Overview of Russiagate Issues
My understanding is that many people are deeply misinformed about the extent to which Russia interfered with our democracy in 2016. I have discussed this with friends, trying to elicit instances which have stood the test of time. So far only one instance has been suggested and that is the claim that Russia purchased Facebook ads to influence the election. Rather than being the tip of the iceberg, this claim is insignificant (in my view) as I lay out in a separate section after having revisited the facts. A pre-Trump account of Russian propaganda (published June 2015) was also presented and this was valid, but in addition to being pre-Trump, the author by 2018 acknowledged that its role was being overstated.
Other instances of Russian election interference were provided in February 2022 but I found at the time that these were misinformation created by U.S. intelligency agency adjacent groups such as Hamilton 68 and New Knowledge. That these high profile groups were mistaken was confirmed by the release of the Twitter files (in addition to the sources I had previously cited). I have not seen or heard any claims refuting the validity of the Twitter files and related evidence.
Motive is Not Evidence of Attack
The main line of argumentation from my friends claiming significant Russian interference in the 2016 election is that Russia had the motive to support Trump. As one friend put it:
“Did Russia/Putin want Trump over Hillary” (clearly, yes), and did Russia throw significant efforts and resources at influencing that result (no duh?).
There seems to be sort of a slippery slope in this argument. Of course, Russia, as a major world power, has significant propaganda activity. I agree with this but it is not at the heart of the point I am trying to make. My point is that there is widespread misunderstanding as to what Russia actually did and that this is fueling a new Cold War. I go into specific areas misinformation in detail in the sections of this paper which follow. The devil is in these details and the widely publicized claims such as that by Hillary Clinton that Russiagate was similar to the 9/11 terrorist attacks:
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton drew a comparison Tuesday between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, saying that in both cases, a foreign power had attacked the United States, but that in the latter, the president had “done nothing.” [Washington Post]
And this was not some isolated outburst. Similar claims were widespread. One more example:
In 2016, our country was targeted by an attack that had different operational objectives and a different overarching strategy, but its aim was every bit as much to devastate the American homeland as Pearl Harbor or 9/11... Piece by piece, name by name, one operational detail after the next, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has documented that the Russian attack on the American homeland and the American people was every inch as organized, expansive, penetrating and daring as that Japanese run on our fleet or bin Laden’s plan to use civilian airliners as weapons. The Kremlin targeted no remote outpost or iconic landmark, but rather aimed at the very heart of what we are as a nation. The attacks target our processes of government, our democratic institutions and our trust in our values. [Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army in Politico]
Attribution Error / Everybody Knows Fallacy
I travel widely in circles of Democrats and I've repeatedly encountered these phenomena.
Attribution error
most people don’t take the power of circumstance seriously enough… our tendency to attribute people’s behavior to disposition rather than situation.. (1) If an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute the behavior to situation… (2) If a friend or ally does something bad, we’re inclined to attribute the behavior to situation.. Attribution error can also have a big impact on international politics. It means that, once you’ve defined another nation as the enemy, that label will be hard to change.. big impediments to cognitive empathy are a grave threat to the planet. And attribution error may be the biggest impediment there is
When political parties or press freedoms are marginalized in Russia, we see it as a sign that Putin is a ruthless dictator. When it happens in our own country, we weigh the both sides of the issue more carefully. When Russia becomes involved militarily in another nation's civil war, we see that as a sign they are intent in conquering other countries without limit. When our country becomes involved in another nation's civil war, we tend to justify that based on human rights, the need to stop terrorists, etc. We see Putin's Russia as inherently evil, while we view are own behavior as understandable given the circumstances.
The United States is extremely sensitive and militaristic with regard to perceived violations of our national security and sovereignty. Yet, according to the New York Times in The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin:
The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.
Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.
And the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.
turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub… our station there, the operation out of Ukraine — became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia,
a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the C.I.A. and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, then Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, arrived at a meeting with the C.I.A.’s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack of top-secret files.
That initial tranche contained secrets about the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, including detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine designs. Before long, teams of C.I.A. officers were regularly leaving his office with backpacks full of documents.
As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington’s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: This inability to control our allies, recipients of vast quantities of U.S. weapons, matches a pattern that we've also seen in Israel.)
So we have U.S. political and military leaders claiming that Russia attacked the U.S. in 2016, while we ramped up military-intelligence operations along the Russian border and even within Russia itself. If the circumstances were reversed, the United States would consider these acts provocations.
Everyone Knows Fallacy
Most people I know consider debating the merits of Russiagate and related issues to be a waste of time because everyone agrees that Putin is evil, attacked our democracy, and is responsible for many of our problems. When I ask what is the basis for this understanding, there is little more than vague gestures regarding assassination, anti-LGBTQ attitudes ("millions killed", one friend said), Trump support, USSR-like desire for world domination, dictatorship, etc. From Wikipedia:
Argumentum ad populum is a type of informal fallacy, specifically a fallacy of relevance, and is similar to an argument from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam). It uses an appeal to the beliefs, tastes, or values of a group of people, stating that because a certain opinion or attitude is held by a majority, it is therefore correct. [emphasis added]
Everyone knows is related to the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction in which demonization of enemies is used to bolster domestic political popularity. This is particularly ironic in the present circumstances where the hard line anti-Russian political leaders and their parties are failing electorally across the board (U.S., U.K., France in very recent news). The democratic impulse suggests that not everyone agrees with what is claimed by the western establishment.
Russian Facebook Ads
The one remaining factual example of Russian interference in the U.S. political system that I have encountered was the Russian purchase of Facebook ads. Over time, however, reporting has shown that this was not significant.
NYTimes 2018: Two more Times Russiagate stories in 2018 and 2019 featured spectacular claims that proved on closer examination to be grotesque distortions of fact. In September 2018 a 10,000-word story by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti sought to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans. But that turned to be an outrageously deceptive claim, because Shane and Mazzetti failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people’s news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts.
Cost: New Knowledge claimed that the IRA’s “manipulation of American political discourse had a budget that exceeded $25 million USD.” But that number is based on a widely repeated error that mistakes the IRA’s spending on US-related activities with its parent project’s overall global budget, including domestic social-media activity in Russia. According to a 2019 court filingby attorneys for Concord Management, a firm tied to the IRA, discovery provided by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team revealed that the total amount spent on social media advertisements “that even arguably meet the definition of” 2016 election-related content amounted to $2,930.
Mueller Indictent of Internet Research Agency: USA v.Internet Research Agency, Concord Catering, Prigozhin. This is the one where Mueller laid out the IRA’s plan to “sow discord” in the U.S. using social media. This is the case the Justice Department had to drop because one of the defendants, Concord, did show up in court, when the DOJ decided going through with the discovery process “unreasonably risk[ed] the national security interests of the United States.”
This seems like an obvious nothing-burger (to use the technical term), but was nevertheless given prominence by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018:
Senate Intelligence Committee on the Internet Research Agency: The Senate Intelligence Committee had been holding a series of hearings in late 2018 on Russian interference in the 2016 election and published outside reports on social media tactics used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). At the request of the Senate, several researchers, as well as Renee DiResta and other New Knowledge employees had written a 99-page report titled “The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency.” “We hope that this analysis of the IRA information warfare arsenal – particularly the discussion of the influence operation tactics – helps policymakers and American citizens alike to understand the sophistication of the adversary,” the report states, “And to be aware of the ongoing threat to American democracy.”
This is an indicator that the anti-Russian hysteria, while being closely tied to the anti-Trump Democrats, is bipartisan. Republicans, as well as Democrats, relied on evidence provided by groups exposed, in the Twitter files, as providing false information in conjunction with intelligence agencies.
Twitter Files
Yoel Roth & Twitter Files: As the Twitter Files revealed, company executives discovered in 2017 that Hamilton 68 was wildly exaggerating the IRA’s reach. Roth reverse-engineered the 600 accounts it relied on, and discovered only 36 were registered in Russia. Pickles and Roth wrung their hands about how to crack down on the “bogus” dashboard. Hamilton 68 was run by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund in the U.S. ASD had a gold-plated advisory board that included ex-directors of the CIA and NSA, a former ambassador to Russia, and Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman, John Podesta. One of the campaign’s foreign policy advisors, Laura Rosenberger, was ASD’s director and appeared on panels with DiResta. Roth acknowledged that forcing ASD to come clean about the Hamilton 68 accounts would be “toxic” to Twitter’s “partnership” with ASD, but said: “I’m increasingly of the opinion that this dashboard is actively damaging and promotes polarization and distrust through its shoddy methodology. That New Knowledge had such an outsize role in creating the public record about Russia — through the Senate report and Hamilton 68 — is more jarring given that it was exposed in late 2018 as a central player in “Project Birmingham,” an audacious dirty trick election operation. Just days after New Knowledge’s high-profile report was being lauded by Senator Warner, the New York Times exposed the scandal, which had targeted a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. In what the firm itself referred to as a “false flag” operation, it had created thousands of fake Russian bots to follow candidate Roy Moore in a hard-fought special election. News stories said it appeared the Kremlin favored Moore.
In early 2023, journalist Matt Taibbi released a “Twitter Files” drop about “Hamilton 68,” a public dashboard created by New Knowledge. Hamiton 68 tracked hundreds of Twitter accounts to monitor the spread of purported pro-Russian propaganda online, but screenshots of emails sent by former Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, voiced alarm that the dashboard was creating, not tracking disinformation. “I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” Roth wrote.
New Knowledge later changed names to Yonder, while DiResta joined Stanford University as an expert in disinformation.
The “Hamilton 68” dashboard had spurred dozens of stories in major media outlets that accused conservatives of trafficking in Russian disinformation, but when Twitter looked into the dashboard’s accuracy, they found it was garbage in, garbage out.
Former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts headed the Hamilton 68 dashboard and Jonathan Morgan of New Knowledge had helped to build it, along with J.M. Berger at the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), housed by the German Marshall Fund.
“No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops,” one Twitter official wrote of Hamilton 68.
The internal Twitter emails were so damaging that the Washington Post later posted corrections to multiple stories that reported on Hamilton 68 and its findings.
So kudos to Elon Musk for releasing the Twitter files and correctding the public record on one of the most important issues of our time. And kudos to Yoel Roth and fellow Twitter employees for pushing back against the disinformation produced by groups such as those described above. Unfortunately, however, most of the public record on these issues wasn't corrected until the Twitter files were released in 2023:
As the Twitter Files revealed, company executives discovered in 2017 that Hamilton 68 was wildly exaggerating the IRA’s reach…
In the week before Christmas in 2018, scare headlines about Russian bots were everywhere: Stories like Russia used social media for widespread meddling in U.S. politics, Russia “meddled in all big social media” around US election, and Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media represented the peak of “Russiagate” mania. In that same pre-Christmas blitz Stephen Colbert debuted A Very Special Counsel Christmas, showing Robert Mueller rescuing a Donald Trump-fired Santa Claus, while Saturday Night Live went with It’s a Wonderful Trump, with Ben Stiller in a cameo as Michael Cohen, on his way to the “grand opening of Trump Tower Moscow!” The world was certain Russians had used Twitter and other platforms to elect Donald Trump.
Inside Twitter, though, executives were skeptical about the level of Russian social media activity, Twitter Files reveal. Senior employees knew a flawed research method, created by outside analysts commissioned by the Senate, was generating hundreds of false news stories… Many of the headlines from the period were based on research from a two-year investigation of Russian “active measures,” conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, showing Russia ran a major social media campaign…
Russian manipulation of social media messaging was one of the central elements of the case that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election to “sow discord” and build support for Trump. That was one of three themes of the Trump-Russia case, along with accusations Trump “colluded” with Kremlin insiders, and that Russia hacked and disseminated a trove of documents from the Democratic National Committee. Special Council Robert Mueller’s investigation found no Trump-Kremlin collusion…
Twitter’s view of New Knowledge’s “shoddy methodology” and concern about bad stories were not publicly known until (2023), …
Related Russiagate Misinformation
Steele Dossier: Durham shows how much more lying went on even than previously thought. For instance, despite the fact that “Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting,” the FBI paid Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, $220,000 over 3.5 years, and wanted to keep paying him an additional $300,000, despite never producing any actionable intelligence. Think of the implications of one other detail about the FBI’s handling of Danchenko:
In late December 2016, the FBI determined that Igor Danchenko, a U.S.-based Russian national living in Washington, D.C., was Steele’s primary subsource. Notwithstanding this fact, the FBI and the Department did not correct in the final two FISA applications targeting Page the characterization of the primary sub-source as being “Russia-based.”
Mueller Probe - Joseph Mifsud: The “Trump-Russia” investigation was built without Russians. The stated predicate was a conversation an American reportedly had with an Australian about a Maltese professor. The public was told, in breathless tones by papers like the New York Times, that the patient zero of the probe, young aide George Papadopoulos, “opened up” to an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer. We were told he shared with Downer that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” a revelation the Times described: … How far would this story have gone if we’d known even the FBI knew Papadopoulos never said anything about “dirt” or “emails,” or that even Downer “did not get the sense Papadopoulos was the middle-man to coordinate with the Russians”?
NYTimes 2019: In December 2019, senior national security correspondent David Sanger wrote a story headlined, “Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds,”and Sanger’s lede said the Senate Intelligence Committee had “concluded” that all 50 states had been targeted. But the Committee report actually reaches no such conclusion. The Committee reported that some intelligence “developed” in 2018 had “bolstered” the subjective judgment by Daniel. But all but one of the eight paragraphs in the report describing that intelligence were redacted, and the one unredacted paragraph suggests that the redacted paragraphs provided no conclusive evidence that Russian intelligence had scanned any state election websites, much less those of all 50 states.
DNC Emails -- it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left. There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.
closed-door testimony came on Dec. 5, 2017 from Shawn Henry, a protege of former FBI Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureau’s cyber crime investigations unit. Henry retired in 2012 and took a senior position at CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to investigate the cyber intrusions that occurred before the 2016 presidential election. The following excerpts from Henry’s testimony speak for themselves. The dialogue is not a paragon of clarity; but if read carefully, even cyber neophytes can understand:
Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC? … when would that have been?
Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated (sic). … There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.Horowitz Report -- The Times service to the narrative was introduced by its February 2017 story headlined, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence.” We now know from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign that the only campaign aide who had contacts with Russian intelligence officials was Carter Page, and those had taken place years before in the context of Page’s reporting them to the CIA. The Horowitz report revealed that FBI officials had hidden that fact from the FISA Court to justify its request for surveillance of Page.
Conclusion & Ongoing Relevance
The Russiagate narrative has played out something as follows:
Russia and Trump had overlapping motives in 2016 presidential election (Russia would prefer Trump's foreign policies to Hillary's. ) -- We all agree
Russia interfered in U.S. election in 2016 via:
Significant Russian manipulation of social media messaging (Facebook, Twitte) -- Discredited in my view
Trump collusion with Kremlin insiders -- Discredited in my view
Russia hacked and disseminated a trove of documents from the Democratic National Committee -- Possible but not proven
Bipartisan mainstream agreement that Russia helped elect Trump.
Trump and his unvoters unhappy with false accusations of treason and/or undeserved presidency.
Our country is deeply divided with little prospect for a healthy presidential election in 2024.
We are in a new Cold War with little near term prospect for resolving critical international issues.
Though we have learned that many of the "facts" surrounding the 2016 election were wrong and the fault of Democrats and their allies in the intelligence services, most of the establishment has not acknowledged these inconvenient truths. The debate continues as this was published just yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:
Russia Seeks to Boost Trump in 2024 Election, U.S. Intelligence Officials Say:
The Russian government has launched a “whole-of-government” effort to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and favors Republican candidate Donald Trump in the race, senior U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday. The officials didn’t mention Trump by name, but said that Russia’s current activity—described as covert social-media use and other online propaganda efforts—mirrored the 2020 and 2016 election cycles, when Moscow also favored Trump and sought to undermine Democratic candidates, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.
All of this is most confusing, and it's not surprising that our country is going through some challenging times politically. Among the blessings of Western culture are freedom of speech and the right to vote. Damage has been done, but it doesn't seem to be what most people like me think.
