Volume V: The DNC Hack and the FBI Response

 

Volume V from the Senate Intelligence Committee then turns from "Counterintelligence Concerns" to the government response, and once again it gets interesting and significant.  There are two sub-sections, one on the DNC hack and the FBI's response and the other on Christopher Steele and his infamous dossier.

The first part is by far the shorter, taking up only 35 pages, from 811 to 845.  Or rather, 815 to 835, with the first few pages serving as a general introduction.  The introduction cites now familiar facts about the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign.  It began with a tip from a friendly foreign government, name redacted, but known to be Australia.  The FBI gave the Trump campaign its usual counter-intelligence briefing without mentioning that four members of the campaign were under FBI investigation. It also said that the Mueller investigation, being criminal, did not address all counterintelligence concerns.

Longer and more interesting is the discussion of the FBI's interactions with the Democratic National Committee (DNC).  The report discusses at length the failures to communicate between the two entities, with each blaming the other.  The details need not concern us.  The FBI attempted to warn the DNC starting in August, 2015 that they were targets for hacking.  Recall at the time, the hacker was Cozy Bear a/k/a the SVR a/k/a Russia's civilian intelligence agency, which limited itself to intelligence gathering and did not publicly release any information.  That was seen as normal intelligence gathering -- undesirable, of course, but not particularly alarming.  The FBI issued warnings to the DNC's cyber security director, but he did not find anything.  The FBI asked for DNC cyber logs and apparently saw the request as a sign of alarm, but the DNC did not recognize the request as alarming.  Fancy Bear, a/k/a the GRU a/k/a Russian Military Intelligence, the agency that did publish DNC e-mails, did not successfully break into the DNC system until April, 2016. 

It was the Fancy Bear hack that the DNC discovered first, on April 28, 2016, only ten days after Fancy Bear broke in.  It was only after that that the DNC began to take alarm and make logs available to the FBI.  However, the DNC did not invite the FBI to examine its system, and instead reached out to CrowdStrike, a private security firm. It was CrowdStrike that discovered the Cozy Bear hack.  The DNC swapped out its system on June 10, 2016 and publicly reported the matter on June 14, 2016.  It was only after the matter became public that the FBI reached out to request copies of the malware CrowdStrike had collected.  The Committee concluded that communications were inadequate on both sides, and that the FBI should have been more forceful in conveying the gravity of the situation, even resorting to subpoena or other compulsory process.

Volume V also emphasizes the high level of distrust on the part of the DNC, and that this is quite common among victims of hacking.  This is important to keep in mind, since right wing revisionist history claims there was a conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and the FBI to frame Donald Trump.  In fact, Hillary Clinton was under FBI investigation and deeply distrustful of the FBI, an distrust that extended to the DNC.  

But this distrust is by no means limited to Hillary Clinton or the DNC.  The FBI's experience is that very often the targets of hackers are uncooperative.  Most organizations do not want to publicize the fact that they have been hacked for fear of losing public trust. Most organizations also do not want the FBI searching through their computer systems and looking at private and proprietary data.  They prefer to hire private security to deal with the hack as privately as possible.  The FBI, in turn, does not know how to navigate most organizations' computer systems and depends on the organization to guide them.  A grand jury subpoena is an option, but rarely used.  The report quotes the FBI as saying that in "a majority of cases" (p. 817) or "half the time" (p. 818) the victim does not want to cooperate.  

Next up:  The Steele Dossier

Volume V, Part 12 Wraps Up the Trump Campaign

 

The final part of the sub-part of the Senate Intelligence Committee Volume V labeled "Counter Intelligence Concerns" is a sort of a wrap-up of what the Committee apparently considers minor matters.

Like the overall report, this final wrap-up begins with the juiciest part -- attempts by Republican operative Peter Smith to locate the missing Clinton e-mails on the dark web.  Placing Smith's attempts in the final section and devoting a mere ten pages (pp. 777-787) suggests that the Committee considers this a minor matter and not important.  I disagree.  Granted, the Committee, like the Mueller Report, found that Smith was on a wild goose chase and never came close to any non-public documents.  All he ever found were a bunch of conmen who believed that a fool and his money were soon parted and tried to shake Smith down.

But it is significant in the sense of showing a clear criminal intent on the part of the campaign. Of course, criminal intent is not by itself a crime.  There has to be a criminal act, or at least a criminal conspiracy or attempt.  Smith is safe from prosecution, being dead, and the Mueller Report did not find grounds to charge anyone else.  The Committee appears to consider criminal intent without criminal capacity to be unimportant.  

Again, I disagree.  Volume V confirms the finding of the Mueller Report that Smith was not a lone wolf operator.  He was acting at the behest of Michael Flynn who, in turn, was responding to Trump's repeated demands to find Hillary's deleted e-mails.  There is no need to follow all the details of Smith's cruising the dark web, willing to obtain the e-mails from anyone, Russian spies included, so long as they were authentic. The one thing he wanted to avoid was presenting what purported to be Hillary's deleted e-mails and having them exposed as a fraud.  Also significant -- Smith discussed his activities with campaign officials Sam Clovis (senior policy advisor) and David Bossie (Deputy Campaign Manager).  

But the biggest bombshell probably comes from Smith's correspondence with Charles Johnson, a political operative who was not part of the Trump campaign, but was in contact with Wikileaks.  Smith revealed his attempts to get the e-mails to Johnson, who responded (p. 787):

I talked to Steve who will compel you to turn over to us all 30,000 emails you located and referred to Wikileaks.  BB wants to publish them first.  We do not give a rats ass what happens to you and will turn you over the the (sic) Feds for prosecution if you do not comply.

The Committee believes that "Steve" referred to Steve Bannon, then Trump's Campaign Manager.  (It does not speculate who BB is, probably Breitbart, Bannon's magazine).  It is possible, of course, that this was a bluff, or that Bannon was not in on it.  But it looks very much as though the Trump Campaign considered Smith's actions to be illegal and still wanted to benefit from them.*

Again, to me this looks serious.  It looks like the strongest proof that outreach between the Trump Campaign and Russia was not entirely on the Russian side, and seems like the strongest evidence of criminal intent, although it did not transmute into criminal activity.  My assessment was:

[Smith's activities are] less equivalent to Smith and Ledeen going to steal the cash from the drawer at the Corner Convenience Store than to Smith and Ledeen going to the Corner Convenience Store to steal the Maltese Falcon. No matter how often the (sic) cased the joint, poked around and tried to find the hiding place, they would never find the Maltese Falcon because it wasn't there. Is it a criminal conspiracy to try to steal the Maltese Falcon from the Corner Convenience Store? I must admit to not knowing. But it does seem to me that if some con man at the Corner Convenience Store thinks that a fool and his money are soon parted, claims that the Maltese Falcon is there, and offers to steal it and sell it to you, some sort of crime is being committed.

In this I was influenced by Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare, who said:

[E]ven as a real hacking operation was going on, Trump personally, his campaign and his campaign followers were actively attempting to collude with a fake hacking operation that wasn’t going on. It is not illegal to imagine stolen emails and try to retrieve them from imagined hackers. But it’s morally little different from being spoon-fed information by Russian intelligence. The Trump campaign was seeking exactly the spoon-feeding it was accused of taking; it just couldn’t manage to find the right spoon, and it kept missing . . . its mouth.

The report goes on the the Alfa Bank server story and finds nothing of significance.  Some computer scientist found an unusual pattern of communications between Trump Tower and Russia's Alfa Bank. Neither the Trump Organization IT department or the IT department at Alfa Bank knew what it was about.  The Committee appears to believe that it was a spam marketing scheme of some sort, but two paragraphs are blacked out, so it is not clear.

During the campaign, there was considerable speculation in the press about why the Republican Party removed a call for providing lethal aid to Ukraine from its platform and suspected something sinister.  The Intelligence Committee, like the Mueller Investigation, found this to be nothing but an innocent attempt to comply with Trump's public speeches, done in coordination with some low-level campaign staffers who had no insight into Trump's thinking beyond what he said in public.  Neither the Russians nor any high level of the Trump campaign had anything to do with it.

There is also some discussion of Russian support for the Green Party.  Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, said she gave interviews to Russia Today and appeared at a RT dinner in Moscow because she wanted to get her message out any way she could.  The Committee found nothing sinister in her motives, although, of course, the Russians presumably had motives of their own.

And that is the end of the sub-section on counterintelligence concerns. But we are still only on page 810 of a 952 page report.  Coming up next is the government response to all this, some of which is quite interesting.

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*I suppose it is also possible that Johnson thought it was somehow a crime for Smith to withhold the e-mails.  The Committee believes the threat to "compel" referred to a civil lawsuit.  But I really don't see how.

Volume V, Parts 10 and 11: Still Not Much Going On

 

The next two parts of Volume V are also not notably significant.

Part 9, Social Media Influence Companies

Part 9 (pages 663-701) deal with tech companies that worked with the Trump campaign, or attempted to work with the Trump campaign doing the sort of datamining and micro-targeting that will presumably be routine in politics from now on.  Although some of these companies were foreign, it found no evidence of Russian involvement. The British firm, Cambridge Analytica, drew the most attention, both because it clearly worked with Team Trump and because it has had shady Russian ties in the past. Cambridge Analytica has done international work, including a survey in 2014 doing focus groups in the US testing people's attitudes toward Putin and Russian expansion.  Steve Bannon and Konstantin Kilimnik were involved in these surveys.  No similar surveys were done on any other foreign country or leader.  Cambridge Analytica offered its services to almost all of the Republican Presidential primary candidates in 2016 and started out working for Ted Cruz, later transferring to Trump.  It appears also to have reached out to Wikileaks regarding Hillary Clinton's missing e-mails.  Nothing case of the outreach since Wikileaks did not have the e-mails.  

An Israeli company called Psy-Ops also reached out to the Trump Campaign, but did not end up working for it.  Psy-Ops' other clients include Eric Prince (founder and leader of Blackwater military contractors) and Oleg Deripaska the Russian Oligarch with ties to Paul Manafort.  A Psy-Ops employee wrote an e-mail that referred to Trump creating masses of fake accounts on social media, but the Committee found nothing to substantiate the allegation.  And another such organization, called Colt Ventures, and apparently American, did some social media work for Team Trump.  On the whole though, this section is a giant nothing burger.

Part 10: Contacts during the transition

Russian government and oligarchs scrambled to establish contacts with Team Trump after the election.  It is not, after all, inappropriate for a foreign government to reach out to an incoming administration.  Indeed, what ultimately convinced me there was no secret, hidden channel of communication during the election campaign was the frantic scramble to establish such a channel after the election.  (Jared Kushner made similar comments p. 764).

The unexpected election of Trump, and his desire to make considerable policy changes from the Obama Administration, the incoming team and the Russians reached out to each other, both through official channels and back channels.  Jared Kushner reached out to the Russian Ambassador, Sergei Kislyak.  Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian financier, reached out to Erik Prince, founder of Black Water.  Robert Foresman, a banking executive with experience in Russia, reached out to the transition team as an unofficial spokesman for Russia.  And, most famously, Michael Flynn contacted the Russians.  On one occasion, Flynn sought to delay a UN resolution condemning Israel that the Trump team intended to veto and the Obama Administration abstained on. (He was not successful).  Flynn also reached out to persuade the Russians not to retaliate against the US for the Obama Administration's large scale expulsion of diplomats over Russian election interference.  In that he was successful, and was ultimately prosecuted for lying to the FBI about the conversation.

Most of this was already well known, or is to obscure to be of any apparent significance.

But fear not.  The report has has a sort of catch-all provision about what Trump associates were up to that is interesting, and then describes the US government response -- also interesting.  More on that later.

Any Suggestions?

 

Look, I think a lot of criticisms of Israel invading Gaza are well-taken.

Yes, I agree, ordinary Gaza residents did not take part in the attacks and should not be subject to collective punishment.  And this will be, at best a long, hard slog of brutal urban warfare against an entrenched enemy.  And there is no coherent exit strategy.  And there is a very real risk of all this spreading into a wider war.

But at the same time, shrugging and saying oh well, we deserved this and continuing business as usual is NOT and option.

So I would ask for any criticism of Israel's actions to be combined with some sort of realistic alternative.

Can We Be Realistic?

 Look, I personally believe that the House Republican Clown Show has proven that House Republicans shouldn't be trusted to operate a blender, let alone the US Congress.  But anyone thinking they will pay an electoral price for their antics is deceiving themselves.

By the next election, this whole episode will be long forgotten. It has always happened that way.

Volume V, Parts 8 and 9: Nothing of Any Importance

 

Volume V of the Senate Intelligence Committee continues to wander further and further afield in Parts 8 and 9, as it spends nearly 100 pages (pp. 586-662) to matters peripheral to the 2016 election.

Part 8

Part 8 (pages 568-635) addresses attempts by Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina to exercise influence on behalf of Russia with the NRA.  Torshin appears to have been a person of some importance in Russia -- vice chairman of the Russian Senate for a time, and a deputy governor of its central bank.  Butina (pronounced BOOTina, not BooTEENa), by contrast, does not appear to have had any particular influence in Russia.  She was born in Siberia and learned to hunt from her father.  She does appear to have done some gun advocacy in Russia, where private gun ownership is severely restricted.  

Butina, acting on behalf of Torshin, approached the NRA as a Russian gun rights activist.  The report gives a detailed chronological account of her activities from 2013 to 2016, none of which appear to have had any bearing on the 2016 election.  Butina attended NRA events, had an affair with one of its leaders, and attempted to establish an informal back channel between the NRA and the Russian government.  At least some of the NRA leaders understood what she was doing and accepted it.  Butina also wrote regular reports of her activities and observations on American politics and the influence of the NRA to Torshin.  On a number of occasions, she asked NRA leaders not to publicize their ties, giving as her reason the fear that she would be discredited in Russia for too strong American ties.  As is often the case, it is not always clear who is manipulating who. 

Maria Butina

Probably the most significant revelation in the report is that Russian intelligence targeted the NRA because it considered the NRA the most influential organization in the US and the key to any influence with the Republican Party.  (Not mentioned:  Whether Russian intelligence sought similar influence with the Democrats, and, if so, what organizations they considered important.  Also significant: NRA leaders appeared to understand that Butina was establishing a back channel to the Russian government and had no objections.  They seemed to value the influence this offered.  Butina's only contacts with the Trump campaign appear to have been meeting with Donald Trump, Jr. (an avid big game hunter) at an NRA dinner and various outreach to the campaign that went nowhere.

The obvious question is whether any of this was a crime.  After all, Butina did not seek out any classified information.  Her reports back on US politics do not appear to have been any more than a journalist might have written.  Her main role appears to have been establishing a back channel of communication with Russia.  She was charged as a spy.  Reports referred to her as a sexy siren whose beauty overbore men's judgment.  Looking at her picture, I could never see it.  Closer was someone's comment (don't remember where, can't find link) calling her the kind of sort-of pretty girl that men might think they had a chance with.  Even that seems generous.  I have included her picture.  Decide for yourself.

Part 9

Part 9 (pages 636-662) deals with whether there was any evidence that the Russians had a sex tape on Trump, apart from Christopher Steele's allegations.  Part 3 traces Trump's 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe contest in excruciating detail and finds only two gaps in which he could have held an orgy with local prostitutes -- one during the night he stayed, at which time his bodyguard turned away such offers, and during the afternoon the next day when he was waiting to see if he could get a visit with Putin.  It seems unlikely that Trump would have engaged in an orgy with Russian prostitutes while waiting by the phone for Putin to call -- what if Putin had actually called after all -- but I suppose with Donald Trump there is no telling.

In any event, even if nothing happened when Trump visited Russia in 2013, he also had visits in 1996 and one other occasion that Volume V does not identify.

The main evidence Volume V offers is that a Trump associate, David Geovanis, Trump had an affair with a Russian woman (name redacted).  Geovanis had contacts with the Russian intelligence services and loose lips, so the intelligence services might have found out.*  Geovanis also had ties to Oleg Deripaska, Manafort's sponsor.  Geovanis did not cooperate with the Committee, so information here is limited.

In addition, a former executive of Marriott International reported overhearing two employees with the Moscow Ritz Carlton discussing what to do with a video that showed Trump in an elevator "involved with several women who the discussant implied to be "hostesses.'"  Michael Cohen also said that following the 2013 visit, he got calls from six people claiming to have compromising tapes.  Trump denied that such tapes were real, and Cohen never received any verification.  The Committee also reported the existence of a realistic and well-sourced but fake tape.  

All this is nothing more than rumor, with nothing concrete to support it.

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*Geovanis, by the way, appears to have done the same sort of work as Hunter Biden -- offering contacts in the West and serving as a front man in dealing with the contacts, and getting paid vastly out of proportion to the actual work he did.

Some Unoriginal Thoughts on Israel-Hamas

 

Some unoriginal thoughts on the latest war in the Mideast:

Coward that I am, Hamas's crimes are so horrific that I cannot bear to read about them, much less view videos.  This is much worse than 9-11, not only in the sense that the killings are much larger relative to population, but also in the send that of being much more up close and personal, with the kind of gratuitous sadism impossible in the more impersonal act of crashing a plane into a building.

To anyone who says that Israel should strike back against Hamas, but not target the people of Gaza in general, I can only say, that would be great. Any idea how?  Hamas is sufficiently rooted in Gaza that plucking it up will necessarily cause massive collateral damage.  Any number of people have also commented that Gaza is extremely densely populated and that fighting there, much less an long-term occupation will be extremely difficult.  That is why Israel withdrew in the first place.

The Iranian government has threatened to intervene if Israel invades Gaza. Since Iran is two countries away, it seems a safe assumption that such intervention would not take the form of ground troops.  It could take the form of an attack by Hezbollah, or by proxies in Syria, or even by firing missiles at Israel.  Scary stuff.

Naturally Trump has blamed Biden and at least some people have suggested Trump is to blame.  The obvious answer is that not everything is about us.  But I think that is only partly true. There has been considerable continuity in US policy toward the Middle East.  We have been trying for a long time to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries.  Jimmy Carter brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.  Bill Clinton brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.  And, to give the devil his due, Donald Trump was highly successful at brokering a normalization of relations between Israel and the smaller Gulf states, as well as Israel and Morocco.  The Biden Administration followed up on these successes and was preparing a normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.  The Hamas attacks appear to have been planned to thwart such an outcome, and to have been successful.  So, yes, to that extent this is about us, and would probably have happened if the Trump Administration had been on the verge of a similar success.  That Hamas was able to derail the process so easily raises disturbing questions about just how solid it was to begin with.

Israel's general improvement in relations with Arab countries has taken place against the backdrop of a strong rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and also serious democratic backsliding by Israel.  These things are probably related.  Clearly, Israel and Saudi Arabia were moving closer largely in response to a shared fear of Iran.  And I am inclined to think that democratic backsliding by Israel facilitated the improvement.  Israel because less of an alien entity, less of a living moral rebuke to Arab countries and more just another country.  Israel and Arab countries could reach a cynical accord -- Arabs would ignore Israel's violation of human rights on the West Bank and Gaza in return for Israel ignoring Saudi Arabia's much worse violations of human rights in Yemen, or Morocco in West Sahara.  

And all of this places undermines the narrative some people are presenting, that this is a confrontation between liberal democracy and an Axis of Autocracy.  Israel, after all, has been backsliding from liberal democracy for the past 20 years. That would also mean including Saudi Arabia and its satellites among liberal democracies, a suggestion I am not willing to credit.  It is really the same criticism that we regularly had during the Cold War -- just because our opponents are evil does not necessarily mean that our allies are good.

And here is where Donald Trump really does matter.  While I believe that Hamas would have acted to derail normalization regardless of who was in the White House, the invasion of Ukraine is another matter.  I suspect it would not have happened, or would have happened differently.  And no, not because, as Trump claims, he told Putin he would nuke Moscow if Russia invaded Ukraine.  Obviously I can't prove or disprove their private conversations, but by all accounts, Trump was generally hostile to Ukraine for very Trumpian reasons -- Ukraine had opposed him as President.  Nonetheless, I do think Putin would have been reluctant to jeopardize his friendship with a US President.  At the very least, he would have waited until the US withdrew from NATO (as Trump wanted to do) before invading, and the invasion would no doubt have been easier.  

I do think that a new Cold War has been brooding for some time -- with the terrifying possibility of turning into a hot war.  Trump postponed it for a time, and hoped to avoid it altogether, essentially by switching sides and backing autocracies over democracies.  To be clear, it is hard to say whether Trump disliked democratic governments because they were democracies or because they were allies. He was decidedly opposed to the whole idea of having allies, which he saw as encumbering our freedom of action.*  So whether he wished to switch sides, or merely to sit it out is not clear.  Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that any leader who does wish to back democracy against autocracy will have to contend with a new Cold War -- or worse.

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*It is my suspicion that what so-called isolationists really oppose is not so much war -- they had no objection in the past to regularly intervening in Central America and the Caribbean, and have no objection to invading Mexico now -- but to having allies because allies force us to take other countries into consideration.