According to the Moscow Times, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov wasn’t too impressed or intimidated when he learned that he’d become the target of U.S. sanctions authorized under the Global Magnitsky Act, the law that punishes authorities who abuse human rights. Stating that the U.S. need not worry because he hadn’t been “ordered” onto American soil “yet,” he accused the U.S. of spilling blood all over the world while his home region enjoys peace and stability.
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal had a different take, basically taking the sanctions as a counterexample to the common wisdom that Trump is soft on Putin and his allies. After all, in June 2016, one of the things the Russians wanted Donald Trump Jr. to promise when they met with him and Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower is that a Trump administration would take the name “Magnitsky” off the global human rights legislation.
This is one way in which the right is fighting back against the Mueller investigation. Another way is to attack the Steele Dossier.
WOW, @foxandfrlends “Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.” And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2017
But the intelligence community hasn’t been idling away their Christmas holiday. They’re sporting a massive feature in today’s Washington Post on how the Russians deployed trolls and composite personalities to place propaganda in leftist online publications like Counterpunch and to overwhelm social media feeds. In addition to that, they’re also pleased to see a second Post article on how the Russians presaged their assault on America with their campaign during the seizing of the Crimea. One of their top pieces of information is a Russian intelligence report from 2014:
An intercepted Russian military intelligence report dated February 2014 documented how Moscow created fake personas to spread disinformation on social media to buttress its broader military campaign.
The classified Russian intelligence report, obtained by The Washington Post, offered examples of the messages the fake personas spread. “Brigades of westerners are now on their way to rob and kill us,” wrote one operative posing as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. “Morals have been replaced by thirst for blood and hatred toward anything Russian.”
It’s not always clear if the intelligence community considers the Russian interference in our election as having been a successful attack because Trump is ridiculous and is destroying our credibility and straining our alliances, or if they think it is because Trump is pro-Russian and parrots Russian propaganda nearly as effectively as their composite trolls. What does come through though is that there is a basic premise that the thing that was unthinkable and that caught us almost completely by surprise was the fact that foreign intervention could achieve an election result as catastrophic as the one we suffered last year. For example, what ambitions and dangers are being referred to here?
U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies saw some warning signs of Russian meddling in Europe and later in the United States but never fully grasped the breadth of the Kremlin’s ambitions. Top U.S. policymakers didn’t appreciate the dangers…
Or, in this case, what exactly is the threat?
This account of the United States’ piecemeal response to the Russian disinformation threat is based on interviews with dozens of current and former senior U.S. officials at the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and U.S. and European intelligence services, as well as NATO representatives and top European diplomats.
Is it that simply that the Russians would introduce information into the public discourse that wasn’t true? I don’t think so. The threat was that they’s use that false information to create divisions on both the left and the right, to undermine trust in American institutions, and to make it possible for a pro-Russian demagogue to take power in Washington. In this sense, it couldn’t be clearer that Trump is not seen as a legitimate president.
I think that’s why the typical administration pushback is so ineffective:
“If it changed one electoral vote, you tell me,” said a senior Trump administration official, who, like others, requested anonymity to speak frankly. “The Russians didn’t tell Hillary Clinton not to campaign in Wisconsin. Tell me how many votes the Russians changed in Macomb County [in Michigan]. The president is right. The Democrats are using the report to delegitimize the presidency.”
One thing should be kept in mind here, however, and this is that the intelligence community and the foreign policy establishment are in no way synonymous with the Democratic Party. It’s not that the Democrats are trying to delegitimize the presidency. The much broader Washington superstructure is what’s at work in this, and they’re not so much trying to convince others that Trump is illegitimate as they’re convinced of it themselves. It’s not really controversial in their circles, which is why they discuss the election the way they do, as an attack on the U.S. that they were not prepared for, that they didn’t fight back against strongly enough when there was still time.
This is also the way Trump views this dispute, which is why he immediately regretted publicly admitting that the Russians were responsible for the hacks: “It’s not me,” [Trump] reportedly told aides about his attribution of the hacking to Russia in that January news conference. “It wasn’t right.”
Trump understands that there is a distinction between legal questions and standards of proof in determining whether his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy and a more general question of whether he’s the beneficiary of an anti-American influence campaign. If he’s basically the prize Putin received for his interference, that’s even more delegitimizing than if he savvily utilized the Russians for his own purposes. In the former case, he might be just as big of a dope and a dupe as the foreign policy establishment and the American people.
However you come down on these issues, we can see the field of battle taking form today by the competing story lines. One is emphasizing that the intelligence against Trump is fake, his investigators are biased and that he isn’t really so soft on Russia after all. The other is adding more factual pieces to their construction of a case for massive Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, reminding us that we were assaulted and that the president is not our own but essentially a puppet imposed on us by a foreign power.
These maximalist strategies are both distorting. The American people elected Trump and even if a majority voted for his opponent, the blame for the election result cannot all be placed on Russia. Trump also has a degree of legitimacy just by virtue of being duly elected, even if certain criminal acts during the election may destroy that legitimacy. In truth, Trump knows and acts like he’s not an innocent party or a legitimate president, and that’s the best evidence against him. It’s never been just sour grapes by the Democratic Party. This is a dispute between Russia and the United States establishment, and in a way Trump is almost a spectator.
“Putin has to believe this was the most successful intelligence operation in the history of Russian or Soviet intelligence. It has driven the American political system into a crisis that will last years.” — Andrew Weiss, a former adviser on Russia in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations
“I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president … You have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and instincts of Putin has come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president.” — James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence
“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.
“Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.
“In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”- Michael J. Morell, the acting director and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013.
Given the basic attitude of the intelligence community, I can see why Trump’s supporters would doubt the objectivity of the FBI and Robert Mueller, but it was the director of the FBI James Comey who delivered the strongest wound to Hillary Clinton in the waning days of the campaign when he announced he was reopening a case against her. What Mueller is trying to do is to see if the intelligence community can prove their theory of the case. If they can, then Trump will be removed from power with just cause. If they can’t, then he’ll stay in power but with the ever-present suspicion from his own government that he isn’t loyal or trustworthy.
Trump should be comforted that a Republican congress won’t impeach and convict him for minor offenses or based on contentious evidence. They probably won’t even remove him even when most Americans think the case is proven. Trump has a jury that is far more biased than the intelligence community ever could be, so he isn’t as disadvantaged as he’d like us all to believe.
I had suspected for a while that a lot of the “purity ponyism” was driven by paid Russian agents and now the evidence is showing up. It’s exactly what I suspected – create legitimate-looking personas and then gradually shift them to produce nonsense about “evil Hillary”.
The disturbing part is – is public opinion that easily shifted? Because now that everyone sees that it works, it’s not just going to be the Russians next time. It’s going to be the Kochs and the Mercers and Exxon-Mobil and every other multibillionaire monstrosity we’re trying to stop. If conservatives can get the leftists to turn on the cleanest and most liberal Presidential candidate in at least 30 years for a few hundred million, tops, in dark money, what can we do in response?
You actually have the timing reversed. It was definitely the Mercers before the Russians and the Kochs back in the early Citizens United era.
“If the conservatives can get the leftists…” Show me the money and where it went. That data is not out there except as repeated allegations like the “Prop or Not?” listing.
The GOP is perfectly capable of producing its own propaganda and false flagging about “evil Hillary”. And most likely did.
What is most easily shifted in elections is the anxiety in the voting booth that gets a shift from one candidate to another.
What we can do in response is make sure to turn out GOTV troops locally for the candidates we want to see.
Koch’s fronted a candidate in 2010 with Walker.
The Supreme Court in their backwards logic allowed money into politics. From there to Trump is a short jog, especially with a little help from your friends in other governments. And what sort of leadership do we have to fight this? Money rules. Muller may find himself at a dead end or white crimes that they all do.
Hard conservative money has been running campaigns since forever. David Koch ran as libertarian VP back on 1980. What’s new, and disturbingly easy, is the manipulation of leftist media and social media. AFAIK, the conservatives weren’t trying to do that in a big way, but they will now.
The shoestring nature of left media makes it easy to create false fronts. A million or two a year will pay a decent group of journalists, making them able to put out high-quality coverage of left issues meeting or surpassing blogosphere coverage. Then, when Democrats select a candidate, the media figures can turn on them, picking nits and making mountains out of molehills. Nobody’s perfect; you can ALWAYS find something anybody has done you won’t agree with.
This is even more true with social media as we’re finding it’s largely steered by bots, which can pile onto hashtags to pick what will be under discussion. That’s not something you can fight with shoestring budgets and volunteers, and in addition I get them impression that most leftists aren’t willing to do something as “dishonest” as have 1000 sockpuppets to get them onto the Twitter hot tags list.
Betcha Obama never gives them a chance. He’s out and staying out, I think. Time to collect on 8 years of hard work. 9 or 10 if you consider his original original presidential campaign.
AG
This coming from a guy who’s been insulting Obama for years.
Precisely.
Thank you, Tarheel.
Right on the money.
The dark money.
AG
Here is who has dogged Hillary Clinton for 25 years and it hasn’t been the left wing.
Digby:
While most urban legends about the Clintons start somewhat small and then grow in the telling, this one appears to have sprung fully formed from the deranged imagination of Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who worked on the security team for the Bush and Clinton White Houses. Aldrich had an unending contempt for the Clintons, who he clearly viewed as a couple of dirty hippies with their Fleetwood Mac records and daughter named after a Joni Mitchell song. After he left, he decided to cash in on that hatred with a 1996 book entitled “Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House.”
The same sort of folks have been only too willing to say virtually anything about the Clintons. The GOP mills have lots of shops working (and still working) the Clintons. They will crank up the Obama shops as soon as Obama looks to be a political threat or when they was to bury his accomplishments. These are professional GOP hit artists. But they are taken for granted as if they are the weather.
Der Trumper and his Fuhrer Circle understood immediately that they cannot just sit back and let “the process” unfold. Instead, they must extensively engage in witness tampering and in poisoning the “jury pool”–the mass of American rubes. Whatever the level of actual collusion turns out to be, Team Trumper was well aware from the start that Putin wished to foist the tragicomedy of a prez Trumper onto his lifelong geopolitical opponent and would do whatever he could to accomplish this goal. And an amoral grifter isn’t going to say “no” to anyone who helps further the con, ha-ha.
One of humanity’s greatest failings is that once opinions have been formed, new data is not used to revise that opinion, but only operates to make the initial opinion stronger. Rightist reactionaries are the people least likely to be able to address this failing in their thought processes. Thus Der Trumper & Co. keep up the (literally) daily dogtrot of disinformation, from tweet to Sara Hucksterbee podium, which serves only to buttress the 46% who voted for him. The mind of the Trump voter is already made up.
And that is far, far more than he needs to keep him squatting in the WH, with the plutocratic Repubs in power. Remember the first few weeks of January when we were assured (by Repubs!) that “we will get to the bottom of this!” What Repub says this now?
Putin paid a high price in the intelligence world for this great success, as all democratic regimes and intelligence services are now very well aware of this Russian cyber-gameplan and (unlike the hapless US of A) will attempt to erect safeguards. And it must be admitted the Russian scheme required a thoroughly dysfunctional “democratic” victim such as the US, with its failed archaic constitution, intellectually destroyed citizenry, hyper-partisan landscape, teeming racial tensions, legalized campaign bribery and useless media structure.
But the prize was well worth the cost to Putin, as American “democracy” has now been shown to be an utter farce and its people abject fools—bumbling, spiteful incompetents who concluded this unqualified, sociopathic conman was somehow fit for the presidency of all things–some of them because of Russian bots and micro-ads that shouldn’t have fooled a nitwit, but were found quite persuasive by noble voters in certain neighborhoods of FailedNation, Inc. Such a colossal national failure can never be rectified or expunged from the record of history, and that can be placed on Putin’s mausoleum.
You write:
I am not seriously accusing you of the following, euzoius…I really have no clue about your intentions. But…isn’t your broad putdown of the U.S. political and social culture…one with which I pretty much totally agree, by the way…exactly what someone who wished to further the disarray of this system would want to see on so-called “progressive” sites like this one?
Thus my growing retreat from the commentary scene. To much possible “post-truth”-era confusion.
And this is an even more frightening fruit of the whole digital tree. Everybody is suspect until proven innocent, and innocence cannot be proven!!!
Sorry, but there it is.
Had to get it off of my chest.
Back to doing something unchallengeably real…practicing an acoustic musical instrument.
Later…
AG
Any insight, opinion or conclusion that has you reducing your presence on this blog is more than welcome.
The entire strategy of folks like Bannon is to use similar tactics to sexual assault to wind the opposition and credibility of the claimants, first of all Hillary Clinton, around the axle. And so far, the defenders of Clinton and the business-as-usual Democrats have walked right into the trap. Schumer’s November call for a tax cut, the revival of Grand Bargain thinking on the Democratic side, Schumer’s collaboration with the redesignation of the capital of Israel. The promises and then failure of DACA. The repeated trusting any Republican as a negotiating partner.
You cannot assert that Trump is an authoritarian (True, very true), that the GOP is marching off in an authoritarian and corrupt manner, and keep treating the Trump administration as business as usual. Did no one in the Democratic caucus expect the disaster the tax bill will be? Did no one expect that the mainstream media would be pushing the public to eat the shit sandwich.
The Trump administration is operating outside the norms of recent American government (even the GOP-corrupted norms of the McConnell administration. The Supreme Court has in its last appointment been rigged differently from ever appointment since Roosevelt’s “court packing”. The American Bar Association standards used to rule so that failure to pass that checkpoint meant immediate failure of confirmation, no arguments. Just check Clement Haynesworth, Harold Carswell, and…bigotry, corruption/incomepetence, and then Harry Blackmun got confirmed. What civil society organizations are contending in the stead of the publc?
What fundraising organizations and donors are contending in the stead of the public and directly fronting the interests of major donors?
Any number of political scholars of authoritarian regimes have pointed out the danger signs with the Trump regime and now with Congressional and Republican Supreme Court collaboration.
The #TrumpRussia battle lines are until Mueller start presenting evidence just jangling keys. And the retired national security heads who lined up with Clinton are suspected of post-political career motives (like the peddling of nuclear reactors and security systems) instead of the good of the country. There is some substantial rot in the secret agencies what must be shaken out in the corruption of the Trump administration. Being able to tell two stories that move in different directions when both are true is going to be what gets the US public through this period. The problem is the absence of credible actors in DC, including Mueller, BTW. Their credibility will have to be created de novo, a bit like the credibility of the Watergate Committees were created. Unfortunately, there are not sufficiently honest actors on the Republican side to act as the straight shooters and some key Republicans in Watergate were.
There is absolutely no one in media with the broad trust that some of the big three anchors in the 1970s had. Nor is PBS and NPR close to the idealistic bunch they were in 1973.
The operation of the United States government is until then more important to watch for what is new and different and unprecedented. And unconstitutional. Even if it takes a running legal battle to move issues to courts that can preserve constitutionality. (Choose jurisdictions carefully.)
Were that the “Resistance(tm)” were an authentic resistances or opposition party and not just a PR drop for a bunch of Democratic media consultants. Were that the Democratic caucus was serious and completely united in their opposition to Trumpism.
What Digby says:
The Democratic Caucus is enabling the illusion of normal procedure in Congress when it is anything but normal.
What the trap is is having it come of as merely partisan because that is how unseriousness in strategy will come off to those not partisans themselves.
Pelosi, Schumer, et al.
AG
When have the Democrats NOT colluded with Republicans to inflict pain and harm on the peons? I’m not talking about working in a bipartisan way for the GOOD of the 99%. I’m talking about how Democrats have appeared to capitulate to Republican demands and/or Republican-developed legislation.
People talk about how Dems need to “grow a spine.”
Phooey. Dems grew very very strong spines a long, long time ago. Too bad those spines were grown in order to thwart the needs of the 99% in order to pander, kow-tow to and just generally help their main constituents in the 1%.
Been going on for far too long, imo, and I really don’t see anything NEW in Dem behavior since Trump has been elected. The D Team continues to “go along to get along.” This inures most specifically to the benefit of the corporations and super wealthy who fund these weasels.
Don’t trust ’em, frankly, but that’s just me.
I mean: Chuck Schumer? Ya mean Chuck Schumer, D-Israel/Wall Street?
That Chuck Schumer?? Ya think he gives a stuff about the peons? He’ll work with Trump, if it inures to his own personal benefit. Count on it. Has already happened.
No surprise.
We keep going through these tiresome semantics. What does “all” mean? If the number of votes he got because of Russian interference is greater than the number of votes he won by (which, yes, he lost the popular vote, but you know what I mean; apportioned to the states in question), then the Russians elected him, full stop.
I’m so sick of the sophistic arguments that we can’t blame the Russians because there were other factors at work; Hillary not campaigning in certain states; Comey’s announcement, etc. It’s a numerical contest; you can focus on any sufficiently large set of votes as the “sole” reason a candidate prevailed, just like you can point to any sufficiently heavy item in a rocket’s payload as the “sole” reason the thrust was insufficient to launch the rocket.
If you remove the Comey letter, Clinton wins. If you remove the Russian interference, Clinton wins. So they’re each “solely” to blame. It doesn’t matter which you’re talking about; you can’t deny the central importance of one by referring to the other. It’s just false logic. “What about all the other reasons” is an exercise in pointless sophistry. I blame the Russians because they tried to do this and it worked. The existence of “other reasons” doesn’t weaken this point in the least. (There’s never been an election in history in which every single vote could be attributed to the same cause.)
I’m tired of Republicans getting off the hook for all of the shenanigans that they pulled.
I’m also interested in just how many votes got swung what which shenaninigan. Disenfranchising felons, even those who have served time, is a 250,000 vote pool that has both black and white voters but is highly skewed toward black voters because that is the purpose of disenfranchising felons and having a school-to-prison pipeline. North Carolina once again had caging of voters, which was counteracted with some strong lawsuits, which had to be filed again because the GOP does not believe the law applies to them if they can get away with it once.
The issue with Russia is not just a matter of Russia. I would like the anonymous PACs audited for foreign funds. And similar investigations of Russia done for Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other countries known to be lobbying in DC.
Considering how far the idea of a purge is spreading and even senators like rand paul and graham are now falling in line, who is going to remove trump from power?
Sorry to bring you down, JO. I am staying, if only until the outcome of the current counter-coup attempt becomes clear. Win; lose or draw seem to be he only options available. Why do I say that? Because Tump’s win was most definitely a coup, the first since the JFK and anti-Nixon coups and also the first that was aimed against the entrenched PermaGov. I can only see three possible results, myself, and none them are very appetizing.
1-The PermaGov manages to completely eliminate Trump (and Trumpism in any dangerously threatening form.) Then we are back where we started…a mediocre, self=perpetuating bureaucracy running a Permanent War economy, only the eyes of the marks will have been at least somewhat opened to the game. Long prognosis…trouble in the cities, trouble in the sticks, more and more militarization of the policing forces and the iron glove will eventually be forced to take charge, all the while protesting that it is doing so in the name of “peace, security and the American Way.”
2-Trump manages to sufficiently resist…using any number of compromises threats and other maneuvers…and he will remain president. His whole game might not succeed but the economy will continue to decline at the bottom and rise at the top. This leads to trouble eventually, either from Trump attempting to grab more power or further economic breakdown and trouble in the streets.
3-Trump not only manages to survive in office but he breaks both partys’ grips on the electorate. If that happens? All bets are off. My own bet in that case? Some form of militarily-enforced fascism emerges.
Happy New Year…
AG