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Part 2 of a new look back at the Russian attack on the 2016 election from Timothy Snyder; 3/1/23 [1]
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Date: 2023-03-01
Four weeks ago I wrote about a recent essay by Timothy D Snyder, here. It was encouraging to me to see that people still very much care about this issue and are staying informed of the developments the past couple of years.
On February 2, Snyder wrote again about the attacks in, The Trauma of 2016, (spy scandal, part 2). I will try to summarize the piece by using excerpts as best I can and encourage you to read it yourself. The excerpts below in the quote blocks are straight copies from the piece, although I have included some emphasis of my own with underlined text.
He starts with a short review of his first essay, and setting the stage for this one. I also want to note that he wrote these two essays in response to the arrest of Charles McGonigal.
As I wrote last time, the FBI helped Trump in 2016 in two ways. Its inquiry (DC office, McGonigal present through October 2016) into his connections with Russia was framed in such a narrow way (person-to-person contacts) that Trump could use it as his own defense, and did so. Some FBI special agents (New York office, McGonigal present from October 2016) managed to make it public that Hillary Clinton was being investigated for her emails, at a time when the election was being decided. In this essay, I will be discussing a third possible way: moving the press coverage of Russia's actions in a way that served Trump.
Snyder is definitely willing to criticize the NY Times and without soft pedaling it or minimizing the damage the article caused.
One of the villains in this piece is, sadly, the New York Times, as writers for some rival newspapers have pointed out: just now Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Erik Wemple in the Washington Post three years ago. The particular focus of criticism is a Times story that ran on 26 October 2016 under the surreal headline "Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia." The newspaper of record was saying that there was no Russia story, and doing so right before the election. The New York Times not only missed the biggest story of 2016, it dismissed it, in a way that did harm . Two days later, the New York Times would pay tremendous attention to another FBI investigation, the one which was about nothing, which is to say about Hillary Clinton's emails. It is worth asking to what extent the Times became useful to Trump and Russia as a result of its FBI sources, who of course themselves would bear some responsibility. But it is also necessary to ask about the journalistic practices that made this collapse possible.
OUCH!
In the concision and timeliness with which the article misled readers, it is suggestive of something malignant.
He starts his breakdown of the article and superbly highlights the flaws inherent in the writing.
I want to start with a brief statement that figures late in the article: an aside, a minor element of a narrative pile-on designed to convince the reader that even the most obvious connections between Trump and Russia have not panned out. The article offers a reassurance that Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is not being investigated in connection with Russia, but instead for his work for a "kleptocratic government in Ukraine." The reader might understandably conclude that nothing connected Manafort and Russia. And that would be entirely incorrect. ** What is meant in the article is not a "Ukrainian government" but rather a Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. And that president was pro-Russian, which is pertinent but not mentioned, as is the fact that his cause had been supported by a Russian social media campaign -- like the one that was underway in 2016 to support Trump. It was also relevant that Russia had tried manipulate a recent presidential election in Ukraine, and was caught doing so. For all of these reasons, the move to change the subject from Russia to Ukraine was spurious at best. ** Manafort was dispatched from Russia to Ukraine by Deripaska to help Yanukovych win. Rather than dismissing Manafort by association with Ukraine, it would have made sense to ask whether such a Deripaska-Manafort-candidate configuration was repeating itself in the U.S., as indeed it was.
We can’t lose sight of how scary it is that McGonigal was head of counterintelligence of NYFBI at the time the article was written.
And of course, it was that very same Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who then (according to the indictment) went on to employ Charles McGonigal, which raises questions about the loyalties and motivations of the FBI sources in October 2016. If (just a hypothesis now) Deripaska and McGonigal were already an item in 2016, it would have been in both men's interest to spin press stories in the direction of Ukraine rather than Russia. If we do not know about McGonigal's arrest, and we assume the good faith of the FBI, the article reads as though FBI New York (and through them the reporters) were fooled by the Russian operation. After McGonigal's arrest, less generous interpretations will get a hearing.
I am so tired of the phrases that minimize the attacks on our election. There wasn’t Russian ‘meddling’ or in this case, ‘disrupting’ of our elections; it was a fully developed attack.
Now let us move to the top of the article, to its thesis: "And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump." ** An apparently minor point: who are "FBI and intelligence officials"? What does that ambiguous formulation actually mean? Some people in the FBI (such as McGonigal) do intelligence work, but it is a law enforcement organization. Does it mean FBI special agents who work in intelligence in their own organization? That would point pretty directly at McGonigal and his colleagues. Or does it mean some FBI people and some intelligence people from other bodies? There are more than a dozen American intelligence organizations. A reader might get the impression that there was a consensus among them that Russia did not intend to support Trump. But that was not the case. The institutions tasked with intelligence had already assigned to Russia the intent of aiding Trump. That is how U.S. senators had been briefed the previous month. Perhaps neither the New York Times nor its FBI sources knew that at the time. Perhaps the sources were ignorant, perhaps they were conflating personal views with a policy community as a whole, or perhaps they were lying.
Snyder references Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s reporting about how the Russians were successfully able to use their stolen material to influence one of our debates — this is a BFD propaganda win for the Russians! The media’s continued use of stolen material to drive their own ratings and stories is truly shameful. Rarely was there any self reflection about the use of the material and how by using it they were partnering with malevolent actors.
There is an obvious circumstantial point that somehow dodged being made in the article: the Russians hacked the Democrats. They then used the available raw materials to harm the Democrats. The Russian leaking of emails revealing strife between supporters of the two main Democratic candidates in spring 2016 cannot have been about disrupting the presidential election. The point was to divide and weaken the Democrats. Making public the contact information of Democratic party officials was obviously meant to wreak havoc in their lives, which it did. Those Russian actions took place before the candidates were even nominated. The Russians tried to hurt Clinton before she was the Democratic nominee, and they tried to help Trump win the Republican nomination. Russia's Internet Research Agency went to work on its social media campaign for Trump in June 2015, right after he announced his candidacy. ** In the weeks before the Times article was published, the Russians again and again acted to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Russian bots and trolls worked hard to exaggerate Clinton's illness on September 11th, and to praise Trump during and after the presidential debates. As Jamieson argues, the leaked emails created the basis for questions in two of the debates; Russians curated a misleading excerpt associating Clinton with "open borders," which then figured in a debate. On October 7th, the Access Hollywood tape revealed Trump to be an advocate of sexual assault. Less than an hour after it was released, Russia countered with John Podesta's emails, which were worked into fictional Clinton scandals which were obviously meant to (and did) rescue Trump.
Snyder moves onto the elephant in the room in regard to Donald Trump and the NY office of the FBI.
..FBI New York had abundant reasons to connect Trump, the Russian state, and Russian organized crime, beginning in the 1980s, from the use of Trump Tower to launder Russian money, to the strange Russian investments through a company called Bayrock. McGonigal himself was assigned to work on Russian organized crime in New York in the 1990s. Knowing this, a categorical dismissal of a connection between Trump and Russia by FBI New York is puzzling.
Once again he hits one of the key failures in the article and also links it to the media at large. So many people here and elsewhere could see what was happening in real time. Why the hell wouldn’t the media cover it seriously?
The assignation of "disrupting the presidential election" as the Russian motive deserves critical attention in and of itself. This claim was wrong, of course, and knowably wrong at the time. What is interesting is its apparent plausibility to reporters. ** The "disruption" thesis was supported by no evidence (that I know of, or that was provided in the article), and made no sense in light of available evidence. Why then was it accepted by New York Times reporters, and made the centerpiece of an important article? I have an intuition. The idea that Russia did not back a side but just had a kind of distant interest in a balanced disruption might have appealed to a sensibility within the Times. There are two sides to every story, goes the received wisdom, and so we must shape stories so that they have two sides. If Russia backed Trump, that would be very inconvenient for the Times, because where then to seek the "other side" of the story? How welcome, then, to imagine that the Kremlin was not taking a side. It is almost as if someone understood how to manipulate the Times.
The rhetorical weakness that is both-sides-ism!
The reader is to understand that Democrats and Clinton supporters make some claims, and that Republicans and Trump supporters make some other claims. But then comes the FBI, presented not as a political entity like the others, but as the arbiter of the truth -- even though what the FBI sources had to say was implausible, suspicious, and wrong. But the hammer falls. The Democrats and the Clinton supporters are wrong. The Republicans and the Trump supporters are right. The New York Times has spoken. And Roger Stone, amazingly but somehow appropriately, gets the article's last word.
Definitely more complicated to investigate after the fact, and after immense damage had been done to some of our political and civic institutions.
The FBI did eventually investigate Trump and Russia, but only after he was elected, which complicated the matter hugely. The real question is: why did that take so long? Why did the FBI help to kill a story that it would then pick up itself only three months later? Might that have to do with the New York bureau? And, it must be asked, with McGonigal personally? We are instructed that the McGonigal case is just a matter of a single career gone wrong. That implausible suggestion is a sign that more reflection needs to be done.
I think it’s important to take his closing to heart; there’s lots of good suggestions here.
We cannot undo or redo 2016, but we can recognize and address our own failures. The tendency not to take other countries seriously, to imagine that all that matters is what happens here, to confuse what is said with what is happening: these are all American mistakes, which we keep making. We pay for them in the currency of conscience during this spy scandal, while Ukrainians pay for them in the currency of blood as they resist Russian invasion. It would be a shame to miss the chance to reevaluate 2016 afforded to us by this spy scandal. If we do not take this opportunity to reflect, we will deepen the trauma of that year, and ensure that is continues, through the institutions that we would like to trust, and down the generations whom we would like to spare the repetition of such terrible events.
Thank you for your time today. I hope you stay connected to this critically important story.
[END]
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[1] Url:
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