Stein Targeted By Russia Investigation 12/21/2017:

The TYT team also followed up with this report, Jill Stein On Russia Inquiry 12/21/2017:

Michael Tracey reports on this in Jill Stein Staffer Undecided on Whether to Share Communications with Senate TYT Investigations 12/21/2017 and Jill Stein Says Senate Russia Inquiry Is “Full Of Crap,” But Urges Staff To Comply 12/21/2017:

Stein has discussed the circumstances of the dinner on numerous occasions, and even publicized the event herself at the time. “No names were exchanged, no eye contact, nada,” she reiterated. “Just a quick handshake—that’s it. There was nothing meaningful at that dinner.”

But Stein says transparency should trump any other concern, and she intends to comply to the fullest possible extent with the Senate committee—if only to highlight its inanity. “There’s plenty of room to critique what this investigation is about, and we will do that in parallel,” she said.

Stein characterized the Senate inquest as part of a political climate which has seen “a resurgence of McCarthyism,” and asserts that media coverage that portrays her as party to some sinister global conspiracy is wildly irresponsible. “The standards of journalism exercised in the discussion of Russia-gate are abysmal,” she said. “There are no consequences for the reporters who basically launched these extremely irresponsible and destructive stories that diminish the stature of the press and that legitimizes the charge of fake news. So yeah, it’s full of crap.”

Cautions on "Russia-gate"

Stephen Cohen is one left-leaning expert on Russia who has been cautioning about politicians, journalists, policy analysis and others jumping to conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump campaign collaboration before clear evidence is available in the public record.

In The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate Consortium News 12/15/2017, he gives us an update. Including this concern:

... the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have spread to “contacts with Russia” — political, financial, social, etc. — on the part of a growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these “contacts” were criminal or potentially so.

This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe McCarthy’s search for “Communist” connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise.

More to the point, advisers to U.S. policy-makers and even media commentators on Russia must have many and various contacts with Russia if they are to understand anything about the dynamics of Kremlin policy-making. I myself, to take an individual example, was an adviser to two (unsuccessful) presidential campaigns, which considered my wide-ranging and longstanding “contacts” with Russia to be an important credential, as did the one sitting president whom I advised.

To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave U.S. policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post, in an editorial. This is one reason why I have, in a previous commentary, argued that Russia-gate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security. [my emphasis]

But Cohen, like some other skeptics who make important points, is also being a bit disingenuous when he argues that "no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced" for the "charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this 'attack on American democracy.'"

This requires a very narrow concept of what constitutes "actual evidence." But the FBI, the CIA and the NSA all did conclude with high confidence that the Russian government was behind the hacks. And also (with somewhat less confidence on the part of the NSA) that Russia had them transmitted to Wikileaks. Russian officials, and Putin in particular, had rational reasons for trying to cause problems for Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, even if most Americans might think they were bad reasons. And, of course, that doesn't justify interference in American elections. Nor should any American government, including Trump's, take that interference less than extremely seriously.

The charges are credible. But it's true that no court or other independent official investigation has vetted the evidence for the hacking. And that no one from Trump's campaign has yet been convicted of or pleaded guilty to collusion with the Russians in the legal sense.

On the latter point, I would say that the circumstantial evidence that collusion took place looks pretty strong. On the other hand, a conviction on direct charges of actual collusion with the Russians by campaign officials has always been less likely than most Democrats would prefer to assume. We'll see what emerges from the special counsel's investigation. And it's entirely possible. But the actual charges related to collusion (or near-collusion) are more likely to have to do with efforts to cover up contacts with the Russians by lying to the FBI or under oath, or from failing to comply with legally required disclosures of financial connections with Russian entities. And there's also a strong possibility Mueller's investigation will uncover illegal business dealings with the Russians or others that aren't involved with collusion on illegal Russian operations around the 2016 election.

Trump is not happy about former intelligence officials talking about the Russians and the 2016 election

Jake Tapper interviewed James Clapper and John Brennan on Trump's latest rejection of the USA intelligence agency findings on Russian hacking and interference in the 2016 Presidential eleciton, Ex-intelligence chiefs fire back at Trump criticism (Entire CNN interview) 11/12/2017:

Juan Cole evaluates this significance of this interview in Former CIA Dir.: Trump is afraid of Putin Kompromat Informed Comment 11/13/2017:

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency openly alleged the real possibility that the sitting president of the United States is being successfully blackmailed and that policy is being made as a result of Trump’s fear of exposure.

Brennan was clear that he has no proof that Trump is compromised.

But Brennan would not make this allegation unless he had at least circumstantial evidence of “kompromat” or compromising materials in the hands of Putin, of the release of which Trump is deeply afraid.

I've never felt comfortable with Democrats or liberals puffing that they're shocked! shocked! I tell you shocked! that Republicans or anyone else would dare question our sacred intelligence agencies. That's a silly and even irresponsible position to take.

James Clapper was Director of National Intelligence (DNI) under Obama (2010-2017), Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Shrub Bush and then Obama (2007-2010), Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Old Man Bush and Bill Clinton (1991-1995). He is a hawkish Democrat affiliated now with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

John Brennan was Director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Shrub Bush (2004-2005), Homeland Security Adviser to Obama (2004-2005), and Director of the CIA under Obama (2013-2017).

I might look at those backgrounds and wish that President Obama had been more cautious about appointing people to senior positions who had been comfortable working in high positions from an irresponsible warmongering like George W. Bush.

But by the same token, it would be difficult to look at those backgrounds and honestly conclude that these were liberal Democratic ideological hacks.

It is also important to remember that some of the claims about the 2016 election interference that were accepted by the Democrats and the press didn't pan out exactly the way they were publicized. This MSNBC segment includes a reminder that the "17 intelligence agencies" trope that Hillary Clinton used in a debate with Trump was not actually true. The most relevant intelligence agencies - the CIA, the FBI and the NSA, endorsed by the Director of National Intelligence - did find that there was real Russian interference.
What Happened To America First? | Kasie DC | MSNBC 11/13/2017;

Dana Priest provides some useful perspective in this piece looking at whether we should fault the US intelligence agencies and the Obama Administration for failing to report publicly during the election campaign what they believed they knew with confidence on Russia interference, Russia’s Election Meddling Is Another American Intelligence Failure New Yorker 11/13/2017.

I found this observation particularly interesting:

Government analysts have always viewed open-source information, or OSINT, as it is called in the intelligence world, as a poor substitute for classified information. Intelligence officials often dismiss the importance of public pronouncements by foreign leaders, actions recorded by journalists, data collected by university professors, and discussions at open conferences. It is a decades-old problem. In 2002, the practice helped blind U.S. intelligence officials to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s evidence that Iraq did not actually possess weapons of mass destruction. In 2010, it blinded them again to the Arab Spring revolutions brewing across the Middle East. Devaluing OSINT has become a more significant problem as Russia and China use social media as an arena to wage disinformation operations.

Unless F.B.I. agents and American intelligence officers get over this bias, they will continue asking for special powers to snoop on Internet users in ways that should not be allowed. If they are denied their surveillance requests, they will likely throw up their hands and say that they then can’t help fix the problem. [my emphsis]

Trump campaign collusion with Russia in Monday's news about legal actions

There are people who are not supporters of Trump or the Republican Party who are justifiably worried about various implications of the accusations of collusion between the Trump campaign in 2016 and the Russian government. Particularly the ways that such interference can be used to promote hawkish foreign policy that may not be in the interests of the United States.

And I'm glad they are being cautious in evaluating the reports coming out. I try to do the same.

Still, some of the comments I've seen today from people with antiwar concerns warning that today's news about formal charges against (at this writing) two people, don't show collusion strike me as being overly cautious. It all has to be legally documented and proven in court. But the legal "statement of facts" filing on George Papadopoulos does have to do with collusion with the Trump campaign and Russia (Tom Schoenberg, Ex-Trump Aide Admits He Tried to Coordinate With Russians During Campaign Bloomberg Politics 10/30/2017):

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, tasked with pursuing collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, just planted the first stake.

Prosecutors on Mueller’s team revealed Monday that a foreign policy adviser on Trump’s campaign, George Papadopoulos, pursued Russia’s help in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and sought to open communication lines to the Kremlin.

Even more than the indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, the case -- showing how Russians attempted to influence key Trump aides -- lays out a blueprint for Mueller’s work as his prosecutors circle other campaign officials.

Schoenberg elaborates these details:

Documents filed in the case against Papadopoulos expand significantly on what had been known about Papadopoulos’s overtures to the Russian government, including that others in the Trump campaign were at least aware of them.

“The Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to meet him when he is ready,” Papadopoulos wrote to a senior campaign adviser on April 25, 2016.

The documents referred to an unnamed campaign supervisor and a second campaign official who nixed Papadopoulos’s idea of setting up a meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The supervisor is quoted telling Papadopoulos in an email that “I would encourage you” and another Trump foreign policy adviser to “make the trip, if it’s feasible.”

The other campaign official forwarded a Papadopoulos email to another campaign official saying, “Let’s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low-level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

This is obviously not the final word on the matter. But it does go to collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Understanding how foreign influence works - and why it's often not at all clear-cut

Russia's attempted interference in the 2016 US Presidential election is a serious concern. And, as I've been saying all year, should be carefully investigated and the facts put before the American public.

But Russian propaganda bots aren't going to be any "smoking gun" that would expose criminal acts of collusion by the Trump campaign. The financial connections look far more promising as a source of such legal problems, and the most promising route to uncovering any actual acts of collusion on the campaign. I'm speculating, of course, based on what we know in the public record so far.

But I've always worried that the Democrats were taking a careless approach to the Russian election-interference issue, too carelessly trying to blame Russian interference for Hillary's loss and treating any contact with Russians, or involvement with Russian business, or even agree with Russia's position on an issue as per se a sign of a sinister association or allegiance.

In researching the events of 1917 in Russia in connection with the posts I'm doing around the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia, one of the intriguing historical issues I've focused on is the "German gold" issues, i.e., the claim that the Bolshevik Party was being heavily financed by the German Kaiser and even acting on his behalf. I'll deal with that issue in a later post. But the accusation involves companies allegedly used by to launder the funds from the German Treasury to the Bolsheviks. It's a fascinating piece of historical forensic accounting.

The record-keeping on international financial transactions is much more elaborate today than in 1917. But so are the possibilities of setting up shell companies and money-laundering operations. Which can be difficult enough for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to unravel. And even more difficult to boil down to clear and coherent claims that will be effective for use in real-time political debates.

I was reminded of these difficulties by a couple of different kinds of story recently. Julia Ioffe, who has done some of the most level-headed reporting and commentary on the Russia election interference, writes about The History of Russian Involvement in America's Race Wars Atlantic 10/21/2017. She describes briefly how the Soviet Union incorporated racial discrimination in America into their international propaganda. And she makes it very clear that they were for the most part using real events and problems:

This came at a critical time for time for the United States. After World War II, the U.S. was a new global power locked in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As the United States tried to convince countries to join its sphere by taking up democracy and liberal values, the U.S. government was competing with the Soviets in parts of the world where images of white cops turning fire hoses and attack dogs on black protesters did not sit well—especially considering that this was coinciding with the wave African countries declaring independence from white colonial rulers. “Here at the United Nations I can see clearly the harm that the riots in Little Rock are doing to our foreign relations,” Henry Cabot Lodge, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote to President Eisenhower in 1957. “More than two-thirds of the world is non-white and the reactions of the representatives of these people is easy to see. I suspect that we lost several votes on the Chinese communist item because of Little Rock.”

“The Russian objective then was to disrupt U.S. international relations and undermine U.S. power in the world, and undermine the appeal of U.S. democracy to other countries,” says [historian Mary] Dudziak, and Lodge was reflecting a central concern at the State Department at the time: The Soviet propaganda was working. American diplomats were reporting back both their chagrin and the difficulty of preaching democracy when images of the violence around the civil rights movement were reported all over the world, and amplified by Soviet or communist propaganda. On a trip to Latin America, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife were met with protestors chanting, “Little Rock! Little Rock!” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained that “this situation was ruining our foreign policy. The effect of this in Asia and Africa will be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians.” Ultimately, he prevailed on Eisenhower to insert a passage into his national address on Little Rock that directly addressed the discrepancy that Soviet propaganda was highlighting—and spinning as American hypocrisy. Whenever the Soviet Union was criticized for its human rights abuses, the rebuttal became, “And you lynch Negroes.”

This is standard fare in international diplomacy and politics. If Country A criticizes Country B over some human rights issue or violation of international law, Country B can always find something to throw back in Country A's face along the same lines.

And it's also common as dirt in politics to refer to what people in other countries are thinking and saying about an issue. Our Allies will think we're unreliable! Credibility in the world! Our example to the world! The US narrative that we should be the lighthouse to the world, the city on the hill, the model for the Free World, that everybody in the world wants to be like America, is such a well-established framing for political rhetoric in the US that worrying about foreign opinion is an everyday concern in foreign affairs and thus in domestic politics.

At the same time, being sucked by an unfriendly power is considered not only dastardly, but evidence of un-Americanism and acting on behalf of a foreign power. Segregationists have always argued that civil rights advocates were Communists and therefore agents of a foreign power, particularly as long as the Soviet Union still existed. And I assume that may be what motivated these tweets from Rebecca Pierce in response to Ioffe's article:

Anti-Blacknesss is reducing Civil Rights struggle to a Cold War propagand tool and giving US govt the credit. Y’all don’t see us as people pic.twitter.com/i8hTxIeUcC

— Rebecca Pierce (@aptly_engineerd) October 23, 2017

The same white liberals who love to quote Angela & Assata have the same racist opinion of their actual work and politics as J. Edgar Hoover

— Rebecca Pierce (@aptly_engineerd) October 23, 2017

I didn't have that impression that's what Ioffe was trying to do in that article. But it also struck me in reading it that it could easily be misused by others in that way. Maybe too easy.

A different kind of foreign involvement story is also in the news this week. More on Hillary and the uranium: John Solomon and Alison Spann, FBI watched, then acted as Russian spy moved closer to Hillary Clinton The Hill 10/22/17. The story says explicitly, "There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal. But there’s definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department."

Of course they were. That's what all countries do. Unless they have too few resources to attempt it. I thought as I was reading this, the story does remind us once again that the Clintons should have been more scrupulous in their conduct of the Clinton Foundation to avoid an appearance of improper influence at work.

But Clinton pseudoscandals have been a minor industry since the New York Times broke its first Whitewater story. And the mainstream media continue to eat them up even decades later. And the Republicans don't even need the appearance of wrongdoing to rave about new Clinton pseudoscandals. So, no surprise here: Olivia Beavers, House GOP leaders open probe into FBI's handling of Clinton investigation The Hill 10/24/17

Digby Parton looks at this latest Republican ploy in Latest weird right-wing trick: The Russians were actually helping Hillary! Salon 10/24/2017. The Reps were encouraged by a new report this week that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is looking into possible failure to register as a foreign agent by a lobbying firm considered to by close to the Democrats:

Needless to say, the right-wing media went nuts at this news. This was the hook they've been waiting for. For months they've been pushing a narrative that has Hillary Clinton as the real beneficiary of Russian manipulation, and this is supposed to be proof that connects all the dots. Rush Limbaugh has cooked up a massive conspiracy featuring President Barack Obama, Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Russians over that uranium sale from years ago that's going to blow the lid off everything. (If you can make heads or tails out of what Limbaugh says happened or will happen, take a drink. You need it.)

This uranium story is all over the alternative-facts media, particularly Fox News, with breathless accounts of nefarious Clinton illegality and corruption. According to Rush and others, congressional investigators are on it.

A New York Times story on Monday indicated that the three congressional committees that were supposed to be looking into Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, are hitting a wall. Partisan infighting and GOP lack of focus and interest are pointing toward the conclusion that nothing will be done about any of it. If Mueller's investigation comes up with something concrete, maybe they'll take another look -- but if anyone was expecting the U.S. Congress to be even slightly concerned about the propaganda campaign, the hacking or the attempts to break into actual voting systems, they're going to be disappointed. The Republicans don't give a damn about any of that and they are running the show. [my emphasis]

The respectable posturing by Republican figures like Shrub Bush and Bob Corker is entertaining. But until the Republicans start taking Trump's misconduct seriously enough to investigate the Russian interference in the election and Trump's own questionable behavior as possibly impeachable offenses, it's hard to take them seriously.

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.

"Fake news" about Russia - a long and venerable tradition

Edward Herman has an informative survey from a left point of view of the history of dodgy reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution of 1917, Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017 Monthly Review 69:3 (July-August 2017):

Fake news on Russia is a Times tradition that can be traced back at least as far as the 1917 revolution. In a classic study of the paper’s coverage of Russia from February 1917 to March 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz found that “From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. ... They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.” Lippmann and Merz found that strong editorial bias clearly fed into news reporting. The editors’ zealous opposition to the communists led the paper to report atrocities that never happened, and to predict the imminent collapse of the Bolshevik regime no fewer than ninety-one times in three years. Journalists uncritically accepted official statements and relied on reports from unidentified “high authority.” This was standard Times practice.

This fake news performance of 1917–20 was repeated often in the years that followed. The Soviet Union was an enemy target up to the Second World War, and through it all, Times coverage was consistently hostile. With the end of the war and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military rival, and soon a competing nuclear power, the Cold War was on. In the United States, anti-communism became a national religion, and the Soviet Union was portrayed in official discourse and the news media as a global menace in urgent need of containment. With this ideology in place and with U.S. plans for its own global expansion of power established, the Communist threat would help sustain the steady growth of the military-industrial complex and repeated interventions to counter purported Soviet aggressions. [my emphasis]

Herman also lists several notorious cases in which the Times and other major US media were insufficiently critical or outright complicit with misinformation, much of it in the context of the rivalry with the Soviet Union: the overthrow of the elected Guatemalan government in 1954 (Hernan's article is especially interesting on that incident); the Vietnam War; the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II; the nonexistent "missile gap" that played such a large role in the 1960 Presidential election; NATO intervention in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s; and, the nature of US the relationship of the US to the Boris Yeltsin regime.

He raises important points of caution about the controversy over Russian hacking int he 2016 election. On this blog, I've tried to focus on Recognizing the seriousness of the Trump-Russia scandal while being careful about the facts (06/02/2017). My own framing of this set of dilemmas differs from Herman's. My outlook would include the following:

• Russian attempts to interfere with the election results via cyber-meddling are serious, whether they were successful or not.
• It continues to strike me as disingenuous to complain that there is no concrete proof of the hacking claims. The FBI, the CIA and the NSA have all concluded that it occurred, but they can scarcely be expected to make public every piece of information they used to come to that conclusion, despite the many ways in which those same agencies abuse the excessive secrecy which they apply to themselves.
• The Wikileaks revelations on Clinton campaign emails played to both the Republicans obsession with her emails and the national press' seemingly endless temptation. But they were mostly routine campaign gossip. And it's hard to imagine they influenced the outcome in as significant a way as, say, James Comey's infamous press conference days before the election.
• We need a good, professional, thorough investigation of the whole Russian hacking issue by Congress and/or some kind of genuinely independent commission. If the FBI, the CIA and the NSA are making such serious claims on such a major and sensitive issue, the voters need to know about that!
• We can object to foolish foreign policies and military provocations against Russia without exonerating Russia of all dirty business on the election hacking and on seeking illegitimate influence with Trump and his team.
• The fact that neoconservative and liberal-interventionist hawks are seizing on the Russian interference issues to promote their dubious and dangerous foreign policy goals does not mean that we should ignore the seriousness of the hacking and influence operation claims.

But some of the claims Herman makes in recommending caution about facts not clearly established in the public record strike me as a bit over the top. Like this one:

The political point of the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] report [of January 2017] thus seems to have been, at minimum, to tie the Trump administration’s hands in its dealings with Russia. Some analysts outside the mainstream have argued that we may have been witnessing an incipient spy or palace coup that fell short, but still had the desired effect of weakening the new administration. The Times has not offered a word of criticism of this politicization and intervention in the election process by intelligence agencies, and in fact the editors have been working with them and the Democratic Party as a loose-knit team in a distinctly un- and anti-democratic program designed to undermine or reverse the results of the 2016 election, on the pretext of alleged foreign electoral interference. [my emphasis]

But he's right in talking about the ways that the mainstream press has been careless about the facts and willing to treat insufficiently documented claims as settled fact, e.g., the claim that it was Russia that provide the hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks. He doesn't even mention the "17 intelligence agencies" trope that I've discussed here before.

Hernan's article suffers a bit from a common left temptation, to treat outcomes as the successful result of some carefully executed plan by the powerful, e.g., the way he describes Trump's bombing of Syria near the end. The role of blundering and just plain incompetence is often underestimated in important matters of state. This current Administration is especially well-endowed with the latter. And the Democrats haven't exactly been brilliant in their political combat against the Republicans in recent years.