As we remember fondly the days of the Obama presidency, he has taken on the mythic proportions of an unerring Chief Executive under siege from a vengeful partisan Republican Party and conservative allies who put their party above their country. Of course, no one is unerring, particularly politicians who are forced to make compromises in order to rule. Barack could be too deliberative, pondering issues even as events progressed more quickly than his decision making process. Like other presidents, he had victories, like the Iran Nuclear Treaty and some less successful efforts, like a response in Syria and Ukraine. And while Obamacare expanded access, it did nothing to address quality of healthcare, the escalating cost of medications as well as medical care, as opposed to the cost of medical insurance.
The inability of both Obama and his advisors to read the evolution of the 2016 campaign and the dangers of the right wing media storm may have led him to misjudge his options around disclosure of Russian interference in the campaign. But then again, the retrospectoscope has an unerring view. We will never know when and what information Obama and the FBI had access to nor will we know fully how the GOP responded. That information may become more available in decades to come, from memoirs after crucial elements have been declassified. With GOP leadership as engrained in the art of fabrication as their erstwhile leader, verifiable information is unlikely to emerge from that quarter. There is high likelihood that there will be a number of attempts at reshaping historical perceptions to cleanse some soiled reputations.
The story begins long before 2016. Ben Rhodes, a former White House aide and national security advisor said in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air that from the very first day in 2008, the threat of Russian espionage was a given; it had been the norm for years. It was emphasized to everyone in the administration that communications should be made secure from not just the Russians, but other foreign interests like the Chinese. So it took them awhile to realize that a change not seen before in Russian tactics was afoot.
One early indicator was the violation of what had been a diplomatic norm, release of top secret information to the public. The release from Moscow of a phone call between an American diplomat about the situation in Ukraine, was a Russian trial balloon. The fact that the leak was about the Ukraine reflected Putin’s blaming the US for the need for regime change in that country. This was a complete fiction. When the Moscow puppet, Yanukovych, resigned in 2014, Putin claimed that the US had a hand in the national demonstrations on the Maidan which had actually been completely spontaneous. This was a piece of propaganda fabricated to legitimize the Russian invasion, claiming the necessity to restore order that Russian troops and gangs were causing. That was ultimately folded into Putin’s domestic propaganda that the Russian people are under siege from the West which fed his assertion that the motherland should reclaim the state of Ukraine. Ukrainians, he preached, had always been part of the Russian peoples.
In February of 2014, Russian tanks and military units invaded Crimea and later annexed it. But there were other incursions into other parts of Ukraine, still ongoing today. In coordination with the military action, Russia mounted TV and social media campaigns, using the same groups tied to bots later used in the US. They also seized the electrical power grid twice, once in Kiev and once in the countryside. Ukrainian operators were only able to recover control because they still maintained an old system from the 1950s. This level of cyber manipulation frightened intelligence officials here and teams were sent to the Ukraine to try to unravel the intrusion and determine if we had the same vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, no one in the United States believed that Putin would be bold enough to export his “active measures” programs to our shores. Russia had tried to interfere in US elections in the past; small isolated attempts that amounted to little. As David Sanger, author of “The Perfect Weapon” detailed in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, when they discovered the servers in the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House (not those with classified information) had been hacked, the administration did not see it as something other than routine Russian espionage. Their response was to fight to get the hackers out, which in the case of the White House took 2 weeks, but not to publicly denounce Moscow or even acknowledge and exact a price quietly from the Kremlin. Even in light of the Ukrainian experience, intelligence officials did not see that the bits and pieces heralded a new much more aggressive posture in Moscow. Sanger openly condemns Obama’s failure to react forcefully as a critical error in policy implementation. Putin is one who will keep pushing boundaries until someone pushes back. No response meant a green light to him; if they didn’t care about important government agencies like the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they won’t respond to hacking the Democratic Party National Committee, which is after all, a nongovernmental, private organization.
The DNC was well aware of its security vulnerabilities but decided the expense was far greater than the risk and their war chest was better spent on the campaign. Internet security seems to be the last thing on organizational and business lists. The DNC chose to defer until after the election. But after the hack, the interaction with the FBI was downright comical. The failure of the FBI to officially inform the DNC can only be considered dereliction of duty. But the DNC hemming and hawing in response was absurd. It was not until the next spring, fully 9 months after FBI contact with the DNC that Obama was made aware.
Still, nobody could envision the reality that Putin had transformed Russian “active measures” into a multi-pronged attack, with a broad array of instruments to weaponize information in an attempt to assist Donald Trump to win the Presidential election. In that assertion, now confirmed by Senate Intelligence Committee report, we have to believe the FBI and words of the Russian operatives and the Trump campaign officials they were trying to groom. Again, Russian propaganda in Ukraine and the associated domestic state media at home that declared there was no war in Crimea and Ukraine set the example.
As slow as they were in detecting the coordinated hacking, the administration couldn’t decide what to do about it. Some in the administration wanted to push Putin hard. They debated direct cyber attacks on Russian infrastructure. There were suggestions to expose Putin’s money trail. In all likelihood, that would have produced little more than a yawn amongst Russians. They all know he’s corrupt; that’s just a given for their whole government and there is little they can do about it. Putin is pretty secure with or without their support; he can just crack down a little harder when things get slightly out of control.
There were ideas to perhaps make some of Putin’s money disappear. But the Federal Reserve generally frowns on extralegal activity, even if governmental, that could lead to loss in confidence in international monetary structures and threaten a collapse of international currencies. Another idea was to cut Moscow off from the International Monetary Fund, but that action would have left Europe unable to pay for the oil and natural gas supplied from Russian fields, leaving EU countries to face the then upcoming winter. The extensive review of legal precedents before deciding on countermeasures also retarded decision making. Still, they thought they would have time to come up with the perfect response.
In August the CIA delivered a top secret report to Obama and 3 other aides that explained the sources in Moscow had evidence that Putin was involved in cyberattacks to help Trump get elected.
In August the CIA delivered a top secret report to Obama and 3 other aides that explained sources deep in the government in Moscow had evidence that Putin was directly involved in the cyber campaign to assist the election of Donald Trump by disrupting the electoral process. At that point, Russian intelligence services were the known culprits in the DNC hack and forwarding the 20,000 emails for WikiLeaks to drop online and the FBI had begun an investigation into contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials. The GRU, Russian Military Intelligence agency, was confirmed as the second agency that hacked into the DNC, leaking its information on their own DCLeaks.com. Still, there were problems in the intelligence gathering for the FBI report, in part because of their strict letter of the law approach that hindered collection of data on Americans who may had been drawn into the middle of Russia’s “active measures”. One may find that hard to believe to hear it from the conservative conspiracy theorists,
But they did know that Russian hackers had been probing voter registration databases in almost 15 states. What if they reaped chaos in the election, questioning its integrity and credibility, playing into Trump’s hands, especially when Clinton won? Trump’s Moscow assisted propaganda about rigging the election could become a political crisis, with Trump’s refusal to accept the results and the sanctioning of extra legal actions against the newly elected Clinton administration. Clearly, the CIA report upped the stakes by pointing to a systematically directed effort in multiple places to at least produce chaos and at best, elect a president in Donald Trump. In response, Obama sent aides to determine vulnerabilities in the election system and facilitate agreement among the intelligence agencies to agree that Putin was trying to influence the election. And John Brennan, in a phone call, warned Alexander Bortnikov, director of Russia’s main security agency to cease and desist. By that point the evidence was conclusive.
In the meantime, Brennan convened a secret task force, including CIA, NSA, and FBI officials, whose work was kept secret from the rest of the intelligence agencies and the White House. Susan Rice, AG Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Clapper and Brennan met to consider options to respond.
Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security Secretary, was seeking mechanisms to reinforce security in the patchwork of state voting systems burdened with aging, outmoded machines and software. His first idea was to designate state voting mechanisms as “critical infrastructure” which would mean that the states would get priority in federal cybersecurity assistance, similar to that of US defense contractors and financial networks. But in an August 15 conference call with dozens of state officials, he was greeted not with a bipartisan patriotic response for national security against a hostile country, but a flat if not downright negative response. Some states called foul over the “overreach of the federal government”. The “critical infrastructure” designation would give the feds access to state-level voter information. Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State and fitting representative descendant of the treasonous Confederacy, denounced the proposal as an assault on states’ rights. He has since pronounced himself a non-believer in Russian interventions in his unquestioning support of Trump as he runs as a gubernatorial candidate. Truly, it was the Pavlovian Republican response of State Liberty or Die!
By late August, Obama had instructed aides to pursue ways to deter Putin, get a high confidence assessment from US intelligence agencies on Russia’s role and intent, shore up vulnerabilities in election systems in each state and elicit bipartisan support from congressional leaders for a statement to condemn Russia and urge states to accept federal help in improving security.
But intelligence agencies outside the CIA were slow to endorse its conclusions about Putin’s direct involvement and the intent to help Trump. Some were unconvinced by sources that came from other countries. In addition, Brennan was refused appointments with certain GOP leaders and it wasn’t until September that both the majority and minority leaders of both houses and the chairmen and ranking Democrats on the intelligence committees in both houses had been reached.
It seems intuitive that Republican reticence to receive additional briefings was politically motivated. With Trump down in the polls, the news of Russian sabotage on his behalf could have been the nail in his coffin, even if charges of sexual molestation weren’t. Their campaign propaganda was dominated by the “crooked Hillary” theme and their candidate would have been revealed as even more crooked, with a treasonous twist. They were intentionally delaying any discussion of a need to reprimand Moscow, in a world where Representatives are expected to put politics aside when the country is under siege, they would have to reveal their duplicity in defending their candidate. The delay was in essence tying Obama’s hands in responding to the threat by denying him a united front.
Of particular concern were voting systems. Moscow had hacked Ukraine’s Central Election Commission to increase totals for a far-right candidate in the Ukrainian elections of 2014 after Yanukovych had fled to Russia, just barely foiled in one district before they could announce their favored candidate as a winner despite lower vote totals. And they knew Russia had been inside the voter registration systems in several states. However, because voting procedures are controlled on the local level, any attempt to plug security holes would require the administration to go to the states and deal with GOP voting officials and governors.
The FBI had detected attempts to penetrate election systems in 21 states, some done so clumsily that they were meant to be detected to induce anxiety in Americans hearing or viewing all the chatter about rigged elections. Probably unbeknownst to intelligence at the time, Moscow’s operatives were pumping social media with discordant messages about illegal voters, fraudulent election results, etc. Admittedly, manipulations in the approximate 3000 precincts is a clumsy, labor intensive and ineffective way to swing elections, without knowing information about crucial districts. They speculated that attempts would be made in all 50 states.
At the time, they also probably didn’t know about possible and still unconfirmed links to Cambridge Analytica and/or RNC campaign social messaging individually targeted down to the household. The intricacies of that whole interaction are still not entirely clear. It is worth noting that Jared Kushner could theoretically have been a critical connector in his role overseeing campaign media communications. Knowledgeable experts have marveled at the campaign’s neighborhood level pinpoint accuracy using targeted social media. The campaign is known to have used Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm funded by ultra conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, which specializes in strategic communications using data mining. Access to those kinds of data, either through consent or through stealth could have easily improved Russian efforts. Bart Parscale, Trump campaign social media director, denies that they used any Cambridge Analytica data. Taking advantage of a Facebook service for political candidates, he contends that they created their messaging strategy with embedded like minded Facebook employees who helped them develop precisely targeted messages through trial and error. In turn, the campaign fielded millions of paid Facebook ads. Kushner’s testimony on this area is high stakes, but, given the family history, unlikely to be truthful. It’s only been a few months since it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had compiled data from perhaps 50 million Facebook users, unbeknownst to them for use in political campaign messaging for the RNC.
All voting is local. Electoral systems are generally managed by county or state officials. Election practices vary widely across different states with different population densities. This leads to a voting process that varies from county to county; this can be considered a strength in defense against an organized attack. In a system that is composed of widely dispersed nonuniform entry points, pinpointing strategic strikes is complicated and requires multiple actions, depending on the desired objective.But across the board, election agencies are generally poorly financed and staffed, without expertise in internet technology or internet security; polls are staffed by older volunteers with even less IT savvy. Election officials are elected, generally a Secretary of State, which introduces a political spin to maintenance of both voter rolls and access to the voting booth as well as financial commitments to upkeep of the voting apparatus. In most districts, election agencies are left with aging equipment and software that will require a major infusion of cash and security expertise that many cash strapped state budgets can little afford. Added to this confusion, individual counties determine their own rules about polling place locations, hours and staffing and ballots, including the number of languages in which they will be written. These have become effective tools in partisan disenfranchisement efforts. All of these factors leave the voting process vulnerable in this day of sophisticated computer hacking especially because of hyper-partisanship at the state and county level that naturally inhibits the idea of change or exchange of ideas.
Part of Republican state officials’ reluctance to respond to FBI assistance with security is the party’s pension for dirty tricks at the polls. Over the last decade such tactics have significantly changed the political landscape, quietly disenfranchising millions and millions of voters across the country. The influence of those purged voters, overwhelmingly minorities, young people and the elderly, could ultimately have affected the 2016 electoral college totals because there were numerous narrow state margins that propelled Trump to victory. This is extraordinarily important because unlike Russian interventions, we can take action against this kind of activity to reclaim our democracy. Americans are free to make dumb mistakes and if a legitimate majority of the country is satisfied with the Trump administration, then so be it. At the same time, future opposition candidates must have an equal possibility of winning electoral office in a fair fight.
More details on federal knowledge about the Russian electoral interventions in the 2016 election is worth discussing. Russian attacks on elections extend back to at least 2008, when both Obama and McCain campaigns were hacked. But the attacks were ephemeral, with the culprits quickly exiting the systems. Putin’s new “active measures” was entirely different. On a primary day in June 2016 in Riverside County, California the district attorney’s office began fielding a lot of complaints from people attempting to vote, that their registrations had been changed without their knowledge but most were able to cast provisional ballots. In the following days, there were more people who came forward with the same complaints. District attorney investigators concluded that the changes had been made by hackers using private information like social security and driver’s license numbers to access the central voter registration database for the entire state. Unfortunately, the state system did not capture the IP addresses of the computers that had made the changes so the trail went dead. Opposing political responses were predictable; the Republicans thought the Dems were trying to suppress GOP votes in the overwhelmingly Democratic state. The Dems thought their opponents were trying to excuse their losses. And there it was; public faith in the electoral process had been dented and as it dawned on federal investigators later, that was the point.
The summer of 2016 saw more attacks in Arizona and in Illinois, a hacker uploaded a malicious code that allowed access to all 15 million current and past voter files for the previous 10 years; he/she stayed for 3 weeks, without being detected. When Illinois discovered the cyber intrusion in July, the FBI Cyber Action Team (CAT) was able to determine that 90,000 files were stolen, the majority of which had social security and driver’s license numbers. But more importantly the hackers tried to change/delete information in the voter rolls. The techniques and digital footprints convinced the FBI that this was the work of Fancy Bear, an arm of Russian military intelligence (GRU).
By August 2016, the FBI had found evidence that hackers had been probing voter registration databases in almost 15 states. Georgia was not one of those states, although there is probably no way to know that given poor security safeguards and the state’s refusal to allow outside review of the system or assistance from Homeland Security to investigate or assist with security enhancements. Georgia’s story is instructive because it uses paperless voting machines like several other states which are both old, circa 2002 and known to have serious security concerns. Georgia has been considered a model of exemplary state voting systems and officials are regularly asked to educate other states and even foreign governments.
Georgia uses one single model of voting machine throughout the state, unlike most states that use multiple different models. These touch screen machines, made by the now defunct Diebold which became Premier Election Solutions, have been in use since 2002. The company also made the associated software for the state’s ExpressPoll poll books which are the electronic devices used by poll workers to verify that a voter is registered before allowing them to cast a ballot. Additional software maintains the databases for GEMS servers that are used to prepare paper and electronic ballots, tabulate votes and produce summaries of vote totals. The software version currently running on the machines was last certified in 2005 and is running on Windows 2000 that hasn’t been supported by Microsoft for at least 10 years. In addition, unlike most states where management of elections is decentralized in individual counties, Georgia’s system is centralized to a center which manages balloting and machines for all the counties.
That center is located in a university, Kennesaw State, in the Center for Election Systems which is responsible for testing and programming all the voting machines for the state of Georgia. The Center is responsible for maintenance of the machines and the associated software as well as providing support for GEMS servers which distribute the electronic ballot definition files that go into each voting machine before elections. These files tell the machines which candidate should receive a vote based on where a voter touches the screen. If these files were altered, the machines could record votes for the wrong candidate. Since Georgia machines have no paper trail which could allow voters to verify their choices before ballots are cast and also be used to compare against electronic tallies during an audit, officials have no way to determine if any machines recorded votes accurately. Computer security experts contend that without an audit trail, there is no way that officials would be able to determine if this has ever happened in any election. The Center has remained a staunch advocate of Premier/Diebold voting machines despite numerous reports by computer security experts over an extended period of time. One report features a 2007 video showing how to introduce a virus into the Diebold voting machine.
One other software system the Center uses is content management software, Drupal. Drupal is a significant problem; the Center is running an ancient version, which has not been updated, despite a well known critical software vulnerability known since 2014. A patch to prevent attackers from easily seizing control of any site had been available for over 2 years, but gone unused by the center despite the widely known existence of automated hacker scripts to attack this Drupal vulnerability.
Much of Georgia’s voter machine security depends on absolute separation from the internet. The system operates on a series of separate servers that, at least in theory, cannot be connected to the internet and therefore can not be hacked. The poll books are stored in another software program, ExpressPoll, which is delivered to workers on CDs, a process that could have easily been compromised when one county official’s car was vandalized and the CDs stolen. The state contends that no data was stolen although they gave no details on the methodology used to determine that because it simply doesn’t exist. Just more concoctions of fake news.
One day soon after the FBI reported hacking voting systems in multiple states, a curious cybersecurity researcher interested in voter system security accidentally downloaded 15GB from the Kennesaw State center’s website using a simple script to explore the site. The files were supposed to be protected by a password protected firewall but the center had misconfigured the server so anyone could access them from the server’s root directory. That 15G included registration records of 6.7 million voters, instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central election server on Election Day and software files for the state’s ExpressPoll poll books, as well as databases for the GEMS servers used to prepare electronic ballots, tabulate votes and produce summaries of vote totals. This was evidence that the wall between the internet and the voting system had been breached at some point, even if they were not continuously and currently linked. The cybersecurity researcher took no data; he simply marvelled at the discovery. He thought to check back on a second intrusion to see whether there had been any security changes after the earlier one in August. There had been no change.
When the researcher approached the Kennesaw Center director before the November elections, he was summarily snubbed. Merle King, the executive director of the Center, thanked him and said he would have the server fixed but threatened him not to reveal the information to anyone, especially the media. King never informed Kemp’s office and took a piecemeal approach to the repair, leaving the unencrypted http version of the Drupal still vulnerable, as a friend of the researcher later discovered in March 2017.
When news of a system intrusion at the Center surfaced 6 months after the cyber researcher’s discovery, the Kennesaw University IT Services, the secretary of state’s and governor’s offices and later the FBI all launched investigations. The investigation did reveal an intrusion, in which state officials falsely reported that millions of voter records were stolen, perhaps unable to tell that they were merely viewed but not retained. In the course of investigation, it became clear that the Center had been operating its networks outside the scope of the university and secretary of state’s office for years, essentially unaligned with any larger security strategy. In addition, although the Center had separate public and private networks, a public network jack sat in the closet with the private network, opening up the possibility that workers could have connected the private network system to the internet. Workers had also installed their own wireless access point in the office, a potential entry point into the network for hackers. The evidence pointed to a knowledge deficit on the part of the center’s small staff, some of whom are non-technical students at the university. The presence of the GEMS files on an internet connected server is a significant piece of evidence that points to previous connections between the private and public systems. All indications suggest that Georgia’s voting system is extremely vulnerable to hackers of all descriptions and that the integrity of the state’s vote is at the mercy of those with malicious intent, whether domestic or foreign.
When Homeland approached the secretaries of state with the news of Russian meddling, Georgia’s secretary of state Republican Brian Kemp was naturally one of those who reacted badly. Armed with news of a data breach at the Kennesaw State Center in March, he thought he would rack up some political points by accusing the FBI of maliciously attempting to hack Georgia systems, when he was well aware that it was an unrelated researcher.
Kemp insisted that the Premier/Diebold machines when purchased in 2002 met federal standards, adopted under 1990 federal guidelines. Kemp also contended that when the system met 2015 certifications, it still met state law requirements, although new federal guidelines have been issued. That simply means that the state has failed to update its own requirements. Security experts say the certification is too old and that the combination of two different certifications is outside the norm for other states. The machines are regularly tested before and after elections, but here again, a security expert knowledgeable about the machines suggested that state testing is a bit like asking the machine itself if it’s results are accurate without any outside corroboration. “Diebold, have you been a good girl.” Answer:”Diebold is always good.” The expert has been able to corrupt machines in the lab with malware that would be almost undetectable during regular operation.
Kemp seems to have a long standing aversion to security experts. Now, candidate for Georgia governor, he has tried to out Trump Trump. He advertises himself a devout Christian with a deep bias against science and factual evidence, a love of guns and a hatred of immigrants, threatening in one advertisement to use his F150 to patrol and hand deliver immigrants back across the border. Georgia was one of two states to reject the offer from the Department of Homeland Security to assist states with securing their systems.
His was the second investigation in a state that would rather not know than have to solve a problem. The previous secretary of state, Karen Handel who is now the 6th district Congresswoman, ordered a security review of the voting system to fulfill a campaign promise. An investigative team from Georgia Tech found a number of security concerns, even though they were denied access to the Kennesaw Center network or review of its security protocols. Handel who had the authority but did not order the Center to comply with requests from the committee for access, did insist that the report itself state that they did not have enough information to evaluate security safeguards. Even with that, she buried the report.
The obvious conclusion is that the secretary of state and the center are hiding something, and it may be more than just security. For instance, there was the “glitch” in some Cobb county precincts memory cards in the recent 6th district special congressional race. But when the issue was supposedly resolved, Ossoff, the Democrat, fell from 53% of the total vote to 49% and stayed there, setting in motion the runoff with Handel, the Republican. There have been other such reported glitches in county precincts that have altered results in favor of GOP candidates in close races. In the absence of paper ballots, there is no way to know if votes were changed or categorized as “inconclusive” or thrown out.
To summarize, voting machines throughout the state of Georgia are controlled by a small university based center with lax security and no indication that they have any interest in changing that. They are unlikely to try to remedy a problem that they refuse to acknowledge. The voting machines are 15 years old, using multiple outdated software systems running on an outdated operating system without the capability to use the latest security safeguards. The Center has refused to update the systems with known security patches. The absence of any paper ballots makes it impossible to verify election results or investigate reports of voting irregularities. The pretense that these ancient computer systems running on outdated software can be made secure against sophisticated hackers is clearly absurd. Officials have also demonstrated a lack of will to create a secure system and a propensity to resist any independent expert assessment and improvement in security, let alone the ongoing security watchfulness required in these days of advanced hacking. That may reflect the mindset of officials in a state where large swatches lack both internet access and cellphone towers. They haven’t yet come to grips with the centrality of technology in today’s life or the maliciousness of technology as a weapon of harm. The optimal solution is to upgrade the whole system, with voting machines with paper ballots and current generation software and management systems. If Georgia is an ideal model, our election system demonstrates a partisan pigheadedness to remain vulnerable to multiple threats, not just the Russians.
Riverside California, probably a test run to see what kind of election day havoc could be generated, was the first evidence that the Russians were mounting an aggressive campaign to undermine Americans’ faith in their own democratic process. The Obama administration struggled to craft a response while unearthing the full extent of Russian efforts. In the interim, Moscow had stepped up its game, with intrusions in Florida, New Mexico, Tennessee. Before the election, they had meddled in 25 states and had tried to hack all 50. By July of 2017, an NSA report confirmed that Russian hackers had employed an extensive phishing campaign to hack election officials as well as targeting voter registration systems. Bloomberg also reported that hackers had targeted voter registration systems in 39 states and had tried to delete or alter voter data in at least one state. They had also accessed software used by poll workers to verify voters at the polls similar to the type used in Georgia.
After Obama had a harsh word with Putin at an international meeting in China, it seemed Moscow may have simmered their attacks while some states were trying to beef up their security, some even used assistance from Homeland. There were a few cyber incidents, but no large coordinated Kremlin effort, at least none that was detected. The FBI worried that they were only detecting the clumsiest of Russian hackers and the more adroit were going undetected. But in October, Russian hackers attacked the company that provides election software and machines for 8 states, using that to create an email for a phishing campaign against elections officials nationwide.
Here are some examples of voting system vulnerability. If hackers were to delete voter names from the database stored on the center’s server or alter the precinct where voters are assigned, they could create chaos on Election Day and possibly prevent voters from casting ballots. This is not idle conjecture; in 2016, a glitch in the ExpressPoll software led some voters in Fulton County to be told that they had arrived at the wrong precinct but when redirected to a different one, they were told to return to the original precinct. Beyond that, a rogue memory card or unsophisticated poll workers could introduce malware from phishing emails in individual machines which is likely to go undetected under current security operations.
The FBI worried about a nightmare scenario in which Russians would actually be able to affect elections results. Ed Felten, a voting machine expert well acquainted with the susceptibility of touch screens, could foresee a compromised poll worker, possibly through phishing, providing outside access to machines before election day. But in the end, a process targeting individual workers or machines would be an extraordinarily tedious way to impact a final result, without information about which precinct would be critical to the results.
The FBI team did create some possible intrusion scenarios that would not appear obvious but could be disruptive. Simply flipping a letter in every voter’s address would mean that every voter in a swing county would have to use a provisional ballot, creating panic which could then be exploited by a propagandist questioning the election result, or in the current climate, suggesting that one of the parties intentionally tried to manipulate results. Even less complicated, a YouTube video showing the hacking of a single voting machine with dialogue that claims it was only one of 10,000 without actually doing it even once – real fake news- could create panic in every precinct, trigger investigations and undermine any final vote count.
We now know that on Election Day, the Russians made some voting machines nonfunctional in cities in North Carolina, which could have reduced the number of votes casts, whether through longer lines at precincts or discounted votes. The manufacturer of those voting machines had been hacked by the GRU in October.
But direct action in voting systems was only part of the Kremlin’s multi-pronged attack. Far more widespread and effective was the use of social media, a proven potent weapon, not well understood as such in the West. As we now know, their interventions spread across all major platforms, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Working from extensive experience with propaganda, Moscow understood the value of trust in persuasion. People tend to trust what confirms their knowledge and beliefs and it is that trust tha permits manipulation. Russian propaganda built outrage from fear turned into hate. Muslim terrorism was a theme hammered by their candidate and validated. In states like Michigan and Wisconsin, anti-Muslims messages in Russian ads targeted those deemed susceptible while pro-Clinton messages were generated on fake American Muslim sites. Part of the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts went into suppressing the vote. Twitter bots churned out messages to “text-to-vote”, obviously not a vote that would be counted anywhere. Democrats were targeted with misinformation about Clinton to discourage them from voting or to vote for Jill Stein. Some were encouraged to write-in Bernie Sanders on their ballots.
One big question overlays all of these investigations: how did the Russians get so good in so short a time. A few years ago, no one on Capitol Hill took the Russians seriously; they were considered among the most ineffective lobbyists in Washington because they didn’t know who to approach and when. John Podesta was a mystery to them and they had no knowledge of the DNC. Fast forward to 2016, when they would coax voters in Ohio and Indiana into watching stories on Russia Today, a state owned international Russian TV network and strategically target districts in Florida with anti-Clinton propaganda. Ultimately, the steady drip of fake news that discredited Clinton- she has Parkinson’s, she had pneumonia, she was tied to sex trafficking in a pizza shop, etc – exploited perennial suspicions that she was duplicitous and could not be trusted. These efforts probably contributed to depressing voter turnout for Hillary as well. How did Moscow know when and where to release different pieces of information?
In response to the mounting evidence, we know that Obama called together the Congressional leadership of both houses and the top Democrats and Republicans on Congressional intelligence and Homeland Security committees to mount a bipartisan attack on Russian meddling. He had hoped to use Congressional assistance in enlisting state cooperation with efforts to improve voter system security. In closed meetings, the Democrats reacted with patriotic dismay and wanted to explore responses; but much to his surprise and perhaps reflecting his naïveté about GOP animus and cut-throat approach to the campaign, Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader had the complete opposite reaction. He rebelled against the whole idea, lifting the “no cooperation ever” torch that had dominated Republicans in Congress for the past 8 years. McConnell, in the height of self interest threatened to broadly politicize the accusation as an attempt to undermine the Trump campaign. He wanted to use “Russians are helping Trump” as chum in the water to attract the sharks at Trump rallies to bloody the race through the conservative right Breitbart-radio-blogs-Facebook-Twitter fake news sphere. Others, like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, a true patriot, did join Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed. The resistance at the state level to federal investigation and assistance with improving system security, the hyper-partisan reaction of Republicans threatening to politicize the election convinced Obama, perhaps mistakenly, to back away from announcements to the public.
By late September, the administration had all but ruled out any pre-election retaliation against Moscow, fearful of a Kremlin escalation in response that would strike at the electoral system itself and assuming they would have time after a Clinton victory. Their only rebuffs to Moscow were personal; Brennan with Bortnik and Obama with Putin at an international meeting in China. He informed Putin that he knew what Putin was doing and that he’s better stop or else. Putin shot back that the US must come up with some proof and stop meddling in affairs in his country. In October Susan Rice spoke with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and gave him a message to carry to Putin. At the end of October, another message was sent over a secure channel to Moscow stating the US was aware of malicious activity originating from Russian servers that had targeted US election systems. The US regarded this type of tampering as totally unacceptable. While Moscow acknowledged the message, it did not return its denial until after the election.
With their hands tied, administration officials decided there was nothing they could do to prevent the cyber activity and settled on a plan to react to cyber incidents on election day. They were convinced that this would be the main thrust of any retaliation from Moscow and the final piece in their strategy. The election day response plan would first defer to the states, but would include armed federal law enforcement agents at polling places if voting was completely blocked and mobilizing military and national guard forces as requested in the presence of violence. For up to 3 days after the voting, an interagency force would address any further internet intrusions including “planted stories calling into question the results.” Proof of Russian success in planting propaganda stories are Gallup poll results that only 30% of adults were confident in the honesty of our elections and 69% were not.
The closest the administration came to accusing Russia of aiding the election of Donald Trump was that one single statement made 1 month before election day on October 7, 2016 by Clapper and Jeh Johnson, head of Homeland Security. Obama, wanting to appear neutral, was not a party to the statement. That statement announced that all of the country’s 17 intelligence agencies were confident that the Kremlin directed intrusions into “US political organizations” and information posted by WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and “Guccifer 2.0” were most likely connected to Moscow’s work. Putin was not named. There was no mention that the efforts were intended to help Trump or hurt Clinton. The statement was then promptly ignored as the press swarmed over the more sensational story of Trump’s pussy grabbing confessions on an “Access Hollywood” tape. Then 30 minutes later, WikiLeaks dropped the first installment of the John Podesta emails, a double diversion likely coordinated with the Trump campaign.
When Hillary alluded to the intelligence announcement in the third presidential debate, Trump responded that nobody had any idea who was responsible for the hacks, not wanting to give credence to the intelligence agencies. He had already begun discrediting the CIA after its report was leaked, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”. To be fair, the CIA had not assessed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; it was the Bush administration that used what they knew to make a false claim of WMDs to justify its war in Iraq, aided by people like John Bolton, who to this day believes that that lie was justifiable.
The DNC hacking and Wikileaks email release provided political fodder for the CelebrityCandidate to exploit across the media, including his appeal to Russia to hack Clinton’s email server in part to distract from pussy grabbing. In classic Trump form, he accused the Democrats of what he was promoting as the implications of the reports of Russian hacking: the elections were rigged. At that point, the core of Trumpophants were willing to believe whatever he said, no matter how contradictory or implausible.
But overhanging the political antics on the part of Republicans in concert with their candidate was the party’s absolute refusal to join with Democrats to condemn Russia’s interference. The party followed Trump through his appeal to a foreign power to step up their cyber offensive and held on with the partisan refusal to even acknowledge Moscow’s efforts publicly. Moscow seemed to be winning the propaganda war; a minority of Republicans viewed Russia as dangerous or as a sworn enemy. By the end of the campaign, Trump was threatening that he would not concede the election if he lost.
In December during the last 6 weeks of the his administration, Obama announced that he had ordered the intelligence services to begin a full investigation into election related hacking. A story leaked to the Washington Post about a secret CIA report that concluded that Russia “intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency.”
Much of the analysis of Russian election interference did not fall into its rightful context until after the Clinton defeat, when Obama realized that he had very little time to penalize Russia. From their effort to compile a comprehensive report of Russian espionage going back to 2008 ordered by Obama, the intelligence agencies had come up with a broader picture of Russia’s coordinated attack. The weaponization of fake news, use of social media bots, lies and misinformation for political propaganda and leaks of hacked information were seen as the same elements that Moscow had pursued in other countries.
These revelations led to the sanctions on specific Russian FSB officials, intelligence officials and 3 companies linked to those services in addition to closure of two Russian compounds and expulsion of Russian operatives with diplomatic cover stories announced as part of sanctions against Russia for actions in Ukraine. There was little public acknowledgement that punishment for election meddling was part of the objective. It left the impression that attacks on allies is more significant than an aggressive, and parenthetically successful assault on US elections, always considered sacrosanct. That was a political error. The Obama administration failed to make the case for the Russian threat to US national security, a larger threat than Russian activity in Ukraine.
The announcement of the sanctions set in motion the circus that resulted in the revelations of contacts between the Trump campaign, transition team and administrative staff that hopefully will become more explicit when the Mueller investigation is concluded and the report issued. Michael Flynn contacted the Russian ambassador to advise him not to react to the sanctions because their boy would be showing his appreciation for Moscow’s help with his victory as soon as he took office.
It was the beginning of the shadow presidency where for the first time, the US had the president-elect running his own game while the current president was still in office. Even as it happened, there was little public outcry. It was a moniker of what was to come from the Trump administration: a wanton disregard for the office of the presidency and the law of the land. He would dare the country to object and without pushback, he has simply asked for more. Much like Putin who felt no reprimands and proceeded forthwith to bring his comrade in arms to office. The Intelligence report was released to the public on January 6, 2017 and then promptly dismissed by the new administration.
What could Obama have done differently? In summary, the administration was slow to recognize Russian interference in the election as something different form espionage in the past. It was unable to place Russian activity in the context of an emerging war on the West in which Putin’s goal is to destabilize it. If Russia is unable to compete with the EU and US, his approach is to confuse and unsettle those countries beginning about a collapse from within. The Kremlin has been at the least moderately successful in these efforts, as it has exploited Muslim immigration, driven in part by its expanded bombing of civilians in Syria, to unsettle citizens throughout Europe and the US. Through financial support of far right parties in Europe, like Marie Le Pan in France, Norbert Hofer and Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria, Italy’s Berlusconi, and the AfD Party and Neo-Nazi parties in Germany as well Nigel Farage and the Brexit campaign in the UK, Moscow inserted pro-Russian conservative parties into European governments. In others, notably Macron in France, it failed. But, it has also waged successful internet and social media based wars in these countries, helping to sway each country’s populace on a more conservative nationalist agenda.
The Obama administration underestimated the efficiency of Moscow’s newest “active measures”, not believing that Putin would have the temerity to try it in this country. Even as officials became aware of the different elements, they were unable to formulate a response to Russia or in the US. Obama, always careful and deliberative, responded first with a charge to gather more evidence. But in the process of evidence gathering, action was delayed. Beyond unofficially letting the Russians know that he knew something was afoot, the question of informing his own citizens loomed large.
Navigating two issues was particularly difficult; campaign 2016 and the potential for Russian escalation in a contest they were clearly winning, given the absence of cyber defense mechanisms in place across broad swaths of the country. The gang of Moscow hackers could simply feast on wherever they landed.
As campaign 2016 unfolded, Obama showed extreme reluctance to be seen as unfairly tilting the scale for Hillary. Still, presidents have traditionally used the power of the office to assist their successor’s campaigns. In this instance, it would have seemed particularly apt, when the Democratic candidate was being ripped apart by imagined scandals and a relentless commercial press more focussed on hype than substantive campaign issues. There may have been some campaign strategizing that hasn’t been revealed, not even in Hillary’s book, What Happened, that led Obama to steer clear, particularly since Clinton was not part of the security circle most knowledgeable about Moscow’s activity.
Barack was afraid of being attacked for using intelligence agencies to undermine Trump’s campaign (and oh how right he was about that.) Not only the President, but the agencies themselves have under fire, an important theme in the MAGA candidate’s evocation of an untrustworthy government that was working against the interest of its citizens.
In his attempts to inform Congressional leaders, granted late in the game, he saw only hyper-partisan political pushback, a continuation of eight long years of roasting him personally and sabotaging his political agenda. A fear of a political firestorm cannot be ruled out as the reason for the vacillation. Obama had suffered painful attacks on his person and that of the First Lady as well as vicious assaults from the conservative right and the Republican Party. Both had shown a level of uncivil conduct that pales in comparison to what the norm has become in 45’s wake, but was even then excessive in ways that only a Black man would be asked to endure without a general outcry. Perhaps he was just tired.
Obama conjectured that an aggressive countermove against Russia could have been met with an outright cyberwar that could have included attacks on the power grid, exacerbating raging anti federal government sentiment, now interpreted as partisan maneuvering for Clinton. The vulnerability of the power grid was certain to trigger fears akin to 9/11, except this time, resulting in an attack from one side of the political spectrum on the other, rather than “we’re all in it together”. Imagine the conspiracy theorists working overtime to assert that the federal government disrupted the power grid to legitimize attempts to seize the electoral process from the states. The spectre of manipulation of election machines as seen in combination in the Ukraine, loomed large as well. The resulting chaos could threaten to bring down electoral results, with conservatives and Republicans leading the charge to overturn the peaceful succession of presidents, never imagined to be questionable. Even the hanging chads of the 2000 election of Bush 42 was resolved by the gracious concession of Al Gore. Donald Trump has never been reputed to be gracious or to concede.
We can’t discount the administration’s reading of campaign polls that predicted a Clinton victory. They provided the illusion of a leisurely response time under a new Democratic administration. Very few pollsters had any inkling that their sampling would misfire big time. Still the margins were so close in key areas that it was probably beyond the precision of most polling.
So the administration bidded its time, focusing on an emergency plan to respond to secure election processes should Moscow target them, even though it had done nothing to provoke an escalation from the Kremlin.
There is still the matter of timing. If the administration had done what it did in December 2016 in July, what could have happened differently. The country was facing a national security threat unlike any other in the past. If James Comey could comment on Clinton email investigations, why was there no comment on Trump associated investigations with the data mounting. Simply, a few leaked stories to the press to satisfy their need for the titillating could have prompted a broader response. Since Loretta Lynch had recused herself, why didn’t someone put a muzzle on Comey in no uncertain terms, for violating the FBI code of ethics. It is possible that no one knew in advance of Comey’s grandstanding announcement so could not have prevented it. But once the threshold had been breached, serious consideration should have been given to a plan to comment that a Trump associated investigation was underway.
It would have been grand if, in July, the country had adopted the patriotic tack of defending the country against an increasingly aggressive and hostile enemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The negativity forces around Trump would have been quashed in reaction to their divisiveness and the nation rallied around the flag. Congressional investigations would have been triggered, Republicans united with Democrats. Sanctions, for all the good they seem to do, even more punishing could have been put in place before December, hopefully with bipartisan backing from Congress. Remember that in July, Trump’s campaign was wobbling and looking like it would lose big. As Trump would have been characterized as an opponent of national security, perhaps some of the Trump leaning voters would have been deprogrammed and shaken out of their reverie. The idea that Russia was not an enemy and could be an ally would have cratered from the 50% of Republicans during the campaign to near none. And conservatives would have cut their RT feeds and stopped posting them on their social media pages.
Of course that would not have deterred the more than one million suspicious Twitter accounts per day, the over 20% of American conversations about politics attributed to Russian bots from its Internet Research Agency, or the one million sites on Facebook that generated tens of millions of “likes” for trending messages into newsfeeds or the 470 Facebook accounts of American purported political organizations that were actually Russian fronts or the 129 events pages staged by the Kremlin’s agents. There were 5.8 million fake Facebook accounts shut down before the election. But then, even as more than 40% of Americans were getting their daily news from their Facebook feeds, maybe Americans would have stopped being sucked in, knowing that was what Moscow was trying to do.
Although it’s hard to imagine it, even the conservative shock jockey media sphere could have rallied around the flag to stand for national defense, generating a counternarrative to Russian propaganda rather than augmenting it. They would be saluting the flag and singing the national anthem at the drop of a hat. Ok, that’s a stretch, by crises do tend to unite people within nations.
Most importantly, the commercial media which weaponized the hacked emails, hammered the Clinton email scandal and subsequent FBI probe as handmaids to the Trump campaign would have awakened to a different drummer, namely national security. The media had found its supposed “objectivity” in pursuing Trump’s marketability to boost ratings and readership. They downplayed Clinton’s efforts to highlight hacking as the culprit, not the content of the documents obtained illegally. Instead the hacking would have been the lynchpin in a story about Russian intrigue to compromise our elections with all its implications for foreign policy and European alliances.
Hopefully, it would have spurred the kind of investigative reporting that has occurred since the RealityTV President took office, perhaps avoiding that event altogether. Trump imprinted with the stain of corruption he hurled at Hillary would have made the choice between the least corrupt, rather than someone called politically corrupt versus a man corrupted by association with a foreign enemy. The campaign would have provided fertile background for breaking stories on Trump campaign contacts with Russian agents, knowing Moscow was pursuing a host of “active measures” during the campaign. Perhaps they would have stumbled onto the role of bots and fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter. And Russian attempts to hack voting rolls across 20 states would hopefully have stoked outrage in Congress and the public, driving some of those who opted to stay home into the voting booth.
And ideally, a mobilization of our international allies against Russia would have ensued. This would also have signalled European countries in advance of their elections to prepare for the kinds of dirty tricks that Moscow first auditioned in the Ukraine, now made even more sophisticated. Russia would have become more the global pariah that it deserves to be.
And of course, the best result would have been for Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the 45th President of the United States.
That scenario unfortunately is overly optimistic; some components are downright fantastical. The GOP still had to worry about the down ballot candidates and national defense against Russian interference did not play well among its racist anti-immigrant themes. Congressional leadership didn’t have a higher calling; its highest calling was first and foremost, remain in office and prevent loss of their majority in both houses. The welfare of the country was somewhere far down the list of priorities, if at all. The billionaire funders were desperate to get back into power and patriotism didn’t seem helpful after they had invested so much time and money into sowing the seeds of division. And the conservative media bubble could hardly turn away from its extraordinarily lucrative pursuits that had bought with it fame.
In the nightmare scenario. McConnell could have acted on his threat to politicize the intelligence reports, impugning the intelligence agencies as partisan and political, previewing the torrent of slander directed at the FBI by 45, albeit in service of a different cause, that of derailing the Mueller investigation and building public support for that. Parenthetically, he is winning that war, with support for continuing the investigation down to 54% in recent polls. Certainly, Moscow would have joined those efforts in the social media realm and through RT, Russian state TV which was surprisingly popular among conservatives during the campaign. After all, less than 50% of Republicans view Russia as a hostile threat to the US even now with the meddling disclosures, granted many have not gotten that information or have chosen to simply ignore it. Russia would have emphatically denied its involvement, as it has since, but official denials are far less important than denials in the internet playground, where they have in other countries, like the Ukraine, proved extraordinarily effective.
In the end, Obama must bear the responsibility for not treating Russian “active measures” as a national security threat, no matter what political environment existed. It is in fact our most imminent peril, above that of a potential nuclear weapon from North Korea. A genuine threat was trivialized by the administration, no less than by the GOP by dropping it into partisan politics.
With his puppet comfortably implanted in the White House, Putin has no real need to expend more effort. Now, it is more difficult for Americans to inoculate ourselves against misinformation because the government itself lies so much, multiple times a day and in ways that are patently obvious, unlike in the past where it could be interpreted as “spin”. We are extremely vulnerable to the information warfare that is being generated, now, within the US, creating our own individual news outlets replicating our own fake news. Americans are hungry for information that confirms their beliefs, not challenges them. Tidbits that disagree can be easily dismissed. As support for Trump becomes more deeply embedded, the necessity to rationalize past behavior becomes ever more important. Trump and conservatives have weaponed information (perhaps he learned this trick from his Russian mentor and has his own playbook for “active measures”). Conversely, progressives haven’t figured out a counter propaganda strategy. Russia doesn’t need to make fake news anymore; Americans are doing that just fine for themselves. Moscow may want to assist with spreading American made fake news around, but they don’t have to. We have become our own worst enemy.
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45 pulled off another rally in some city a couple of days ago for a candidate he gave little attention or time. The Donald is a star that burns so brightly, the best others can hope for is not to get scorched. For him, the location is irrelevant, although some local event or place may play briefly in the narrative.
There was nothing new. The RealityTVPresident has nothing new to say. He works from a standard score, expanding on one or another theme as his audience reacts. He becomes more or less animated as the crowd reacts.
There is the glorification of his person throughout. He’ll brag about his accomplishments which range through election night, the inauguration crowd, the tax bill, the economy, the tariffs, the empty and meaningless North Korean summit agreement and numerous often fictitious or overblown responses to twitter bullying, like businesses who created new jobs, or investments. As he is want to do, the Egomaniac in Chief claims create for events completely outside his purview. The Supreme Court is prominent in his new narratives. Let’s see, Mitch McConnell stole the seat for Neil Gorsuch and the Federalist Society provided the list of nominees; 45 didn’t even interview the potential nominees. This time, Justice Kennedy deserves the credit for handing his seat over to conservatives, as a member of their club. The most momentous change in the court in recent history which will change the course of civil rights for the next 4 decades has nothing to do with the CelebrityPresident; yes he will announce the name, but the course has been set by others. Trumpophants will continue their idolatry as they pant for an end to legal abortion in the US.
There’s always a reference to Hillary Clinton, now 19 months after the campaign ended and she is a private citizen. It helps him relive, deep within his groin, the magnificence of his election victory. He needs to keep rummaging around in his past to expand his person by absorbing the cheers of the adoring.
He’ll launch a few insults against the enemy of the state, the press and assorted Democrats, Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer and the infamous Nancy Pelosi. He may have a Republican or two in his crosshairs. The media will provide a history and timetable of previous insults for each individual, They’ll interview others to get their reaction, as if any of it is important. Ho hum; the names and ad libs change but the scripts are essentially the same.
And it goes without saying that the narrative will be littered with 45’s signature artistry: false facts, half-truths and fictitious unsubstantiated statistics. Seldom are these new either; they are generally recycled from tweets. Trump has very little fresh in his kitty. In his weaponization of misinformation, he understands the principle that endless repetition makes fiction real. The fiction becomes what “the good guys” have to contest. Intermittent fact checking, now used sparingly as the standard of a commercial media reluctant to call out the lie or alienate some readers or viewers, is no match for the relentlessly steady repetitive drip.
Let’s not forget that he will make unintentional errors, revealing his ignorance on general topics or history. None of us, not even his ardent supporters, think he is knowledgeable; no nonreader can be. Trumpophants don’t think a president need be knowledgeable. The press gets down in the weeds of these gaffs, exploring their nuances and larger meanings. Truthfully, it’s just a dumb guy too arrogant to know how stupid he is.
Is he more free-wheeling in some rallies than others? Does he reveal something more of his character? News flash. There is nothing new in his character. He is nothing but consistent and has been so since he burst on the New York scene. There are many things that he’s done that we don’t yet know, but he’s not very complicated. He laid all his cards on the table a long time ago.
The rallies are 45’s propaganda tools to capture commercial media attention. When times get tough, like the blow back from the treatment of Central American immigrants and the expanded assault on all immigrants in the country, he easily shifts to his entertainment personna and the commercial media becomes mesmerized. The RealityTVPresident is so amusing. His appearances satisfy that American fascination for the gaffs and goofiness of reality TV characters and internet videos. There’s the building tension waiting for a sentinel funny moment; Tymphopants ignore them and the unenchanted chuckle or moan.
I have suggested in the past that the press spend less time chasing Trump. They haven’t yet come to grips with their self-serving role during the campaign as unquestioning Trump boosters relying on his notoriety in boosting their advertising revenue. Similarly, they followed his trail of Clinton scandal mongering under the guise of press objectivity, another misnomer for the failure to question Trump’s veracity. They still haven’t found their legs. Fact check? Slip in a corrective for misstatements. They still can’t find their way to challenging too deeply the veracity of administration spokesmen, fearful of a loss of access without realizing their absolute necessity to the Trump propaganda machine, not simply as punching bags but as an integral part of spreading 45’s message.
At least one journalist, Ezra Klein of Vox.com recently agreed with me in comments on the PBS News Hour. He implored news editors to stop letting Trump “be our assignment editor”. He has seen through the deflections, like in this instance the resignation of the scandalous EPA Chief Scott Pruitt who has been feeding at the taxpayer’s trough since before his arrival in office while harboring aspirations to become either the next Attorney General or Secretary of State and the appointment of a #metoo cover up colluder, Bill Shine from Fox News to post of Director of White House Communications. The former was no surprise; 45 had to cut him loose as the burden of scandals began to overwhelm him, despite his due diligence in carrying forward the oligarchs’ agenda to eliminate regulation interfering with pillaging the earth as usual. The latter wasn’t unexpected either, the old boy network of misogynists has always protected its own.
Klein accurately described the cycle: the BullyPresident hurls a few insults, the press reacts and he plays up the negative coverage as anti-populace revolution. The base loves it. He recalled a time when even substantive presidential addresses made on the road with thoughtful oratory received scant coverage in the TV. Such a contrast to multiple TV clips of random quips whenever the RealityTVPresident opens his mouth, the very essence of Reality (edited) TV. Judy Woodruff, the host, quickly dismissed it with a quip, but Klein may have convinced David Brooks of the New York Times who replied, “we don’t want the guy to control our brain.” Amen! Hopefully he will move forward to persuade people that matter to shift from entertaining news to the hard news of old.
Listen up news editors. The press needs to examine what its doing and how to go forward. Trump is here to stay, at least for a while, continuing to suck all the air out of the news cycle. But the power to change that is in the media’s hands. Drop the relentless daily tweet coverage. Let the self indulgent rants of an aging dotard slip to a short piece buried at the end; A mention of the campaign rally location, the date and the candidate will suffice. Further coverage of races deemed significant can focus on the candidate and his opponent. There are other stories, important stories out there that are not being published or become minor footnotes in the barrage of coverage surrounding Trump. Many stories are written with an emphasis on Trump sphere relatedness as if he is the Sun God around which all things orbit. The exception of course is the Mueller investigation and investigative reporting designed to penetrate the cloud of secrecy surrounding the administration and Trump and his cronies. On a whole, the media outside conservative circles deserves accolades for that. We welcome any attempt to bring the light of public scrutiny to our government.
Clearly, the CelebrityPresident thinks that he is his own best counsel, no different in this job than he has been in his real estate career. His Cabinet meetings are staged love feasts; the platform for testimonials of gratitude for being able to serve him. They’re grateful for the financial rewards and perks too, but they’re not allowed to say that when the cameras are rolling. With the presidential schedule no longer public record, one can only guess the difficulty of squeezing in policy discussions between meetings with dignitaries and his TV viewing sessions in the morning, afternoon and evening, as he retires early to his quarters. Some of that time is advisory as well, as FoxNews and Sean Hannity gets double time: on air and in his night time phone call.
Although he towers over Putin, 45 never looked limper as he stood next to his mentor. There was one macho leader on the podium and it wasn’t him. Remember that it was the CelebrityPresident who insisted on meeting with Putin, soon after his “triumph” in Singapore. It was Trump who also insisted that they have a private meeting unobserved, a precedent that no honest global leader would want. There is no record, not even an unofficial one. There are, no doubt, Russian intelligence recordings. This was time the two could share, away from public scrutiny. It was a time for 45 to express his gratitude for the decades of Russian financial support and the leg up to the presidency. One can only laugh at the scene of the two high-fiving and fist-bumping just after the doors closed, a great idea for a cartoon. Yeah, that’s an exaggeration; neither one of them seems like the high-fiving type, it smacks too much of people of color. Perhaps Trump kissing Putin’s hand is more like it.
When Putin took the mic, he must have been so secretly proud. Trump had done all the heavy lifting, he could simply coast. When asked about Russian interference, he responded with “You can trust no one. We should be guided by fact. Can you name a single fact to show collusion?” Again, the reference to collusion, not the hacking or the bots and trolling. Here would have been the place for a true American president representing our interests to jump in with details from the indictments or FBI/CIA reports, to which as president he has access. Instead, Putin could finish up with, “take it from your president (another liar well versed in implausible deniability).” It was almost like a double act. 
The man who would become the RealityTVPresident is Putin’s most successful campaign to date. He parrots Putin’s propaganda. He pursues Putin’s objectives in international relations: to disrupt NATO and European defense, making Eastern European countries on NATO’s fringes vulnerable to seizure. To disrupt international trade through a trade war powered by tariffs, weakening national economies and halting growth. To disrupt the European Union, encouraging countries to leave. Trump has spouted Putin’s agenda in recent weeks, carrying his message into the heart of those very organizations. In a recent interview, he couldn’t have been clearer, “I think the EU is a foe,”, qualified by adding “in terms of trade.” 
oleblacklady 