[Peace-discuss] Russia Gate Hoax - eveidence # 5

Mon Dec 24 15:30:28 UTC 2018

Russia Gate Hoax evidence # 5

 But economic discontent, along with voter suppression, the Democratic
Partys failures to reach voters, and corporate media that gave endless
attention to Trumps empty promises and racial animus, are among the issues
cast aside by the incessant focus on Russigate, as are the very real
US-Russia tensions that do not fit the narrative.

THE NATION 

Russiagate Is More Fiction Than Fact

>From accusations of Trump campaign collusion to Russian Facebook ad buys,
the media has substituted hype for evidence.

By  <https://www.thenation.com/authors/aaron-mate/> Aaron Maté
<https://twitter.com/@aaronjmate> Twitter

October 6, 2017 

In her new campaign memoir, What Happened, Hillary Clinton reveals that she
has followed every twist and turn of the story, and read everything I
could get my hands on, concerning Russias role in the 2016 presidential
election. I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President
Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning
that our democracy was under attack, she writes.

Clinton has had a lot to take in. Since Election Day, the controversy over
alleged Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion has consumed
Washington and the national media. Yet nearly one year later there is still
no concrete evidence of its central allegations. There are claims by US
intelligence officials that the Russian government hacked e-mails and used
social media to help elect Donald Trump, but there has yet to be any
corroboration. Although the oft-cited January intelligence report uses the
strongest language and offers the most detailed assessment yet, The
Atlantic
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/odni-report-on-russian
-hacking/512465/> observed that it does not or cannot provide evidence for
its assertions. Noting the absence of any proof and hard evidence to
back up the agencies claims that the Russian government engineered the
election attack, The New York Times concluded that the intelligence
communitys message essentially amounts to trust us. That remains the
case today. 

The same holds for the question of collusion. Officials
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-contacts/exclusive-trum
p-campaign-had-at-least-18-undisclosed-contacts-with-russians-sources-idUSKC
N18E106> acknowledged to Reuters in May that they had seen no evidence of
wrongdoing or collusion between the campaign and Russia in the
communications reviewed so far. Well-placed critics of Trumpincluding
former DNI chief
<https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/full-clapper-no-evidence-of-co
llusion-between-trump-and-russia-890509379597> James Clapper, former CIA
director
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/clinton-ally-says-smoke-no-fire-no-rus
sia-trump-collusion-n734176> Michael Morrell, Representative
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ46k6MQN6c> Maxine Waters, and Senator
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzrlpKtY2DY> Dianne Feinsteinconcur to
date. 

Recognizing this absence of evidence helps examine what has been substituted
in its place. Shattered, the insider account of the Clinton campaign,
reports that in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take
responsibility for her own loss. Instead, one source recounted, aides were
ordered to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way. Within
24 hours of Clintons concession speech, top officials gathered to engineer
the case that the election wasnt entirely on the up-and-up.
 Already,
Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

But the focus on Russia has utility far beyond the Clinton camp. It
dovetails with elements of state power that oppose Trumps call for improved
relations with Moscow and who are willing to deploy a familiar playbook of
Cold War fearmongering to block any developments on that front. The multiple
investigations and anonymous leaks are also a tool to pacify an erratic
president whose anti-interventionist rhetoricby all indications, a
rusealarmed foreign-policy elites during the campaign. Corporate media
outlets driven by clicks and ratings are inexorably drawn to the scandal.
The public is presented with a real-life spy thriller, which for some
carries the added appeal of possibly undoing a reviled president and his
improbable victory. 

These imperatives have incentivized a compromised set of journalistic and
evidentiary standards. In Russiagate, unverified claims are reported with
little to no skepticism. Comporting developments are cherry-picked and
overhyped, while countervailing ones are minimized or ignored. Front-page
headlines advertise explosive and incriminating developments, only to often
be undermined by the articles content, or retracted entirely. Qualified
languagelikely, suspected, apparentappears next to Russians to account
for the absence of concrete links. As a result, Russiagate has enlarged into
a storm of innuendo that engulfs issues far beyond its original scope. 

The latest two stories about alleged Trump campaign collusion were initially
received as smoking guns. But upon further examination, they may actually
undermine that narrative. One was news that Trump had signed a non-binding
letter of intent to license his name for a proposed building in Moscow as he
ran for the White House. Russian-born developer Felix Sater predicted to
Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that the deal would help Trump win the
presidency. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald
elected, Sater wrote, believing that voters would be impressed that Trump
could make a real-estate deal with the United States most difficult
adversary. The New York Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/politics/trump-tower-putin-felix-sate
r.html> describes the outcome: 

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There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises,
and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In
January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putins spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov,
asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But
Mr. Cohen did not appear to have Mr. Peskovs direct email, and instead
wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries. 

The project never got government permits or financing, and died weeks later.

Peskov has confirmed he ended up seeing the e-mail from Cohen, but did not
bother to respond. The story does raise a potential conflict of interest:
Trump pursued a Moscow deal as he praised Putin on the campaign trial. But
it is hard to see how a deal that never got off the ground is of more
importance than actual deals Trump made in places like Turkey, the
Philippines, and the Persian Gulf. If anything, the story should introduce
skepticism into whether any collusion took place: The deal failed, and
Trumps lawyer did not even have an e-mail address for his Russian
counterparts. 

The revelation of Saters e-mails to Cohen followed the earlier controversy
of Rob Goldstone offering Donald Trump Jr. incriminating information on
Hillary Clinton as part of Russia and its governments support for Mr.
Trump. Goldstones e-mail was more fruitful than Saters in that it yielded
a meeting, albeit one that Trump Jr. claims he abandoned after 20 minutes.
Those who deem the Sater-Goldstone e-mail chains incriminating or even
treasonous should be reminded of their provenance: Sater is known as 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/felix-sater-donald-trump-russi
a-investigation.html> a canny operator and a colorful bullshitter who has 
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/someones-lying-about-the-money-for-trump-towe
r-moscow> launched a host of crudely named websitesincluding
<http://iamafaggot.com/> IAmAFaggot.com and  <http://vaginaboy.com/>
VaginaBoy.com
 to attack a former business partner. Meanwhile, Goldstone is
a British tabloid journalist turned music publicist. One does not have to be
an intelligence expert to doubt that they are Kremlin cut-outs. 

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Then there is Facebooks disclosure that fake accounts likely operated out
of Russia paid $100,000 for 3,000 ads starting in June 2015. The New York
Times editorial board
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/russia-facebook-twitter-election
.html> described it as further evidence of what amounted to unprecedented
foreign invasion of American democracy. A $100,000 Facebook ad buy seems
unlikely to have had much impact in a $6.8 billion election. According to
Facebook, the vast majority of ads
didnt specifically reference the US
presidential election, voting or a particular candidate but rather focused
on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological
spectrumtouching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration
to gun rights. Facebook also says the majority of ads, 56 percent, were
seen after the election. The ads have not been released publicly. But by
all indications, if they were used to try to elect Trump, their sponsors
took a very curious route. 

The ads are commonly described as Russian disinformation, but in the most
extensive reporting on the story to date, The Washington Post
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-tried-to-give-zuckerb
erg-a-wake-up-call-over-fake-news-on-facebook/2017/09/24/15d19b12-ddac-4ad5-
ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html?utm_term=.e68c87c7a4be> adds multiple
qualifiers in noting that the ads appear to have come from accounts
associated with the Internet Research Agency, itself a Kremlin-linked firm
(emphasis added). 

The Post also reveals that an initial Facebook review of the suspected
Russian accounts found that they had clear financial motives, which
suggested that they werent working for a foreign government. Furthermore,
the security team did not find clear evidence of Russian disinformation or
ad purchases by Russian-linked accounts. But Russiagate logic requires a
unique response to absent evidence: The sophistication of the Russian
tactics caught Facebook off-guard. 

The Post adds how Russian sophistication was overcome: 

As Facebook struggled to find clear evidence of Russian manipulation, the
idea was gaining credence in other influential quarters. 

In the electrified aftermath of the election, aides to Hillary Clinton and
Obama pored over polling numbers and turnout data, looking for clues to
explain what they saw as an unnatural turn of events. 

One of the theories to emerge from their post-mortem was that Russian
operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken
advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their
messages to American voters in key demographic areas in order to increase
enthusiasm for Trump and suppress support for Clinton. 

These former advisers didnt have hard evidence that Russian trolls were
using Facebook to micro-target voters in swing districtsat least not
yetbut they shared their theories with the House and Senate intelligence
committees, which launched parallel investigations into Russias role in the
presidential campaign in January.

The theories paid off. A personal visit in May by Democratic Senator Mark
Warner, vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, spurred the
company to make some changes in how it conducted its internal
investigation. Facebooks announcement in August of finding 3,000 likely
Russian ads is now an ongoing scandal that has dragged the company before
Congressional committees. 

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Other election threats loom. A recent front-page
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.html
> New York Times article linking Russian cyber operations to voting
irregularities across the United States is headlined, Russian Election
Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny. But
read on and youll discover that there is no evidence of Russian election
hacking, only evidence-free accusations of it. Voting problems in Durham,
North Carolina, felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack, election
monitor Susan Greenhalgh says, and months later
questions still linger
about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North
Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona. There is one caveat: There are
plenty of other reasons for such breakdownslocal officials blamed human
error and software malfunctionsand no clear-cut evidence of digital
sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. 

The evidence-free concern over Russian hacking expanded in late September
when the Department of Homeland Security informed 21 states that they had
been targeted by Russian cyber-operations during the 2016 election. But
three states have already dismissed the DHS claims, including California,
which announced that after seeking further information, it became clear
that DHSs conclusions were wrong. 

Recent elections in France and Germany saw similar fears of Russian hacking
and disinformationand similar results. In France, a hack targeting the
campaign of election winner Emmanuel Macron ended up having no trace, of
Russian involvement, and was so generic and simple that it could have been
practically anyone, the head of French cyber-security quietly explained
after the vote. Germany faced an even more puzzling outcome: Nothing
happened. The apparent absence of a robust Russian campaign to sabotage the
German vote has become a mystery among officials and experts who had warned
of a likely onslaught, the Post reported in
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as-germans-prepare-to-vote-a-mystery-g
rows-where-are-the-russians/2017/09/10/07d47f54-9257-11e7-8482-8dc9a7af29f9_
story.html> an article headlined As Germans prepare to vote, a mystery
grows: Where are the Russians? The mystery was so profound that The New
York Times also
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/world/europe/german-election-russia.html
> explored it days later: German Election Mystery: Why No Russian
Meddling? 

Following this evidentiary praxis, Russia can be blamed for matters far
beyond Western elections. After the recent white-supremacist violence in
Charlottesville, foreign-policy consultant Molly McKew issued a widely
circulated appeal on
<https://twitter.com/MollyMcKew/status/896453597696806912> Twitter: We need
to have a conversation about what is happening today in Charlottesville &
Russian influence, and operations, in the United States. (McKew recently
testified at a US government hearing on The Scourge of Russian
Disinformation.) 

Writing
<http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/opinions/russian-far-right-opinion-rangappa/i
ndex.html> for CNN, Yale Law Schools Asha Rangappa asserted that
Charlottesville highlighted again the problem of Russia. Sure, Rangappa
concedes, there is no evidence to date that Russia is directly supporting
extreme right groups in the United States. But Russian government ties to
the European far-right when viewed through the lens of Trumps response to
Charlottesville, suggests an opening for Russian intelligence to use
domestic hate groups as a vehicle for escalating their active measures
inside the United States. 

Linking Russia to right-wing American racists contrasts with just a few
months prior, when it was fashionable to tie Russia to the polar opposites.
In March, intelligence-community witnesses soberly testified to Congress
that Russias 21st-century cyber invasion has tried to sow unrest in the
U.S. by inflaming protests such as Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives
Matter movement. The evidence presented for this claim was that both
movements were covered by the Russian state-owned television network RT. 

Russian-linked tweets about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem
to protest racial injustice show the Russians trying to push divisiveness
in this country,
<http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/352768-gop-senator-russian-trolls-using-
nfl-spat-to-push-divisiveness-in-us> says Republican Senator James Lankford.
A Russian-linked ad about Black Lives Matter aimed at audiences in Ferguson
and Baltimore tells us
that the Russians who bought these ads were
sophisticated enough to understand that targeting a Black Lives Matter ad to
the communities
would help sow political discord.
 the goal here was really
about creating chaos, says CNN reporter Dylan Byers. 

But this story might actually tell us a lot more about the attitudes of
pundits and lawmakers towards their audiences. On top of the 3,000 ads
identified by Facebook, Twitter has now informed Congress of around 200
accounts linked to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Twitter has
328 million users. To suggest 200 accounts out of 328 million could have had
an impact is as much an insult to common sense as it is to basic math. It
also suggests Black Lives Matter protesters in places like Ferguson and
Baltimore were unwitting foreign agents who needed Russian social-media
prodding to march in the streets. To protest racism is not to sow chaos
and political discord, but to protest racism. 

Because the ads may have originated in Russia, it is widely taken for
granted that they were part of an alleged Russian government plot. Few have
considered a different scenario,
<http://therealnews.com/t2/story:20147:Did-the-Russians-%27Meddle%27-Just-fo
r-Clicks%3F> pointed out by the journalist Max Blumenthal, that the ads
could have been like those from any other troll farm: clickbait to attract
page views. 

Some who focus on Russiagate may be acting from the real fear and
disorientation that follows from the victory of the most unqualified and
unpredictable president in history. But those who partake, particularly
those in positions of privilege, should consider that Russiagate offers them
a safe and anodyne way to Resist. For privileged Americans to challenge
Trump mainly over Russia is to do so in a way that avoids confronting their
own relationship to the economic and political system that many of his
voters rebelled against. If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, if
the American presidency right now is the product of collusion between the
Russian intelligence services and an American campaign, to borrow a
scenario posed by Rachel Maddow, then there is nothing else to confront. 

But economic discontent, along with voter suppression, the Democratic
Partys failures to reach voters, and corporate media that gave endless
attention to Trumps empty promises and racial animus, are among the issues
cast aside by the incessant focus on Russigate, as are the very real
US-Russia tensions that do not fit the narrative. Amid widespread talk of
Putin pulling the strings, Trump has quietly appointed anti-Russia hawks to
key posts and admitted a new NATO member over Russian objections. Trumps
top military commander, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, is backing an effort by the Pentagon and Congress to arm Ukraine with
new weapons. President Obama had rejected a similar proposal out of fear it
would inflame the countrys deadly conflict. Just before Russias recent war
games with allied Belarus, the United States and NATO allies carried out
their biggest military exercise in eastern Europe since the Cold War right
next door. 

These tensions only stand to worsen in a political climate in which
diplomacy with Russia is seen as a weakness, and in which challenging it
through sanctions and militarism is one of the few areas of bipartisan
agreement. Conflict with a nuclear power may threaten the future
annihilation of many, but it offers immediate benefits for some. NATO
concerns about Russia are seen as a positive for the defense industry, the
business press notes in reporting that military stocks have reached
all-time highs. As have the ratings of MSNBC, the cable network that has
pushed Russiagate more than any other. 

Those unbound by Russiagates offerings need not succumb to them. Trump
didnt get to the White House via Russia, but by falsely portraying himself
as a populist champion. The only con he will be undone by is his own. 

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