1.
In her new campaign memoir, What Happened,
Hillary Clinton reveals that she has followed “every twist and turn of the
story,” and “read everything I could get my hands on,” concerning Russia’s role
in the 2016 presidential election. “I do wonder sometimes about what would have
happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the
fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack,” she writes.
2.
Clinton has had a lot to take in. Since Election
Day, the controversy over alleged Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion
has consumed Washington and the national media. Yet nearly one year later,
there is still no concrete evidence of its central allegations. There are
claims by U.S. intelligence officials that the Russian government hacked
e-mails and used social media to help elect Donald Trump, but there has yet to
be any corroboration. Although the oft-cited January [2017] intelligence report
“uses the strongest language and offers the most detailed assessment yet,” The
Atlantic observed
that “it does not or cannot provide evidence for its assertions.” Noting the
“absence of any proof” and “hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that
the Russian government engineered the election attack,” The New York Times
concluded that the intelligence community’s message “essentially amounts to
‘trust us.’” That remains the case today.
3.
The same holds for the question of collusion.
Officials acknowledged
to Reuters in May that “they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing or
collusion between the campaign and Russia in the communications reviewed so
far.” Well-placed critics of Trump—including former DNI chief James
Clapper, former CIA director Michael
Morrell, Representative Maxine Waters, and
Senator Dianne Feinstein—concur
to date.
4.
Recognizing this absence of evidence helps
examine what has been substituted in its place. Shattered, the insider
account of the Clinton campaign, reports that “in the days after the election,
Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Instead, one source
recounted, aides were ordered “to make sure all these narratives get spun the
right way.” Within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession speech, top officials
gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the
up-and-up.… Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
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5.
But the focus on Russia has utility far beyond
the Clinton camp. It dovetails with elements of state power that oppose Trump’s
call for improved relations with Moscow [sic] and who are willing to deploy a
familiar playbook of Cold War fearmongering to block any developments on that
front. The multiple investigations and anonymous leaks are also a tool to
pacify an erratic president whose anti-interventionist rhetoric—by all
indications, a ruse—alarmed foreign-policy elites during the campaign.
Corporate media outlets driven by clicks and ratings are inexorably drawn to
the scandal. The public is presented with a real-life spy thriller, which for
some carries the added appeal of possibly undoing a reviled president and his
improbable victory.
6.
These imperatives have incentivized a
compromised set of journalistic and evidentiary standards. In Russiagate,
unverified claims are reported with little to no skepticism. Comporting
developments are cherry-picked and overhyped, while countervailing ones are
minimized or ignored. Front-page headlines advertise explosive and incriminating
developments, only to often be undermined by the article’s content, or
retracted entirely. Qualified language—”likely”, “suspected”,
“apparent”‘—appears next to “Russians” to account for the absence of concrete
links. As a result, Russiagate has enlarged into a storm of innuendo that
engulfs issues far beyond its original scope.
7.
The latest two stories about alleged Trump
campaign collusion were initially received as smoking guns. But upon further
examination, they may actually undermine that narrative. One was news that
Trump had signed a non-binding letter of intent to license his name for a
proposed building in Moscow as he ran for the White House. Russian-born
developer Felix Sater predicted to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that the deal
would help Trump win the presidency. “I will get Putin on this program and we
will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote, believing that voters would be impressed
that Trump could make a real-estate deal with the United States’ “most
difficult adversary.” The New York Times describes
the outcome:
8.
There is no evidence in the emails that Mr.
Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater
overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s
spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower
project, which had stalled. But Mr. Cohen did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s
direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.
9.
The project never got government permits or
financing and died weeks later.
10.
Peskov has confirmed he ended up seeing the
e-mail from Cohen, but did not bother to respond. The story does raise a
potential conflict of interest: Trump pursued a Moscow deal as he praised Putin
[sic] on the campaign trail. But it is hard to see how a deal that never got
off the ground is of more importance than actual deals Trump made in places
like Turkey, the Philippines, and the Persian Gulf. If anything, the story
should introduce skepticism into whether any collusion took place: The deal
failed, and Trump’s lawyer did not even have an e-mail address for his Russian
counterparts.
11.
The revelation of Sater’s e-mails to Cohen
followed the earlier controversy of Rob Goldstone offering Donald Trump Jr.
incriminating information on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its
government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Goldstone’s e-mail was more fruitful than
Sater’s in that it yielded a meeting, albeit one that Trump Jr. claims he
abandoned after 20 minutes. Those who deem the Sater-Goldstone e-mail chains
incriminating or even treasonous should be reminded of their provenance: Sater is known as “a canny operator and a colorful bullshitter” who
has “launched a host of crudely named
websites—including IAmAFaggot.com
and VaginaBoy.com…
to attack a former business partner.” Meanwhile, Goldstone is a British
tabloid journalist turned music publicist. One does not have to be an
intelligence expert to doubt that they are Kremlin cut-outs.
12.
Then there is Facebook’s disclosure that fake
accounts “likely operated out of Russia” paid $100,000 for 3,000 ads starting
in June 2015. The New York Times editorial board described
it as “further evidence of what amounted to unprecedented foreign invasion of
American democracy.” A $100,000 Facebook ad buy seems unlikely to have had much
impact in a $6.8 billion election. According to Facebook, “the vast majority of
ads…didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or a
particular candidate” but rather focused “on amplifying divisive social and
political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching on topics from LGBT
matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.” Facebook also says the
majority of ads, 56 per cent, were seen “after the election.” The ads have not
been released publicly. But by all indications, if they were used to try to
elect Trump, their sponsors took a very curious route.
13.
The ads are commonly described as “Russian
disinformation,” but in the most extensive reporting on the story to date, The
Washington Post adds
multiple qualifiers in noting that the ads “appear to have come from
accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency,” itself a Kremlin-linked
firm (emphasis added).
14.
The Post also reveals that an initial
Facebook review of the suspected Russian accounts found that they “had clear
financial motives, which suggested that they weren’t working for a foreign
government.” Furthermore, “the security team did not find clear evidence of
Russian disinformation or ad purchases by Russian-linked accounts.” But
Russiagate logic requires a unique response to absent evidence: “The
sophistication of the Russian tactics caught Facebook off-guard.”
15.
The Post adds how Russian
“sophistication” was overcome:
16.
As Facebook struggled to find clear evidence of
Russian manipulation, the idea was gaining credence in other influential
quarters.
17.
In the electrified aftermath of the election,
aides to Hillary Clinton and Obama pored over polling numbers and turnout data,
looking for clues to explain what they saw as an unnatural turn of events.
18.
One of the theories to emerge from their
post-mortem was that Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to
support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media
platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas
in order to increase enthusiasm for Trump and suppress support for Clinton.
19.
These former advisers didn’t have hard evidence
that Russian trolls were using Facebook to micro-target voters in swing
districts—at least not yet—but they shared their theories with the House and
Senate intelligence committees, which launched parallel investigations into
Russia’s role in the presidential campaign in January.
20.
The theories paid off. A personal visit in May
by Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, “spurred the company to make some changes in how it conducted its
internal investigation.” Facebook’s announcement in August of finding 3,000
“likely” Russian ads is now an ongoing “scandal” that has dragged the company
before Congressional committees.
21.
Other election threats loom. A recent front-page
New
York Times article linking Russian cyber operations to voting
irregularities across the United States is headlined, ‘Russian Election Hacking
Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny’. But read on and
you’ll discover that there is no evidence of “Russian election hacking”, only
evidence-free accusations of it. Voting problems in Durham, North Carolina,
“felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack”, election monitor Susan
Greenhalgh says, and “months later…questions still linger about what happened
that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia
and Arizona.” There is one caveat: “There are plenty of other reasons for such
breakdowns—local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions—and no
clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in
it.”
22.
The evidence-free concern over Russian hacking
expanded in late September when the Department of Homeland Security informed 21
states that they had been targeted by Russian cyber-operations during the 2016
election. But three states have already dismissed the DHS claims, including
California, which announced that after seeking “further information, it became
clear that DHS’s conclusions were wrong.”
23.
Recent elections in France and Germany saw
similar fears of Russian hacking and disinformation—and similar results. In
France, a hack targeting the campaign of election winner Emmanuel Macron ended
up having “no trace” of Russian involvement and “was so generic and simple that
it could have been practically anyone,” the head of French cyber-security
quietly explained after the vote.
24.
Germany faced an even more puzzling outcome:
Nothing happened. “The apparent absence of a robust Russian campaign to
sabotage the German vote has become a mystery among officials and experts who
had warned of a likely onslaught,” the Post reported in an
article headlined ‘As Germans prepare to vote, a mystery grows: Where are
the Russians?'” The mystery was so profound that the New York Times also
explored
it days later: ‘German Election Mystery: Why No Russian Meddling?’
25.
Following this evidentiary praxis, Russia can be
blamed for matters far beyond Western elections. After the recent
white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, foreign-policy consultant Molly
McKew issued a widely circulated appeal on Twitter:
“We need to have a conversation about what is happening today in
Charlottesville & Russian influence, and operations, in the United States.”
(McKew recently testified at a U.S. government hearing on ‘The Scourge of
Russian Disinformation’.)
26.
Writing for
CNN, Yale Law School’s Asha Rangappa asserted that Charlottesville
“highlighted again the problem of Russia.” Sure, Rangappa concedes, “there is
no evidence to date that Russia is directly supporting extreme right groups in
the United States.” But Russian government ties to the European far-right “when
viewed through the lens of Trump’s response to Charlottesville, suggests an
opening for Russian intelligence to use domestic hate groups as a vehicle for
escalating their active measures inside the United States.”
27.
Linking Russia to right-wing American racists
contrasts with just a few months prior, when it was fashionable to tie Russia
to the polar opposites. In March, intelligence-community witnesses soberly
testified to Congress that Russia’s “21st-century cyber invasion” has “tried to
sow unrest in the U.S. by inflaming protests such as Occupy Wall Street and the
Black Lives Matter movement.” The evidence presented for this claim was that
both movements were covered by the Russian state-owned television network RT.
28.
Russian-linked tweets about NFL players kneeling
during the national anthem to protest racial injustice show the Russians
“trying to push divisiveness in this country,” says
Republican Senator James Lankford. A Russian-linked ad about Black Lives
Matter aimed at audiences in Ferguson and Baltimore “tells us…that the Russians
who bought these ads were sophisticated enough to understand that targeting a
Black Lives Matter ad to the communities…would help sow political discord.… the
goal here was really about creating chaos,” says CNN reporter Dylan
Byers.
29.
But this story might actually tell us a lot more
about the attitudes of pundits and lawmakers towards their audiences. On top of
the 3,000 ads identified by Facebook, Twitter has now informed Congress of
around 200 accounts “linked to Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
Twitter has 328 million users. To suggest 200 accounts out of 328 million could
have had an impact is as much an insult to common sense as it is to basic math.
It also suggests Black Lives Matter protesters in places like Ferguson and
Baltimore were unwitting foreign agents who needed Russian social-media
prodding to march in the streets. To protest racism is not to sow “chaos” and
“political discord,” but to protest racism.
30.
Because the ads may have originated in Russia,
it is widely taken for granted that they were part of an alleged Russian
government plot. Few have considered a different scenario, pointed
out by the journalist Max Blumenthal, that the ads could have been like
those from any other troll farm: clickbait to attract page views.
31.
Some who focus on Russiagate may be acting from
the real fear and disorientation that follows from the victory of the most
unqualified and unpredictable president in history. But those who partake,
particularly those in positions of privilege, should consider that Russiagate
offers them a safe and anodyne way to “Resist.” For privileged Americans to
challenge Trump mainly over Russia is to do so in a way that avoids confronting
their own relationship to the economic and political system that many of his
voters rebelled against. “If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, if the
American presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian
intelligence services and an American campaign,” to borrow a scenario posed by
Rachel Maddow, then there is nothing else to confront.
32.
But economic discontent, along with voter
suppression, the Democratic Party’s failures to reach voters, and corporate
media that gave endless attention to Trump’s empty promises and racial animus,
are among the issues cast aside by the incessant focus on Russigate, as are the
very real U.S.-Russia tensions that do not fit the narrative. Amid widespread
talk of Putin pulling the strings, Trump has quietly appointed anti-Russia
hawks to key posts and admitted a new NATO member over Russian objections.
Trump’s top military commander, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, is backing an effort by the Pentagon and Congress to arm
Ukraine with new weapons. President Obama had rejected a similar proposal out
of fear it would inflame the country’s deadly conflict. Just before Russia’s
recent war games with allied Belarus, the United States and NATO allies carried
out their “biggest military exercise in eastern Europe since the Cold War”
right next door.
33.
These tensions only stand to worsen in a
political climate in which diplomacy with Russia is seen as a weakness, and in
which challenging it through sanctions and militarism is one of the few areas
of bipartisan agreement. Conflict with a nuclear power may threaten the future
annihilation of many, but it offers immediate benefits for some. “NATO concerns
about Russia are seen as a positive for the defense industry,” the business
press notes in reporting that military stocks have reached “all-time highs.” As
have the ratings of MSNBC, the cable network that has pushed Russiagate more
than any other.
34.
Those unbound by Russiagate’s offerings need not
succumb to them. Trump didn’t get to the White House via Russia, but by falsely
portraying himself as a populist champion. The only con he will be undone by is
his own.
Aaron Maté is a host/producer for The Real News.
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