You are here: Home » General » Thoughts On the Potential Russian Involvement in an Ultimately Illegitimate Election
- There is one thing Donald Trump was (opportunistically) right about in his outrageous statement yesterday: nothing the CIA says should be taken at face value. Do I think the Russian state was involved in the DNC hacks? Probably. And one major difference from Iraq: God knows we know Obama wasn’t pressuring them to cook the intelligence. But, still, I wouldn’t say the charges have been proven.
- I, myself, don’t think that the precise source of the hacks is all that big a deal, although the potential Russian involvement will get many more people interested. We certainly know from the fact that the information targeted only one party, how it was sold, and what was excluded (as a commenter points out, no emails with oppo research on Trump) that Wikileaks was trying to throw the election to Trump. Not only do we know that now, it was blindingly obvious at the time.
- Like the Comey scandal, this is really a media scandal. As Yglesias says, “Russian hackers could steal Podesta’s emails but it took an ideologically diverse set of American writers to misrepresent what they said…Whoever stole them for whatever reason, the vast bulk of the damage was done by irresponsible reporting not the hack per se.” 100% correct. And while the relentless hyping of inane trivia as if it was a major scandal is particularly irritating coming from media organs of the ostensible left, the relentless hyping of inane trivia as if it was a major scandal by media outlets like the Washington Post was surely much more consequential.
- Does this mean that the leaks shouldn’t have been reported on? No. But they should have been reported on with an appropriate skepticism given the obvious agenda behind them. To put it mildly, they weren’t. As with the Clinton Foundation stories, once reporters invested enough time they were unwilling to write stories that just said “we looked and there’s nothing here.” And by carefully portioning out the emails to ensure a steady drip of stories, Wikileaks played the media beautifully. But reporters and editors have agency: they didn’t have to be the cat’s paw of what was at least a libertarian ratfucking operation. They chose to.
- Mitch McConnell will be an interesting case study in whether there’s anything a major Republican politician can do to get the kind of contemptuous media treatment Hillary Clinton receives. It seems kind of important that the Senate majority leader put upper-class tax cuts and getting a neoconfederate on the Supreme Court over the security of the country and the integrity of its elections. He really is a disgusting figure even by contemporary Republican standards, and further reaffirms that Trump isn’t just some wild outlier.
- I’ve gone back and forth about what Obama should have done. My first inclination is that he should have gone public despite McConnell’s threats. And, in retrospect, this was the best course of action — having campaign coverage dominated by a he said-she said discussion of whether Russia was throwing the election to Trump would have been better than what did dominate the final two weeks of election coverage. But at the time, Obama didn’t know how the election would turn out, and (reasonably) believed that Clinton was going to win, so going public would have poisoned her relations with Russia and undermined the CIA investigation. Unlike the Comey appointment, which was a disastrous blunder at the time, this was more a reasonable choice among bad options.
- To make a related and highly unoriginal observation, a substantial portion of the collision of trainwrecks that produced President Trump was caused by people assuming Clinton would win. Clinton was covered from an aggressively adversarial pose as if she was already president, which led in part to the relentless flogging of EMAILS and A DONOR EMAILED HUMA ABEDIN stories — if you don’t have scandals you can make do with pseudo-scandals because you need something. Trump, on the other hand, was covered negatively but not really seriously. Very few of the editors and reporters, mainstream or left, who created the impression of false equivalence actually thought that Clinton and Trump were comparably bad or dangerous figures. But because they didn’t think Trump would win — and, pro forma qualifications aside, until the Comey letter I didn’t think there was any real chance he would win either — we are where we are. And while the erroneous assumption was understandable, creating the strong implication that Hillary Clinton was the corrupt and dishonest candidate in a contest with Donald Trump is unforgivable.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Please take that picture down. It’s like he’s staring into my soul so as to steal it.
Everybody Loves HypnoPutin.
All glory to HypnoPutin
So that’s what Damian from the Omen movies looks like all growed up.
Going to give me a nightmare!
He already did, Donald Trump!
Can’t…………look…………..away…………..must resist urge to………….drink……….. ….VODKA…………..*gasp*
Oh, what the hell. Pass me the Stoli.
This is an incredibly important observation.
A great swath of the American people want an aspirational leader: they want to believe in something that will change a system they believe takes a person of will (as in, the Triumph of). Trump had upside for these people as long as he was not in power. Clinton had no upside for these people because she is a Clinton, had a lot of government experience, etc.
The next Dem nominee needs to have a greater awareness of this. Competence is, sadly, not a plus for the low info folks.
Whenever I want to feel particularly sad I think of that SNL skit about the final debate, where the moderators agree they can just go ahead and call her President Clinton at this point. I think for some she was already president and thus open to all the standard critiques for a president, and then some (because a Clinton). They didn’t realize how fragile a construct U.S. democracy actually is.
Your first point re the CIA is true, they are not, taken as a whole, a completely credible source. But that raises the question – who would be on a thing like this? Other than a full confession by Putin, (and some would question the motives for that) how would we the citizenry, know what is actually true?
The best I can think of is multiple different sources, including outside the government, saying the same thing, but that will put a pretty heavy burden on verification.
Of course, as implied by the rest of your post, not knowing for sure is no excuse for not acting based on the probabilities of what is known.
Ahem…Both sides do it…(ducks)… :-)
The standard I argued for–and was pilloried for–is that the ethical bias should be to release more information rather than less. While Comey’s actions had bad consequences the bias in a democracy should be transparency. I explicitly argued using this very example that if the Administration had information linking Trump to Putin they should likewise release it because the worst possible thing would be for voters to learn disqualifying potentially criminal information after the election.
That was always the best standard because of the precise situation we find ourselves in. I’m glad Scott finally came around to the sensible position. Welcome to the club.
This assumes that Comey had anything you could regard as “information.”
Which he admitted, at the time, he did not.
Puh-leeze he had a whole new laptop of information. Again this is just playing partisanship with principles. You don’t do that with elections.
There is one thing Donald Trump was (opportunistically) right about in his outrageous statement yesterday: nothing the CIA says should be taken at face value.
This is true, but it’s important to re-emphasize that the part where he blames the CIA for the Iraq War is profoundly dishonest.
Correct – the rank-and-file of the CIA had findings exactly the opposite of what War Criminal Powell stated at the UN.
This. George Tenet ignored his own people.
I don't see what you're whining about Scott, it's not like the media's conduct resulted in a cross between Pieter Willem Botha, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu and Idi Amin Dada becoming president or anything.In all fairness, though, the editorial staff of the NYT, NBC & CNN deserved to be executed for treason.
ANOTHER FOOTBALL ANALOGY
0 and 12 Browns defeat 6 and 6 Titans by final score of 7 – 6 despite the fact that the Browns turn the ball over 6 times during the game. But the Titans are unable to muster the sort of offense necessary to put the Browns away due to an obsession with their ground game and the fact that statistics showed the Browns were extremely weak defensively in this area and should be vulnerable. Several conservative in-game coaching decisions by Mularkey as well did not improve his team’s chances.
Unfortunately, penalties also played an important part in the game as various infractions were called against the Titans during key drives, many of which seemed ticky-tack or in fact non-existent, halting opportunities that should have produced more points. Titan fans screamed that these calls were unfair and that the refs clearly ignored many worse fouls committed by the Browns that occurred RIGHT BEFORE THEIR EYES. Still, the Titans appeared to be on the verge of victory. They held a 6 – 0 lead with under a minute to go when a long pass from mid-field by Charlie Whitehurst, the Browns’ 6th QB this year, soared out of the end zone but the officials called a controversial PI on a Titan DB who never even touched the receiver. A replay showed that Terrelle Pryor had stumbled over his own feet. With ten seconds left, the Browns finally punched it in from the one on their fourth down attempt. The extra point hit the crossbar but fell through for the Browns victory.
Faithful Titan fans remain deeply upset by the officiating which they believe cost their team the win and repeatedly point to numerous penalties that affected the outcome.
The more cynical Titan fans think the contest should never have been that close: that poor game planning deserves most of the blame (even if all signs showed that Exotic Smash Mouth should have worked) as well as poor execution (the reason for the penalties).
The faithful respond by shouting that the cynics have no evidence that a better game plan would have worked, just a lot of Monday morning QBing reliant on hindsight. The cynics reply by saying, “Okay. But we lost. I think we could have done some things better.” The faithful respond that we can’t really know that. There’s no proof that another offensive strategy in those various game contexts would have worked better. However, what we can and do know and have evidence for is that the refs fucked up.
Faithful fans end every blog comment with “Thanks, refs. We won’t make the playoffs again this year because of you.”
Cynical fans end every blog comment with “Thanks, Titan coaching staff. You had one job.”
Late-breaking news: Evidence that high-stakes gambler paid off refs is being investigated. Goodell announces that this new information does not in any way tarnish the result and as a sidenote re-emphasizes that his Deflategate decision was correct. Flash forward: It will turn out that none of refs individually thought that any iffy call they might make against the Titans would actually be able to throw the game to the Browns – because the Browns suck so much.
What an awful game. Did Don Criqui do the play-by-play?
Heh.
A Trump in the White House with a Democratic congress would be a lot less apocalyptic. By concentrating on why Clinton lost, we continue to ignore that the Democrats have lost the last 4 down ticket elections.
This is a completely broken system at this point.
But why do Democratic congresspeople do so badly?
Better organizing at the state level, Koch Brothers money, gerrymandering…
Did anyone force the DCCC to run a Romney voter in my district this year? And then for him to not run a single damn commercial? A district that HRC won, BTW!!
I don’t know, maybe all the other Democrats in your district who didn’t run in the primary?
Too much money spent by the party pushing “centrist” candidates over progressives in the primaries. The national organizations really are an incumbent protection racket.
It really is mostly demographics and cultural migration patterns at this point. For at least a couple of decades, demographics that skew Democratic (young, minority, educated) have moved from rural, exurb and outer suburb areas to cities and interior suburbs. The concentrates Democratic voters and results in a situation where Republicans can win lots of suburban, exurban and rural districts 60-40 while the Democratic districts in the city go 85-15 Dem. Here in Colorado, for example, Mike Coffman’s district would have been winnable a couple of elections ago but for the fact that so many of his Democratic constituents have moved from Brighton and the outer parts of Aurora to Denver.
Same thing on a macro scale with the Electoral College. Too many people have moved from Iowa or Wisconsin or Ohio to Chicago, the coasts, or Colorado.
Am I missing something? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the point here—always a good bet—and, admittedly, the senate races turned out a lot worse than most of us were expecting, and almost all of us (here) were hoping. But the reason the Democrats have lost at least the past several House elections is due in no small part to gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering *is* a small part of it (as in, a minority cause). It really is as simple as the Democratic coalition likes to concentrate in cities.
Interesting observation that Trump is essentially in a group with JQA and Hayes in his unpopularity with the public at the time of election.
As to the rest, welcome to the Russian century. Nobody — nobody outside the left, which thinks the following is a good thing — will now report that the candidate with a hawkish and realist view of Russia just lost to, you know, a puppet. We’ll do nothing for Ukraine. Our relationship with Iran will become surreal. Al-Assad now has a clear field to bring down Aleppo.
The only way this will be the Russian century is if they, as a declining power overestimating their strength, precipitate a major international conflict
Indeed, which is far too likely unfortunately.
Hell, Trump will have us bombing Aleppo to help out his god friend Putin. I hear those people in Aleppo are Mooslems
Since you’ve brought this issue up…Can someone explain this to me?
How is poisoning relations with Russia at all relevant? You’d think if there was anything that should poison relations with Russia it would be hacking a goddamned US election. How about showing a little backbone and standing up for our country?
Who gives a good goddamn if Russia’a fee-fees get hurt? Where’s the fucking sense if patriotism?
It calls to mind the Lenin quote: “Capitalists will sell us the rope we need to hang them.” Selling out is every bit as bad as selling. If poisoning relations with Russia was at all an issue for Obama it’s an impeachable offense.
Hillary? A realist view of Russia?
You clearly have no understanding of what the term “realist” means in international relations.
Note that Nick’s using “realist” to modify “hawkish;” I doubt that Clinton’s liberal interventionism would be particularly productive regarding Russian policy, but said policy would be infinitely preferable to Donald’s. (And I would say that while I don’t usually agree with Mearsheimer and Walt’s conclusions, they are eminently reasonable realist. Cohen, however, has long been obsolete – though I’d like to hear your thoughts on whether O’Hehir’s making this same point counts as neocon shillery).
the candidate with a hawkish and realist view of Russia
Yeah, no.
If we suggest, as some cynics do*, that there has always been disinformation and lack of rigour in media reporting, I’m wondering perhaps the problem is that in the good old days we did have a more diverse media with a broader approach to topics, based on more widely spread political power. So some sources would lie, and others oppose them, and something approaching accurate ideas would get out there.
But now we have all the media acting in the same way, without a diversity of viewpoint, and the net result is a confusing media fog which inhibits any sort of accuracy, because they are all reporting everything in the same style and without depth, and daren’t say that one side is lying.
*And I’m very cynical myself but it seems there are others even more so.
Huh?
The differences are due to the proliferation of cable channels like Fuks Nooz, the lack of the common purpose the parties had in the Cold War, and the increasing polarization of American politics (mainly due to changes on the right).
The media, more diverse in the past? You must be kidding. There were basically two groupings in American media of yesteryear: the establishment media (big broadcasters, national newspapers), and more regional media. The former were roughly centrist, and a lot of the latter were extremely right-wing.
For Christ’s sake, we were somewhat involved in Indochina from 1946 on, and heavily involved from the early 1950’s (we were footing 75% of the French war bill by the time of Dien Bien Phu). Yet the American media didn’t really start questioning the war until the late 1960s.
Indeed. Media concentration – both in terms of media companies themselves and their role in much larger conglomerates – is a huge weakness of the electoral system. Hard to see EMAILZ gaining such complete dominance forty or even just twenty years ago. These days there’s only a handful of people working for all of six or so different companies who have any real influence over what the news of the day is.
The press’s assumption that Trump couldn’t win the election (or didn’t really want to be president/would drop out) should have died a swift death at the very latest, on the day he accepted the nomination.
True, especially after his very scary speech that it was not hard to imagine millions of low-information voters applauding. But it did not die. Remind us what the LGM pool looked like?
I think people were complaining about the media’s disproportionate hard treatment of HRC as early as spring 2015. IIRC Vox ran an article at the time stating that media is always hardest on the presumed next president.
The truth is that alarm bell’s should have been going off when Trump was sweeping through the GOP primaries. Certainly when he cinched the nomination. Everyone’s alarm bells should have been going off and thinking “If Donald Trump can win the nomination, something is very wrong.”
Instead everyone was blase about Trump. I remember fellow Democrats accusing me of being a chicken little and saying stuff like “there is no way Trump can win the nomination. The Democrats just aren’t that lucky.” I think everyone was imagining a Goldwater kind of defeat for the Rs.
To be fair, there were times when it looked like a Goldwater style defeat was likely. There were also times when Democrats panicked but those usually lasted a few days or a week before the polls swung back to a Goldwater looking defeat for the Republicans.
Trump was able to win on the barest of technical victories. The problem is that the GOP has no shame or humility and they will treat this like the Mandate from Heaven.
The liberal project seems to be fading all over the West.
I think a lot of people just had more faith in the American public than was warranted. As a born and brad Alabamian I knew he was tailor made for the people of my state. I just thought they were outliers and states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would be more resistant to the appeal of white backlash.
In this we were simply wrong.
The truth is that alarm bell’s should have been going off when Trump was sweeping through the GOP primaries.
Vox(or was it 538?) didn’t have Trump as the odds on winner until after South Carolina. This despite Trump leading the polls, by wide margins, for months. Some of us know Trump could beat those other losers long before that and said so.
It seems quite hard for a lot of people to realise just how much struggle went into the liberal project int he first place. Under attack from racists, plutocrats and suchlike, it seems surprising that it ever got anywhere at all.
Yet there seem to be a surprising number of people who just don’t realise the attacks on it at all.
Heck, even one of my friends who is normally cynical, reckons that the UK will be prevented from leaving the EU somehow, by intelligent people in politics doing something. It’s obvious that there aren’t any intelligent people at the top level in UK politics, but he refuses to see this.
Exactly. We all trustest that the voices of sanity would eventually win out. We forgot that the insane vote more reliably.
The mental arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward madness.
To be certain, the politicians in the UK have been savvy enough to avoid pressing the history eraser button that they created and armed, at least up until now, but they haven’t been savvy enough to avoid creating and arming the button in the first place.
Martin Prince beat the smart kids. Again.
Do you mean Nelson Muntz?
Ralph Wiggum
My question is, who is bringing this all up right now, and why? “Officials briefed on the matter” can include President Obama. Could be folks in the CIA (in which case they’re in trouble unless they have a bunch more ammo in store). I’m thinking that “officials briefed on the matter” probably doesn’t include Rudy “Next Secretary of State” Giuliani but I think that it’s worthwhile to tease out whom it might include.
I suspect one of the Gang of 12 leaked. Not even necessarily one of the Democrats.
It is appropriate to call this an illegitimate election result. The term “His Fraudulency” – borrowed from 1877 – would be suitable for re-use.
American elections have never met UN fair elections standards anyway, but this particular one was fraud through-and-through. And, although there is zero evidence of actual vote fraud (as opposed to vote suppression and other elements of vote fixing) the failure to recount further hurts the overall election credibility.
On January 20th at noon I’ll be rooting for a large meteor to hit a certain location near the Potomac River.
What definitions of legitimacy and fraud are being used here, exactly, that makes this an illegitimate election? The final tally is off, but the final tally is always off if you’re counting to 120 million– there’s zero indication that it’s off by enough to matter in three states. The voters can, legitimately, be as stupid as they like.
As recently as a few days ago I was positive there was less than no chance Trump would be impeached. I’m no longer so sure. What’s more, the thought of a President Pence was beyond horrific as recently a month ago. Now I’m thinking that, yeah, it’d be utterly fucking awful…but one hell of a lot less awful than President Trump. (Talk about a low bar.)
I don’t think Scott thought Trump would win even post-Comey. I think he was talking about losing the Senate at the time.
One important difference, compared to the Iraq story, is that no one is arguing that we should go to war over this–just that we should be a lot more wary, both of the Russians and of those they seem to have tried to benefit.
There is a right answer here. Obama should have asked Clinton’s people how she wanted him to play it.
That doesn’t really work, I don’t think, because asking Clinton’s people “Should we go public with this?” would itself be corrupt and possibly criminal because Clinton’s people wouldn’t be entitled to have access to that information– or, even if they were, a POTUS deciding on whether to go public with information based on the sayso of a political campaign strikes me as legally and politically dubious at best. You are trading a problem for a bigger one.
I don’t think so. It’s a political question, not a national security one. He kept it quiet because he was concerned it would hurt her once it became politicized; she’s the one who should have made that call.
My very vague impression is that they don’t get along so well.
It’s not the most immediate concern here, but this represents a massive, stellar sized indictment of the prevailing attitude towards cryptography and on-line security on the part of the federal government. The NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. should be building strongly encrypted open-source communication tools for the masses, everything from email to chat. The US has far more to lose from legitimate communications being intercepted and published by foreign actors than we stand to gain from being able to read the world’s email.
(a) Making government-provided tools available cheaply violates the rule that some private party must make a lot of money on these things. So we can’t have that.
(b) Clearly reading the world’s email is more important than protecting our own citizens and infrastructure.
I think you vastly underestimate the relevance (and thus the need to investigate) of whether:
1 – Trump colluded with a foreign country to get him elected
and/or
2 – Since Putin *also* hacked the RNC, whether Putin has any leverage on Trump.
I mean, Tillerman. Come on.
Your last point is so critical to understanding this election. I have maintained, and still believe, that the biggest bias this election season – a bias held by the media, but also by voters and by other politicians – was the bias towards believing that Hillary Clinton was the obvious next President and that Trump was a joke. It’s a bias which started very early on, but somehow was never dislodged throughout the entire process, even when he won the nomination, when he pulled even in the polls at the conventions or when he narrowed the gap very late. I don’t think almost anyone took seriously the idea he would be President literally until it was clear he might win Michigan on election night. The result was stuff like this – insane focus on mundane Clinton stuff, while very little focus on Trump’s insanity and his staggering illiberal beliefs.
I feared after the election that this was actually going to continue, and it looks like I’m sadly correct so far. I honestly don’t think people do or will take Trump seriously even though he has been elected and is actively saying crazy shit and appointing crazy people. He’ll continue to say and do crazy shit and people will shrug it off. It’s hard for me to even imagine what it would take for him to be impeached, for example, since the bar is so low. I don’t see how this changes.