For those of us who are avid consumers of cable news, the last 72 hours have been quite amusing. The tables have turned on the Russia Collusion scandal. As a result, we have seen a stunning display of hypocrisy, media bias, conflation of issues, and thoughtless partisanship from both sides.
In an attempt to cut through the fog, I will parse the individual elements of this and related, sometimes conflated stories.
“Russia Influenced Our Election”
My response: Of course they did!
As did France, Germany, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and virtually every other country on the face of the planet. We do the same all over the world. In an international community, each nation, and each major faction within each nation has a stake in the outcome of the leadership selection process of other governments. Political figures, media organizations, as well as government agencies exert influence to the extent they have a stake in the outcome. This is part of international political discourse. The only thing that varies is the intensity, methodology, and motives.
I seem to remember during the 2016 primary, reports from foreign news sources about a British Parliament debate on the subject of banning Donald Trump from visiting the United Kingdom. Several members of the Parliament didn’t like Trump or his political views, and used their position to publicly influence our democratic process before he had even won the nomination of his party. Foreign news organizations were more than willing to advance this narrative to undermine candidate Trump’s chances, and US media organizations quickly followed suit. Should we be at war with or sanction the UK for interfering with our election process?
Are we really pretending like we live in a world without spies and foreign influence? The fact of the matter is that friends spy on friends, friends spy on enemies, friends spy on enemies of friends, and friends of enemies. Nations spy, influence, and inject themselves into the politics of other nations. We gather information, and we use that information to advance our interests.
Yes, we must acknowledge that Russia is a rival and adversary in the current political environment. Obviously, we want to make every effort to minimize their influence and impact, and if lines are crossed, consequences should be forthcoming. However, this notion that something unprecedented has just happened, or we were attacked, or we are at war with Russia as a result? These are meaningless talking points to advance a narrative to accomplish a very partisan goal: To discredit, impede, and de-legitimize President Trump and his agenda.
If we really care about minimizing this sort of influence over future elections, we should stop pretending like this is something unusual, new, or preventable. We should acknowledge that this type of influence is common place, and comes from a multitude of sources.
The ultimate weapon against ALL forms of undue influence, whether financial, governmental, ideological, theological, or any other “ical” you can imagine, is a discerning electorate. We should have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that there are countless forces, both legitimate and illegitimate, malignant and benign, trying to influence our policies and politics. We live in the information age, and political discourse occurs on a border-less internet. The greatest challenge we face as a nation is to develop our electorate’s ability to contextually assimilate an unprecedented volume of information, and to parse fact from fiction, and the motives of sources.
“Russia Hacked Our Election”
What does that mean? Did Russia hack into our voting machines? Did they attempt to do so? It seems well established that despite possible attempts, there were no successful physical manipulations of the vote tally by Russia or any other actor in the 2016 election. Instead this hyperbolic phrase is most commonly used in reference to the hacking, and subsequent release of the DNC emails. I have not heard any conclusive proof that Russia was behind the hacking of the DNC emails. In fact, Julian Assange has repeatedly stated that Russia was not the source. However, for the sake of argument let’s say they were.
What that means is that Russia committed acts of espionage against us. This is nothing new. Russia has been engaged in espionage against the U.S. for over 70 years. Whether a brief case of documents being surreptitiously passed in a corner café in Berlin, microfilm being smuggled into the Russian embassy, U2 overflight data, signal intelligence, or internet hacking, it is all the same. They spy, we spy, we all spy! Information thus obtained is then used in a manner to best further the interests of the agency that gathered it.
In terms of the effects the release of these emails had on the election: Basically private, truthful information was made public. Let’s apply some cognitive dissonance: We can dislike that Russia engaged a successful espionage campaign against us, while simultaneously saying that the information that came to the public was truthful, and could have easily become public through any number of sources (disgruntled DNC worker, American hacker, accidental mail forward, etc..). In fact, our news media is largely based on the idea of uncovering private and secret information to expose it to the public. We not only accept this, we tout it as the 4th pillar of democracy, and consider this activity an essential part of the election process.
So, if Russia had a successful espionage campaign, and leveraged the information they obtained in the 2016 campaign to sow chaos and dissent, as a citizen I can say that I am concerned, and hope our government agencies do everything they can do to continue to protect our institutions and citizens from foreign espionage. Further, if proven, though not unusual or unprecedented, acts of espionage should result in appropriate, retaliatory responses when discovered.
However, none of this has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election process. Our election process is riddled with influence from opposition research, leaks, stolen information, leaked classified information, investigations, wild allegations, etc. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by entities with varying motivations, and multi-national interests, to influence voters.
Ultimately, the American public is tasked with assimilating all available information from all sources, and selecting our leaders through a democratic process. The power of our democratic process is its resiliency, and inherent ability to cope with all forms of foreign influence.
“Trump colluded with Russia To Steal the Election”
First and foremost, the term “collusion” is largely subjective, and wholly political. In fact, it has no legal meaning in this context. It is a manufactured term used by the media to de-legitimize the 2016 election results. This is the art of conflation and obfuscation used by politicians and the media to advance a narrative and to project a partisan point of view.
It starts with an extremely broad term like Russian Collusion. This could encompass anything from a member of the Trump Campaign shaking the hand of a Russian diplomat, to Trump and Putin in a dark, windowless room plotting the demise of American democracy. The term invokes the emotions of the latter, while its only justified use is derived from evidence of the former.
After a year of countless investigations, special prosecutors, thousands of investigative journalists, and wall to wall media coverage, the most damming evidence of this “collusion” seems to be that at a couple points in 2016 the Trump campaign showed interest in obtaining negative information about Hillary Clinton, and in the process, didn’t preclude sources that may have ties to Russia.
I have been amazed for months about how this can be called news, or breaking news, or anything other than self-evident, and routine campaign activity. In the last few days, my incredulity has turned into side splitting laughter as I watch the mainstream media flip the script to make this exact point on behalf of Hillary Clinton now that the information has surfaced that her campaign was doing the exact same thing.
“Clinton Campaign Funded the Trump Dossier”
We have now learned that the Clinton campaign not only sought “dirt” about candidate Trump, but paid millions of dollars to use a retired foreign spy, to tap Russian sources to manufacture a dossier riddled with salacious dirt about Donald Trump. With that set of circumstances in the news cycle, the same pundits who have used words like collusion and treason to describe far less, now sit on panels defending the Clinton campaign portraying these activities as standard opposition research.
In fairness, there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around. Republicans and right leaning news organizations are now eager to point to Clinton’s conduct and call it criminal, and treasonous. I will admit that after the last year of wall to wall coverage of the Russia scandal, it feels good to feed them a dose of their own medicine. I even see some legitimate value in advancing this point of view in a facetious attempt to illustrate the hypocrisy of the last year. However, if we are to find a constructive path forward, consistency should be our road map.
The confirmed facts of the conduct of both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, in BOTH cases indicate legal, routine, and commonplace opposition research. It may not be pretty, but in terms of what has been proven, or even credibly alleged, it seems to be standard practice. The only thing out of the ordinary is what the news media and disgruntled democrats have tried to do with this story for the last year.
“Is It Possible Laws Were Broken?”
Of course. This is still a possibility in either case.
Political campaigns involve many nuanced laws. There may ultimately be some aspect of what either of these two campaigns have done, that may be proven to be improper, unethical, or even illegal. However, after a year of digging into the Trump Campaign, there is ZERO evidence, even credibly alleged, of any specific legal wrong doing. On the other hand, after only a few days of an examination of the Clinton campaign’s role in the dossier, there is very real potential that they violated campaign finance disclosure laws, and a strong possibility that John Podesta and/or Debbie Wasserman Schultz were untruthful in their testimony before Congress (a crime).
To be fair neither of these claims have been proven, nor any other crime alleged against any party. What we should all do is wait to see actual evidence emerge before engaging in the kind of reckless hyperbole we have seen from the left for the last year+.
At this juncture, I would draw focus to three key points:
#1 – Both campaigns were engaged in opposition research, and both sought dirt on their opponent from any source available to them, including Russia.
#2 – Neither campaign or candidate has been proven to have committed any crime. Though at this point I would consider it far more likely that if any crime was committed it was on the part of the Clinton campaign, I think we should wait for evidence.
#3 – The left, and the left leaning news media in particular, has used this false narrative to engage in a massive, disingenuous, partisan assault on the Trump Presidency for the last year. Though recent revelations have put that narrative in very serious jeopardy, we should use this opportunity to expose the hypocrisy, not to indulge in the same conduct!
