Whenever Donald Trump insists — in those rare moments he can bring himself to acknowledge Russian election interference before walking his mushy statement back — that no votes were changed because of the Kremlin’s attack on our democracy, I instantly think, “How the f*ck do you know?”
Counterfactuals are fun to puzzle over, but so many moving parts contribute to any real-world outcome — especially one as complex as an election result — that it’s almost impossible to know “what might have been.”
But we can make educated guesses about uneducated assheads, right?
Max Boot thinks so. The conservative Washington Post contributor is putting his chips on the table, claiming in a new column that were it not for Russia’s interference in our last presidential election, Hillary Clinton would now be president.
To buttress his claim, he cites former FBI agent Clint Watts’ new book Messing With the Enemy:
While the intelligence agencies are silent on the impact of Russia’s attack, outside experts who have examined the Kremlin campaign — which included stealing and sharing Democratic Party emails, spreading propaganda online and hacking state voter rolls — have concluded that it did affect an extremely close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, writes in his recent book, “Messing with the Enemy,” that “Russia absolutely influenced the U.S. presidential election,” especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin was less than 1 percent in each state.
We still don’t know the full extent of the Russian interference, but we know its propaganda reached 126 million people via Facebook alone. A BuzzFeed analysis found that fake news stories on Facebook generated more social engagement in the last three months of the campaign than did legitimate articles: The “20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.” Almost all of this “fake news” was either started or spread by Russian bots, including claims that the pope had endorsed Trump and that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State.
Elsewhere on social media, tens of thousands of Russian bots spread pro-Trump messages on Twitter, which has already notified about 1.4 million users that they interacted with Russian accounts. The Russian disinformation, propagating hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison and #MAGA, reflected what the Trump campaign was saying. The Russian bots even claimed after every presidential debate that Trump had won, whereas objective viewers gave each one to Clinton.
And by no means was that the end of it. The Russians famously funneled some of their best oppo research through Wikileaks, helping to create a rift between Hillary and Bernie backers just as the Democratic National Convention was set to kick off.
And then there was the crucial impact of the Russian hacks of Democratic documents disseminated primarily by WikiLeaks. The first tranche of stolen documents — more than 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments — was strategically released on July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic convention. The resulting news coverage disrupted the Clinton campaign’s plans by creating the impression that the Democratic National Committee was biased against Bernie Sanders and forcing DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign.
The second tranche of stolen documents was released on Oct. 7, just 29 minutes after The Post reported on the “Access Hollywood” videotape in which Trump is heard boasting about grabbing women by the genitals. These emails, stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, distracted voter attention by revealing the transcripts of lucrative speeches Clinton had given to Goldman Sachs, a populist boogeyman.
A third release of stolen emails, on Oct. 11, revealed that Democratic operative Donna Brazile, while working at CNN, had provided debate questions to Clinton during the primaries and that senior Democratic operatives, who were themselves Catholics, had exchanged emails disparaging Republicans who cherry-picked their faith for political gain. This fueled Trump’s narrative that the election was “rigged” and that the “Clinton team” was, as he said, “viciously attacking Catholics and Evangelicals.”
That’s a hell of a lot of ratfucking, and the notion that all those measures moved not a single vote suggests the Russians like to pour untold resources into completely feckless efforts. If you believe that, you’re as dumb as a fucking Trump.
Boot acknowledges that James Comey’s letter, which dropped just 11 days before the election, was likely a bigger factor than anything the Russians did, and that’s probably true. But it all added up, and because of Vladimir Putin, we now have an idiot in charge of the most powerful democracy on the planet. He must be over the moon.
As Watts concludes in his book, “Without the Russian influence effort, I believe Trump would not have even been within striking distance of Clinton on Election Day.”
We’ll never know for sure, of course, but that sounds pretty reasonable to me.
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