Senate Intelligence Committee Reports Volumes III and IV: US Government and Intelligence Community

 So, on to Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Report Volume III and Volume IV.

Volume III

Volume III recounts the U.S. government's real time response to Russian election interference and finds it inadequate. At 53 pages, it is the shortest volume. The report found that Obama Administration hampered in its response by a highly politicized environment, concern that warnings would undermine public confidence in election results, fear that Russia might be able to manipulate vote totals, incomplete information, and limited time, and that these prevented an effective response.  The Administration was navigating uncharted waters.  Nothing of this kind had ever happened before.  And one party, after all, stood to benefit from the Russian intervention and therefore had a strong incentive to disbelieve in it and reject effective response.

Most Administration officials said they learned of the Russian hack of the DNC when they read about it in the Washington Post. (p. 5).  The intelligence community appears to have been aware of at least some sort of hack, but it is not clear whether they understood who was making the attempt (pp. 5-8).  

As soon as the hack became publicly known, the GRU (Russian military intelligence, Fancy Bear) created a front identified as "Guccifer 2.0" to claim credit as an individual. Cyber security experts almost immediately saw through Guccifer 2.0.  Guccifer immediately published some of the hacked documents and claimed to have sent others to Wikileaks for publication (p. 9).  Nonetheless, the intelligence community (IC) and policy makers generally saw the hack as intelligence gathering, rather than election interference -- undesirable, of course, but still within normal behavior. The general public became aware that something more was happening on July 22, 2016, when Wikileaks started releasing hacked information right ahead of the Democratic Convention.

But that alone did not truly alarm the Obama Administration and convince them that the hack was a serious threat.  Volume III, pp. 11-13 states that another piece of intelligence convinced the Obama Administration that there was a serious threat. The intelligence was so alarming that the Administration leapt into action within an hour or two. The intelligence was so sensitive that initially only nine executive officials other than the President and National Security Advisor were briefed.  At first, only top ranking intelligence officials were included and ever the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were excluded, although they were later let in (p. 14).  The House and Senate Intelligence Committees were not informed, but the Gang of Eight* were individually briefed throughout August and into early September.

The intelligence tip was also so sensitive that report blacks it out, so we do not know what it was.  But we can make a good guess.  In early August, 2016, Obama received an extremely classified report from the CIA that a confidential source in the Kremlin had reported that the hack and leak operation was ordered by Putin personally with the goal of electing Trump.  Compare the linked story with the report (pages 11-16), the overlap in dates and personnel, and see if Volume III could be referring to anything else.**

Volume III then goes over the perceived constraints (set forth above).  Very much contributing was Donald Trump's insistence in 2016, as in 2020, that the election was "rigged" and that if he lost it would be proof of fraud. Public claims by the Intelligence Community that Russia was in the tank for Trump would only strengthen the impression of a "deep state" plot.  Official also feared that if they exposed Russia's actions, the Russians might retaliate by hacking into state databases and either disrupting the election or altering votes.  The Administration therefore limited itself to admonishing the Russians and offering anti-hacking assistance to state election officials without explaining what the offer was about.  The Russians were unmoved, while state officials generally saw the offer and unwanted federal "interference."  Republican members of the Gang of Eight (including Senator Richard Burr, the Senate Intelligence Committee Chair portrayed above) were deeply distrustful. Only after the election did the Intelligence Community officially attribute the hacks and leaks to the Russian government and begin expelling Russian diplomats. 

Volume III concludes with additional opinions from the Republican members (pp. 47-49) rather hypocritically berating the Obama Administration for its weak-kneed response, and from Democrat Ron Wyden saying that the full Intelligence Committees should have been notified as to what was happening.

Volume IV

Volume IV takes up about where Volume III leaves off.  It is a review of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) completed after the election on December 30, 2016.  The overall report is favorable. It finds the ICA reviewed numerous sources, followed accepted analytic tradecraft, was free of political interference, and was well supported in its conclusions. The ICA had no policy recommendations, but this is standard practice in the intelligence community.  There was some criticism of open source analysis and historical analysis as weak, and some criticisms of the FBI, but overall Volume IV appears to endorse the ICA in its methodology and conclusions.

It is not possible for the general public to say much more about Volume IV, because, although at 158 pages Volume IV is the second longest report, the vast majority of it is blacked out.  Volume IV (p. 11) give the date that CIA Director John Brennan learned about Operation Crossfire Hurricane (the FBI investigation of the Trump Campaign), but the date is blacked out.  Volume IV also described in excruciating and unredacted detail (pp. 38-46) the feud between the FBI and CIA as to whether to include the Steele Dossier.  The FBI wanted to include the Steele Dossier as part of the report, while the CIA considered the  dossier worthless and contrary to their own human intelligence. The FBI did not want to be accused of hiding anything and finally compromised by including the Steele material in a two-page annex.  The NSA (National Security Agency, signals intelligence) played no part in the dispute. Probably somewhat significant -- Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper said that he first learned of the Steele Dossier on December 15 (p. 42).

Going over the report section by section, Volume IV generally endorses its conclusions except to say that its analysis of historical context was weak and the FBI failed to provide some sort of important material (blacked out). Almost not other details are shown.  

It is hard to tell, but Intelligence Community may not have been aware of the Troll Farm's activities at the time the report was written.  Reviewing the section saying the Russian attack was multifaceted, there were five sections, cyber espionage against political organizations, public disclosures, cyber intrusions on state election systems, propaganda, and another section that is blacked out entirely.  The report goes over these one by one, but does not have a section on the last, completely covered, category.

Finally, there is an opinion section by Senator Wyden that does some justified crowing that these reports clearly show that Russian interference was not a hoax.  What a shame that we, the public, are not allowed to see the proof!  Wyden also calls for paper ballots as backup to safeguard against election hacking, which has mostly been done.

Next up:  Volume V, the biggie.  That one will undoubtedly take multiple posts.

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*Both party leaders in each house and the chair and ranking minority member of both intelligence committees.

**The WaPo story, it should be noted, had been published over two years before the report.  It is my understanding that the secret spy has been successfully exfiltrated and was later identified. Another possibility were reports by friendly foreign intelligence services of a suspicious volume of contacts between Trump associates and Russian figures, which appear to have come in about the same time.

Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Volume II: Russia's Use of Social Media

 

Well, this is what you get for procrastinating.  I am finally getting around to posting about the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and already Special Prosecutor John Durham has come out with his report on the investigation.  That will be next, after the Senate Committee report.  In fact, it should be an interesting counterpoint to the Senate Committee and the Inspector General.

But on to the Senate Intelligence Committee Reports.  Volume II (85 pages) deals with Russian activity on social media. 

Its findings are decidedly depressing for anyone who is confident that if free speech is unrestricted, the truth will out.  Rather, it offers actual, empirical evidence for the old saying that the lie is halfway round the world while truth is still putting its boots on.  It quotes an MIT study (p. 10) that tracked over 125,000 news stories on Twitter, shared by three million people over 11 years:

Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends,. or financial information.

The study also found that false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories, and that true stories take about six times as long to reach 1,500 people on Twitter as false stories.  This was exacerbated by the frequent use of bots.

The reason for this should not be so hard to understand.  Unfortunately, our brains are not all that well equipped for recognizing truth, flattering delusions to the contrary.  Our brains tend to glom on to things that are simple, unequivocal, catchy, and meet our preconceptions.  Lies can easily be crafted to do these things.  Truth is under no such obligation.  

The report goes on to comment that commercial actors have been manipulating social media for a long time, but with relatively innocuous intent of selling things. The techniques the Russians used in the US in 2016 were ones they had been perfecting had home for many years.  Of course, the Russian government has used propaganda since Soviet times (or earlier), but its propaganda was crude by today's standards. At least two factors have given the Russian government of the 21st century an advantage over its 20th century predecessor.  One is the invention of the internet and later social media, which allows much greater diffusion of propaganda.  The other is that while Communist propaganda had ideological constraints and had to provide a consistent message, present-day Russia had no such constraints and will support any viewpoint so long as it is divisive. 

The report (pp. 15-20) found several consistent characteristics of Russian media tactics: high volume and multiple channels to overwhelm the audience; merging overt and covert operations, as with hack and leak; speed in putting out (false) information; automated accounts and bots, and paid trolls.  The report also emphasized Russian propagandists' complete lack of commitment to ideology in favor of divisiveness for its own sake. Russian propagandists have found that introducing radical viewpoints with no widespread support tends to fall flat. Rather, the more effective approach is to exploit existing divisions and resentment to tear a society apart. 

And on the subject of tearing a society apart, the report also noted that black people were targeted more than any other demographic, often under the guise of anti-police brutality activism and imitations of Black Lives Matter.  This posed a problem for Russian intelligence.  While Black people were the most alienated part of American society and most easy to exploit with social divisions, they were also the least likely to support Donald Trump. So Russian propagandists worked on encouraging Black people to despair and not to vote at all.

Yvgeny Prigozhin

The most interesting part of the report dealt with the Internet Research Agency (IRA)* popularly known as the Troll Farm.  The Troll Farm was run by our friend, Yvgeny Prigozhin, now of Wagner Group infamy. He also operated a troll farm in St. Petersburg.  The report (p. 25) quotes a news article on the operation, which had some 400 employees, working two 12 hour shifts, in nearly 40 rooms.  Originally target toward domestic audiences, the Troll Farm branched out into international operations, including the US.  Employees had a quota per shift of five political posts, and 150 to 200 comments. Leaked materials (p. 26) revealed that trolls were supposed to post on news articles 50 times a day, have at least three Facebook and ten Twitter accounts, with quotas as to the number of subscribers.  The non-political posts were essential to lure in unsuspecting followers and build rapport and trust with people so that scattered political comments would be convincing.  Trolls were expected to constantly create new content and penalized for copying previous posts.  One employee (p. 27) described working for the Troll Farm as feeling very much like working for the Ministry of Truth in 1984.  

The English language language section was the most prestigious.  Trolls obviously had to have strong English language skills and were briefed in US holidays and directed to synchronize with US time zones. Trolls were also trained in what was and was not grounds for blocking for various publications, and to read tens of thousands of comments to learn to fit in.  Interestingly (p. 29) they were specifically forbidden from saying anything about Russia, based on the belief that most Americans just don't talk about Russia. The goal, instead, was to seize on any divisive issue in the US and use it foment divisions.

As discussed before, most Troll Farm content in the US was apolitical and intended to establish trust.  Russian trolls posted in right-wing and left-wing forums and advocated all different political positions so long as they were (1) divisive and (2) anti-Hillary. (Left-wing posts supported either Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein of the Green Party, or else encouraged not voting at all).  Right-wing content was pro-Trump.  After the election, left-wing trolls posted strongly anti-Trump comments that had been absent before the election.  (pp. 32-35).  There was also a spike in activity, particularly on the left, just before Wikileaks released the John Podesta e-mails (pp. 36-37).  The report speculates that this may have been a sign that the trolls had advanced notice, but has no evidence to support this.  Trump primary opponents were also targeted (p. 37). Troll activity increased, rather than decreased, after the election and was geared toward stirring up opposition to Trump (p. 42). 

The report (pp. 43-62) then goes on to give an extended and (to me at least) rather dull account of the different ways that Russian trolls used different social media platforms.  I will forbear to go into detail.  Two larger points are significant. For one, manipulating social media for advantageous posting is older than Russian trolls.  It has been done by commercial actors, mostly for the relatively harmless purpose of selling their product.  Presumably legitimate political actors have used similar forms of manipulation, although the report does not go into it.  But ultimately, social media was designed for part-time, amateur posters.  Full time, professional posters of this type were not anticipated.

I may also have been wrong in saying that the Senate Intelligence Committee did not address the hack and leak operation, considering the Mueller indictment and report to have said all that needs saying.  In fact, Volume II does have a section (pp. 63-70) devoted to Russian military intelligence a/k/a the GRU, a/k/a Fancy Bear's social media activities to spread their hacked documents.  What it says remains unknown to the general public, however, because most of this section is blacked out.

Although the existence of the Troll Farm was reported in the US in 2015 (pp. 25, 72), no one in the US, either government or private citizen, appears to have been aware of its activities in the 2016 election until after the election was over. The report offers various doomsday scenarios of ever more sophisticated forms of micro-targeting and more sophisticated fakes, ever more difficult to detect (pp. 73-75).  But it is the Committee's recommendations that are most . .  interesting . . .  in the clear light of hindsight.  

The Committee, alarmed at the possibility of more trolling activities or spread of hacked information, urges greater information sharing between the public and private sectors.  Social media companies should also cooperate more closely with each other and share information on how to spot fake accounts.  The Committee also recommends warning users of such efforts. (p. 79).  The report encourages Congress to pass laws establishing formal procedures for information sharing between government and tech companies (p. 80), the executive branch to develop a plan for notifying targets of foreign plans to interfere in an election (p. 81) and campaigns to be judicious in what sources they quote (p. 82).

But here is the thing.  If social media companies are on the lookout for disinformation campaigns of this type, invariably they will sometimes get it wrong. That is exactly what the Twitter Files are all about.  Long story short, Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Delaware computer shop and never bothered to reclaim it.  Under Delaware law, the laptop and its contents then became the property of the owner, to do with as he pleased.  What the owner pleased was to turn the laptop over to the FBI for possible criminal activities, and to keep copies for himself and share them with Rudy Giuliani.  Giuliani passed the contents on to the New York Post, which ran a story hinting at corruption.  In response, 51 retired intelligence officials signed a letter saying that story looked like Russian disinformation.  Twitter and Facebook both (temporarily) blocked the story, although it remained accessible on Google and other internet searches.  Neither company was acting at the direction of the FBI, but both had had previous conversations with the FBI about the dangers of Russian hacks and disinformation and saw the laptop as an example of what to look out for.

It was never very convincing. Hunter Biden's laptop seems like a most unlikely target for either hacking or planting false information.**  In fact, there does not appear to have been any significant foreign interference of any kind in the 2020 election.  This looks very much like an example of generals fighting the last war and getting it wrong. 

But it has led to a world class freakout by right wingers, whose view now appears to be that any contact whatever between government officials and social media, except as part of a criminal investigation, is government censorship and should be banned. Can anyone doubt that that, too, will lead to further problems down the line if Republicans manage either to enact it as law or intimidate social media companies to refrain from all communication with government without a warrant.  Overcorrection for past mistakes is all too common and leads to overcorrections of its own.

If only Republicans could be persuaded to read the Senate reports and see that there were, in fact, past mistakes that called for correction.

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*To people of my generation, IRA will always stand for Irish Republican Army, so I am avoiding the acronym.
**To use Hunter Biden's laptop struck me as an Underpants Gnomes approach to disinformation.  Step 1: Plant disinformation on Hunter's laptop.  Step 2: ???  Step 3: Exposure!

Senate Intelligence Committee Report: Volume I, Russian Attacks on Election Infrastructure

Senate Intelligence Committee

And, in turn, all the previous posts about Trump-Russia are meant as a lead-up to the real story here -- the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.  Trump supporters, trying to downplay or even deny Russian interference, dismiss the report as the "last resort" of people who believe in Russian interference.

It is nothing of the kind. While the House Intelligence Committee degenerated into partisan bickering between Adam Schiff and Devin Nunes, the Senate Intelligence Committee worked together in a remarkable serious, bipartisan fashion to investigate Russian interference and left no doubt that the interference was real.  As for any cooperation between Trump and Russia, the report raised more questions than it answered -- but some of the questions were quite disturbing.

The Committee released its report(s) in five volumes over a year's time.  The fifth and final volume, dealing with contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, is by far the largest (more than all the other volumes combined)* and has attracted by far the most attention.  But the other volumes amply establish Russian interference and deserve at least some attention.

Interestingly enough, no volume deals with the details of the hacks and the transfer of information to Wikileaks, although there is some discussion of the subject in Volume V.  Perhaps the Committee thought that the Mueller investigation had the final word on the subject, both in its indictment and its final report.

But the Senate Intelligence Committee does comment on other aspects of Russian interference.  Volume I addresses Russian attacks on state election infrastructure.  Volume I is too technical to hold the interest of your average person, but it does include some notable comments.

First, it does not identify any states, except for Illinois, which appears to be the first state to realize it was targeted.  The other states investigated are simply identified as State 1 through State 22.  (Presumably the Committee did not want to reveal details of specific states' weaknesses).  Sorting through redacted sections, technical discussion, minutia, and hypotheticals, a few things do stand out.  

First, whenever the intruder was identified, it was determined to be the GRU, a/k/a Russian Military Intelligence, a/k/a Fancy Bear.  The report does not detail a single attack by the SVR a/k/a Russian Civilian Intelligence, a/k/a Cozy Bear.  This is significant because, although Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear (a/k/a GRU) both hacked the DNC servers, Cozy Bear limited itself to intelligence gathering.  All election interference was the work of Fancy Bear.  Although Cozy Bear got there first, it never released any of the hacked material.  Fancy Bear began to do so in quite a short period of time.

Second, although the hacks were the work of the same agency that engaged in election interference, none of the state-level hacks made any attempt to interfere in elections.  The hacks were not directed toward vote counting, but rather toward voter registration and voter lists (p. 22).  The first known hack took place in June, 2016 in Illinois and successfully breached the voter registration database.  "Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data, but the Committee is not aware of any evidence that they did so."  (p. 22).  The report discussed at some length things that Russian Intelligence could have done with voter registration data to disrupt the election, but notes that none were done.

Speculating on Russian motives, the Committee says:

Russian intentions regarding U.S. election infrastructure remain unclear. Russia might have intended to exploit vulnerabilities in election infrastructure during the 2016 elections and, for unknown reasons, decided not to execute those options. Alternatively, Russia might have sought to gather information in the conduct of traditional espionage activities. Lastly, Russia might have used its activity in 2016 to catalog options or clandestine actions, holding them for use at a later date. Based on what the IC knows about Russia's operating procedures and intentions more broadly, the IC assesses that Russia's activities against U.S. election infrastructure likely sought to further their overarching goal; undermining the integrity of elections and American confidence in democracy.

(p. 35) 

 Third, there was serious distrust and friction between the federal Department of Homeland Security and state-level voting agencies. State agencies tended to resent federal "interference" and see it as an attempt at a federal takeover.  States often received incomplete information, sometimes no more than certain IP addresses to look out for, among thousands pinging them.  Many did not learn they were targeted by Russians until after the election was over.  DHS often communicated with state officials responsible for cyber security, but not with election officials.  And DHS officials knew very little about how state elections worked.  Some were just reading spreadsheets they had been given.  (pp. 49-51).  

Nonetheless, Volume I also reported that cooperation between DHS election officials was improving.  Hence the boast by Chris Krebs, head of cyber security for DHS that the 2020 elections were the most secure ever and DHS Undersecretary Ken Cuccinellis attempt to qualify that remark by saying that it referred to cyber security only.

All of which leads to the final and most obvious point.  Volume I emphasizes the potential vulnerabilities of the US election system and the various ways it might be attached through cyber hacking.  All of this becomes highly significant in the 2020 election, when various Trump supporters alleged all manner of vulnerabilities real and imagined.  One wonders if any of them had read this report. Looking at the reports through the perspective of the 2020 election serves as a painful reminder of the adage that generals always start by fighting the last war -- and find out just how much has changed.

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*To be specific:
Volume I, Russian attacks on election infrastructure, 67 pages
Volume II, Russian use of social media, 85 pages.
Volume III, US government response, 54 pages
Volume IV, intelligence community assessment, 158 pages
Volume V, counterintelligence, with a focus on the Trump campaign, 966 pages.
Wow!

Trump and Russia, a Counterfactual

 

Let me begin with a confession.  I did go off the deep end with Trump and Russia.  It was the publication of the Steele Dossier that set me off..  I was not as bad as some people, but when I speak of the mainstream media going down a rabbit hole, it is hard for me to tell to what extent the media were going down the rabbit hold and to what extent I was reading things into that. And when I blame all of this on the Steele Dossier, I am not sure how much other people's reaction was driven by the Steele Dossier, and how much I was projecting my own reaction.

So with that out of the way, let me try a few counterfactuals.  First of all, in the clear light of hindsight, it was a mistake for Buzz Feed to publish the dossier.  But would it have made a difference if they had not published it?  I am guessing no. There were little hints here and there before the election, not to mention the Mother Jones article that revealed the existence of the dossier.  Even without the Buzz Feed allegation, I would expect that most of the contents would eventually have leaked out, though more in the form of a drip, drip, drip than a gusher.

What if the Democrats had stuck to open source information about Trump's business ties to Russia and not hired Steele in the first place?*  Well, the FBI counterintelligence probe would still have taken place.  The FBI began its investigation before learning of the Steele Dossier (although after Steele started reaching out to the FBI).  The initial form of the investigation (open source search, decision to focus on Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos, and Flynn, and sending informants wearing a wire to talk to campaign officials) would probably have been much the same.  The agents involved in the investigation wanted to wiretap Page even before hearing from Steele.  Maybe they would have been able to get a warrant without Steele; maybe not.  But at that point the FBI investigation would largely have run dry because it was severely constrained by the need to conceal its existence.  Maybe the FBI would have closed shop at this point, unable to decide anything.  Maybe they would have continued sending out informants to talk to campaign personnel.  Maybe they would even have placed an informant in the campaign.

The Gang of Eight (parties leaders of both houses of Congress and chair and ranking minority member of the intelligence committees of both houses) would still have been briefed, about the counterintelligence investigation, but without anything as sensational as the Steele Dossier, merely some vague suspicions. Maybe that would have been enough for Harry Reid (one of the Eight) to drop dark hints that something more sinister was happening, maybe not.  Certainly Trump would still have been told he had been the target of a counter-intelligence investigation shortly prior to his inauguration, but without the sensational allegations of the Steele Dossier.  Doubtless it is true that he would not have taken kindly to the news, but he probably would not have been as outraged as he was in learning about the dossier.  Undoubtedly Trump supporters would have found some ground for outrage -- that Trump was investigated at all, maybe. If Carter Page had been wiretapped even without Steele's memos (possible), that would have been grounds for outrage. And certainly the FBI had ended up placing informants in the campaign itself,* that would have been a major grounds for outrage.

Would Trump still have fired James Comey, leading to the Mueller investigation?  That is hard to say, given that Trump's requests to drop the Flynn investigation were a major impetus for firing Comey. But still, attempts to quash the ongoing Russia investigation were probably the primary reason for Comey's firing.  So it would really be a question of whether the Russia investigation would have continued without the Steele Dossier.  I am inclined to believe that it would have continued simply because the early investigation had been so crippled by the need to conceal its existence, and being in the open would have allowed a much more thorough investigation. So Comey would probably still have been fired and the Mueller investigation would probably still have proceeded. I would guess there would have been less paranoia on the part of Trump's foes, but the mere knowledge that the FBI took seriously the possibility of a conspiracy between Trump and Russia would have been enough to inspire significant paranoia.

What would have happened if the DNC had headed the FBI's warnings that it was a target for hacking seems straightforward enough.  The DNC had already been hacked by Russia's civilian intelligence agency ("Cozy Bear"), so it would not be possible to keep Cozy Bear from learning some things.  But Cozy Bear limited itself to intelligence gathering and never disclosed what it learned.  Russia's military intelligence ("Fancy Bear") hacked much later (in April, 2016) and began disclosing information almost at once. If the DNC had been more alert, it might have blocked the Fancy Bear hack, and there would have been no suspicion of collusion because there would have been nothing to collude with.

But my favorite counterfactual speculation about Trump/Russia is, what if people had learned what Trump was really up to in more or less real time.  Let's omit fake rumors like the Steele Dossier and suppose that people had learned during the campaign about what was actually going on.

The Washington Post ran an article on Trump's business ties to Russia that was generally accurate, but incorrectly said that plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow "never moved past preliminary discussions."  In fact, negotiations for a Trump Tower in Moscow had been well underway and ended only when news of the Russian hacks came out days before the article. Trump and Cohen lied about the negotiations, which, as one Trump defender commented, was a good reason to vote against him, but not a crime. Suppose some sharp investigative reporter had revealed that Trump actually was negotiating a heavily subsidized Trump Tower in Moscow and lying about it, even as he pushed for a pro-Russian policy.  Would it have mattered?  I doubt it, for the simple reason that Trump did cease negotiations once the Russian hacks became known and could thereby have proclaimed himself a patriot who refused to work with any foreign power that targeted our elections.

What if the public had become aware during the campaign that Junior, Jared, and Manfort met with some Russian business associates and a Russian lawyer suspected of ties to the intelligence services, promising dirt on the Clinton campaign? Suppose it also became known that the "dirt" was mostly about the author of sanctions on Russian officials and actually had nothing to do with the Clinton campaign?  Recall that this meeting took place five days before the Russian hacks became public knowledge. Certainly, nothing in the meeting so much as hints at the hacks, but it would at least have shown that the Trump campaign was willing to accept help from the Russian and would have put Trump's "Russia, if you're listening" remark into a different light.  

The paranoid might have taken the meeting as a preliminary to real, and much closer, coordination and looked for follow up.  No such follow up occurred, but it is fair to ask whether the Trump campaign's demonstrated willingness to to accept Russian help informed Fancy Bear's subsequent actions in releasing the e-mails. 

Or suppose that after Trump made his "Russia, if you're listening" remark and dismissed it as a joke, some intrepid investigative reporter had learned that Trump really was sending people out to cruise the dark web looking for the missing e-mails, unconcerned with whether he was dealing with Russian spies.  (He never found anything).

There was speculation even at the time that Roger Stone had inside information when he said on August 21 that it would soon be "John Podesta's time in the barrel" and on October 7 Podesta e-mails came out.  Stone said at the time that it was merely a lucky guess and he made a lot of other predictions that did not come true.  Suppose it had come out that he really did have a secret back channel to Wikileaks and was passing message on the the Trump campaign?  Since Stone was not a member of the campaign, his role was scandalous and indecent, but not actually illegal.

Would these things -- all scandalous and indecent, but not illegal (except possibly the Trump Tower meeting) -- have made a difference in the election outcome?  For any one, taken by itself, probably not. But suppose all had been revealed over the course of the campaign?  Suppose in May it were revealed that Trump was pursuing a Trump Tower in Moscow and lying to the public about it? Then in June, suppose we had found out (as we did), that the Russians had hacked the DNC, even though it was generally assumed to be purely intelligence gathering. Suppose in July it came out that Junior, Jared and Manafort had met with Russians to ask for dirt on Hillary days before the hacks became public?  Might there at least have been speculation whether this openness to Russian assistance had played a role in Russia's decision to release information to Wikileaks?  Supposed in August, in addition to Manafort's payments from the pro-Russian party in Ukraine, it had also came out that Trump didn't just say, "Russia, if you're listening," but actively sent Flynn and others out to cruise the dark web for Hillary's e-mails, unafraid of dealing with hostile intelligence services?  Suppose in September, instead of Harry Reid's false insinuations that something bigger was going on, and instead of the false Yahoo story about Carter Page, one of Roger Stone's intermediaries had come forward to say Stone had an inside line to Wikileaks and was passing tips on to the campaign?  

All of these, after all, would have been true.  None, except the Trump Tower meeting, would have suggested a secret line of communications. But then again, nothing in the DNC or Podesta e-mails suggested illegality either.  And instead of the shotgun sort of unrelated scandals that Trump encountered, there might have been a drip, drip, drip of revelations about a disturbing closeness to Russia. Would that have been enough to convince the Trump-curious that his loyalty was in question?  Would it have persuaded people who didn't care for Trump but couldn't stomach Hillary to stay home or vote third party?  Of course, there is no way to know.

The other question is whether revelations of this sort would have been enough to waken the paranoid and convince people that there was more going on than met the eye?  On the one hand, clearly yes, some people are always eager to believe the worst.  But would that sort of paranoia have gone mainstream and had a role in the respectable press that had rejected the wilder rumors about all previous Presidents?  In the absence of the Steele Dossier, maybe not.

But above all else, imagine the shock that would have reverberated if New York Times reporters had learned, as they did on October 16, that Trump was under counterintelligence investigation for his ties to Russia, and, instead of deferring to the FBI, had revealed that bombshell some time between October 16 and October 28.  After all, some people were outraged by Hillary because she was under investigation by the FBI.  Suppose they had found out that Trump was also under investigation?  Revelation of the counterintelligence investigation would certainly have made Trump/Russia a serious subject.  And yes, it would have been a fruitful field for paranoia, even in the absence of the Steele and Alfa Bank allegations.

It would also no doubt have increased the pressure by the FBI for Director James Comey to make his announcement that the FBI was reopening its Clinton investigation.  But my guess is that it would have blunted the effect of that investigation.  Why?  Well, as it was, the FBI announced the reopening of the investigation.  Clinton's ratings took an immediate, devastating hit.  It was only after the announcement Slate made its announcement about the Alfa Bank server and Mother Jones revealed the existence of the Steele Dossier.  These blows failed to land because they looked (probably correctly) like desperate flailing by a losing campaign.

So supposed the reopening of the FBI investigation of Clinton had followed right after the New York Times revealed that Trump was also under investigation.  My guess was that, too, would have looked like desperate flailing by a losing campaign.  Wikileaks has shot its bolt with the Podesta e-mails and had no further ammunition.  And if any false rumors, like the Alfa Bank story or the Steele Dossier had come out, they would have looked like further evidence behind the FBI's counterintelligence investigation.

In short, my guess is that Hillary would have won. Everyone would promptly have forgotten about Trump-Russia in light of the Clinton e-mails scandal and any other scandals a Republican Congress could have ginned up.  If further investigation had revealed that there was really no "there" there, 

Doubtless Hillary would have lost in 2020 -- probably by a landslide in light of the disasters of that year.  But presumably the Republicans would have shied away from Trump and gone with a more normal candidate.

AStroll Through Memory Lane: The Clinton Campaign and the Press

My previous post pointing out how hostile relations were between the Clinton Campaign and the FBI in 2016 is mostly warmup to allegations that the Clinton Campaign and the mainstream media worked hand-in-glove in 2016 to link Trump to Russia. This posting is largely inspired by an article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how unfairly the press hounded Donald Trump about Russia and how his belief that the entire system was hopelessly rigged against him was, if not justified, at least understandable. And I will concede, the press was all too credulous about Trump-Russia conspiracy theories after he was elected But this was at least partly an attempt to correct their general disregard of the issue before he was elected.

The word cloud to the left is revealing. If you look closely enough "Russian" and "Russia are in there, but it takes some looking to find them. The dominant words are "speech," "immigration," "president," "make," "convention," and "Mexico."

Nonetheless Jeff Gerth, the author of the article, finds some articles linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 election, and some attempts by the Clinton Campaign to cultivate Trump/Russia stories that failed. So I suppose that if you focus single mindedly on the two small mentions of "Russia" and "Russian" in the word cloud, you can create the impression of an all consuming obsession by the press with Trump and Russia in 2016 -- but only if you airbrush out everything else.

In 2015, Gerth says, presumably approvingly, the press was far more concerned about Hillary Clinton's ties to Russia. These included a paid speech by Bill Clinton in Moscow, Russian donations to the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary's attempts at improving relations with Russia while serving as Secretary of State. Gerth sees the entire attempt by the Clinton campaign to tie Trump to Russia as an unfair smear to deflect attention from her own Russia ties, and her hiring of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele in those terms. It was only after the disclosure in June, 2016, that Russia had hacked the DNC (which Gerth seems to call into question) that the Washington Post ran its first article on Trump's suspicious financial ties to Russia. Gerth found some evidence that the reporter had communicated with Fusion GPS in writing the story, and that Fusion GPS contributed. To Gerth, this appears to wholly discredit the article.

Can we take a step back here. Trump was running for President on a pro-Russia platform. In my opinion, it was not crazy in 2016 to seek an alliance with Russia to defeat Islamic terrorism, and that, in itself, was not sinister. What was concerning was the Trump seemed contemptuous of the whole idea of international cooperation or of having any allies at all. He showed no interest in friendly relations with any country whatever -- except Russia. It was not unreasonable to find that problematic, and perhaps in need of further investigation. And the article's reports on Trump's business ties to Russia were accurate, even understated.* Also accurate were reports that two of Trump's advisors had lived in Russia and worked for Russian companies; that his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was an advisor to a pro-Russia Ukrainian president; and that Michael Flynn, considered as a possible vice president had attended a Russia Today banquet and was seated near Putin. Perhaps one can dismiss reporting of the lower-level advisors as mere bigotry or McCarthyism. But if a campaign manager or possible vice presidential candidate have unusual Russia ties, that really is newsworthy and deserves reporting. Even if one of the sources is an opposition researcher for the opposing candidate.

The next article Gerth cites is a Washington Post editorial made on July 18, 2016 during the Republican convention. The article blamed Trump for removing a portion of the Republican platform calling for lethal aid to Ukraine. This later proved to be false and quite innocent. And, given that the US was not supplying lethal aid to Ukraine at the time, it would not have been all that important even if true. So yes, this is an unfair smear based on speculation. It was followed by two opinion columns using that erroneous speculation and Trump's general hostility to NATO as evidence that he would promote Putin's interests at the expense of the US. Gerth treats dissent from this view as an extraordinary outlier, but in fact concerns about Trump and Russia were far from center stage at this time.

The Democratic Convention began on July 26, and Wikileaks significantly disrupted the convention by releasing hacked DNC e-mails showing that the party leaders clearly favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries. This badly split the Democrats at a time they needed to come together. Gerth concedes that this was "not helpful" to Clinton but adds that it "energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators." Well, yes, up until then everyone had just assumed that the Russian hack of the DNC server was just intelligence gathering. To have the e-mails turn up with Wikileaks, which released them in a manner calculated to cause maximum harm to the Clinton campaign does legitimately give rise to questions about whether Russia was trying to get Trump elected. The concerns are legitimate, even when matched with false accusations that Trump was behind the change in the Republican platform. 

The purportedly innocent Trump then blundered into the trap by saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.”  Was he serious or joking?  Gerth accepts that it was an innocent joke.  In fact, there are two strong pieces of evidence to the contrary.  One was, as the Mueller report revealed, the Russians took the comment very seriously and significantly escalated their attempts to hack into Clinton's e-mails directly.  They were not successful. But Trump cannot be held responsible for how the Russians take his comments.  Far more significantly, Trump really did task Michael Flynn to cruise the dark web, looking for Hillary's e-mails, unconcerned with whether the e-mails might come from a hostile intelligence service.  But even if Trump was joking, it was a legitimately scandalous joke. The proper response for a patriotic candidate to a hostile intelligence service targeting his opponent is to make clear that such targeting is utterly unacceptable, and that, whatever our internal differences, Americans stand together in rejecting foreign meddling.

In August, Gerth sees three sinister events.  One was attempts by the Clinton campaign to interest the press in stories about an alleged link between Trump Tower and Russia's Alfa Bank. The press did not bite. The second was a story in the New York Times about reported payments from Ukraine's pro-Russia party to Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort.  The third was Harry Reid, Democratic leader in the Senate, dropping dark hints about Trump-Russia collision. As for the first, Gerth presents the goods to show that the Clinton campaign really was trying to plant stories in the press.  Does he truly think this is something unprecedented or even unusual?  Candidates seek to plant stories in the press all the time.  In any event, the press did not bite.  Second, the story about payoffs to Manafort got him fired as campaign manager, and rightly so. Manafort would ultimately acknowledge that the amounts were right but deny that the payments were in cash, rather than wire transfers. In any event, he was prosecuted for the payoffs.  Not known at the time, and certainly not mentioned by Gerth -- Manafort was secretly providing campaign polling data to a Russian spy.  As with the report on Trump's business ties with Russia, the public report was actually less bad than the reality.  And finally, Harry Reid's hints were based on the Steele Dossier and were false. Reid had a longstanding history of fighting dirty.

In fact, at about this time the Steele Dossier was beginning to circulate among some of the leading journalists. All but one declined to publish, finding the work somewhere between too unsubstantiated to outright "bullshit." The one exception was a September 23 article in Yahoo News by veteran national security reporter Michael Isikoff reported that Trump advisor Carter Page was under investigation by US intelligence agencies for his activities during a July trip to Moscow.  The article speculated that Page might have attempted to bypass US policy by setting up an informal channel of communications about lifting sanction and might have met with (named) sanctioned individuals.  The trip to Moscow was real and Page used the opportunity to criticize US promotion of democracy and human rights as self-serving hypocrisy.  However, the meetings with sanctioned individuals were more unsubstantiated rumors from the Steele Dossier.  (The article omits some even more sensational allegations).

So, from June to September, 2016, the press's purported obsession with Trump/Russian and sinister collaboration with Hillary Clinton consisted of:

• An accurate article about Trump's business ties to Russia
• A sincere but wrong opinion piece, based on speculation, attributing to Trump the change in the Republican platform to leave out calls for lethal weapons to Ukraine
• Two somewhat overwrought opinion pieces expressing alarm over Trump's proposed anti-NATO, pro-Russia outlook that proposed to reverse consensus US foreign policy since WWII
• Hillary Clinton seeking to convince the press that Russian intelligence agencies hacking DNC e-mails and releasing them to Wikileaks to publish in the manner calculated to cause her maximum damage was an attempt to get Trump elected
• A broadly accurate story about payments by pro-Russia politicians to Trump's campaign manager
• Sinister insinuations by the Senate Democratic leader based on false stories in the Steele Dossier
• An inaccurate Yahoo News story based on the Steele Dossier
• The Clinton campaign seeking to interest the press in a dubious story about Trump server ties to a Russian bank, and the press refusing to publish.

Dare I say that some of this seems accurate, fair, and well within reasonable bounds. Some are unfair and hyperbolic opinion pieces, but election campaigns are rife with unfair and hyperbolic opinion pieces.  Some are attempts by the campaign to manipulate the press, which as absolutely standard behavior for politicians, with entirely appropriate resistance by the press.  And two stories -- the insinuations by Harry Reid and Yahoo were based on the Steele Dossier and clearly turned out out to be false. Both Reid and Isikoff can both be fairly rebuked and told they should have known better.  

But this hardly looks like a media obsession with Trump-Russia, or a hand-in-glove cooperation with the Clinton campaign.

It is also a case of acute tunnel vision, focusing exclusively on what the press said about Trump and Russia and completely ignoring, not only what it was saying about Trump on other subjects, but what it was saying about Hillary.  The word cloud on the right makes clear just how contentious Hillary's relationship with the press actually was during the 2016 campaign.  

Unlike Trump, a single overreaching theme dominated for Clinton -- emails.  And the other major words are also revealing, "lie," "health," "scandal," "speech," "people," "president," "foundation," "campaign."  Some of these words admittedly are neutral, but even "health" refers to exaggerated rumors of illness and "foundation" refers to a series of ginned up scandals.  The media was, I agree, generally hostile to Trump during the 2016 election.  But they were considerably more hostile to Hillary, as the word cloud makes clear.

I quote Gallup:

The top substantive words Americans use when reporting on Trump include "speech," "president," "immigration," "Mexico," "convention," "campaign" and "Obama." Though Clinton has attacked Trump on several issues related to his character, no specific words representing negative traits have "stuck" to Trump the way the word "email" has to Clinton. Instead, Americans' recollection of information about Trump shifts in response to his campaign schedule, speeches, comments and the resulting controversies that sometimes arise from those comments.

The same article even included a table of the top stories about each candidate, week by week from mid-July to mid-September:

The table shows the leading stories about the two candidates over ten weeks.  Hillary Clinton's e-mails were her lead story in eight of the ten weeks.  On the week of the convention, the e-mails were merely the second story, the convention, with the damaging materials released by Wikileaks, was first.  The one week in which e-mails were not a leading story was when Hillary collapsed at the 9-11 commemoration, and stories about her health predominated.  Lie, foundation, scandal, FBI, and release are also major stories, all reinforcing the impression that Hillary was suspect.

On the weeks of the Democratic convention, Russia was the top story about Trump, presumably because of his "Russia, if you're listening" remark.  It was not among the top stories any other week, with the possible exception of the Week of September 12-18, in which the third word is "bear."  (I don't know what that is about). Admittedly, some were unfavorable for other reasons.  For instance, August 1-7 appears to focus on his comments insulting a Muslim family whose son was killed in Iraq.  The focus of Mexico and immigration is no doubt a YMMV matter, as is normal with any policy focus.

But this summary should make clear that the idea that the media was in the tank with Hillary and obsessing over Trump's Russia ties during the election is clearly false.**

Of course, this account only goes up to mid-September and omits all of October.  But even Gerth admits that Trump-Russia did not dominate October press coverage.  The intelligence community did put out a brief statement that they believed Russia was behind the hacks, but this was "overshadowed" by the Access Hollywood tape and Wikileaks publication of John Podesta (Hillary's campaign manager) e-mails.  Several things here are notable.  One is the the Access Hollywood tape was the only scandal that really stuck to Trump during the campaign and consumed a significant time with negative stories.  Presumably if Gallup's word cloud and lead stories had extended into October, they would have looked different.  Second, the Podesta e-mails were also part of the Russian hacks.  Gerth acknowledges the allegation, but seems to see it as unsubstantiated.  Finally, as a major social media promoter of the Podesta e-mails admitted, there was nothing "particularly weird or strange" about the Podesta e-mails, but they somehow nonetheless became a scandal.

Gerth does reveal some interesting things that were happening behind the scenes.  Members of the Clinton campaign took a strange pattern of communications between Russia's Alfa Bank and Trump tower and tried to convince the New York Times to publish. Eric Lichtblau, the Times reporter, found the story intriguing, but the FBI persuaded him to hold off until it investigated.  The FBI investigated, found nothing there, and persuaded the Times not to publish.   In mid-October, Times reports also learned that Trump was under counterintelligence investigation by the FBI.  The FBI convinced them to keep the story under wraps.

Naturally, Gerth does not mention the FBI's October 28 bombshell that it was reopening the e-mails investigation, which may very well have sunk the Clinton campaign.  He does mention October 31 stories by Slate, reporting the Alfa Bank server and by Mother Jones, revealing the existence of the Steele Dossier.  Both stories were in outlets that did not truly qualify as mainstream media -- liberal advocacy publications with relatively small readership. And neither one gained any real traction. Both seemed too much like desperate flailing by a campaign that knew it was in serious trouble.  Lichtblau of the New York Times actually followed p with a story saying that the FBI has investigated the server and found nothing to it.  And, as we all know, Trump ended up winning the election, probably largely as a result of the FBI's last minute revelations.

So what is the scandal here that Gerth is pointing to?  If he is trying to argue that the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the media were working closely together to hurt Trump, he comes much closer to making the exact opposite case.  At most, he shows the Clinton campaign trying to interest reporters in various stories and generally failing.  This is completely normal behavior.  I suppose one could say the scandal was that the Times was being too deferential to the FBI and should have gone ahead and published stories that he agreed to keep under wraps.  Certainly the current lesson from Republicans about Twitter heading FBI warnings and blocking links to the Hunter Biden laptop story seems to be that the government has not business telling media what stories to publish. But somehow I don't think that is what Gerth has in mind.

Nonetheless, as Gerth admits, it was the lesson that the Times took away from the election.  Coming down hard on Clinton because they assumed she would win, the FBI and the media paved the way for a Trump victory.

None of this is to deny that the news media overcompensated in the opposite direction by being all too credulous about the Steele Dossier and all too eager to believe the worst about Trump and Russia.  But any attempt to suggest that this began during the 2016 campaign is flatly false.

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*The article mentions prior negotiations about a Trump Tower in Moscow but says that the plan had long since been abandoned.  In fact, such negotiations were underway in the early stages of the campaign and ended only when news of the Russian hacks came out.

**My own stroll down memory lane from December 8, 2016 is revealing.  I looked at the Gallup article and lamented that there were so many Trump scandals that none ever seemed to stick, and speculated on what might have happened if there had been just one.  My candidates for the one scandal were the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump University lawsuit, or general financial shadiness.  Trump-Russia did not even occur to me.  My sole mention of Russia was to say that the Clinton e-mail revelations were carefully timed by "Republicans in the House Oversight Committee, the FBI, the Russians, and Wikileaks" to do maximum damage, with the clear disclaimer that the only coordination was between Russia and Wikileaks.

A Stroll Through Memory Lane: The FBI and the Clinton Campaign

 And the point of all this is to circle back to the whole matter of Trump-Russia.  Conventional wisdom in the "Russia hoax" narrative now posits and iron triangle of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the mainstream media all joining forces to thwart a Trump candidacy and smear Trump with the fake Steele Dossier.

All of this seriously muddles the timeline and calls for a considerable degree of revisionist history and an impressive forgetting of what actually happened in the 2016 campaign.  But narrative has a way of overtaking facts, so in order to refute stories of the Clinton/FBI/MSM alliance, let us take a tour down memory lane about what actually happened.

The Clinton Campaign and the FBI

First consider Clinton and the FBI. It is true, of course, that FBI began investigating the Trump campaign in July, 2016.  However, this fact did not become public until after the election and therefore did nothing to harm the Trump campaign.

Clinton, by contrast, was under open and public FBI investigation for a year before the Trump investigation began, a fact that almost certainly did harm at least some voters' view of Clinton.  The FBI publicly declined to prosecute Clinton several weeks before it opened its investigation into Trump, but a year of FBI scrutiny made Hillary highly suspicious and distrustful of the organization, contrary to allegations that they were working hand-in-glove.

These strained relations proved costly for the Clinton Campaign.  The FBI began warning the Democratic National Campaign (DNC) as early as September, 2015 of Russian hacking attempts. These warnings went unanswered until the DNC became aware that it had been hacked in May, 2016.  The delay proved costly to the the Democrats, and perhaps to Trump as well.  While in September, 2015, the DNC had been hacked by Russia's civilian intelligence agency, a/k/a the SVR, a/ka "Cozy Bear," Cozy Bear limited itself to intelligence gathering and never publicly disclosed DNC materials.  Perhaps a timely response would have prevented hack by Russia's military intelligence, a/k/a the GRU, a/k/a Fancy Bear, which did not hack in until April, 2016, and which did start revealing the materials it found in within a fairly short time.  And, after all, if there had been no successful Russian hack-and-leak, there would have been no question of whether Trump was complicit in it and no Trump/Russia investigation.

It is true that the Clinton Campaign (indirectly) commissioned the Steele Dossier, and that Steele turned over his findings to the FBI, which investigated them. But the Clinton campaign did not know about the FBI's investigation of Trump, which was a closely guarded secret.  And neither the Clinton Campaign nor the FBI ever revealed the existence of the Steele Dossier to the public.  It is true, of course, that both knew about the allegations, and that this knowledge presumably influenced their actions.  But it seems decidedly strange that they would conspire together to frame Trump with a fake dossier and then never release it to the public until after he won the election.

Another point often made by Trump defenders is that the FBI investigators looking into his possible Russia ties were hopelessly biased against him, as shown by the strongly anti-Trump texts exchanged between the lovers, Peter Strozk and Lisa Page.  The accusation is true, but incomplete. The New York field office, which investigated Hillary, was strongly biased against her and greatly resented the decision not to prosecute. Many people on our side of the aisle wonder what an inspector general investigation of the New York field office and their internal texts might reveal.  In defense of members of both investigations, it seems most likely that both succumbed to the all-to-human failings of tunnel vision and confirmation bias.  Focusing so hard on a particular target, both investigations developed a deep-seated hostility to their target and a conviction that there must be something much worse just below the surface if only they could find it. This is a very understandable tendency in human nature, but it must be combatted when people's liberties are at stake.

But what should be the final nail in the coffin of the theory that the FBI improperly colluded with the Clinton campaign was its October 28 announcement, less than two weeks before the election, that it was reopening the Clinton e-mail investigation.  This was in clear violation of FBI policy not to take action in high-profile politically charged investigations so soon before an election. The last-minute investigation proved to be utterly trivial, but it may very well have thrown the election to Trump.  Hardly the actions of an agency secretly in league with Clinton!

In Defense of Whataboutism

 

I do see an obvious criticism of my last post.  Certainly one could dismiss it as an exercise in whataboutism. Do I seek to justify the failures of scientists, mainstream media and the like by pointing to the failures of the right wing?  

In answer, I would say that the reason whataboutism has significant intuitive appeal is that it is often fully justified.  To consider when "whataboutism" is an is not justified, it is best to think about context.  Because there are at least three cases in which the accusation is made.  Not all three are the same.

Whataboutism when used to justify one's own misconduct.  (First party criticism).

The criticism of "whataboutism" is quite correct when the speaker seeks to justify the speaker's (or the speaker's "team's") misconduct by pointing out someone else's. Worse still is the implication that somebody else's misconduct not only justifies one's one misconduct, but that so long as other people do bad things, one's own side is in some way morally obligated to do similar bad things, and that to improve one's own conduct if other people do not improve theirs is somehow hypocritical.   This is what my sister called the "Darth Vader kills people so why shouldn't I" argument.  

Example:  An employee is embezzling from his/her employer and refuses to stop because the employer is cheating on his/her/its taxes. The employer's misconduct in no way excuses, much less mandates, the employee's.

This argument was much used during the War on Terror to justify killing civilians, indefinite detention, torture, and other types of abuse. Any criticism of our own behavior was met with quite accurate accounts of the worst things terrorist did and a strong implication that it was immoral to refrain from such things so long as our enemies did them.

For much the same reason, I do not agree with people who say Elon Musk is a hypocrite for denouncing Twitter's coordination with our government while complying with censorship by the governments of China, India, etc.  It is perfectly reasonable to say that it is not Twitter's job to change government policies in countries like India or China, and that it is asking too much to expect Twitter to defy the law of the host country.  It is also reasonable at the same time to say that we expect our government to refrain from meddling in social media, except as part of a criminal investigation.*

Or consider the classic expression of hypocrisy from Matthew 7:3-5:

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? 5Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

The Gospel does not say what you should do if the mote is in your own eye and the beam is in your brother's.  But presumably you are not under any obligation to leave it there, much less to measure and insist that it would by hypocritical to remove your own mote so long as your brother's beam is larger.

Whataboutism when used to refute an implied claim of moral superiority.  (Second party criticism).

This is what is known as the tu toque fallacy, not a refusal to engage in self-criticism, but an attempt to deflect another person's criticism by pointing out the other person's flaws.  The point of the tu toque fallacy is that just because the other person has the same moral flaws, it does not follow that your own misconduct is morally right.  That is true, of course, but it is not the whole story.  When the other person calls out your moral failings, he or she is almost always making an implied claim to moral superiority.  It is not unreasonable under these circumstances to point that out.

Example:  An employer cheating on his/her/its taxes calls out an employee for embezzling.  The employee points out the hypocrisy.  If the mote is in your eye and the beam in your brother's, you are in no way required to leave the mote there -- but perhaps you are justified in calling our your brother for criticizing it.

Another classic example was the Soviet Union under Communism retorting to criticism of its human rights records by raising the question of lynching in the United States.  But can we point out the obvious. Implicit here is the assumption that US lynching was worse than anything happening under Communism.  And what, after all, would be most Americans' response to Communist criticism of our record on race?  Presumably, to point out the Communists' own failings.

So, too, any time the right wing media points out the real failings and errors of the mainstream media, the clear implication is that the rightwing media is more reliable.  It is entirely reasonable to point out that this is not so.  Or if Elon Musk points to the alleged censoriousness of Twitter before he bought it out, it is fair to shoot down any implication that he is not censorious.

But even hypocritical criticism has its value.  US Presidents in the Cold War threw their support behind the Civil Rights movement in large part to maintain the moral high ground against the Soviet Union.  And if right wing criticism leads the mainstream media to strive to be more accurate, that is all to the good.

Whataboutism when used to choose between imperfect options in an imperfect world.  (Or, third party criticism).

But the time that whataboutism makes most sense, is when addressed to a third party other than the accuser who has to make choices between imperfect options in an imperfect world.  In that case, it makes perfect sense to weigh the relative degree of everyone's faults and misdeeds before making a choice.  This would be, say, a triage facility deciding what item to remove from somebody's eye first.  Presumably it would be the great beam.**

Suppose the white collar crimes division is investigating and embezzler and the embezzler points out that his/her employer is engaged in tax evasion.  The white collar crimes division will presumably take note.  And it will probably weigh the relative severity of the two offenses in deciding which party to offer a plea in order to testify against the other.

Much the same principle should apply to viewers deciding whether to follow the mainstream media or the right wing media.  Neither is perfect; the only question is which is more reliable (or less unreliable). 

Political candidate are an obvious example of this principle at work. Donald Trump is actually quite spectacular in this regard, because no matter what Republicans say is the Democratic candidate's worst quality that make them unacceptable, Trump invariably manages to exceed them.***

Are you running against Bill Clinton and want to argue that character is what is most important?  Well, on any character test, Trump will run dead last.  Do you oppose Bill Clinton because the one thing you can't stand is sexual impropriety?  Well then, you must hate the man who says, "Grab 'em by the pussy."

But her emails (Mar-a-Lago raid)

Do you oppose Hillary Clinton because she was careless in her handling of classified documents?  Then you must hate the man who took hundreds of them home.  Is the real issue that Hillary evaded record keeping laws and deleted e-mails?  Trump routinely tore up every paper that crossed his desk in clear violation of the Presidential Records Act and even flushed some down the toilet. Are you worried that the Clinton Foundation creates possible conflicts of interest?  Then it makes no sense at all to vote for a candidate with a far-flung international business empire. Are you concerned about personal profiteering in the Clinton Foundation?  Meet the Trump Foundation.

Similarly, if your biggest issue in candidates is sons who who trade on their family name to profit, or whose international business ties create potential conflicts of interest, Donald Trump is probably not a good choice.  And a lot of people wonder about drug addicted sons as well.

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*And to note, while I think this is a reasonable position, I am not necessarily saying that I agree with it.  My mind is not made up on the subject.  What is clear is that it did not take Musk long to learn what other right wing social media operators learned -- that it is simply not realistic to have no terms of service or content moderation, and that any attempt to do so quickly degenerates into a complete sewer.

**Don't think too hard about how a great beam would fit.

***Of course, if what you really find unacceptable about Democrats is their policies, then doubtless Trump will seem the better choice.  But, given how closely divided the electorate is, candidates invariably have to reach out beyond the party faithful to explain to undecided voters why the other candidate is unacceptable for reasons other than policy.