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 Russia’s 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 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 community’s message “essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’” That remains the case today.
The same holds for the question of collusion. Officials 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 Trump—including former DNI chief James Clapper, former CIA director Michael Morrell, Representative Maxine Waters, and Senator Dianne Feinstein—concur 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 Clinton’s concession speech, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t 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 Trump’s 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 rhetoric—by all indications, a ruse—alarmed 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 article’s content, or retracted entirely. Qualified language—likely, suspected, apparent—appears 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 describes the outcome:
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 Trump’s lawyer did not even have an e-mail address for his Russian counterparts.
The revelation of Sater’s 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 government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Goldstone’s e-mail was more fruitful than Sater’s 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 “a canny operator and a colorful bullshitter” who has “launched a host of crudely named websites—including IAmAFaggot.com and 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.
Then there is Facebook’s 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 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…didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate” but rather focused “on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching 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 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 weren’t 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 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.” Facebook’s announcement in August of finding 3,000 “likely” Russian ads is now an ongoing “scandal” that has dragged the company before Congressional committees.
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 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 community’s message “essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’” That remains the case today.
The same holds for the question of collusion. Officials 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 Trump—including former DNI chief James Clapper, former CIA director Michael Morrell, Representative Maxine Waters, and Senator Dianne Feinstein—concur 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 Clinton’s concession speech, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t 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 Trump’s 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 rhetoric—by all indications, a ruse—alarmed 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 article’s content, or retracted entirely. Qualified language—likely, suspected, apparent—appears 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 describes the outcome:
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 Trump’s lawyer did not even have an e-mail address for his Russian counterparts.
The revelation of Sater’s 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 government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Goldstone’s e-mail was more fruitful than Sater’s 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 “a canny operator and a colorful bullshitter” who has “launched a host of crudely named websites—including IAmAFaggot.com and 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.
Then there is Facebook’s 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 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…didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate” but rather focused “on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching 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 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 weren’t 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 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.” Facebook’s announcement in August of finding 3,000 “likely” Russian ads is now an ongoing “scandal” that has dragged the company before Congressional committees.
