A piece by a right-leaning journalist named Jordan Schachtel. I met him once on one of my trips to DC, and he struck me as committed to the mission of journalism, by which I mean that he's definitely trying to advance his political agenda (which is at the core of journalism: 'comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable'), but that he's not willing to sell out his credibility to do it. If he publishes something, he has some reason to think it's defensible.
That said, the Nunes report concluded many of the same things as the Obama-era "consensus" report, which were reaffirmed by the recent indictments announced by Rosenstein. The timing of the announcement of those indictments is surely political, and intended to bracket the President during his Helsinki meeting: indictments that will never lead to arrests, such as these, could be announced at any time or never. The President's refusal to be bracketed in this way by publicly doubting the community attempting the bracket is going to cost him politically, but makes a kind of sense. Yet the similarity of the Nunes report's findings mean that the facts are probably not going to stray too far from the ones laid out in the indictments.
What that says to me is that there's a real attempt by the so-called "Deep State" to break out of its constitutional limits, and control the man whom the voters via the Electoral College appointed over them. Their refusal to investigate the servers, mentioned by the President in his controversial answers yesterday, is proof that they are defying the constitutional order. The move to bracket a president in foreign policy is out or order, no matter how much wiser the lesser bureaucrats in fact may be than the President. Even if their assumption of superiority is entirely correct, this is not their proper role.
It also says to me that the President should probably climb down a bit on his rhetoric, and accept that the question of Russian attempts at meddling is reasonably settled. The fact that they tried these various methods of influencing our elections is as reasonably well established as it probably can be in such a contentious environment, and there is a severable question of securing our elections that should be taken seriously apart from the machinations of the insurgent bureaucrats. Both problems need solutions, not one or the other.
UPDATE: See discussion in comments on the division; the President seems to be 'revising and extending his remarks' along these lines in front of Congress today.
14 comments:
I heard a report yesterday from a credible journalist (and if I can find the cite, I'll post it; it was a one-off, though, in the flood of opprobrium) that the NLMSM (my term, not the journalist's) has, for years, deliberately (? the journalist was unsure) conflated the Russia-interfered-with-our-election beef with the Trump-Russia-collusion beef with the outcome of interfering with the administration, and after Helsinki, they're hell bent on deconflating the two further to make Trump look bad. At the same time, Trump has conflated the two as a result of the NLMSM drumbeat of conflation, and now he has trouble deconflating out of concern that separating the two would let the Russia-interference beef deprecate the legitimacy of his election.
I think he's wrong on that last, but both sides now are trapped by their past rhetoric. He's also wrong to have accepted the conflation in the first place (if nothing else, Rule #4 applies to him as well as to the Left), but the argument, such as it is, for conflation at the outset would have held at from the outset--a Russia-interference only beef would have deprecated the election's legitimacy. I think he was wrong to make that argument (if that was his motive), but there it is.
Eric Hines
In fairness to Rosenstein et al, they did try to make this part easy on him by including in the indictments a clear claim that (a) there were no suggestions being made of US collusion with Russian efforts, and that (b) the election outcome was not in any case affected. They were trying to bracket him from negotiating with Russia by highlighting that it was actual Russian intelligence officials that were acting to manipulate the US elections. (Which, of course, we do to them as well -- a point Rand Paul has been making lately, for which he has been widely abused but about which he is quite correct.)
Ultimately I think most Americans, as opposed to the high-stakes partisans who make up most of the commentariat, would like a solution that permanently put both these issues to bed. Clear the Trump administration's legitimacy, and then secure our elections from future meddling. That would be the best outcome, but I doubt it's the one we'll get.
I was surprised and a little disappointed to hear the president claim that Russia didn't try to interfere in the election, since they clearly did. What they didn't clearly do was collude with the Trump campaign; if any, there's much clearer evidence that they colluded with the Clinton campaign. It's not at all clear to me what they were up to, really, beyond the standard bloody-mindedness. And I agree we attempt the same on a regular basis. I can't bring myself to care much about hacking or propaganda. If someone showed they'd actually fiddled with vote counts I'd explode, and I'm very alert to signs that they paid off one campaign or another or duped people with dossiers and so on. I'd like to see as much sunlight on all of that as possible, so we'll be fore-armed the next (inevitable) time they try it--and so the Clinton machine is more likely to be busted along with the Russians. But I don't care greatly, nevertheless.
I'm much more concerned about Syria, ISIS, etc., and I don't fault Trump in the least on those real-world issues. He so clearly is doing a better job for us than his predecessor did or than I could have hoped Clinton would do.
Poor Chris Wallace floundered a good deal trying to pin Putin down. He should have known Putin would try the standard rhetorical gambit of denouncing America for blacks killed by cops or JFK or MLK killed by assassins. How could he not have been ready to point out that he was trying to ask about personal enemies of Putin killed by actions personally sanctioned by Putin as the head of state? Those are a far cry from screw-ups by off-the-reservation individuals, and Putin should have had to work harder to argue that the Russian assassinations of recent years were the works of crazed loners over whom he had no control.
I was interested to hear Putin claim that an ex-pat American had sent $400MM to the Clinton Foundation, but that story doesn't seem to hold much water. I'd have liked to hear even more from Putin about the Clinton campaign's unsavory connections to Russia.
An aside: so we'll be fore-armed the next (inevitable) time they try it
There is no "next time." They're already doing it still (not, again); they have been, are now, and will be planting malware to be triggered at a later time.
Eric Hines
I don't get the "Russian interference" hysteria. As far as I know, all that happened is that some Russians bought a bunch of online ads. There is no way to prevent this where the cure is not worse than the disease.
I have heard nothing to convince me that any of the WikiLeaks releases came from Russian Intelligence as opposed to a disgruntled DNC staffer.
So given where I'm starting from, what can you show me to indicate this is anything other media show? Especially one that has come out of events that had basically zero real world effects.
Chris Wallace was trying to make a big deal of the hacking of the DNC computers. Putin impertubably noted that it wasn't as though the hackers released fake data--it was real DNC communications. Bad for the DNC, and rude and so on, but not lying propaganda. Even if the purpose was to influence the election, I can't gin up much outrage over it in my own heart.
imperturbably
It hasn't been talked about much, but China been extremely active in the manipulate-Americans game, especially via American media corporations and global chains. I wrote about this here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57018.html
Note also the apparent *Russian* use of social media to try to influence Americans in the direction of opposing fossil fuels, and the interesting marketing game they are playing re GMO crops.
My feelings on this are very similar to Eric's. Russian activity in our elections has been going on for years, and would still be utterly meaningless without the spoken or unspoken assumption that it actually mattered to the outcome of the 2016 election. It is only front and center now (as opposed to say, 2012) because the Democrats have seized on it as the answer to why their girl didn't win the election she wasn't supposed to lose. I see from a late post that Trump is going to try to deconflict these streams. I wish him well but it's going to be next to impossible to both acknowledge Russian activity in the election and at the same time argue the negative that it made no difference, or at least did not have the influence that the Democrats think it did.
As far as I know, all that happened is that some Russians bought a bunch of online ads.
That's the NLMSM hyping that--the Russians didn't even spend much on those buys--while downplaying the Russians' major effort at interference: hacking into several (half?) States' voter roles and stealing voter identification information. That would dovetail nicely with Republicans' concern over voter fraud.
Hacking the DNC takes importance from the rest of the story, also downplayed by the NLMSM. The Russians tried and failed to hack RNC computers. The failure of the one coupled with the success of the other, coupled with the Obama Intel community's telling Obama about Russian attempts directly to influence the election in the spring before the voting and Obama's decision to do nothing about the effort, nicely illustrates the Progressive-Democrats' lack of give-a-s* on matters relating to American security.
Eric Hines
Rep. Nunes has waded into this today, claiming that the FBI and DOJ are obstructing the House investigation. The idea he has is that they hope the Democrats will “dissolve” the investigation into how much they tried to help in 2016.
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/intel-chair-fbi-doj-obstructing-trump-probe-hope-dem-takeover-congress/
A lot of this Russia stuff really gets my radar up- the indictment of Butina- a 'spy' who "bragged about her connections at the Kremlin"- are we really worried about 'spies' with such poor craft?
This is a very long, but interesting article questioning the veracity of Crowd Strike, which so far as I know is the only source for saying Russia is involved in hacking the DNC/DCCC/Hillary campaign.
There's a lot that smells fishy here. To many seemingly obvious tell tales left to point to Russia. As I said to someone else- amateurs merely hack, pros point you in another direction.
This is how it looked from Nixon's pov, Trum. Enjoy it while you can.
Pay no attention to what Trump says. He has always been all over the map. Actions only.
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