A friend — an expert — recommended this David Graham column purporting to respond to Trump’s latest claim of a Russian hoax. It is solid enough.
It goes through all the assessments about the Russian attack on 2016 (notice how we never focus on Russia’s even more overt assistance for Trump in 2020 and 2024?), and describes that, “perhaps because” there’s so much evidence, Trump dismisses it as a hoax.
In spite of all of this evidence, or perhaps because of it, Trump has loudly insisted that it’s all a hoax.
Where it goes hopelessly off the rails is in this paragraph, in which Graham uses the passive voice to describe how three things — the focus on Carter Page, the Alfa Bank anomalies, and the Steele dossier — “assisted” Trump in instilling doubt.
His attempts to instill doubt have been assisted by the fact that some of the wilder rumors and reports concerning his campaign didn’t turn out to be true. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, was a bit of an eccentric character but not a traitor, as some suggested, much less the key to unraveling any grand conspiracy. Trump was probably not communicating with a Russian bank via a mysterious server. He was almost certainly not a longtime Russian-intelligence asset. The so-called Steele dossier was full of falsehoods. I argued at the time that BuzzFeed’s decision to publish it was a grievous error, and it warped conversation about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
With that passive voice, Graham dodges the agency involved in these things, at least one of which goes back to a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to fill the dossier with disinformation, and another of which has been stoked by years of lawfare (and, as I suggested here, also had help from someone I believe was involved in the Russian operation).
Graham then describes an SVR plan* — concocted in advance of, but within a week of, the founding moment in the Steele narrative — to frame Hillary Clinton, a plan that right wingers have adopted as their own for years, this way:
A special counsel appointed by Barr during Trump’s first term, with the goal of ferreting out political skulduggery in the Russia investigation, found that messages about Clinton being treated as a smoking gun were, in fact, likely concocted by the Russians.
Again, the passive voice. Not, “the Russians concocted a hoax that a Bill Barr-appointed Special Counsel chased as if it were true for four years, two of those after he had concluded it was a fabrication,” but that that “Special Counsel ‘found’ that the document was concocted by Russians.”
And as a result, this column participates in the polarization about this debate that was baked in from the start. Graham presents claims, all true, and in the process pits actual facts against Trump’s necessary faith in the Hillary hoax. It’s a good column. But I’m not sure where it gets us.
I’d like to attempt to reconceive the 2016 election operation, not in terms of the judgments that spooks and prosecutors have come to (on which Graham focuses), but instead on what it achieved. I laid out some of this last year with LOLGOP, but this scheme adds the SVR hoax built into the process.
Network within the attention economy: First, in the election during which the attention economy became the medium in which elections (and politics generally) are contested, Russia tapped into that economy in a way that networked with right wingers. I’m in no way saying that Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s troll operation had an effect on the outcome (I’m less sure about the hack-and-leak operation). I believe now, as then, that the effect of the trolling operation was like throwing a few matches onto a flaming bonfire. But the trolls proved they could get Trump’s closest buddies to treat fakes like TEN_GOP as one of their own; Trump’s closest propagandists still prove to be easy, if pricier, marks. They also got Trump’s now Chief of Staff to treat them as real. It’s also likely that the chat rooms in which Trump’s allies orchestrated their own attention campaigns, starting with the one that a Nazi living in Eastern Europe helped to professionalize, were influenced by Russian-linked figures; chat rooms are a wonderful way to cultivate people with plausible deniability. Perhaps most importantly, the hack-and-leak campaign proved not just that Trump was happy to rely on Russian props for his own exploitation of the attention economy, but would even do really stupid things in pursuit of such props. Russia discovered they could get Trump and all his allies to chase what they were offering.
Impede Hillary: Ginger Rogers had to do everything backwards and in heels. So did Hillary. But she also had fend off a persistent wave of hacks (the effect of this on a campaign was overlooked). And her own attempts to function within that attention economy were not just drowned out by the algorithmically boosted efforts of Trump, but were corrupted by Russian disinformation.
Dangle various quid pro quos: Russia also offered a number of inducements they might collect on in case of a Trump win: An impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal, relying on GRU ties and sanctioned banks, to Trump’s personal attorney. Advance notice of the campaign and maybe energy deals to the Coffee Boy. Dirt for sanctions relief to the failson. Advance notice of the hack-and-leak campaign in exchange for a pardon for Julian Assange to the rat-fucker. Campaign assistance and millions in payment or debt relief in exchange for a plan to carve up Ukraine from the campaign manager. *** Importantly, Trump said yes — or at least, maybe — to every single one of these dangles. What disrupted them was the investigation — first the discovery of Mike Flynn’s intervention to undermine sanctions, then the exposure of the June 9 meeting, and ultimately the August 2 meeting exchanging campaign assistance in the context of a plan to eviscerate Ukraine. The Mueller investigation showed that every one of these men (save Don Jr, who wisely dodged the grand jury) lied to cover up these dangles. And Trump pardoned most of them, thereby affirming the import of those lies.
Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.
Stoke conspiracies about the Deep State: As I said here, that SVR plan, apparently birthed on July 26, 2016, to do …
something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in the IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else?) about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU
… was probably no more than spaghetti at the wall. Not everything Russia tried that year worked. But that one did, because it weaponized Trump’s venality — his enthusiasm for all those inducements and therefore his anger that something (the investigation) prevented him from collecting them — and his narcissism. Consider: We know that Trump was all too happy to use the stolen files published at WikiLeaks to drive his information economy. We know that Trump was all too happy to use Hunter Biden — some parts of which came from Russia no matter where the actual laptop did — to drive his information economy. But the claims of a Hillary hoax, all built in from the start, remain his go-to distraction. To get out of his own Russian trouble, Trump used the dossier disinformation to take out one after another Russian expert at the FBI. At the moment Trump needed to reclaim his ability to distract and redirect attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he turned back to his Russia Russia Russia grievance, a grievance that built on the disinformation injected in the dossier and — we now know — an SVR fabrication that gave him an excuse to corrupt the Justice Department and spin his adversaries as the enemy, which increasingly entailed relying, secretly, on Russia as his enabler.
At every step, Trump’s reliance on the Hillary hoax entailed more and more destruction of the US security establishment.
This is why I’m making such a big deal out of this redaction, one that attempts to hide that this was an SVR plot from the start and how obvious that should have been and likely was to Durham before he chose to continue his witch hunt pursuing Trump’s adversaries for two more years.
The redaction hides Durham’s efforts to obscure all that in an annex he likely assumed would be buried forever; the temporal games the annex play resemble ones Andrew DeFilippis repeatedly used during the Michael Sussmann trial. But it also attempts to hide that Trump’s top spies — the ones resuscitating a claim two of them first championed in an earlier attempt to distract and redirect — know that Durham attempted to obscure it. As I said, the people to whom this is obvious are Putin’s spies.
Over the years, Trump’s serial adherence to that Hillary hoax — out of necessity to avoid narcissistic injury, as his favorite tool to leverage the attention economy, and increasingly as a measure of loyalty of right wingers to him — has always depended on the continued cooperation of Putin’s spies. That’s how Trump came out of a meeting in Helsinki with Putin and declared the Russian spies were right. And that’s how we got to this place, where all three of Trump’s top spies are reading right from a script written by Russian spies nine years ago. They can’t reveal the plot. Trump can’t reveal the plot.***
The answer to the question, “What exactly is the “Russia hoax’?” is not all the proof that Russia interfered in our election to 2016, hoping to help Trump win. The answer is that the “Russia hoax” is a ploy Russian spies seeded all those years ago to leverage Trump’s narcissism to polarize the US on competing sides of a grievance that would have the effect of destroying the US Deep State.
* SVR is Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Under the moniker APT 29, they were hacking Hillary-related targets long before Russia’s military intelligence did so, under the moniker APT 28, during the election. This post provides more background.
Update: I have removed mention of sanctions relief — and business deals generally — in conjunction with Kirill Dmitriev at the asterisks, at the demand of RDIF. I apologize for the original misrepresentation.