Alex Finley - Center for Public Integrity | Vox

Was Russia’s 2016 intervention for Trump a strategic failure?

2019-04-25T17:29:57-04:00

On the night of Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, Russian President Vladimir Putin must have felt triumphant. Members of the Russian Duma reportedly burst out in applause when Trump’s election was confirmed, and Putin was spotted sipping champagne. In a speech at the Kremlin, he announced, “Russia is ready and wants to restore full-fledged relations with the US.” In the middle of the celebration, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, received a text from a friend in New York: “Putin has won.”

One can hardly blame Putin for his sense of triumph. The sweeping operation aimed at dividing the American people and landing a pliable candidate in the White House, which he had launched in 2014, must have looked like a resounding success as the Electoral College votes were tallied.

After all, Russian military intelligence, the GRU, had successfully hacked into the emails of the Democratic Party during the campaign and orchestrated their leak at opportune moments. The operation had hammered the reputation of both Clinton and the Democratic Party while deflecting attention from embarrassing news about Putin’s preferred candidate, Trump. The same group had even made digital forays into state election systems before the vote, possibly practicing for more disruptive future activities.

At the same time, the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had run a large campaign from St. Petersburg to amplify divisions within the American electorate, using fake accounts, bots, and trolls to catalyze polarizing actions by our own citizens — all the while hiding its hand and appearing to be organically American.

Although Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, released on April 18, said he did not “establish” the existence of conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, there was a convergence of pre-election interests: “The Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, [while] the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

Not only did Trump’s campaign benefit from the public dump of Hillary Clinton’s emails but Trump’s campaign director Paul Manafort had fed a well-connected Russian with internal campaign polling data on Trump’s standing in key battleground states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. We don’t know for sure what the Russian, Konstantin Kilimnik, did with the information because Mueller wasn’t able to learn it, but we could presume Kilimnik’s rapt attention to such obscure data was not idle curiosity.

Russia’s post-election pivot was about influence

Once the election was over, Putin’s priorities needed to shift. To promote a future pro-Russian tilt to American foreign policy, he and his colleagues had to forge direct connections with Trump and his incoming advisers. And because Trump’s team was small, insular, and mostly lacking in diplomatic experience, this meant using a complex network of interlocutors and finding nontraditional pathways to communicate — an effort described in fresh detail by Mueller.

Putin, or those close to him, directed a number of proxies — oligarchs, business leaders, and, allegedly, one ostensible student — to build targeted relationships with American individuals who were or soon would be in a position to help shape American foreign policy.

As Robert Anderson Jr., a former top counterintelligence official with the FBI, explained in a March court document related to the student’s indictment, these types of back channels “would have benefited the Russian government by enabling Russia to bypass formal channels of diplomacy, win concessions, and exert influence within the United States. Such benefits to the Russian government would have carried with them commensurate harm to the United States, including harm to the integrity of the United States’ political processes and internal government dealings, as well as to U.S. foreign policy interests and national security.”

As Mueller’s report makes clear, Putin viewed Trump and his aides as potential collaborators in his plan to restore Russia’s role as an influential global player. So, Mueller reported, “as soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads.”

We know in particular that Putin wanted an early meeting with Trump after the election, and was floating an agreement he wanted Trump to sign about the importance of the two nations’ ties and their commitment to working jointly on global problems — a deal that would have been a feather in the cap for a country with a fraction of Washington’s economic power. He also wanted Trump to lift the economic sanctions imposed to punish Russia — and its wealthy elite — for the annexation of Crimea, and to forestall the imposition of tougher sanctions. His government was pushing a Ukraine peace plan that would largely preserve the status quo, and it needed Trump’s assent to quell international and regional opposition.

For a while, the effort to create warmer relations and find a compliant partner must have looked like it was making headway.

The month after the election, for example, then-President Barack Obama launched a series of new sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for its interference in the election. But Michael Flynn, a Trump senior aide who would soon be named his national security adviser, quickly handed Putin an opportunity to curry favor with Trump, which the Russian president adroitly seized. As the report describes, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and asked him to persuade Putin not to respond to Obama’s sanctions in kind. The following day, Kislyak phoned Flynn to inform him that his request “had been received at the highest levels,” as the report put it. And Trump was able to tweet, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin).”

Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, also had some success. After Putin had urged his oligarchs at a quarterly meeting to build relationships that could help ensure the lifting of sanctions, Dmitriev took it upon himself to pass on a “proposal for reconciliation between the United States and Russia,” according to Mueller’s report. With the help of Rick Gerson, a hedge fund manager and friend of Trump son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner, Dmitriev managed to get the proposal into Kushner’s hands. Kushner then passed it on to Steve Bannon and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Dmitriev also texted George Nader, who played a role in bringing the players together, that Putin hoped Trump would use the proposal to prepare for a phone call between the two leaders. Nader texted back, “Definitely paper was so submitted…. They took it seriously!”

But some of the Russians’ entreaties were ignored — partly due to dysfunction and incompetence on the part of Trump’s team. Although Dmitriev sought a direct meeting in November 2016 with a Trump aide, he was forced to settle in January 2017 for a Seychelles meeting with Erik Prince, who was not an official campaign adviser. “Dmitriev was not enthusiastic about the idea of meeting with Prince,” according to Mueller’s report. After the meeting, Dmitriev expressed disappointment. He had wanted to meet with someone with more authority, and he had hoped to develop a more substantive “road map” for Russia and the United States. He found Prince’s comments “insulting.”

The Russian overtures run into a wall

As questions about Russian election interference began to swirl in the American media and the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s influence efforts — which had formally kicked off four months before the election — expanded, Putin’s proxies started running into walls. Flynn, who had convinced Kislyak to tell Putin to hold off on retaliation for sanctions, was booted from the White House within a month of Trump’s swearing in, after the FBI made it clear he had lied to the vice president and was a counterintelligence risk. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and made a plea deal, explaining his sanctions conversations to Mueller.

Petr Aven, the oligarch chairman of the Russian Alfa-Bank, had sought — at Putin’s direction — intermediaries to push for a communications channel to improve US-Russia relations, according to the Mueller Report. But he was told in an email from Richard Burt, a former US ambassador who was on the board of one of Aven’s companies, that “with so much intense interest in the Congress and the media over the question of cyber-hacking (and who ordered what), Project A [a back channel] was too explosive to discuss.” Later, the Mueller Report states, Aven had to explain to Putin in one of their quarterly meetings that not only had he failed to establish a back channel with the new American president, he had received a subpoena from the FBI and been questioned about his efforts to do so.

Maria Butina, the gun-loving Russian national with an affinity for Republicans who was supposedly studying at American University, was arrested by the FBI in July 2018. She later pleaded guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent and, as part of her plea agreement, promised to cooperate with investigators. She is now awaiting sentencing. She will be deported once her sentence is served.

So as problematic as things got — with multiple pre- and post-election contacts between Russians and Trump aides or administration officials that went unreported to the FBI, contrary to standing US government policies — they might have been even worse, the section of Mueller’s report dealing with Russia suggests.

It’s not unlike his message in the other half of the report, dealing with Trump’s persistent, extensive efforts to stop Mueller’s probe from moving forward. It was bad, the report suggests, but it could have been worse — if any of Trump’s aides had taken the steps he asked them to undertake. As Mueller notes, for example, White House counsel Don McGahn refused to tell Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, declined to relay instructions to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit the special counsel’s investigation. And Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, declined the president’s request to state that there was no link between Russia and the Trump campaign.

So how are we to evaluate who won and who lost in the long-running scandal? Putin’s tactics worked to help bring Trump into the Oval Office, and Trump’s role as a strategic disruptor is obviously paying dividends, with America’s popular reputation provably in decline around the globe. But the overall plan may still prove a strategic failure for the Russian president. Despite attempts, even by Trump himself, to downplay Russia’s interference, the considerable evidence to the contrary dug up by Mueller has now mostly been published.

So even as the trolls and bots continue to try to spread disinformation, the truth — or at least part of it — is finally out. And with it comes a diminished chance of repairing US-Russia relations on terms that Putin might like. For now, at least, relations between the two countries remain tainted by scandal, and Putin has yet to secure a Ukrainian peace plan, meaning some (although not all) sanctions remain in place.

At the same time, the American electorate — despite the unwillingness of Trump to affirm the scope and seriousness of what Putin did in 2016 — has more information now about how disinformation works, which will make it harder, although not impossible, for Russia to implement the same playbook in 2020. Perhaps Putin, as he held court over his minions and sent them out to wreak havoc on our democracy, couldn’t imagine checks and balances being enforced by others on a national head of state. In Trump, Putin found a willing dance partner. But our democratic institutions still aren’t playing the music he wants to hear.

Alex Finley (@alexzfinley) is the pen name of a former journalist and an officer of the CIA from 2003 to 2009, who is now writing analyses of Robert Mueller’s investigation. She is the author of Victor in the Rubble, a satire about the CIA and the war on terror. The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative journalism organization in Washington, DC.

Why Trump’s “no collusion” victory lap is premature

2019-03-27T16:30:00-04:00

President Donald Trump at the US Capitol on March 26, 2019. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

After nearly two years of investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on what’s generally referred to as the question of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Attorney General William Barr has informed us in precisely worded language that Mueller “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

There is interesting mystery and ambiguity in this statement, however, just as in any spy story.

A footnote in Barr’s letter says Mueller defined “coordination” as an “agreement — tacit or express — between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference.” Note the three key elements: a tacit or express agreement, with the Russian government, about election interference.

The wording is important, particularly given how intelligence operations work. And so it is worth parsing this a bit, not only because Trump has declared this means he was exonerated, but also to highlight the lurking uncertainties at a moment when Congress is deciding how hard to press for direct access to the report itself, or at a minimum, to sworn testimony by Barr and Mueller about any hidden elements.

One of the core functions of the CIA, where I worked, is to carry out covert action. Covert action is defined as “a special activity abroad in support of foreign policy where the role of the US government is neither apparent nor publicly acknowledged.”

Both Barr’s letter and Mueller’s indictments make clear Russian intelligence services aimed to disrupt the 2016 election. Those intelligence operations against our democratic institutions, which persist, operate in similar ways to the aforementioned covert action. They are designed to support and advance Russia’s foreign-policy agenda while hiding the hand of the Russian government.

How does an intelligence service hide its government’s involvement? It does this by building into the operation what we call “plausible deniability” — more colloquially known as a cover story.

Remember in high school when you sent a friend over to the girl you liked to get a sense of whether she would go out with you if you asked? The friend could claim he was asking out of his own curiosity, to save you from embarrassment if the girl was uninterested. You could claim you never asked your friend to talk to the girl. The girl might guess you sent your friend, but she might not be able to prove it. That is plausible deniability. Your friend was acting as a “cutout” — to hide your involvement — with a cover story, that he was asking for his own curiosity.

In an intelligence operation, plausible deniability is a bit more sophisticated. Intelligence officers use individuals or businesses that are not part of the government but are, at arm’s length, working on behalf of the government as cutouts, and they can develop much more complex cover stories by using witting and unwitting foreign agents and front companies.

Another country’s intelligence services might be able to uncover some of these cutouts and cover stories. Using their own intelligence methods, they might collect information that points to the conclusion that a particular government is behind those cutouts and cover stories — a task that US intelligence agencies were able to accomplish not only in the case of the Russian influence operation but also in some notorious hacking incidents. Or they might not be able to do this, depending on how well the opposing service did its job. And even if the opposing service does leave some traces, the targeted country could still find it challenging to develop the sort of evidence that a prosecutor could bring to a courtroom.

Think of it like this: You’re a detective working on a murder case, and you come upon a safe that is smoking and smells of gunpowder. But without being able to open that safe, there is no way to say with certainty that a smoking gun sits inside.

The narrow wording of Mueller’s partial sentence that Barr quoted in his letter limits the question of coordination to a “tacit or express” agreement “with the Russian government.” Yet the Russians’ interventions — which aimed, in part, to help Trump win and to denigrate Hillary Clinton — were surely meant to hide those two elements. This wording leaves open the possibility that Mueller found plentiful coordination with others who were not part of the government but were a step, or several steps, removed.

A Russian lawyer such as Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has connections to the Kremlin but is not herself a member of the government, and who participated in a meeting with campaign officials where Russian dirt on Clinton was supposed to be shared, certainly fell into this category. And Mueller’s investigation and public reporting have surfaced a variety of other characters — such as Joseph Mifsud, Aras Agalarov, Rinat Akhmetshin, Konstantin Kilimnik, and Oleg Deripaska — who had some Kremlin connections without evidently being direct employees and who were in discussions with Trump campaign officials.

What does Mueller’s report actually say?

The bracket around the first letter of the Mueller quote is another small clue that more may be behind the curtain than we’ve been allowed to see so far. “[T]he investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” The bracket around the T indicates there is a phrase that begins that sentence.

This, of course, is speculation, but the first part of that sentence — at one end of the spectrum — might be: “Although we detailed a number of troubling links between the Trump campaign and people associated with the Russian government, including links with worrisome national security implications, the investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Alternatively, the first part of that sentence might also more reassuringly read: “After running every lead to the ground, the investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

But without seeing the actual report, we just don’t know. And given the public record of the Trump campaign’s contacts with many Russians and its officials’ repeated lies about those contacts, it is difficult to believe Mueller found nothing with national security implications.

Barr’s letter also states Mueller did not find anyone in the campaign who participated in the specific crimes of the Internet Research Agency influence operations or in the hacking and stealing of Democratic emails by Russian military officers.

But Barr’s letter does not address whether Mueller concluded that Trump or his associates were compromised by Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower Moscow, a project that required Russian government approval and was slated to net him hundreds of millions of dollars, at precisely the time the Russian government was running an intelligence operation aimed at helping him win the presidency.

Such a project might not amount to “tacit or express” coordination on “election interference,” but the overlapping timing of the campaign and the construction planning leaves open the possibility that Trump was vulnerable to manipulation. An intelligence asset might be unwitting — a “useful idiot,” as we say in the intelligence world — but that doesn’t diminish the threat that asset might be to national security, nor negate that he may actively have been used to some end.

The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner told some interns in July 2017, for example, that the campaign was so disorganized or decentralized “we couldn’t even collude with our local offices,” according to Foreign Policy. But intelligence officers are skilled at gaining someone’s cooperation without them directly knowing what they are doing or why — and none of that sort of connivance would be readily prosecutable.

The language in Barr’s letter also does not address if Trump made an agreement to change US foreign policy — on issues such as the sanctions imposed over Ukraine — in order to get his coveted tower. Such an agreement would not fall under the narrow definition of “election interference” and would not even necessarily be illegal, but would still be a grave US counterintelligence concern.

A case that may not be black and white

None of this is to say Trump is a foreign agent under Vladimir Putin’s control. It’s important to know there is a gray area between “no collusion” and “Trump is a foreign agent.” We don’t know from what we’ve been able to read so far in whose interest he is acting. Even if he is acting in his own interest and solely on his own accord, many of his public actions (and we don’t know how many of his private actions) have fulfilled Russia’s overarching agenda of vilifying America’s institutions and hurting US national security. Supporting, and even publicly encouraging, a hostile foreign power to hack a former secretary of state’s emails is, to say the least, reckless. Mueller’s report likely would help put context to the many disturbing episodes we know about and help the public understand the nature of those meetings and relationships with Russians, from those at the lowest levels to Putin at the very top.

Importantly, Barr’s letter says Mueller’s investigation does back up the intelligence community’s overall findings that Russia interfered in the election, an idea Trump has consistently refused to accept. Furthermore, the letter confirms that “Russian-affiliated individuals” made “multiple offers” to assist the campaign. Notably, no one on the campaign ever reported those offers to the FBI and everyone consistently lied about them when asked. We need to discuss, as a nation, if this is acceptable for US politicians going forward. The standard of merely having “no criminal liability” is comically low for the position of US president; other, higher standards of ethics and morality should be discussed.

Because Russia’s interference in our democratic institutions involves covert action designed to hide the Russian government’s hand, drawing a conclusion about how successful Russia was with their many approaches to Trump and his team is difficult without access to the underlying intelligence that Mueller saw and the information gathered from more than 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communication records, and nearly 50 orders to monitor phone call records. And given the nature of intelligence, coming as it does from classified sources and methods, we, the public, may never see it.

Even if we did, it might not rise to the level of criminality, which is why setting that bar was never going to be satisfactory. Many things intelligence officers from all countries get people to do are not illegal, but they can still be unethical or even dangerous to US security. Our laws also allow all kinds of unethical behavior at the nexus of money and politics.

In the end, the question comes down to this: Has the president faithfully executed the responsibilities of the office, free of untoward foreign influence? Without access to Mueller’s report, we cannot say for sure.

The only thing that Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report tells us for sure is that Mueller could not establish a “tacit or express” agreement with the Russian government as fact. That is, he did not feel he could prove it in court. This does not mean Mueller found no links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government’s actions.

While most have painted this partial sentence to mean Mueller found no evidence of collusion, it actually states Mueller could not find enough evidence to state conclusively, at a level that would stand up in court, that members of the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government.

Amid all the lingering questions, one thing is utterly clear from Barr’s summary: Until we see a fuller picture, the president’s “no collusion” victory lap feels premature.

Alex Finley (@alexzfinley) is the pen name of a former journalist and an officer of the CIA from 2003 to 2009, who is now writing analyses of Robert Mueller’s investigation. She is the author of Victor in the Rubble, a satire about the CIA and the war on terror. The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative journalism organization in Washington, DC.

Trump got the National Enquirer to bury his secrets. Did he do the same with Putin?

2018-12-20T19:48:44-05:00

US President Donald Trump sitting opposite Russian President Vladimir Putin in November. | Guido Bergmann/Bundesregierung via Getty Images

A powerful man holds decades of compromising material on a businessman who has long considered running for president of the United States. He strikes a deal with the future politician, in which he will bottle up any negative information about him and, even better, circulate and amplify negative stories and conspiracy theories about the candidate’s political opponents.

To help foster the deal, the candidate’s lawyer sets up creative workarounds to hide payments related to that help. When asked about it, all sides deny any arrangement. All of this is done with the aim of influencing the US presidential election.

That’s the exact situation we now know occurred during the 2016 election between President Donald Trump and the publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid magazine.

And we know all of this because Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer who acted as the go-between, making the whole shady deal happen — admitted it in his recent plea agreement and because the publisher’s company filled in details in a non-prosecution agreement. Cohen pleaded guilty to financial crimes, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress, and on December 12 was sentenced to three years in prison.

The scheme was simple: American Media Inc. (AMI) — the parent company of the National Enquirer, headed by Trump’s longtime friend David Pecker — made hush payments to a woman who claimed she had had an affair with Trump, and tipped off Cohen that another woman was shopping a similar story.

Pecker’s intention was not to publish the information, but rather to keep it hidden from the American public, which was already seeing screamingly negative headlines in the Enquirer about Trump’s opponents — from Ted Cruz to Hillary Clinton.

Cohen, at the direction of Trump, made arrangements for AMI’s payment to the woman, former Playboy model Karen McDougal, to be reimbursed. When asked about the arrangement, time and again, Pecker, Cohen, and Trump all denied it. The statements of the participating parties nonetheless now make clear that the Trump campaign colluded with AMI to influence the election.

But hang on — haven’t we heard a similar story before?

Russian President Vladimir Putin held compromising information on Trump — namely, that Trump and his advisers had routinely lied about their contacts and business dealings with Russia — throughout Trump’s campaign, the election, and after taking office.

Putin knew, for example, that Trump and his team had publicly denied having meetings with Russians, while in fact Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had met with a team of Russians — including a lawyer connected to Russia’s top government prosecutor — in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Trump’s team also lied about the timeline involving discussions about Trump Tower Moscow. (Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about this; that is, he lied to Congress, while Putin knew the truth.)

And while we don’t know exactly what Trump did during his trip to Moscow in 2013, little that goes on there involving wealthy American businessmen would escape the Kremlin’s attention. So it’s safe to assume that Putin knew details of the trip. He also surely had details of Trump’s financial dealings with pro-Putin oligarchs.

Like Pecker, Putin has denied he has any compromising information about Trump. Also like Pecker, Putin helped direct the release of disinformation meant to promote Trump and hurt Clinton, according to a report by the Director of National Intelligence. We learned from two Senate reports this week that this effort utilized nearly every social media platform and reached more than 100 million potential voters.

In dealings with Putin, Cohen also played a fixer role, wheeling and dealing with the office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, about a potential Trump Tower Moscow.

When asked later about any business arrangement, all parties denied it, then said it had been discussed but went nowhere and had ended before Trump was the Republican candidate, when in fact, discussions for the project carried on past the Republican primaries (even though the plans did not come to fruition).

It’s an interesting parallel, particularly given how the AMI story is now unraveling. Might the dynamics of the Trump-Pecker relationship provide insight into the perils of the continuing give and take between Trump and Putin?

Collecting dirt and granting favors

According to the Associated Press, Pecker kept a safe full of negative stories on Trump. As multiple sources told the AP, “the safe was a great source of power for Pecker. … By keeping celebrities’ embarrassing secrets, the company was able to ingratiate itself with them and ask for favors in return.” A former National Enquirer reporter described the so-called “catch-and-kill” technique to the AP as: “‘I did this for you,’ now what can you do for me.” The Enquirer, he said, “always got something in return.”

And Pecker did get something out of the relationship: In addition to flights on Trump’s private plane, Pecker got access to the gossip about the circles Trump inhabited. Trump is reported to have supplied Pecker with information the National Enquirer could turn into juicy stories. Pecker also received public praise from Trump that may have helped him professionally and financially.

Trump’s election also opened up new avenues for more gossip exchanges and more business opportunities for Pecker. Trump hosted a dinner for Pecker and a French businessman with ties to the Saudi royal family, for example, at a time when, according to the New York Times, Pecker was looking to expand AMI’s business with the kingdom. Word of Pecker’s access to the White House opened doors in Saudi Arabia for him.

And shortly before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s tour of the United States last spring, AMI just so happened to publish a glossy magazine that appeared in supermarket checkout aisles that introduced the Crown Prince as “the most influential Arab leader, transforming the world at 32.”

The transactional nature of this relationship between Pecker and Trump tells us a lot about Trump’s approach to business: You do something for me, and I’ll do something for you.

This kind of give-and-take, however, can also leave people exposed. Trump and Cohen seemed to have realized this.

At one point during the campaign, they evidently began to fear Pecker had too much leverage and that they were too reliant on blessings from the tabloid, which has an average weekly circulation of around 265,000. So they decided to try to buy back the rights for the negative stories, according to reports by the New York Times and ABC News. (A lawyer for AMI denied the company would “seek to ‘extort’ the President of the United States,” according to a letter obtained by the AP.)

But in a way, that, too, is a normal state of affairs for Trump and his associates. Everyone in his circle seemed to have embarrassing information about others. Omarosa Manigault Newman underscored this point last summer when she — a favorite but losing The Apprentice contestant who later won herself an office in the West Wing — revealed audio recordings she had made to make sure her reputation and position were safeguarded from backstabbing.

The Trump business ethos has long been: Do whatever is necessary to beat your competitors. So if Putin came offering a deal to help Trump win, who was Trump to say no?

Following a similar collusion model

Interestingly, the Steele dossier — a series of raw intelligence reports compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele — outlines a deal between Trump and Putin that is very similar to what we now know existed between Trump and Pecker.

In a July 30, 2016, memo to the research firm employing him, Fusion GPS, Steele noted that the Kremlin had plenty of compromising material, or kompromat as it’s known in Russia, on Trump. Steele added that, according to his source for this information, “the Kremlin had given its word that [the compromising material] would not be deployed against the Republican presidential candidate given how helpful and cooperative his team had been over several years, and particularly of late.”

That same memo claimed that Trump was providing information to the Kremlin, mostly on Russian oligarchs and their families. Just as Trump was able to supply gossip to Pecker, Trump might have been able to provide interesting tidbits on Russian oligarchs outside of Russia, particularly given their affinity for investing in Trump properties. As Donald Trump Jr. himself has said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Some of Steele’s information has been borne out in court proceedings initiated by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Steele’s claims that Trump or his team provided information to the Kremlin has not been proven, along with several additional claims in the dossier. But it would fit into Trump’s pattern of behavior, as evidenced by the arrangement Trump had with Pecker.

We know that Cohen played the fixer in Trump’s dealings with Pecker and that he played a similar role in Trump’s dealings with Putin. Cohen has already confirmed that he was a go-between in Trump’s efforts to secure a deal to build Trump Tower Moscow. Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, even lied on Cohen’s behalf, in order to back up Cohen’s story (until Cohen’s public confession).

We also know that Cohen worked with Pecker to cover up embarrassing information about Trump. Did he do the same thing in a collaboration or parallel effort with Putin, as Steele’s document suggests? “According to [a] Kremlin insider,” Steele wrote in a memo dated October 19, 2016, “Cohen now was heavily engaged in a cover up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia being exposed.”

And if so, what favors might Trump have been willing to offer Putin in return for his help? Because like Pecker, you can be sure that Putin, too, keeps a favor bank, including a record of all loans and other disbursements.

What happens when he comes to collect?

Alex Finley (@alexzfinley) is the pen name of a former journalist and an officer of the CIA from 2003 to 2009, who is now writing analyses of Robert Mueller’s investigation for the Center for Public Integrity. She is the author of Victor in the Rubble, a satire about the CIA and the war on terror. The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative journalism organization in Washington, DC.

How Russian money and influence slipped through cracks in the US legal system

2018-10-24T19:46:17-04:00

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a weekly meeting with ministers of the government at the Novo Ogaryovo state residence on October 29, 2014, in Moscow, Russia. | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Foreign influence was never supposed to be part of America’s elections. What is a democracy if not rule by a country’s own citizens?

Sitting in offices in St. Petersburg, Russia, however, employees of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) had plenty of ideas about how to waltz past American legal and political safeguards to sow discord and try to manipulate the US midterm elections this fall.

Internal messages by the group’s officers to its staff advised that LGBT groups and “their liberal allies” were active online late into the night and responded well to manipulative infographics and colorful pictures, unlike their conservative counterparts.

John McCain — a critic of Russia and an advocate for higher military spending — was to be branded “an old geezer” in online messaging, even on his deathbed. Paul Ryan — who notably said last July that “Russia is not our ally” — was to be branded on social media as a “two-faced loudmouth.”

These were just a few of efforts by the Russian organization’s online army of trolls to promote divisive messages on hot political topics ranging from sanctuary cities to illegal voting to whether athletes stood or knelt during the national anthem at NFL games.

The result was to short-change democratic discourse in the US — an outcome made possible by the shortcomings of the US laws and rules that are supposed to ensure fair election outcomes.

Operation Lakhta

The snarky guidance provided to the Russian trolls, according to a detailed US federal court filing last week, was part of Operation Lakhta, which itself was just one aspect of Russia’s attack on American democracy.

It was laid bare when prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia revealed on October 19 they had taken the Washington mantra “follow the money” to heart in tracking the activities of Russian citizen Elena Khusyaynova, chief accountant of Operation Lakhta.

According to the filing, she “managed the financing of substantially all aspects of the Project [Lakhta] operations” and — luckily for prosecutors but perhaps unluckily for Russia — Khusyaynova kept “meticulous” records, covering her payments for rent, travel, furniture, and even garbage disposal. It’s unclear how the emails arrived in Washington, but creative Western hacking seems a distinct possibility.

The indictment says Operation Lakhta had an ever-increasing budget that reached more than $1 million per month earlier this year. Much of that money was used to purchase and promote posts on social media, develop and promote online videos, buy ads on Facebook and Instagram, and pay “activists” and “bloggers.”

The operation also included promoting political rallies and counter-protests, all in an effort to “inflame passions” and conduct what the Russian-financed internet trolls themselves called “information warfare against the United States of America.”

Those involved were instructed not to use news sites like Breitbart in their social media posts when trying to influence liberal groups, and to avoid outlets like the Washington Post and BuzzFeed when trying to win over conservatives.

They were also given “Tasking Specifics” with content that reflected deep knowledge of American political jargon, including such terms as “RINO” (Republicans In Name Only) and “anchor babies” (used pejoratively to refer to children born in the United States to non-citizens).

And they demonstrated a sense of humor by using a seemingly pro-Trump Twitter account labeled “@CovfefeNationUS” to post or retweet more than 23,000 messages, including one encouraging people to donate money to a political action committee opposed to Democrats.

Prosecutors found a law to use against Khusyaynova, charging her with conspiracy to defraud the United States by acting as an undisclosed foreign agent, in violation of requirements that such agents register and publicly declare their ambitions. They also said she broke Federal Election Commission laws prohibiting foreign expenditures in American elections.

How foreign money can taint elections

But are these laws enough?

They haven’t proven much of a deterrent so far — some of the activities depicted in the indictment took place this year, long after Russian involvement in the 2016 election had been well exposed. Moreover, there are other, more direct ways that foreign money can corrupt the system, without breaking any existing laws.

Two Supreme Court decisions — the 2007 Wisconsin Right to Life ruling that Congress could not ban “issue ads” in advance of elections and the 2010 Citizens United ruling that said corporations have a First Amendment right to engage in political spending — opened the floodgates for “dark money,” that is, money whose source is unknown.

Since the 2007 case, more than $900 million from hidden donors has spilled into federal elections, according to an April report from the Brennan Center for Justice.

The main route has been to give the funds to politically oriented nonprofit organizations, which are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of cash from individuals, other organizations, and corporations without disclosing who those donors are, and then to spend it on issue-oriented advertising meant to influence election outcomes.

Foreigners can also exert influence through US companies they own or control, including US-registered Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs), which can act as shell companies to disguise the source of their funds and the names of the owners or controllers.

While the law prohibits companies based outside the United States from spending on US elections, foreign-owned companies based in the United States can do so as long as the money comes from their US revenues and a US citizen — not a foreigner — decides where that money goes. But there is no real way to check who is responsible.

This is particularly worrisome if a supposedly private company acts as a “proxy” for a government, a common set-up in places like Russia, whose president has bragged about “patriotic hackers” and other ostensibly private citizens who just so happen to act in the interest of the Russian government.

Although Moscow has tried to distance itself from some of the groups that intruded into the political debate, there’s little doubt that their work was all part of a well-organized campaign.

Just as foreign influence operations can be “laundered” through private companies and nonprofits, so can direct political donations. Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly looking at political disbursements from the National Rifle Association (NRA) to determine if Russia funneled money through the organization to influence the election.

In the 2016 presidential election, the NRA spent more than $30 million to support Donald Trump’s campaign. That is more than it had spent in all races — House, Senate, and White House — during the 2008 and 2012 elections combined. Where did that money come from?

We don’t know. But take the case of Maria Butina, the alleged Russian foreign agent who is accused of trying to influence a number of Republican officials, particularly through the NRA.

She and her boyfriend, Paul Erickson, a top Republican operative with connections to the NRA who tried to broker a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin in May 2016, created an LLC, ostensibly to pay Butina’s education bills.

Erickson, on his own, set up several other LLCs. He has not been charged with any wrongdoing — but paying university tuition through an LLC is more than a bit odd. We don’t know if the LLC had a wider role, for example, in funneling Russian money to the NRA or other political organizations.

Numerous media reports have said Mueller is also looking at a total of $285,000 in payments to Trump’s inauguration fund, reelection campaign fund, and the Republican National Committee from a man named Andrew Intrater.

Intrater is the American cousin of Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch whose company is under US sanctions. Intrater wasn’t a big political donor before 2016. (Even larger donations to Trump’s inauguration were made by others considered close to Vekselberg and Russia.)

We don’t know much about the circumstances of all these donations, but it’s clear that a flow of funds between foreign-connected Americans and major US politicians reasonably raises questions about who is buying what and why.

Weak US campaign finance laws helped create this situation

The Brennan Center has some ideas about how to ameliorate the risks of foreign election influence: It recommends more transparency — with more disclosure of the source of funding for radio and television ads before elections, and complete disclosure of funding sources for dark money groups.

It says companies owned or controlled by foreigners but based in America should be completely barred from making political contributions. And it calls for more vigorous enforcement of the rules by the Federal Election Commission, which has long been hobbled by partisan bickering.

Here’s the rub: These steps would almost certainly help. But foreign governments will always seek a way to influence us, and water will always find a crack to enter. Until we truly clamp down on the overall flow of money in politics, we are leaving open a wide avenue for infiltration.

While Russia must be held accountable for its actions, we need to remember that their tactics took advantage of a freewheeling culture of paid political influence that we created ourselves.

Alex Finley (@alexzfinley) is the pen name of a former journalist and an officer of the CIA from 2003 to 2009, who is now writing analyses of Robert Mueller’s investigation for the Center for Public Integrity. She is the author of Victor in the Rubble, a satire about the CIA and the war on terror. The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative journalism organization in Washington, DC.