Rogue spooks, p.18
Rogue Spooks, page 18
They were both right. And both wrong.
But the situation was not a simple one.
Putin’s new aggressiveness scared Europe even as Ukraine’s westward drift terrified Russia.
As Ukraine’s internal tensions stoked the old Cold War back to life, Obama was getting alarmed at Russia’s increasing imperial ambitions.
Putin originally sought to use the democratic process to gain influence in Ukraine. His proxy was Viktor Yanukovych, who was defeated for election by pro-Western forces in 2004. After years of economic pressure by Russia—which included cutting off gas deliveries to Ukraine—the Ukrainians caved and voted for Yanukovych to resume power in the elections of 2010. His campaign was masterminded by American consultant Paul Manafort (later to be Trump’s campaign manager).
But when Yanukovych began to move away from a close association with the European Union and toward a closer bond with Russia, Ukraine erupted.
Pro-democracy demonstrators occupied downtown Kiev in November 2013. When Yanukovych tried to crack down in January 2014, the protests turned violent. Ukraine’s parliament ousted Yanukovych and called for new elections. Voting was strictly along ethnic lines, and Petro Poroshenko, the pro-Western candidate, won over 50 percent of the vote.
The next month, Putin invaded Crimea, adjacent to Ukraine, using Russian troops at the Sevastopol Navy Base to occupy the country. At the same time, pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine started a civil war. Armed and supported by Russia, the conflict has raged ever since.
No longer could Obama ignore the Russian threat, and, in the spring of 2014, he imposed sanctions on Russia, limiting travel to and from the United States and seizing the American bank accounts of several key Russians. The European nations lined up behind the United States and imposed sanctions of their own.
A second and third round of sanctions followed in April and July 2014, targeting Russia’s vulnerable energy and banking sectors. As the sanctions bit and expanded, Russia began to feel the pain.
The Putin-Trump Bromance
In this environment, the Obama administration was surprised to hear candidate Donald Trump say nicer things about Putin than Americans had been hearing from their politicians lately.
In September 2015, in a Republican presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would get along with Putin and Russia despite Putin’s support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. “I would get along with him,” Trump said. “I would get along with a lot of the world leaders that this country is not getting along with.”6
A bromance between Trump and Putin seemed to blossom when they sent each other verbal Christmas gifts in separate TV appearances on December 17, 2015.
Putin went first, saying that Trump is “a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt.”7
Trump replied the same day during an interview on the TV show Morning Joe. Asked how he could get along with Putin after knowing that he had murdered political dissidents and journalists who opposed him, Trump replied, “he’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike we have in this country.”8
Pressed about Putin’s tactics in crushing political dissent, Trump seemed to excuse it, saying, “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also.”9
Putin purred back: “[Trump’s] saying he wants to go to another level of relations, closer, deeper relations with Russia. How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome that.”10
The warm comments between the two must have raised the eyebrows—and the antennae—of the Obama White House and State Department.
While the verbal bouquets were flowing between Trump and Moscow, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the NSA (signal intelligence and wiretapping), alerted Washington that the bromance might not be just platonic. In autumn of that year, as Putin and Trump were exchanging warm messages, the British raised the “alarm that Moscow had hacked the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee.” The Guardian explained that “the compromise of email exchanges among senior Democrats was spotted when voice intercepts, computer traffic or agents picked up content of the emails flowing towards Moscow.”11
But when the FBI passed the British warning to officials at the Democratic Party, they brushed them off, refusing to take them seriously.
Seriously?
The New York Times reported the bungling, blaming a series of “missed signals, slow responses, and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack” that allowed Russia to “roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months.”12
When the FBI called the DNC, in September 2015, to pass on the British warning of a hack of the party’s computers, their call was initially referred to the “Help Desk.” From there it went to a DNC contract worker with limited computer skills.
Apparently the genius who took the call from the FBI thought it might be a “prank call” and, after a “cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of cyberintrusion,” paid it no heed. The FBI called back several times but was still ignored. According to an internal memo, the staffer said he “had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call.”13
The Democratic National Committee even delayed the FBI investigation into the hacking by initially refusing to give the FBI direct access to servers and data.14
While we do not know for certain if Russia was responsible for the hacking, we have to suspect it was, based on the unanimous opinion of U.S. intelligence.
All we do know is that on July 22, 2016, just as the Democratic National Convention was being called to order, 19,253 emails and 8,034 attachments contained in the emails of seven key DNC staffers were made public by WikiLeaks. The emails dated from January 2015 to May 2016.
The emails showed overt bias by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in favor of Hillary Clinton’s nomination.
With the Democratic Party locked in a close seesaw contest between Hillary and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, the national party apparatus—and its chairman—was supposed to be neutral.
But the emails showed a very different story. The party machinery had been closely coordinating with the Clinton campaign and doing all it could to advance her candidacy.
For example, in May 2016 DNC chief financial officer Brad Marshall told the DNC chief executive officer, Amy Dacey, that they should get the media to ask Sanders if he was an atheist.
Donna Brazile, who succeeded Wasserman Schultz as party chairman, tipped off Hillary about what questions she would be asked at an upcoming town hall–style debate with Sanders.
WikiLeaks also released ten years of hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign manager. Oddly, a typographical error may have been at fault in opening Podesta’s door to the hackers.
The New York Times reported that in March 2016, the Democratic Committee got an email purportedly from Google saying hackers had tried to infiltrate Podesta’s Gmail accounts. As The Hill summarized, “When an aide emailed the campaign’s IT staff to ask if the notice was real, Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan replied that it was ‘a legitimate email’ and that Podesta should ‘change his password immediately.’ ”15
Oops! Delavan meant to type that it was “illegitimate.” And, by telling Podesta to change his password, “he had inadvertently told the aide to click on the fraudulent email and give the attackers access to the [real] account.”16
Meanwhile, the investigation into the hacking of the Democratic computers continued. The Washington Post reported, in December 2016, that “The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.”17
The paper reported that “Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.”18
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”19
Again, no sources, just “a senior U.S. official.”
But many had their doubts.
Donald Trump, for example, sneered that “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” He told Time magazine: “I don’t believe they interfered” in the election. He said that the hacking “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”20
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in a September 2016 briefing for congressional leaders that he doubted the veracity of the intelligence.
For his part, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, says flatly that the “Russian government is not the source” for his published leaks.21
On December 29, 2016, as noted, Obama imposed sanctions against Russia to retaliate for their meddling in the U.S. election. The president expelled thirty-five Russians living in the United States who were suspected spies. He seized two luxurious waterfront properties in Upper Brookville, New York, and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that, he said, were being used for intelligence.
Putin denied the charges, paraphrasing former president George H. W. Bush, who, in the 1988 campaign, famously denied that he would raise taxes, saying “read my lips.” Putin replied, when he was asked if he had sought to influence the U.S. election, “read my lips—no.”22
Putin blamed the accusations on U.S. politics and warned that it was dangerous to pit Washington against Moscow. “Do we want to completely destroy our diplomatic relations, to bring the situation to how it was in the 1960s, with the Cuban missile crisis?” Putin asked.23
And how did Russia supposedly “meddle” in the U.S. election? Actually, the verb “meddle” was a comedown from the earlier charge that Moscow “hacked” the election, implying that they may have monkeyed with the vote count itself. But, on January 5, 2017, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia “did not change any vote tallies or anything of that sort.”24
Even if Russia was behind the hacking, there was no way that the release of these emails was responsible for Hillary’s defeat. While one can argue credibly that Hillary’s entire handling of her emails, her deletion of tens of thousands of work-related correspondence, and her secrecy all contributed significantly to her defeat, the actual hacking of the DNC and Podesta’s emails did little to destroy her candidacy. While they embarrassed the Democratic Party in general and Podesta in particular, there was no way the hacked emails contained information that crippled Hillary’s campaign.
In making the accusation of meddling, the Democratic/media establishment invoked the idea of “fake news,” suggesting that Russians had used online and social media news sources to plant phony stories that were widely read and even more broadly believed. Some speculated that Russia generated these stories and that their propagation was a major example of the Kremlin meddling in the U.S. election.
In an effort to pin the blame for Hillary’s defeat on fake news, Hunt Allcott of NYU and Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford published a study in March 2017, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.”25
Their research found that “fake news was both widely shared and heavily tilted in favor of Donald Trump” during the 2016 election cycle. They said they found 115 pro-Trump fake stories that were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared a total of 7.6 million times.26
But the bottom line, they said, was that 15 percent of respondents recalled seeing at least one of the fourteen fake news headlines tested in the study. The authors cited this fact to show how widely fake news was spread—to one in seven American voters!27
But their finding was totally debunked because, when they read to the same voters in their study fourteen bogus headlines they had just made up for the survey and which had not been in circulation during the election, 14 percent also recalled reading at least one of them during the election! So the study’s finding—that fake news permeated deeply—was disproven by its own data.28
But whether or not Russia’s supposed intervention in the election was decisive, the question remained: Did Donald Trump or his people try to solicit and aid Russian meddling in the election?
Ever since Hillary’s defeat, the entire apparatus of the intelligence community—with its echoes in the media and in Congress—has sought to create a phony scandal with the implication that the new American president was treasonously involved with Russia and Putin.
The scandal was the key element in the campaign to destabilize Trump and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his presidency. The campaign of anonymous stories and leaks has led to formal investigations of Trump and his campaign by the FBI and the congressional intelligence committees.
Could the intelligence community create enough disinformation to lead to impeachment proceedings? The question hangs over the Trump presidency. Exactly as the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence community planned. And as they have done in so many countries around the globe.
During the Senate debate on the nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) characterized the investigation of Russian meddling as “a huge shadow over the incoming administration. The more we know the darker the cloud becomes.”29
Suspicion and pseudo-scandal have always been the destabilizing hallmarks of the intelligence community. The phony scandal of Russian meddling served this purpose admirably as it grew in intensity as the election campaign proceeded.
At first, Obama refused to take the hacking story seriously. The New York Times reported that Obama did not publicly name the Russians, so the Russians escalated again—“breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or broadcast what they found.”30
And the bromance between Trump and Putin continued to blossom. Questioned by Matt Lauer during a candidate forum in September 2016, Trump again praised Putin as a “leader” and said he was “highly respected within his country and beyond.” Trump noted that Putin “does have an 82 percent approval rating.”31 When Lauer asked Trump about Putin’s praise of him, the candidate replied, “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.” Trump said, “The man has very strong control over a country. Now, it’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system. But certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”32
Lauer persisted, naming Putin’s bad deeds—invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea, supporting Iran, and backing Assad. He even told Trump that, “according to our intelligence community, [Putin] probably is the main suspect for the hacking of the DNC computers.”33
Trump responded, saying Obama was just as bad: “Do you want me to start naming some of the things that President Obama does at the same time?” Trump asked.34
Earlier, on March 28, 2016, Trump had called attention to Russia when he hired longtime Republican political consultant Paul Manafort to run the show. Manafort had many business ties with pro-Russian Ukrainians, and served without pay in the Trump campaign. He had received millions in fees from his Ukrainian clients, much of it allegedly in cash.35
Was it a coincidence that Trump, who had warmly praised Putin, now hired a consultant who had represented the Russian’s favorite candidate in the Ukraine?
Suspicions of a Trump quid pro quo with Putin were heightened when the Republicans avoided a sharp condemnation of Russia’s Ukraine policy. Diana Denman, a platform committee member from Texas and former Ted Cruz supporter, proposed an amendment during a national security platform meeting to support arming Ukraine to fight Russia.
Josh Rogin, writing in the Washington Post, said that “The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes . . . to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.”36
The climax came on July 22, 2016, when the hackers—Russian or not—released the Democratic Party’s emails. The resulting storm forced the resignation of the party chairman and blighted the opening day of the Democratic National Convention.
Trump laughed it off, inviting Russia to hack and release Hillary’s State Department emails, too. He said, five days after the Democratic Party’s emails were published, “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”37
Trump said he was only kidding, but was he?
The question seemed to hang in the air.
Now that Trump was the official Republican nominee and Democratic fantasies that someone else might overtake him were dashed, the nominee’s relationship with Putin seemed to offer new fodder as a campaign issue.
Hillary’s allies in the media pounced.
The Washington Post headlined its story: “INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY INVESTIGATING COVERT RUSSIAN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES.” In the story, Post reporters confirmed that U.S. intelligence believed there is a “broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions.”38
