David Corn writing at the Our Land newsletter from Mother Jones brings up a timely reminder:
The Great Forgotten Betrayal of the Trump Years.
It’s a reminder that, despite the way the media has stopped even mentioning it, there was credible evidence that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to aid Trump.
Why is it timely? Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo looks at revelations that Alexander Smirnov, whose story that Hunter Biden involved his father in a bribery scheme that sparked Republican impeachment efforts and a special counsel investigation, has been lying all along, may face charges, and appears to have been getting his stories from Russian intelligence officers. Marshall calls it
First up — David Corn
There’s no direct link to the newsletter yet for non-subscribers yet; it will be up in next week’s email. Corn begins by noting what is missing from recent news coverage about Trump and Russia:
...After his remarks earlier this month encouraging the Russian leader/war criminal to invade NATO countries that do not increase their defense spending, there was a flurry of stories in the media that referenced Trump’s peculiar years-long love affair with Putin. Another rush of similar commentary followed the death (or murder) of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp, when Trump at first said nothing about this tragedy and then issued a self-serving statement that did not condemn Putin or Moscow but instead compared Trump to Navalny, citing his own supposed persecution by “CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges.”
Reporting Trump’s dreadful, delayed, and narcissistic response to Navalny’s death, the New York Times noted, “The former president has a long history of complimenting Mr. Putin, calling him ‘pretty smart’ even as Russia prepared to invade Ukraine. And he has at times favored [Russia] over traditional U.S. allies.” A week earlier the paper mentioned Trump’s “odd affinity” for Putin. Following Trump’s NATO remarks, NPR produced a piece noting there was a “romance” between the American right and Putin. The Associated Press reported that Trump “has often praised [Putin] as tough.” A Forbes article on Trump’s NATO comment pointed out his longtime “pro-Putin stance.” Check, check, check.
What was absent in much of this recent coverage was the Putin-approved covert attack on the 2016 election that helped elect Trump. None of the above-mentioned reports—as well as others—alluded to it. This major and successful assault on American democracy appears to have disappeared in the media’s memory hole—the result of Trump and his crew’s successful long-running disinformation campaign.
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Trump and right wing media have denounced the connection between Russia and the 2016 election as a hoax loudly and repeatedly. Corn observes that the vehement denials appear to have worked. That Trump’s weird bromance with Putin is based on Putin’s efforts that helped get in him in the White House is never mentioned. And yet Corn reports there is a body of evidence that it happened.
Still, the importance of that episode cannot be overstated. For the umpteenth time, the Russians did mount a clandestine scheme to boost Trump in 2016. And the Trump campaign—in a meeting between top Trump aides (Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner) and a Moscow emissary—signaled to the Kremlin that it welcomed this secret intervention. Then Trump and his henchmen aided and abetted the attack by echoing Putin’s denials. The full story is spelled out in a variety of sources, most notably a 2017 US intelligence community assessment, a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee (when it was controlled by Republicans), the final report from special counsel Robert Mueller, and the comprehensive 2020 bipartisan report issued by the Senate intelligence report. All this official reporting is backed up by private cyber research firms and media accounts. (The book that I wrote with Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, remains a good primer on this sordid chapter.)
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Among other things, the DNC was hacked, Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta was hacked. Trump’s campaign official Paul Manafort had ties to Konstantin Kilimnik, named as a Russian intelligence officer. Although no collusion in a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia was proved, the fact remains that Putin worked to shape the election in Trump’s favor and the Trump campaign knew it and welcomed the help.
A March 5, 2020 report at the Brennan Center reported Russia attempted to assist Trump in the 2020 election as well.
Intelligence officials have reportedly found that Russia is interfering in the 2020 elections to try to support President Trump’s reelection, while also meddling in the Democratic primaries to help Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign. The reports have not revealed details about what actions Russia is taking or their scope, but my analysis of social media activity exposes some examples.
The report goes on to analyze how the approach targeted selected audiences in different ways and employed some new tactics. The aim was the same however: to interfere with the 2020 election in ways that would advance Putin’s interests while destabilizing the United States as a functioning democracy.
Marshall is making an importance case here, that the Russian campaign against the United States is far bigger than just the connections between Trump and Russia and the 2016 election.
I know that’s a big headline that promises a lot. But I think it’s true. David has a good rundown of the events in the Morning Memo. But I want to do my best to set them out on a larger canvas that goes back to the “Hunter Biden laptop” and really all the way back to 2015, a continuing Russian information operation that has been ongoing for almost a decade.
Let’s review recent events. First came the news that prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office had decided that the confidential FBI informant who had been one of Biden’s top accusers had been lying and that they were charging him for lying to the FBI. That next step is critical. Informants lie to prosecutors all the time. They seldom get charged. It’s one standard to decide your informant isn’t telling the truth and/or won’t hold up at trial. It’s an entirely different one to think that you can prove they knowingly lied beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly investigators felt they had caught Alexander Smirnov dead to rights. Yesterday came news that Smirnov has admitted that he got his false stories from Russian intelligence officers. Smirnov isn’t just at the center of the DOJ investigation, he’s at the center of what we have to generously call James Comer’s House inquiry, the premise for Joe Biden’s increasingly wobbly impeachment.
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The Morning Memo by David Kurtz that Marshall links to is not ambiguous at all:
Russia’s Staggering Success In Duping Willing Republicans And Right Wing Media
….The implications of this Russian operation are staggering, especially for the willing Republicans and right-wing media stooges who were the useful idiots propagating the disinformation for years. The James Comers, Chuck Grassleys, Jim Jordans of the world have been trafficking in this stuff as the purported basis for a Biden impeachment, which is itself tightly yoked to Trump’s campaign for re-election. Right-wing outlets, most notably Fox News, have been amplifying the claims not dozens or hundreds but thousands of times over the past several months.
Everywhere you turn, it’s Russia either helping Trump directly or indirectly by damaging Trump’s foes. The pattern is clear and persistent but also so sweeping and far-reaching that it really requires taking a step back to grasp the full scope of it all. It has dominated right-wing media, become an accepted “fact” among MAGA adherents, and allowed elected Republicans to play mainstream media like a cheap fiddle. All those breathless Biden impeachment process stories? They’re an outgrowth of this disinformation campaign.
...We’re nearly a decade into Putin’s sustained, unrelenting attack on American democracy through misinformation and mischief. Among other things, the Republican Party and its standard bearer have been successfully enmeshed in it and thoroughly compromised. When this all began, Putin in his wildest imagination could not have conceived of this level of success.
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Marshall lays out a case that this is all part of a continuing larger campaign by Russia going back to 2015. Russia hasn’t just been able to aid Trump; they’ve been attempting to attack President Biden through his son Hunter Biden and feed disinformation into politics here, as well as Rudi Giuliani’s frenetic search in Ukraine and elsewhere for anything that could be used against Biden — another channel for Russian disinformation.
Take the mysterious Hunter Biden laptop story. The reluctance of the media to initially give any credibility to it has since morphed into acceptance. Meanwhile Republicans have run as hard with it as they can. But Marshall has a very different view of the situation:
For years I’ve continued saying, against what seems like the unified thinking of every reporter, editorialist and credentialed smart person, that the fabled “Hunter Biden Laptop” was obviously the product of a Russian influence operation. The story was absurd on its face. Somehow Hunter Biden decided in a drugged-up fugue that he needed to take his laptop to a computer repair shop. He then forgot about it. The legally blind owner of the repair shop decided to crack it open and look at the files (as one does, of course) and then somehow managed to get the contents to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.
Republicans are so eager to take anything they can use against President Biden and the Democratic Party, feeding them disinformation is child’s play. The revelations about Smirnov have not lessened their determination to impeach Biden — if only to ‘even the score’ for Trump. They have demonstrated repeatedly that they don’t need facts to pursue their agenda. Right wing media certainly doesn’t. There’s also the little matter of their mounting an insurrection and promoting the Big Lie as Gospel Truth.
Further, there’s also the reluctance of the media to acknowledge just how ridiculous and dangerous the situation is. There’s also their willingness to go along with it in hopes it will turn into something they can run with — as long as it is a Democratic issue. Calling out Republicans is not something the press really likes to do, even when it’s as blatant as it is now..
As Marshall concludes:
This entire thing has been based on Russian plants and intelligence operations from the start. Every bit of it. It’s been obvious. And yet, well … they’re all dupes. Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.
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Digby has picked up on Josh Marshall’s piece, with her own take on The Really Big Story. She has a bit more from Marshall’s newsletter and concludes with this:
The point is that Republicans may or may not have been willing dupes. At this stage it’s really hard to extend them the benefit of the doubt. This has been going on for years and years now and it’s become one of those “first as tragedy finally as farce” things. But an even greater problem for us in this moment is, as Josh says, the “reporters, editorialists and commentators, who vouched for and credited this whole edifice of lies and bullshit.” They knew it was bullshit. All you have to do is listen to these clowns for five minutes to know exactly what they were doing. But they wanted the sweet, sweet thrill of taking down Biden. That dynamic has been going on for decades and it’s at the heart of what’s gone wrong in this country.
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And… QOTD — Digby passes on an observation from Stuart Stevens.
Vladimir Putin looked at Donald Trump as a weak man who would do anything for power.
Donald Trump looked at Republican Party as weak men and women who would do anything for power.
Both were right.
A major American political party is now compromised and extending Russia's power to attack the West.
Nothing like this has ever happened in American history. Until we acknowledge it and respond, what it means to be an American will die a little more each day.
Of course, Putin has had a much easier time of it because destabilizing American democracy has been the goal of conservatives in America ever since the Powell Memo in 1971 formalized how to proceed. If you look at Robert Reich’s The Big Picture, 1980 is when it really started to take off. Trump is the end game of Reagan’s “Morning in America”.
This link should allow access to the TPM article by Josh Marshall — it’s a good read. (It’s worth subscribing in any case, just as it is with David Corn, in case you hit a pay wall.)
Speaking of David Corn, the link to last week’s newsletter is now available.
February 17, 2024: A refresher on Trump’s porn-star/hush-money case; a farewell message from Alexei Navalny; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Jared Kushner); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
I’d written a diary drawing on it — David Corn has a primer for the first criminal trial for Mr. 91 counts... UPDATE with COLBERT! — now you can go to the source.
