This week’s diary is going to have a bit of a Rachel Maddow feel to it, in that I’m going to give some background info before getting to the main story. That said, the background info is hard hitting, too. I’ve found that despite paying close attention the past 8 years, ( what??!!!), it’s been easy to forget some the information and have missed some information as well.
This article from September 2018, by Jane Mayer, How Russia Helped Swing The Election For Trump, falls into the latter category. We were deep into our move from OR to CA at the time it was published, so maybe that’s how I missed it. Regardless, it was fascinating to read it this past weekend, and am glad that Timothy Snyder linked to it in his piece.
The article discusses the impact that Russia had on the 2016 election. More specifically, a book by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, that “offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.”
I’ve highlighted some excerpts from the article below. The article is fairly long as is often the case with magazines like The New Yorker.
I don’t share her confidence, but wish I did.
Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—“it is “likely that it did.”
***
Something important to understand!
She argued that “the standard of proof being demanded” by people claiming it’s impossible to know whether Russia delivered the White House to Trump is “substantially higher than the standard of proof we ordinarily use in our lives.”
***
Cooperation, not coincidence in my view.
Strikingly, the July indictment* showed that Russian hackers’ first attempt to infiltrate the computer servers in Clinton’s personal offices had taken place on July 27, 2016, the same day that Trump had declared, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing,” adding, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
***
This event has been mentioned a lot, but she links it to other events.
It also pinpoints another, less well-known, instance of Russian sabotage, and Jamieson argues that this dirty trick, in combination with the actions of trolls and hackers, may have changed the course of the 2016 campaign. In her telling, James Comey’s decision to issue a series of damaging public pronouncements on Clinton’s handling of classified e-mails can plausibly be attributed to Russian disinformation. As evidence, Jamieson cites Comey’s own story, told in interviews and in his recent memoir, of what happened behind the scenes.
***
At a press conference, Comey announced his intention to recommend that the Justice Department not charge Clinton, but first he denounced her actions as “extremely careless.” Jamieson recalls wondering, “Why are you doing this?” She told me, “It was odd.”
* Mueller’s indictment in July 2018 of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC & Clinton campaign.
www.newyorker.com/...
Here’s the big closing, the kicker if you will, of the article. It is still so painful to read and makes me want to scream, and not just in frustration, but to remind people of what happened, and what is still happening to democracies because of Putin and Russia.
Underlined sentences are my emphasis.
Screaming has begun.
Six months after the election, the Washington Post broke a story that solved the mystery. At some point in 2016, the F.B.I. had received unverified Russian intelligence describing purported e-mails from Lynch to a member of the Clinton team, in which she promised that she’d go easy on Clinton. An unnamed source told the Post that the intelligence had been viewed as “junk.” Nonetheless, Comey has reportedly told aides that he let the disinformation shape his decision to sideline Lynch. Fearing, in part, that conservatives would create a furor if the alleged e-mails became public, he began to feel that Lynch “could not credibly participate in announcing a declination.” A subsequent report, by the Justice Department’s inspector general, described Comey’s behavior as “extraordinary and insubordinate,” and found his justifications unpersuasive.
More screaming!
Nick Merrill, a former Clinton-campaign spokesman, describes Comey’s actions as “mind-blowing.” He said of the intelligence impugning Lynch, “It was a Russian forgery. But Comey based major decisions in the Justice Department on Russian disinformation because of the optics of it! The Russians targeted the F.B.I., hoping they’d act on it, and then he went ahead and did so.”
Really losing it now.
In the fake Russian intelligence, one of the Clinton-campaign officials accused of conspiring with Lynch was Amanda Renteria. She was shocked to learn of the allegations, and told me that, although she is friendly with a woman named Loretta Lynch—a political figure in California—she does not know the Loretta Lynch who was the Attorney General. Renteria said, “To me, it says that, in the new world of politics, even if something isn’t real, it can still move things. You aren’t living in the world of reality anymore.”
www.newyorker.com/...
*********
Now to move onto the big, breaking news of the past 10 days — the arrest of the former head of the FBI Counterintelligence team, Charles McGonigal.
Timothy D Snyder, a Yale professor, and author is an expert on Eastern European history, and authoritarianism wrote a VERY GOOD article on what the arrest means about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, the state of the FBI, and the risk we still face.
I really encourage you to read the entire piece because I can’t do it justice with just the excerpts below.
So many people should have taken the actions of 2016 seriously, and we paid a big price.
If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office. The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process.
For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling memory. In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources. At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously. American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia. Too few people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people who took all three seriously felt very small. Yet there was also specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared, but something worse. After I wrote that piece and another, I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New York. This was no secret at the time. One did not need to be close to such matters to get that drift. And given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber counterintelligence, this was worrying.
***
Definitely looks hideous.
Now that McGonigal has been arrested, Trump has claimed that this somehow helps his case. Common sense suggests the opposite. The man who was supposed to investigate Russian support of Trump then took money from a Russian oligarch close to Putin, who was at one remove from the Trump campaign at the time? That is not at all a constellation that supports Trump's version of events. If the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was investigating Trump's connection to Russia was on the payroll of the Russian oligarch (Deripaska) to whom Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) owed millions of dollars and provided information, that does not look good for Trump. It looks hideous —but not just for Trump.
***
I think a lot of us felt that there was pressure from the NY FBI, now we know that’s likely true.
Then, weirdly, FBI director James Comey announced on 28 October 2016, just ten days before the election, that the investigation into Clinton's emails had been reopened. This created a huge brouhaha that (as polls showed) harmed Clinton and helped Trump. The investigation was closed again after only eight days, on 6 November, with no charges against Clinton. But that was just two days before the election, and the damage was done. As I recall it, in the fury of those last forty-eight hours, no one noticed Comey's second announcement, closing the investigation and clearing Clinton. I was canvassing at the time, and the people I spoke to were still quite excited about the emails. Why would the FBI publicly reveal an investigation on a hot issue involving a presidential candidate right before an election? It now appears that Comey made the public announcement because of an illicit kind of pressure from special agents in the FBI New York office. Comey believed that they would leak the investigation if he did not announce it.
***
He’s making a critical point here and he is not prone to hyperbole.
Now that we are informed that a central figure in the New York FBI office was willing to take money from foreign actors while on the job, this line of analysis bears some reconsideration. Objectively, FBI New York was acting in concert with Russia, ignoring or defining narrowly Russia's actions, and helping deliver the one-two punch to Clinton in October that very likely saved Trump. When people act in the interest of a foreign power, it is sometimes for money, it is sometimes because the foreign power knows something about them, it is sometimes for ideals, and it is sometimes for no conscious motive at all -- what one thinks of as one's own motives have been curated, manipulated, and directed. It seems quite possible -- I raise it as a hypothesis that reasonable people would consider -- that some mixture of these factors was at work at FBI New York in 2016.
***
Absolutely 100% of what he is saying here!
The Russian operation to get Trump elected in 2016 was real. We are still living under the specter of 2016, and we are closer to the beginning of the process or learning about it than we are to the end. Denying that it happened, or acting as though it did not happen, makes the United States vulnerable to Russian influence operations that are still ongoing, sometimes organized by the same people. It is easy to forget about 2016, and human to want to do so. But democracy is about learning from mistakes, and this arrest makes it very clear that we still have much to learn.
I appreciate you taking the time to read this dense diary. I share these because I was shook by the seriousness of what I was reading, and I consider myself fairly informed. I’m hoping that there will be more reporting about McGonigal and the FBI. Obviously I hope that justice will be served and more people will open their minds to what’s Russia has been doing to us and other democracies.
