Morning Reads for Friday, June 15, 2018

I just finished James Clapper’s book and even though I went into it with some skepticism he did change my perspective if not my mind on a few things, reinforced some others, and some of them are currently under discussion in this thread along with the Handel/IG one. The view of an avowed patriot in service to his country for 55 years is well worth the read as he is sometimes defiant and at other times self deprecating in his past actions, but obvious in that he did what he felt was right at the time.
Just a few snippets:
…I was shocked. Everyone was shocked, including Mr. Trump, who’d continued on Election Day to cast doubt on whether he would accept the election results as legitimate… I also thought about the warning on Russian interference in the election that Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and I had issued to the American public a month earlier. We’d agonized over the precise wording of the press release and whether naming Russian president Vladimir Putin as the mastermind and puppeteer of the Russian influence operation would cause an international incident, drawing Jeh’s department and the Intelligence Community into the political fray. Reading responses to exit polls, I realized that our release and public statements simply hadn’t mattered. I wasn’t sure if people were oblivious to the seriousness of the threat we’d described or if they just didn’t care what the Russians were doing. Either way, I saw that our efforts ended up having all the impact of another raindrop in a storm at sea.

I wondered what President Obama was thinking and if he regretted his reticence to “put his thumb on the scale” of the election—as he put it—by not publicly calling out the Russian interference while Putin was effectively standing on the other end of that scale. At the same time, I was no longer sure it would have mattered to the people in Middle America if the president had presented everything we knew about Russia’s massive cyber and propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy, disparage former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and promote Donald Trump…
I didn’t realize it then, but the Russians were just as shocked as we were. They’d succeeded beyond their wildest imagination and were completely unprepared for their own success. The Russian propaganda network in the United States, formerly known as Russia Today and since rebranded as just “RT,” was jubilant in calling the election for Mr. Trump: “That’s what this is, a defining moment in global history, that America is willing to turn the page and possibly isolate itself from the rest of the world.” They declared, “The next speech that Donald Trump gives to the world will be one of the most important speeches in the history of the world.” As the anchors reveled in Trump’s victory, the crawl at the bottom of the screen continued running lines intended to delegitimize Clinton’s win, such as SEVERAL STATES REPORT BROKEN VOTING MACHINES. The Russian internet troll factory scrambled to stop its #DemocracyRIP social media campaign, set to run from its fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook. In the middle of all this, Putin lost the chance to return the favor of challenging Clinton’s victory, as she’d challenged the results of the 2011 Russian election when she’d been US secretary of state. I don’t believe he minded—at all.
His stated purpose in writing this book and going on camera after a career when he most often sought to stay out of the limelight is to note the danger to democracy in this country brought about by a foreign tyrant. He notes that James Comey was between a rock and a hard place in his July announcement on Hilary Clinton’s emails because of Bill Clinton’s famous meeting a few days before with Loretta Lynch. The October one was in response to the troll avalanche expected if he didn’t announce later developments in order to protect his FBI in the event of an expected win by Clinton. He is thoroughly disgusted by the Trump administration’s refusal to address Putin’s interference in our election regardless of collusion issues. Instead they have chosen to hinder and obfuscate, attack, threaten to fire and/or actually fire the investigators.
It is not as simple as the stories on RT. Russia used a veteran network of trolls and hackers already adept at their craft from experiences in Croatia and Ukraine along with others. They created bots to generate hits and get their truly fake news at the top of everyone’s news feeds. They planted stories from #BlackLivesMatter on the racist’s sites and vice versa. Ditto con v. lib sites, R v. D, etc. If some of the posters here are not on Putin’s payroll they have been duped into being his tools.