RUSSIAN ELECTION MEDDLING: RED OCTOBER SURPRISE

From March 29, 2019

It’s All-Mueller-Report, All-the-Time this week, but that’s domestic so I’m largely going to set that aside. Suffice it to say, I expect a full role reversal among the chattering class in the coming days and weeks. Those that cursed Mueller’s name for the past two years will now hold him up as a paragon of integrity. Meanwhile, those that had been venerating him as a mastermind and soon-to-be Savior of the Republic will point out that he’s just another Republican tool and can’t be trusted. This is why I prefer international relations — at least until recent times, people were normally consistent. And so are national interests.

Which smoothly transitions to what parts of the Russian tampering narrative I will discuss. The “tampering” part. As opposed to “collusion.” Trump may not have colluded with the Russians, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t interfere on their own accord. Russia did meddle with the election. They did run “bots” and Facebook ads to create confusion.

Do I like that Russians are trying to sway voters in this country? No. But it is in their national interest to do so. And they didn’t just start — the Soviets planted stories and paid candidates throughout the West as far back as Stalin. We can be certain that the Chinese do it as well, and no doubt are very good at it. More openly, there are lobbying groups representing nations and ethnicities around the world that advocate for their interests. Not only do I hope we do the same, we don’t even try to conceal it much of the time. The Clinton Administration could not have done more to keep Boris Yeltsin in office if they tried. Obama and his team would have pushed Netanyahu out of Air Force One if they had the opportunity. And again, we do so because we perceive certain electoral results to better suit our needs. It’s all about those consistent national interests that I mentioned.

But even while I understand the legitimate interests the Russians have in sowing discord in our electoral process, that doesn’t mean we don’t have an even greater interest in preventing such meddling. I would like to think that Facebook ads don’t change voting habits, and the studies show that they do not, but that doesn’t mean we can disregard them. We obviously need to be vigilant against foreign hackers compromising actual vote totals, but the cumulative effect of dozens or scores or more anonymous posts and ads being seen daily can not be dismissed out of hand. Once there is a real, definable effect on an election, people will lose faith in the system going forward.

Despite that dire possibility, we’re not there yet. Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian Meddling, which includes but isn’t limited to Collusion. I hope that when we see the actual report, which we will, there will be serious attention paid to this. Given the fact that we’re talking about Russian state actors and their hirelings, though, such hopes should be reasonable. I doubt that Mr. Mueller had wide open access to FSB personnel or files. And if he somehow did, I hope that fact is deeply, deeply redacted. Regardless, people are now, perhaps, a bit more savvy about being manipulated. And the liberals who once sung the praises of Wikileaks now, at least for the moment, acknowledge that it is just a Russian supported Agent of Chaos. These minor steps, if true, are better than nothing. But does the fact that we see these kernels of meddling mean that we are now immune? Hardly.

In fact, I will go so far as to say that we’ve missed the forest for the trees. All those ads and bots and leaks did nothing to actually effect the outcome of the election. Nonetheless, the Russians just pulled off an operation against our system unrivaled in its success. Not only a success in terms of it’s destabilizing effect on our democracy, but also in that nobody seems to understand that it happened. But it did. It was that big of a success. Put simply, it is fairly evident that all of the domestic political strife brought about by the allegations of Russian Collusion, which has torn this country apart for almost three years, is in fact the result — intentional result — of Russian Meddling. Yes, the Collusion didn’t happen, it was a narrative CREATED as a result of the Meddling.

OK, maybe this is getting a bit complex, thanks to the syntax. So let’s go step by step. In 2016, the Hillary campaign, through their law firm Perkins Coie, engaged Fusion GPS to do oppo research on Trump. (Fusion had been working on a similar project for the Washington Free Beacon during the GOP primaries, but terminated the project after Trump secured the nomination.) Fusion GPS, working with former British spy Christopher Steele (to be played by Michael Sheen in the movie), at this began poking around Europe for dirt. Steele turned to his high-placed sources in and around the Russian government and they gave him just what he was looking for. And the resulting Steele Dossier, which somehow landed in the hands of the Obama FBI and Justice Department led to the FISA court which lead to tapping which lead to….. on and on.

I’m not indicting the Clinton campaign, or singling them out for taking a course of action that led to the production of a salacious, dubious, unverified (in fact, widely debunked). It was an honest attempt at opposition research, and I have no problem with that. It is a part of campaigns. It always has been, an always will be. (If it is ever shown that they somehow supplied it to the Justice Department while vouching for it’s authenticity. Well, that ‘s a little different.) What I am angry about, or at least troubled by the fact that no one seems to care, is the fact that it seems obvious that the Russian government fed false information about an American presidential candidate to an individual acting (indirectly, but knowingly) for the opposing candidate. That information, even though widely disproved or dismissed, served as the basis for multi-year investigation of the President and effectively handicapped his administration on many issues while casting doubt not just on his legitimacy, but in fact his loyalty to the United States. I can’t imagine that whoever in the Kremlin decided to feed this information to Steel could have dreamt of just how successful the operation would be. Putin should give him the Order of Lenin (whatever it’s called now) immediately, if he hasn’t done so already.

This isn’t to say that this is as Putin planned it. In fact, I don’t believe that Putin wanted to see Trump elected. I think he wanted Hillary. He knew her. He’d run circles around her and her boss. He had no reason not believe that she wouldn’t roll over in the same manner that Obama had. Putin had (has) her emails, the mere suggestion of which could have been used against her. He knew that Trump in defeat would have railed against a rigged election, an argument that Putin would have echoed and used domestically as further evidence that democracy is corrupt. At the same time, he could tell his people that the West again chose the anti-Russian candidate as further evidence of Russian persecution. But Trump won, and with him came two years of chaos.

So, while there seems to be nothing that can support the claims that Russian bots persuaded 80’000 Midwestern Hillary fans to switch their vote for Trump, it seems equally obvious that they accomplished something far more insidious instead. And we don’t seem to even want to acknowledge how badly we were played.