RussiaGate and Propaganda

Disinformation in the Age of Social Media

Oliver Boyd-Barrett

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429536144
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Étude des média

This book furthers our understanding of the practice of propaganda with a specific focus on the RussiaGate case.

RussiaGate is a discourse about alleged Russian "meddling" in US elections, and this book argues that it functions as disinformation or distraction. The book provides a framework for better understanding of ongoing developments of RussiaGate, linking these to macroconsiderations that rarely enter mainstream accounts. It demonstrates the considerable weaknesses of many of the charges that have been made against Russia by US investigators, and argues that this discourse fails to take account of broader non-transparent persuasion campaigns operating in the election-information environment that are strengthened by social media manipulation. RussiaGate has obscured many of the factors that challenge the integrity of democratic process in the USA. These deserve a much higher priority than any influence that Russia may want to exert. The book concludes that RussiaGate discourse needs to be contextualized with reference to a long-established broader competition between great powers for domination of EurAsia. This pitches the US/European Union against Russia/China and perhaps, ultimately, even the USA against Europe.

This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, propaganda studies, US politics, Russian politics, and International Relations in general.

1 Trump’s campaign, the “Steele” dossier, and the intelligence community assessment

Trump and RussiaGate: main “portals”

President Trump’s denunciations of what he called “fake news” amounted to wholesale condemnation of the RussiaGate narrative, much of which arose from charges of collusion between the Russian government, or its proxies, and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. These charges were still being investigated at the time of writing by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI who was appointed in spring 2017. They play out in three main directions:

• 1 Alleged Russian interference in the election, in non-transparent ways, through social media, that included the use of anonymous or falsely identified websites and pages (“bots”) and anonymous, paid-for social media commentary (“trolling”) that can often be monitored, controlled, and programmed by artificial intelligence.
• 2 Alleged Russian hacking of the servers and/or individual computers of the Democratic National Campaign (DNC) and its partner group, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and of the Chair of the DNC (John Podesta), the stealing of Hillary Clinton’s private emails, and alleged Russian delivery of such hacked material to DCLeaks, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks – in possible collusion with members of the Trump Campaign.
• 3 Alleged contacts between members of the Trump Campaign and Russian government officials or with Russians thought to have close ties to the Russian government. Interest in such meetings stems from widely publicized suspicions that the Trump Campaign invited or connived with Russian assistance in influencing the US voting electorate to vote for Trump, in possible return for the promise of a Trump Administration’s support for a reduction in US sanctions on Russia and other benefits. These allegations embrace claims that Trump was a “Russian asset” – as has been claimed by a former Director of Intelligence James Clapper, a former NSA official (Sheth 2017) and by the Steele Dossier (Bensinger et al 2017).

Robert Mueller and the Trump campaign

I shall not look in detail at the Special Counsel’s charges or investigations targeting key Trump Campaign actors or their associates, such as the following: Michael Cohen, Jerome Corsi, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Rob Goldstone, Constantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Richard Pinedo, Roger Stone, Donald Trump, Jnr., and Alex Van der Zwaan.

Some of these people entertained a possibly surprising array of contacts with influential Russians, which in itself is neither criminal nor undesirable. The nature and extent of links of Trump or Trump administration figures to Russian businessmen, some of them possibly fitting the term “Mafiosi,” some of them allegedly linked to Russian intelligence and to Russian oligarchs, has been the subject of numerous books and articles although some of these were arguably contaminated by a desire to damage Trump and rescue the tattered image of the Democratic Party following its electoral defeat (see Harding 2017; Unger 2018).

The significance of evidence against Trump campaigners is rarely clear-cut, encompassing activities that might have passed unscathed in other campaigns and relating to other countries. Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had lied to federal investigators about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the Presidential transition. He asked Russia not to escalate tensions after President Obama imposed sanctions for alleged election meddling (Russia agreed to Flynn’s request). He lied about conversations with Kislyak concerning Russia’s UN vote on a resolution to condemn Israeli settlements in the West Bank. And he had lied about his lobbying work for the Turkish government (Leonnig et al 2017). What was it that was really important here: what he actually did? Or that he lied?

Mueller’s supposed successes have often seemed irrelevant to the central issue of collusion. For example, Paul Manafort was convicted of financial fraud stemming from his earlier consultancy for the pro-Russian former leader of Ukraine. Manafort’s associates Konstantin Kilimnik and Rick Gates were indicted for similar reasons. In November 2018, already in jail, Manafort’s role was highlighted in a somewhat more relevant, though likely deceptive, way, when a Guardian story alleged that Manafort had visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in which Assange had taken refuge from possible extradition, including one such alleged visit in 2016. The story was problematic: one author had long been thought close to MI6, sources were anonymous, and claims were based on intelligence said to have originated under the now right-wing administration of the government of Ecuador from Ecuador’s intelligence service SENIAN. The proposal that somehow Manafort’s visits had escaped detection by external security and press surveillance, and that his visits had not been logged by the Embassy yet information about them suddenly came to light in November 2018, was implausible and inexplicable (Harding and Collyns 2018). Subsequent revelations (debunked by Aaron Maté 2018) claimed that Manafort had passed polling data to his associate Kilimnik, whom some news media alleged was close to Russian intelligence (a claim Kilimnik denies and for which there is no evidence (Chalfant 2019).

Those who fell afoul of Mueller often made the mistake of lying to investigators – who presumably knew the real answers – even if there was no suggestion they had engaged in egregiously criminal behavior relevant to collusion. In January 2019 Mueller charged Roger Stone, Trump’s political advisor, with obstruction, false statements, and witness tampering, and he accused Stone of being a conduit between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks during the period when WikiLeaks released e-mails stolen from the DNC. The New Yorker noted that the charges stemmed not from the original acts themselves but from Stone’s alleged lies about them (Davidson 2019). The principal issue was whether the timing of WikiLeaks’s release of emails of DNC chair John Podesta (hacked or leaked from DNC computers) in October 2016 had been coordinated with the Trump Campaign with a view to neutralizing the Access Hollywood (“pussy-grabbing”) video released on that same day and potentially damaging Trump’s image. Did Roger Stone play any role in such coordination? Evidence that WikiLeaks’s release was a response to Access Hollywood is thin (it could have been the reverse), as is evidence of Stone’s involvement. Private emails from Julian Assange to Roger Stone appear to expressly deny any such relationship (McCarthy 2019).

Indictments and charges can be grossly contaminated by the politics of plea deals and maneuvers for leniency, presidential pardons, or other forms of judicial relief. By the time this book is published the special counsel’s investigation may have established a robust case for collusion, one that can survive judicial or impeachment processes. At present, the published evidence falls short (Maté 2018a, b, c).

Trump sustained his ambition to “build” (i.e. lend his name to) a Trump Tower in Moscow well into the presidential campaign. His former lawyer, Michael Cohen, in November 2018 retracted earlier statements and alleged that negotiations continued at least up to May 2016 (other sources suggest much later). Cohen had agreed to visit Moscow on behalf of his client, but the trip never occurred, the tower did not get started, let alone built, no gift was given to Putin, and whether Trump’s conflict of interest amounted to illegality is moot (Blake 2018). Cohen claimed he had briefed members of the President’s family about the Tower, and had minimized Trump’s role in pursuing a deal. Was any of this as damaging to Trump’s credibility, electoral chances, and national interest as Cohen’s role, whether or not under Trump’s direct instructions, in paying off women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump and in securing a deal with a tabloid publisher that in return for payment the publisher would not publish such stories (Rutenberg and Protess 2018)?

Mueller’s concerns therefore often appeared “legalistic” (e.g. to do with possible attempts to obstruct a legal investigation, to “cover up,” or lying to special counsel investigators) rather than concerning matters of real substance pointing unequivocally to collusion with Russia for the purposes of securing electoral advantage. Nation writer Aaron Maté concluded that, after 5 guilty pleas, 20 indictments, and over 100 charges, “what’s been revealed so far does not make a compelling brief for collusion” (Maté 2018). Russian affairs professor Stephen Cohen noted dismissively that “after all this time and frenzy, substantiated charges and indictments amount to little more than customary financial corruption on the part of the bipartisan top 2% and ‘lying to the FBI,’ the latter apparently open to interpretation as to what was actually said and perhaps involving entrapment” (Cohen 2018). Jason Ditz was equally scornful, denouncing RussiaGate as a “fraud, a setup, and really a criminal conspiracy to take down a sitting US President on the basis of a gigantic lie.” Veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward concluded that despite looking for over two years in researching his book Fear, he encountered no evidence of collusion nor espionage of the kind denominated by the label RussiaGate (Walsh 2018; Woodward 2018).

From a different perspective other commentators were incensed by what they saw as Democratic Party collusion with the intelligence establishment (including the British) to spy on and smear the Trump campaign, with help from Christopher Steele (ex-MI6), and Cambridge professor Stefan Halper (connected to MI6 and CIA: see Greenwald 2018). A reporter who had been briefed by Christopher Steele was Michael Issikoff, whose story on Steele’s dossier aroused FBI interest. Former senator John McCain said he gave the dossier to James Comey, director of the FBI, after being briefed by former British ambassador to Russia Sir Andrew Wood (Haltiwanger 2018). The dossier (possibly leaked to Buzzfeed by an associate of McCain’s – see Re 2018) and Issikoff’s story provided justification for FBI’s request for four FISA warrants to spy on Trump Campaign adviser Carter Page. Yet by December 2018, Issikoff told radio host John Ziegler that the Steele report had not been vindicated and that many of its allegations had yet to be supported (e.g. that Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague to coordinate with the Russians; the existence of the “pee tape” with which Russians were said to be blackmailing Trump; McGovern 2018d).

FBI source Professor Halper (Costa et al 2018) had allegedly “cultivated” an influential group that included George Papadopoulos (Trump campaign adviser in foreign affairs); Carter Page (Trump campaign adviser); Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6); Joseph Mifsud – who introduced Papadopoulos to the idea that the Russians had incriminating evidence against Clinton (Papadopoulos was eventually jailed for one week for lying about the timing of his meeting with Mifsud); and Alexander Downer, formerly Australia’s ambassador to the UK and who had notified the FBI of Papadopoulos’s claims (Ditzd 2018; Ross 2018). By fall 2018, Papadopoulos was openly asserting that he had been set up by western intelligence agencies, including British (Cheney 2018b). British involvement in the 2016 US presidential election would not only have constituted illegal support to the Clinton campaign but would likely have far exceeded in magnitude and subterfuge the efforts attributed to Russia on behalf of Trump.

Suspicions of British involvement were compounded by reports in fall 2018 that MI6 struggled to prevent President Trump from releasing pages of FBI applications to wiretap Carter Page. M16 worried that sources might be compromised. Trump wanted declassification of FBI notes of its interview with Department of Justice employee Bruce Ohr and his wife. Along with Christopher Steele, the Ohrs were paid for information by Fusion GPS on behalf of the Democratic Party campaign. Bruce Ohr was twice demoted at the Department of Justice for evading exposure of his contacts with Fusion GPS (Durden 2018d, citing the Daily Telegraph among other sources).

Of interest is the arrest and pre-trial jailing in solitary confinement and later conviction of Marina Butina, charged in July 2018 of being a unregistered Russian agent who “under cover” of a Russian pro-gun advocacy group, had “infiltrated” the strongly Republican and, later, pro-Trump National Rifle Association and who had tried to arrange a meeting between candidate Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In a less hysteric perspective than that pertaining in 2018 her activities could reasonably have fallen under the description of transparent public relations or lobbying in the promotion of guns. She was charged by the Justice Department outside the purview of the Mueller investigation. Mueller had declined to investigate the case, and prior Senate Intelligence Committee scrutiny had not unearthed criminal activity (Bamford 2019). Butina had worked in association with Alexander Torshin, a longtime friend of the NRA who later served as the deputy head of the Russian central bank. Together, the two were suspected of attempting to establish a backdoor channel between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. At the time of writing, the FBI has not concluded its investigation into whether Torshin funneled money to the NRA in support of Trump. The story was denied by the NRA (who funded the Trump campaign by $30 million). It was Butina whom Trump called to put a question at a conference in Las Vegas in July 2015, prompting Trump to assert his interest in better relations with Russia (Prokop 2018b). Butina likely accepted a plea deal under considerable pressure when admitting guilt of failing to register as a foreign agent and being involved in an organized effort, backed by Russian officials, to open up unofficial lines of communication with influential Americans in the NRA and in the GOP and to win them over to the idea of Russia as a friend (Hornberger 2018a).

It is hardly strange that a country at the receiving end of sustained western efforts to undermine its geo-political security, sovereignty, and internal stability should seek friendlier relations with at least one of the major US political parties. A lengthy investigation by James Bamford (2019) who interviewed Butina many times concluded that the case against her was weak. The Butina case needs to be encompassed within an understanding of the full scope of lobbying of US politicians by overseas interests, a phenomenon so large it would deservedly dwarf RussiaGate. For example, it should be assessed in relation to the strong influence on US politics and public opinion of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on behalf of the government of Israel (Al Jazeera 2018; Mearsheimer and Walt 2017).

The “Steele dossier”

Responsible for the ensuing popularity of the term “fake news” was its use by President-elect Trump in criticizing CNN in January 2017 for its coverage that month of the “Steele Dossier” – then about to be published (without permission) by the online news site Buzzfeed. CNN reported that then FBI Director James Comey had briefed Trump about the dossier. (The FBI and CNN may have communicated with one another about CNN’s disclosure; the likelihood of FBI leaks to the press played a role in Trump’s firing of James Comey on May 9, 2017, and the later firing by Attorney General Jeff Sessions of the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, on March 16, 2018). The briefing occurred on January 6, CNN reported it on January 8, and Buzzfeed published the dossier on January 10 (see Tracy 2017a; Davis 2018).

The Steele dossier alleged Trump connections and possible collusion with Russians, for the purpose of gaining advantage in the 2016 presidential election. The dossier was compiled by Orbis, a private investigation agency founded by British former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Steele was also a FBI informant: FBI documents released to Congress in August 2018 showed that although Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party, there were at least 11 FBI payments to Steele up to that time in 2016. He had been admonished for unknown reasons in February 2016 (Judicial Watch 2018). His company Orbis reportedly had links to a Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska – with whom Paul Manafort, an associate of Trump, had connections in Ukraine (Mayer 2018). Steele at one time worked for MI6 in Moscow (1980s) and in the early 1990s headed up the Russia desk for MI6 in London. His report was contracted by Fusion GPS, which was, in turn, contracted by attorneys (Perkins Coie) working on behalf of the Democratic National Campaign and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. (Fusion GPS had initially been hired by a conservative website, the Washington Free Beacon, to conduct research on Republican candidates including Trump.) Among a number of astonishing allegations, the Steele dossier indicated that Trump was some kind of “Manchurian candidate” who had been identified as a possible candidate for high office by Russian authorities over several years, and was subsequently groomed by them. The report identified business and personal relations between Trump and various powerful Russians – the so-called oligarchs.

The main allegations (as yet unproven) of the Steele dossier were as follows (see Ewing 2018; Kessler 2018):

• 1 Trump had cooperated with Russian authorities for years. Russia “had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents,” including Clinton, for “several years” before 2016. In exchange, Trump’s team had fed the Kremlin intelligence on Russian oligarchs in the USA and their families “for at least eight years.”
• 2 Trump was vulnerable to Russian blackmail on sexual matters.
• 3 There was a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and Russia, managed by Trump adviser Paul Manafort, with Carter Page serving as intermediary until Manafort’s firing in August 2016, after which point Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen was said to have played an increasingly large role in managing the “Kremlin relationship.”
• 4 Trump’s team was said to have known and approved of Russian plans to deliver emails, allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence from the servers and computers of the Democratic National Campaign and its chairman John Podesta, to WikiLeaks, and offered the Russians policy concessions in exchange.
• 5 Trump adviser Carter Page was said to have played a key role in the conspiracy. Carter Page had “conceived and promoted” the idea that the DNC emails to WikiLeaks should be leaked during the Democratic convention, “to swing supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and across from Trump.”
• 6 Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was said to have played a key role in a conspiracy to cover up and limit damage arising from Manafort’s work for the regime of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine (deposed with US assistance in 2013) and in efforts to prevent exposure of the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia.

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, ridiculed the Steele report. He asked how a small, private outfit could have persuaded senior Russian spies to talk about a five-year-old “Manchurian candidate conspiracy” without the knowledge of Russian or US intelligence. Steele’s contacts seemed dated and Murray speculated whether this might reflect the putative influence of Sergei Skripal in providing data for the dossier (Murray 2018a; Keefer 2017). Former Guardian journalist Luke Harding, who reported for the paper from Moscow for several years, suggested in his book that several Russian spies were actually liquidated as a result of their talking to Steele, but he offered little by way of hard evidence and is a problematic source, given his reportedly pro-MI6 and anti-Putin record (Harding 2017; Murray 2018b; Sputnik 2017).

Russia specialist Stephen Cohen found the dossier unconvincing, not least on account of “an abundance of factual errors, inconsistencies, outright contradictions, and, equally important, information purportedly from secret Kremlin sources but that had already been published in open Russian or other media” (Cohen 2018). Cohen ridiculed Steele’s allegations that Putin had personally “ordered” and “directed” the RussiaGate operation on behalf of Trump, and the supposed motives that have been variously assigned to Putin for doing so. Cohen considered Steele had outrageously underestimated the established rationality of the Russian president.

The Steele dossier had nothing to say about a history of arguably Russia-friendly policies by the Obama administration or possible links between Russians and the Democratic Party. Putin referred in 2018 to some $400 million in illegally earned profits funneled to the Clinton campaign by associates of Americ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Trump’s campaign, the “Steele” dossier, and the intelligence community assessment
• 2 “Election meddling” and the health of US democracy
• 3 “Bots” and “trolls”
• 4 Cambridge Analytica and Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL)
• 5 Implications for social media
• 6 Fake news and intelligence: enter “spooks”
• 7 Fake news and intelligence: hacks and hackers
• 8 RussiaGate and the Russian “threat”
• References
• Index