The Real Problem With Russia
- Charlie Biscotto
- Jan 7, 2017
- 5 min read
I've taken some interest in Donald Trump's response to allegations of Russian hacking, and so I was waiting with bated breath for his response to the full briefing from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Suffice it to say, I was not surprised, though I was still disappointed. To his credit, Donald Trump released a statement where he at least offered some positive statements about America's intelligence community and admitted that Russia has an interest in hacking American institutions, saying:
"While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines."
That's progress. He's not outright disagreeing with the assessment, and he does make one good point. American intelligence found no evidence that any actual votes were tampered with. Around half of all Democrats believe, according to a YouGov poll, that Russian interference affected vote tallies, and there just is no evidence to support this.
For a fuller picture though, it's important to remember that FBI Director James Comey and other sources revealed back in September that the Russians attempted to infiltrate voter registration systems and successfully did so in four states. If the Russians could have impacted our vote tallies, they might have, but the decentralized nature of our election processes makes that a significantly greater challenge. Either way, a man who at least acted as though he had no interest in seeing Hillary Clinton elected president was saying a month and a half before Donald Trump's election that Russia was actively attempting to affect American democratic processes.
But, ever the thin-skinned and predictable fellow that he is, Donald Trump needed to marry his acceptance of reality with a little bit of self-legitimizing, stating as quoted above that "there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election," a statement that is not actually correct. There was no tampering with actual votes, but there was a constant drumbeat of leaks and then social media trolling to turn those leaks into negatives about Hillary Clinton, as Katie Bo Williams described in an explication of the declassified report for The Hill:
Russian state-run outlets Sputnik and RT both amped up campaigns to delegitimize the Clinton campaign, including English-language videos like one headlined “Clinton and ISIS Funded with the Same Money,” and promoted the idea that WikiLeaks had an email that would “put Clinton in Prison.”
“In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems,” said the report, which describes Clinton’s health as a focal point of the campaign.
Russia’s “Internet Research Agency,” a paid army of social media “trolls,” also got in on the act. Accounts once devoted to supporting Russian annexation of the Ukraine flipped to support Trump.
This work by the Internet Research Agency is not new. In June 2015, PBS was reporting on them and their efforts to discredit President Obama by claiming ISIS had attacked in Louisiana and that an ebola outbreak had occurred in Atlanta. And people believe these fake news stories. In the same YouGov poll that conservatives are bandying as proof that Democrats believe in conspiracy theories is the fact that 62% of Trump voters believe millions of illegals voted in this election and 53% of Trump voters believe that the Clinton e-mail leaks included conversations about pedophilia and human trafficking. Fake news is effective, and efforts to control it through fact-checking are failing for people of all ideologies. The leaks and falsified information coordinated by Russian trolls undoubtedly affected some voters, and to deny that is comical.
Adrien Chen, who is interviewed in the linked PBS video and has written extensively about the Internet Research Agency in the past, wrote about the agency again for the New Yorker this summer, prior to Trump's election, and had this to say about their goals:
The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
...
Russia’s use of propaganda, dirty tricks, leaks, and hacks in foreign affairs works a lot like a troll farm on a larger scale. The aim is to promote an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia, heightening divisions among its adversaries. “Having realized it is unlikely to make any real or lasting friends, Moscow has instead turned its efforts into paralyzing and demoralizing its enemies,” [NYU Professor of global affairs Mark] Galeotti writes. This effort is ideologically blind: Russia supports extreme right-wing nationalist parties in France and Germany, while in the U.S. the state-run news outlet Russia Today is better known for highlighting the causes of the far left (Occupy Wall Street, the drone war, government surveillance). When I was investigating the Internet Research Agency, one of the trolls’ favorite topics to promote was the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of Michael Brown. Today the agency has moved on to Trump. And yet one can see a future where political protests against police brutality or income inequality are discredited by opponents, because of superficial connections to Russia. This is especially easy to imagine under President Trump.
It is clear from the declassified report that Russian actors attempted to undermine Hillary Clinton, in part because they believed she was certain to win. They were more successful than they ever could have dreamed. They thought that they would sow doubts about America's duly elected president and the notion of liberal democracy, and they have done it while still managing to elect their preferred candidate.
Faced with a mountain of evidence that Russians have attempted to influence American elections, how did Donald Trump respond?
He insults his political foes and talks about forging an alliance with people who have clearly and actively attempted to affect faith in American democratic institutions. This is the wrong way forward, and as Vladimir Putin surely knows, it only aids him further. As former CIA Chief Michael Hayden said a week before the election, our greatest worry should not be that Donald Trump is an active Russian agent, but a "useful fool" whose been cultivated to act against democracy's long-term interests.
We must accept Donald Trump's election, as unpalatable as it may be to us. But if we are to do accept reality, he must do so as well. He may not have wanted Russian assistance, and he may not have needed it. None of us can say for sure. But he got it, and the motivation behind it couldn't be clearer. If his administration does not forcefully oppose Russian incursions in other democracies, he is a threat to the very office he holds.