What Putin’s real objectives are
News leaked recently that the FBI has briefed Bernie Sanders that Russia was engaged in activity favorable to his 2020 presidential campaign.
This is actually not new. In the 2016 Trump-Russia frenzy, almost entirely overlooked was the conclusion by U.S. intelligence officials that Russia had also engaged in activities favorable to Sanders in the primary against Hillary Clinton. The report by special counsel Robert Mueller contained the same finding.
There are two points with respect to this.
The first is the need to revise the prevailing view of what Russia was, and is, trying to do by intervening in our elections.
The prevailing view is that Russia preferred Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and took action to try to bring about that result.
There was reason for Russia to prefer Trump to Clinton. During the 2016 campaign, Trump said he wanted to improve relations with Russia. Clinton said she wanted to crack down on Russia even more.
But, considering Russian activities as a whole, and its actions in other democratic countries, that was neither the singular nor even the primary objective of its interference campaign.
The democratic norm is that the legitimacy of government rests upon the consent of the governed, as expressed in free elections. That norm is a threat to autocratic governments, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Putin is bothered by the spread of democratic governments among former Soviet satellites. And he’s particularly worried about the democratic norm taking root in Russia itself.
One of his responses is to conduct disinformation campaigns in democratic countries, intensified during elections. The objective is two-fold: amplify discord within the body politic of democratic countries; and undermine the confidence in, and acceptance of, democratic outcomes.
Putin’s activities in the 2016 election weren’t limited to helping Trump. There were also some general election social media messaging favorable to Clinton. And messaging favorable to Sanders in the primary.
While Russia widely disseminated hacked emails from Democratic sources, there was also hacking attempts on GOP sources and some, much more limited, leaks of flinched emails.
It wasn’t so much that Russia was trying to tilt the elections in favor of
Sanders and Trump. It was that Sanders and Trump were the most conducive vehicles for disinformation campaigns to sow discord and undermine confidence in the legitimacy of democratic outcomes. They are both polarizing figures and the objective of the Russian disinformation mission is to increase the amplitude of polarization in democratic countries.
Similar disinformation campaigns, with comparable objectives, have been conducted during elections in Western European democracies.
A revised understanding of Russia’s objectives in its election interference would be more possible if Trump quit casting doubt on its unquestionable existence, and instead sought to provide a broader perspective of Russian activities and intents. But he views any discussion of Russian interference as questioning the legitimacy of his election.
This is far from the only instance of Trump being his own worst enemy, which gets us to the second point.
The FBI briefed Sanders about the Russian activities favorable to his campaign. In 2016, Trump received no comparable briefing. Instead, the FBI launched an ungrounded investigation into collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian efforts.
Now, there are important differences. Russian efforts favorable to Trump were much larger than those favorable, to date, for Sanders. And the FBI did have a report of a letterhead policy adviser to Trump suggesting that the Trump campaign would benefit from damaging information about Clinton leaked by the Russians.
That report was received in July of 2016. Rather than investigate what the letterhead policy adviser, who turned out to be a popinjay, might know, the FBI opened up a much larger collusion investigation. That turned up nothing, as did the follow-up Mueller investigation.
Attorney General William Barr wants to know why the FBI didn’t brief Trump about possible foreign interference with his campaign. As the Sanders example illustrates, that’s the standard.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report has already established that the FBI’s collusion investigation should have been terminated shortly after it commenced. Barr’s inquiry as to why Trump was treated differently than other presidential candidates is Trump’s best path to putting the Russian collusion issue completely behind him.
Yet, through tweets and other behavior, he keeps raising doubts, unfairly in my judgment, about Barr’s independence — thus undermining his potential vindication.