Monday, April 03, 2017

2016 Election Investigation: Russian Context

2016 Election Investigation:
The Russian Context

Where we are. Some preliminary reading.

“That’s the point, isn’t it?... We can’t move. We can’t investigate because all the instruments of enquiry are in the Circus’s hands, perhaps in the mole Gerald’s. We can’t watch, or listen, or open mail. To do any of those things would requires the resources of Esterhase’s lamplighters, and Esterhase like anyone else must be suspect. We can’t interrogate; we can’t take steps to limit a particular person’s access to delicate secrets. To do any of those things would run the risk of alarming the mole. It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy


"...why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government. Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?"




The Russian Kleptocracy

Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? is a 2014 book by Karen Dawisha. Published by Simon & Schuster, it chronicles the rise of Vladimir Putin during his time in Saint Petersburg in the 1990s. In the book, Dawisha exposes how Putin's friends and coworkers from his formative years have accumulated mass amounts of wealth and power. Although Putin was elected with promises to rein in the oligarchs who had emerged in the 1990s, Dawisha writes that Putin transformed "an oligarchy independent of, and more powerful than, the state into a corporatist structure in which oligarchs served at the pleasure of state officials, who themselves gained and exercised economic control... both for the state and for themselves."[1] As a result, 110 individuals control 35% of Russia's wealth, according to Dawisha. Whereas scholars have traditionally viewed Putin's Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, Dawisha argues that "from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal... who used democracy for decoration rather than direction."[2]


The most famous oligarchs of the Putin era include Roman Abramovich, Alexander Abramov, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Fridman, Mikhail Prokhorov, Alisher Usmanov, German Khan, Viktor Vekselberg, Leonid Mikhelson, Vagit Alekperov, Pyotr Aven, and still Vladimir Potanin and Vitaly Malkin.

Between 2000 and 2004, Putin apparently engaged in a power-struggle with some oligarchs, reaching a "grand bargain" with them. This bargain allowed the oligarchs to maintain their powers, in exchange for their explicit support of – and alignment with – Putin's government.[10][11]


"“Anybody who is an oligarch or is in any position of power in Russia got it because (President) Vladimir Putin or somebody in power saw some reason to give that person that job,” Hall said in an interview. “All the organized crime figures I’ve ever heard of (in Russia) all have deep connections and are tied in with people in government.”

"FBI Director James Comey acknowledged at a  congressional hearing into Russian interference in the U.S. election March 20 that many wealthy Russians may have close ties to the Kremlin and may be acting on its behalf.

"Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection to any of the individuals mentioned in this article."




Eurasianism: Putin’s Ideology

Aleksandr Dugin

Imagine a world in which the old left-right divide and the east-west conflict of the cold war era were practically irrelevant. The conflict of consequence would be between traditionalists and pluralists, between internationalists and nativists, between autocracy and liberalism. This is Dugin’s world. In it, Trump and Putin, for all their differences, would be on the same side.


Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ге́льевич Ду́гин; born 7 January 1962) is a Russian political scientist known for his fascist views[4][5][6] who calls to hasten the "end of times" with all out war.[7][8][9][10][11] He has close ties with the Kremlin and the Russian military,[12][13] having served as an advisor to State Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov[14] and key member of the ruling United Russia party Sergei Naryshkin.[15]

*     *     *

“In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution ... The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us. This common civilizational impulse will be the basis of a political and strategic union.”
— The Basics of Geopolitics (1997)


Within the United States itself, there is a need for the Russian special services and their allies “to provoke all forms of instability and separatism within the borders of the United States (it is possible to make use of the political forces of Afro-American racists)” (p. 248).  “It is especially important,” Dugin adds, “to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S.  It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics…” (p. 367).


[Lutheran Bishop] Heiser then proceeds to dissect Dugin’s political and geopolitical ideology of Eurasianism. The core idea of this is that “liberalism” (by which Dugin means the entire Western consensus) represents an assault on the traditional hierarchical organization of the world. Repeating the ideas of Nazi theorists Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Carl Schmitt, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Dugin says that this liberal threat is not new, but is the ideology of the maritime-cosmopolitan power “Atlantis,” which has conspired to subvert more conservative land-based societies since ancient times. Accordingly he has written books in which he has reconstructed the entire history of the world as a continuous battle between these two factions, from Rome vs. Carthage to Russia vs. the Anglo-Saxon “Atlantic Order” today. If it is to win its fight against the subversive oceanic bearers of such “racist” (because foreign imposed) ideas as human rights, Russia must unite around itself all the continental powers, including Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Turkey, Iran, and Korea, into grand Eurasian Union strong enough to defeat the West.
Dugin's Evil Theology (National Review)



Eurasianism

Under Eurasianism, Russia seeks integration with its neighbors along cultural lines, which would in effect expand Russia’s borders to include the regions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia that comprised the former Soviet Union. Furthermore, the result of such an expansion would be a massive Eurasian super-state. The brainchild of Aleksandr Dugin, former head of the department of sociology at Moscow University and confidant to Vladimir Putin, Eurasianism provides the ideological basis for Putin’s foreign policy. Unknown to most, Dugin is one of Russia’s most powerful men, sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain.” Dugin likely became a potent political force due to his role in the nationalist think tank, the Izborskij Club, which was founded in 2012. He and his followers hold powerful positions at the highest levels of Russia’s government: Dugin is an advisor to the State Duma Chairman, and Dugin’s protégé, Ivan Demidov, is on the Ideology Directorate of Putin’s United Russia Party.

*     *     *

Along with advocating the absorption of Eastern Europe and Central Asia into Russia, Dugin, in The Fourth Political Theory, promotes a political ideology that combines what he views as the best elements of Nazism, Communism, Ecologism (opposition to modernity), and Traditionalism, describing this ideology as a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism.” For Dugin, Traditionalism is a priority, as he emphasizes the preservation of traditional Russian culture, and encourages the other nations of the world to remain true to their traditions and senses of national identity. Consequently, Dugin sees Western promotion of liberal democracy, individual liberty, and globalism as an effort to destroy traditionalist societies. In Dugin’s eyes, the West, which he calls “Atlantis,” unlike Russia, has abandoned God and is working for the “Antichrist.” Furthermore, grounded in the fundamentally irrational premise that the West, with the United States at the helm, is purely evil, Dugin envisions Russia at the head of an alliance of traditionalist societies in Eurasia, serving as a counterweight to the West.





Strategic Deterrence: Putin's Geopolitical Strategy

Putin’s Foreign Policy Strategy

John Herbst, former Ambassador to Uzbekistan and Ukraine, and Director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, spoke next. According to Herbst, Putin’s objectives are coherent enough to amount to a grand strategy, which is focused on overturning the post-Cold War order. Russia’s foreign policy goals and behavior include five main elements. First, Russia seeks a sphere of influence, at minimum, within the borders of the post-Soviet space. Second, Russia is responsible for the protection of ethnic Russians abroad. Third, the Eurasian Union should be constructed as a counter to the European Union. Fourth, the concept of state sovereignty is not absolute. The sovereignty of powerful states (including Russia) trumps the right to sovereignty of other states. Finally, the concept of frozen conflicts plays a major role. In these, Russia sides with minorities in conflicts in neighboring countries in order to push majorities toward Moscow-friendly policies. This strategy has been applied since the 1990s but has been expanded under Putin.


"What’s at stake here is more than the future of Ukraine. Putin’s larger goal appears to be to change the nature of the international system, particularly with respect to Europe. If he’s successful it will have exposed the hollowness of the Western model approach to international affairs. He also will have made the model of democracy appear morally corrupt. Ultimately what frightens Putin the most is the viability of that model for his rule at home. Striking a blow against its credibility is not only about international prestige and national pride but a cynical way to maintain his power base inside Russia."


"Putin has figured out how to turn the West’s purported greatest strength — its belief in democracy, peace, and a rules-based international system — against itself. America and the Europeans are rightly proud of their values and see themselves as models for the world. But when challenged by someone like Putin who disavows these values, Westerners — and Europeans in particular — are forced to choose between their model approach, which means intentionally eschewing the hard methods of the opponent, and the strategic approach, which may require tougher methods.



Strategic Deterrence (What the West calls Hybrid War)

‘Strategic deterrence’ is described in the military-encyclopaedic dictionary of the [Russian] Ministry of Defence:
A coordinated system of military and non-military (political, diplomatic, legal, economic, ideological, scientific–technical and others) measures taken consecutively or simultaneously
… with the goal of deterring military action entailing damage of a strategic character
… Strategic deterrence is directed at the stabilisation of the military–political situation  Russian Strategic Deterrence | 11
… in order to influence an adversary within a predetermined framework, or for the de-escalation of military conflict
… The objects to be influenced through strategic deterrence may be the military–political leadership and the population of the potential adversary state (or coalition of states) … Strategic-deterrent measures are carried out continuously, both in peacetime and in wartime.19




Ideological Warfare: Pro-Eurasianism Think Tanks

We, at Katehon, clearly defend the principle of a multipolar world, and thus we fundamentally support a pluricentric worldview defined by an international balance of powers; we reject and challenge any kind of unipolar world order and global hegemony. … All of our fellow contributors hold firm to the main principles of the continentalist school of geopolitics. In addition, we stress the importance of religious and cultural identities in international relations, and so we closely monitor the ethnic dimension in social processes, conflictual situations and agreements.

The conspiracy to force President Trump from office
“The Democrats, the liberal media and juvenile snowflakes are bad losers and they’re making themselves look ridiculous by continuing to refuse to accept that Donald Trump is their President, and looks set to be so for eight glorious years as he Makes America Great Again”. That is the view of many millions of American patriots and conservatives – and, sadly, it is terribly wrong.

The reality is that Donald Trump, American democracy, and the survival of the Christian world as a whole, are in grave and growing danger. This is because the ‘War on Trump’ is not the futile and ridiculous lost cause that many on the right naively believe. Rather, what we have seen so far are just the opening shots and manoeuvres in a well-planned coup d’etat, which is being prepared by sinister forces with enormous experience of ‘regime change’ all over the world.

There are, of course, significant numbers of grass-roots Republicans who are now aware that there is nothing ‘spontaneous’ about the petulant student riots, Women’s Marches, Antifa gang attacks and other protests against Trump. While the liberal controlled media have largely avoided the issue, the Internet has helped to spread information about the key roles of George Soros in funding [1] and Barack Obama in organizing [2] the ‘Resistance’.


Some of those attacks found a home on Russian websites such as the one for Katehon, a right-wing Christian think tank aligned with Mr. Putin. Katehon recirculated anti-Clinton conspiracies under headlines like “Bloody Hillary: 5 Mysterious Murders Linked to Clinton.”



Russian Active Measures: Weaponizing Espionage

Active measures (Russian: активные мероприятия) is a Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it.[1] Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration into churches, and persecution of political dissidents.[1]

Active measures included the establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g. the World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties; wars of national liberation in the Third World; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups.[1] The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc states also contributed to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations.[1]


In testimony before the Senate, Clapper described an unprecedented Russian effort to interfere in the U.S. electoral process. The operation involved hacking Democrats’ e-mails, publicizing the stolen contents through WikiLeaks, and manipulating social media to spread “fake news” and pro-Trump messages.


"Until recently, Western governments focused on state-to-state negotiations with Putin’s regime largely missed Russian state-to-people social media approaches. Russia’s social media campaigns seek five complementary objectives to strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies:

* Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;

* Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;

* Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;

* Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;

* Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction

"In sum, these influence efforts weaken Russia’s enemies without the use of force. Russian social media propaganda pushes four general themes to advance Moscow’s influence objectives and connect with foreign populations they target."


“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security online magazine War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns. (Update: The report came out on Saturday)


According to notes of Krutskikh’s speech, he told his Russian audience: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President Harry] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.”

Krutskikh continued, “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

Putin’s cyber adviser stressed to the Moscow audience the importance for Russia of having a strong hand in this new domain. If Russia is weak, he explained, “it must behave hypocritically and search for compromises. But once it becomes strong, it will dictate to the Western partners [the United States and its allies] from the position of power.”


This sort of espionage was business as usual, a continuation of long-standing practice. And during the cold war, both the USSR and the United States subtly, and sometimes covertly, interfered with foreign elections. What changed over the past year, however—what made the DNC hack feel new and terrifying—was Russia's seeming determination to combine the two. For the first time, Russia used a hacking operation, one that collected and released massive quantities of stolen information, to meddle in an American presidential election. The inspiration and template for this new attack was a poisonous cocktail of fact and fabrication that the Russians call kompromat, for "compromising material."


This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. It covers the motivation and scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion. The assessment focuses on activities aimed at the 2016 US presidential election and draws on our understanding of previous Russian influence operations. When we use the term “we” it refers to an assessment by all three agencies.

*     *     *


We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.

* In early September, Putin said publicly it was important the DNC data was exposed to WikiLeaks, calling the search for the source of the leaks a distraction and denying Russian “state-level” involvement.

* The Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks. RT’s editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT, according to Russian and Western media. Russian media subsequently announced that RT had become "the only Russian media company" to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to "new leaks of secret information." RT routinely gives Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States

*     *     *


Russian Propaganda Efforts. Russia’s state-run propaganda machine—comprised of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik, and a network of quasi-government trolls—contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences. State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.

* Starting in March 2016, Russian Government– linked actors began openly supporting President-elect Trump’s candidacy in media aimed at English-speaking audiences. RT and Sputnik—another government-funded outlet producing pro-Kremlin radio and online content in a variety of languages for international audiences—consistently cast President-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment.

* Russian media hailed President-elect Trump’s victory as a vindication of Putin’s advocacy of global populist movements—the theme of Putin’s annual conference for Western academics in October 2016—and the latest example of Western liberalism’s collapse.

* Putin’s chief propagandist Dmitriy Kiselev used his flagship weekly newsmagazine program this fall to cast President-elect Trump as an outsider victimized by a corrupt political establishment and faulty democratic election process that aimed to prevent his election because of his desire to work with Moscow.

* Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if President-elect Trump won, Russia would “drink champagne” in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine. RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism. Some Russian officials echoed Russian lines for the influence campaign that Secretary Clinton’s election could lead to a war between the United States and Russia.
RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism. Some Russian officials echoed Russian lines for the influence campaign that Secretary Clinton’s election could lead to a war between the United States and Russia.

* In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems.

* On 6 August, RT published an English language video called “Julian Assange Special: Do WikiLeaks Have the E-mail That’ll Put Clinton in Prison?” and an exclusive interview with Assange entitled “Clinton and ISIS Funded by the Same Money.” RT’s most popular video on Secretary Clinton, “How 100% of the Clintons’ ‘Charity’ Went to…Themselves,” had more than 9 million views on social media platforms. RT’s most popular English language video about the President-elect, called “Trump Will Not Be Permitted To Win,” featured Assange and had 2.2 million views.

* For more on Russia’s past media efforts— including portraying the 2012 US electoral process as undemocratic—please see Annex A: Russia—Kremlin's TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US. Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.

* The likely financier of the so-called Internet Research Agency of professional trolls located in Saint Petersburg is a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence. • A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015.


Russian Active Measures: Money Laundering

Some $50 billion per year were leaving Russia and heading for Western financial centres, at least until the oil price falls of 2014.61 A significant proportion of that money is the fruit of corrupt practices, and Western financial institutions are accused of profiting from those illicit gains. The laundering of corrupt money in Western finance systems implicates Western institutions in malpractice and makes it more difficult for the West to do anything about it. It also strengthens the Kremlin’s grip on its domestic elite. Together these constitute a powerful tool against the domestic opposition, according to Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss:

Western acquiescence in profiting from the corrupt gains of Russian elites then acts as a psychological weapon to demoralise the Russian domestic opposition, which feels abandoned and finds the Kremlin’s arguments regarding the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the West reinforced.62



Russian Active Measures: The Use of Robots

Russia had the capacity to influence key precincts in swing states with fake news-disseminating bots during the 2016 presidential election, and could still be disrupting American politics, experts said Thursday in the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s first public Russia hearing.

Russia had every ability to create fake social media accounts by mimicking profiles of voters in key election states and precincts in the 2016 election, and use a mix of bots and real people to push propaganda from state-controlled media outlets like Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, cybersecurity experts told the Senate panel Thursday. Clinton Watts, a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at The George Washington University, said many social accounts during the election pushing questionable news looked just like real voters in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

“Part of the reason those bios had conservative, Christian, you know, America, all those terms in it, (is) those are the most common ones,” Watts said. “If you inhale all of the accounts of the people in Wisconsin, you identify the most common terms in it, you just recreate accounts that look exactly like people from Wisconsin.”

“So that way, whenever you’re trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true, it’s much more simple, because you see somebody and they look exactly like you,” Watts added. Even down to the pictures. When you look at the pictures, it looks like an American from the Midwest or the South or Wisconsin or whatever the location is.”

*     *     *


Warner told reporters Wednesday there were “upwards of 1,000 paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect, taking over series of computers, which is then called a botnet.”

*     *     *


Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio wanted to make sure, in discussing tactics, the Senate panel didn’t lose the forest for the trees and miss Russia’s overall “coordinated” effort to “sow” instability and “pit” Americans against each other.



Russian Active Measures: Fake News


RIA Novosti newswire reported on Wednesday that White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that new sanctions against Russia because of the situation in Syria are possible. "There are a number of things that are to be considered, including some of the financial sanctions that the United States can administer in coordination with our allies. I would definitely not rule that out." This is not the first time that RIA Novosti, now known as Sputnik International, has put out stories of Earnest warning of sanctions. The most recent one came on Oct. 6.

But during Earnest's press briefing on Monday, the word 'sanctions' in relation to Russia never came up. Russia was mentioned a total of 8 times, all in relation to its air raids against anti-Assad forces in Aleppo.


Fraudulent stories during the 2016 U.S. presidential election popularized on Facebook included a viral post that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, and another that actor Denzel Washington "backs Trump in the most epic way possible".[53][54] Donald Trump's son and campaign surrogate Eric Trump, top national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, and then-campaign managers Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski shared fake news stories during the campaign.[51][55][56][57]

After the 2016 election, Republican politicians and conservative media began to appropriate the term "fake news" by using it to describe not made-up news, but rather any news they saw "as hostile to their agenda", according to the New York Times, which cited Breitbart News, Rush Limbaugh and supporters of Donald Trump as dismissing mainstream news reports as "fake news".
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