SEVEN
TRUMP, RUSSIA, AND TRUTH
Late in the summer of 2017 a detailed story in Wired magazine on how Russia was subverting U.S. democracy cited a European study that found that, rather than trying to change minds, the Russian goal was simply “to destroy and undermine confidence in Western media.”1
Conservative talk radio host and never-Trumper Charlie Sykes echoed the theme: “The essence of propaganda is . . . to overwhelm your critical sensibilities. It’s to make you doubt the existence of a knowable truth.”2
The Russians found a surprising but powerful ally in candidate and later President Trump, who attacked American institutions with much the same ferocity as did Russian propaganda, as when he identified the press as the “enemy of the American people.” The attack on the media was essential to the campaign, but it was rarely about arguing the facts. James Poniewozik, TV critic for the New York Times, reflected in a June 2017 tweet that Trump didn’t try to argue the facts of a case—“just that there is no truth, so you should just follow your gut & your tribe.”
Wired also pointed out a remarkable convergence between the themes of the Russian media/web blitz and the Trump campaign: Clinton’s emails, Clinton’s health, rigged elections, Bernie Sanders’s raw deal, and so on.
And then there was the echo chamber between Russian news and American right-wing outlets, epitomized by the sight of Sean Hannity on Fox News shilling his fantasy that the tragic murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich was somehow related to the theft of DNC emails and the dumping of them to WikiLeaks—that it was an inside job and not connected to Russia at all.
There is a lot of American responsibility and even guilt to go around here. Trump seemed the perfect candidate for the Russians’ purpose, and that was ultimately our choice and not theirs. But the central fact to be faced and understood here is that the Russians have gotten very good indeed at invading and often dominating the American information space.
For me, that story goes back twenty years.
I arrived in San Antonio, Texas, in January 1996 to take command of what was then called the Air Intelligence Agency. As I’ve written elsewhere,3 Air Force intelligence was on the cutting edge of thinking about the new cyber domain, and I owed special thanks to my staff there for teaching me so much about this new battle space.
There was a question in Texas that we debated with all the intensity of Jesuits arguing an issue of theology at a medieval university: Were we in the cyber business or were we in the information dominance business? Did we want to master cyber networks as a tool of war or influence or were we more ambitious, with an intent to shape how adversaries or even societies received and processed all information? Since the United States now has a Cyber Command (and not an Information Dominance Command), you can probably figure how this all turned out. But the debate was lively.
Cyber was complicated enough as we worked through the legal, policy, operational, and oversight considerations of new and untested concepts like computer network operations (CNO), computer network defense (CND), computer network attack (CNA, i.e., destroying networks or information), and computer network exploitation (CNE, i.e., spying).
It was all so complicated that taking on information dominance looked like a bridge too far. Not only would we have had to deal with all the challenges of computer network operations, but we would have to fold in such esoteric topics as deception, public affairs, public diplomacy, perception management, and psychological operations and still keep a handle on the more traditional tasks of electronic countermeasures, jamming, and defense suppression. That, and more, would be what information dominance would demand.
Besides, we knew we could not get very far along in the information dominance space without creating serious First Amendment implications. In a globalized, interconnected world, how does one affect, say, Belorussian perceptions without also affecting the perceptions of Americans (which is clearly prohibited)?
So we stuck with door number one: cyber dominance.
Russia, we now know, opted for door number two: information dominance.
It was a logical choice for a weak but proud nation, one that could not match the West in the traditional forms of economic or military power. And it was less about matching the West than it was about bringing the West (especially the United States) down to Russia’s level by challenging its confidence in itself and its institutions.
And the enabler for all of this was the World Wide Web and social media, the ability to “publish” without credentials, without the need to offer proof (at least in the traditional sense) or even to identify yourself. The demise of a respected media as an arbiter of fact or at least as a curator of data let loose impulses that were at once leveling, coarsening, and misleading. A. C. Grayling, the British philosopher, says that this explosion of information overwhelmed us and happened so quickly that education did not keep up, leaving us, he laments, with regularly reading the biggest washroom wall in history.
In a way, it is surprising that the Russians would be the first to so ruthlessly exploit all this since in 1991, at the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited a dysfunctional communications system with limited global connectivity.4 But by 2017 three-fourths of the country had access to the Internet; some Russian firms, like Kaspersky Lab, were global leaders; and Russian organized crime groups had adopted cyber tools as a significant engine of profit. The weak rule of law, economic uncompetitiveness elsewhere, and the technical skills of the Russian people combined to create a capacity that soon attracted the attention of the Russian state.
And the Russian most interested in that capacity was General Valery Gerasimov, an armor officer of some talent who, after combat time in the Second Chechen War, served as commander of the Leningrad and then Moscow military districts. Writing in 2013, Gerasimov pointed to the “blurring [of] the lines between the state of war and the state of peace” and—after noting the Arab Awakening—observed that “a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict . . . and sink into a web of chaos.”
He continued, “The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown,” and the trend now was “the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population” (my emphasis).
Seeing large clashes of men and metal as “a thing of the past,” Gerasimov called for “long-distance, contactless actions against the enemy” and included in his arsenal “informational actions, devices, and means.” He concluded, “The information space opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy,” and so new “models of operations and military conduct” were needed.5
It was, of course, taken as a given that Russia was already in a state of conflict with the West.
Putin had appointed Gerasimov chief of the general staff in late 2012. Fifteen months later there was evidence of his doctrine in action with the Russian annexation of Crimea and occupation of parts of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Now called “hybrid war” by the West, Russia’s approach limited the overt use of force, focused extraordinary attention on the population, and combined surprise, ambiguity, and plausible deniability in a way that seemed to freeze any opposition. Gerasimov’s notorious “little green men”—special operations forces with modern Russian weaponry but no insignia and balaclava masks covering their faces—effected a bloodless takeover of the Crimean peninsula.
In eastern Ukraine, Russia promoted the fiction of a spontaneous rebellion by local Russian speakers against a neofascist regime in Kiev, aided only by Russian volunteers, a story line played out in clever, high-quality broadcasts from news services like RT and Sputnik coupled with relentless trolling on social media.
With no bands, banners, or insignia, Russia had altered borders within Europe—by force—but with an informational canopy so dense as to make the aggression opaque, responsibility unclear, and responses uncertain.
One incident illustrates the extent of the Russian informational and population-centric effort: the downing by Russian advisers and Ukrainian separatists in July 2014 of a scheduled and on-course Malaysian airliner over Ukraine with 298 innocents on board. Western intelligence knows a lot about the weapon used, the Buk or SA-11/13 system. It’s widely deployed, it’s big, and it consists of multiple tracked vehicles. It has unique radar signals to acquire and identify targets and to launch, track, and control its missiles.
Overhead satellites would routinely gather electronic intelligence that locates the radar. Imagery satellites would be tasked with imaging the areas where it operates. There is also a branch of intelligence that measures physical phenomena. Measurement and signature intelligence surely would have recorded the heat from the airliner’s explosion and likely would have detected the heat plume of the missile itself.
Admittedly, some of the data may not have been collected in this specific instance and not all of the information would have been releasable to the public. But in a fact-based world, the evidence of what the Russians/separatists did would have been compelling.
Little matter. This world was not fact-based.
Shortly after the shootdown, the Russian information machine created an alternative universe and manufactured a Ukrainian fighter in the vicinity of the airliner and even spiced up the narrative by claiming Vladimir Putin’s plane was in the area returning from Brazil at about the same time.6 With all the obfuscation, within two weeks of the shootdown, 82 percent of Russians were convinced that the Malaysian jet had been downed by the Ukrainian government. One percent admitted Russian culpability.
Beleaguered Russians were a ready-made audience for this kind of thing, of course, but how different is this from the many “beleaguered” Americans—subjected to the same kind of information barrage—who now believe that Hillary Clinton actually arranged for American uranium to be shipped to Russia even though she didn’t and they haven’t received any?
All the Russian story lines in the shootdown case were quite inventive, fine examples of Gerasimov’s use of the “information space.” They finally settled on the shot being taken by a Buk, but one under Ukrainian government rather than Russian separatist control. Various other explanations had been floated and changed quickly. Those false starts, rather than undercutting Moscow’s credibility, seemed to merely erode confidence that anyone could ever know for sure.
To me all the “explanations” were predictable and easy to dismiss. But they were not dismissed. It all seemed a version of a DC Comics plotline where Superman visits Bizarro World and all is reversed: up is down, in is out, good is bad. Peter Pomerantsev, in his recent book on Russia, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, attributes that to strident media nationalism and propaganda appealing to the pride of a traumatized people. But the techniques used were transferable. Now these same Russian information operations have been used to undercut democratic processes in the United States and Europe, and to erode confidence in institutions like NATO and the European Union.
Indeed, Garry Kasparov, Soviet chess champion turned Russian dissident, outlined the progression for me. Putin’s attacks were “developed and honed first in Russia and then the Russian-speaking near abroad before expanding to Europe and the U.S.” Unable to play for parity, Russia—an inherently weaker power—now just tries to bring its opponents down to its level.
America in general and U.S. intelligence in particular were slow to recognize and appreciate this new Russian approach. In retirement, former DNI Jim Clapper admitted, “We had a general awareness . . . of Russian use of social media—Facebook ads, use of Twitter, fake news implants . . . but now, as time has elapsed . . . I’ve certainly learned a lot more about the depth and breadth of what the Russians were about.”7 Jim’s intelligence community was often consumed by the more immediate tasks of counterterrorism and counterproliferation, and policymakers in the Obama administration tended to view the Russians as an irritant rather than a strategic danger.
And then there was the question of the lens we were using to understand all of this. Committed to a path of cyber dominance for ourselves, we seemed to lack the doctrinal vision to fully understand what the Russians were up to with their more full-spectrum information dominance. Even now, many commentators refer to what the Russians did to the American electoral process as a cyber attack, but the actual cyber portion of that was fairly straightforward.
American intelligence eventually detected that and some other aspects of the Russian effort and dutifully tried to alert its political masters. But there was so much more involved, and our understanding of the story evolved only slowly over time.
There was one man, however, who more than any other was trying to ring the alarm more than two years before the 2016 elections.
I sat with Clint Watts on an overcast November 2017 afternoon in an office in midtown Manhattan that had been made available by one of Clint’s former West Point classmates. I had recently been on a panel with Clint discussing Russian active measures against the West and was aware of his extraordinary testimony on that topic to the U.S. Congress.
Clint is an FBI veteran and has done work at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and as a contractor for the intelligence and special operations communities, in addition to his scholarly work at George Washington University and the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
In early 2014, Watts and two colleagues, J. M. Berger and Andrew Weisburd, were studying the use of social media by ISIS to recruit and proselytize its members when he came across unexpected connections between a Syrian/Iranian troll8 network and Russian social media accounts. This looked like a common effort to support Assad, but Clint saw more. The longer he looked into the Western-looking accounts, the more he was convinced that Russia was reigniting its old active measures campaign, defined years ago by the U.S. Information Agency as the “manipulative use of slogans, arguments, disinformation and carefully selected true information . . . to try to influence the attitudes and actions of foreign publics and governments.” But this time the Russians were taking full advantage of easily accessible, low-cost social media platforms.
As the Malaysian airliner story above suggests, the Russians had already succeeded in what Clint calls “bubbling” their own population, that is, isolating and controlling their news flow. But the accounts he thought were backed by the Russians had ties to both the United States and Europe. The longer he watched, the more he was convinced that this was an organized effort against the West. To Clint, it looked like the Russians were taking what had worked for them domestically and exploring how well these techniques would work with a foreign audience.
Evidence mounted. The faux personae created at the Russian bot farm—the Saint Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency—were routinely represented by stock photos taken from the Internet, and the themes they pushed were consistently pro-Russian. There was occasional truth to their postings, but clear manipulation as well, and they all seemed to push in unison.
The Russians knew their demographic. The most common English words in their faux Twitter user profiles were “God,” “military,” “Trump,” “family,” “country,” “conservative,” “Christian,” “America,” and “Constitution.” The most commonly used hashtags were #nuclear, #media, #Trump, and #Benghazi . . . all surefire dog whistles certain to create trending.
It was straightforward science for Clint, J.M., and Andrew to use smart algorithms to determine whether something was trending because of genuine human interaction or simply because it was being pushed by the Russian botnet.9 And Clint could see that the bots ebbed and flowed based upon the needs of the moment. He tried to call attention to what he was discovering, but found American intelligence fixated on his original ISIS mission, with little energy left over to explore or even be much interested in his Russia discovery.
Clint characterized 2014 to me as a year of capability development for the Russians and pointed to a bot-generated petition movement calling for the return of Alaska to Russia that got more than forty thousand supporters while helping the Russians build their cadre and perfect their tactics. In 2015, with that success in hand, the Russians started a real push toward the American audience, by grabbing any divisive social issue they could identify. They were particularly attracted to issues generated from organic American content, issues that had their origin in American commentary. Almost by definition, issues with a U.S. provenance could be portrayed as genuine concerns to Americans, and they were already preloaded in the patois of the American political dialogue (and often U.S.-based conspiracy theorists).
“Jade Helm 15” was an American military exercise conducted across several southern and western states in the summer of 2015 that Russian-based but Western-looking social media accounts portrayed as the impending imposition of martial law, a characterization echoed in American alt-right media outlets. The New York Times reported that Infowars, a website operated by Alex Jones, a Texas-based libertarian talk radio host, ominously suggested that the name “Helm” was an acronym for “Homeland Eradication of Local Militants.”10
Jones fed the conspiracy plotline—one that eventually included trains with shackles transiting Texas, an exercise map labeling Texas and Utah as hostile territory, and abandoned Walmarts being used as prison camps—by broadcasting, “This is just a cover for deploying the military on the streets. I’ve hardly ever heard of something joint like this unless they’re planning an invasion.”11
In this and similar episodes, Twitter was the most powerful tool. Watts pointed out to me that Twitter makes falsehoods seem more believable through sheer repetition and volume. He labeled it a kind of “computational propaganda.” Twitter in turn drives mainstream media, and it also inspires subsequent, more detailed content posts and pulls on Facebook.
And Twitter as a gateway is easier to manipulate than other platforms since in the twitterverse we voluntarily break down into like-minded tribes, easily identified by our likes and by whom we follow. Watts says that the Russians don’t have to “bubble” us—that is, create a monolithic information space friendly for their messaging. We have already done that to ourselves since, he says, social media is as gerrymandered as any set of state electoral districts in the country. Targeting can become so precise that he considers social media “a smart bomb delivery system.” In Senate testimony, Watts noted that with tailored news feeds, a feature rather than a bug for those getting their news online, voters see “only stories and opinions suiting their preferences and biases—ripe condition for Russian disinformation campaigns.”12
Charlie Sykes, the “never Trump” conservative, believes “many Trump voters get virtually all their information from inside the bubble. . . . [C]onservative media has become a safe space for people who want to be told they don’t have to believe anything that’s uncomfortable or negative. . . . The details are less important than the fact that you’re being persecuted, you’re being victimized by people you loathe.” Thomas Rid, a German-born, London-based, America-knowledgeable expert on cyber conflict, stressed the point in front of the U.S. Congress: “The more polarized a society, the more vulnerable it is.”13
There were so many tweets and YouTube videos “proving” that Jade Helm was an attempt to impose martial law on hostile states that President Obama later jokingly identified it as his favorite conspiracy theory while in office.14 It was no laughing matter at the time, though, as Governor Greg Abbott was forced to deploy observers from the Texas National Guard to calm public concerns.
It didn’t offer much humor for the future, either, with the Russians pocketing a success achieved by amplifying and manipulating themes all too native to America.
And now there was the specter of the leading Republican presidential candidate reinforcing the belief that the Obama administration was indeed capable of such things. He also went out of his way to personally validate conspiracy-mongers like Jones. Before 2015 was out, Donald Trump gushed, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.” Jones responded that 90 percent of his audience supported the candidate.15
And this is the same Alex Jones who is a 9/11 truther and who broadcasts that the Sandy Hook murder of twenty little children and six staffers never happened. It was all a hoax.
By the summer of 2015, in light of Russia’s successful experiments with broad American audiences, Watts was convinced the Russians would go after the American election. He told me that clear patterns in Russian trolling and messaging soon emerged: suppress Democratic turnout by discouraging voters; push Trump via a sympathetic echo chamber; support Green Party candidate Jill Stein to bleed votes away from Hillary Clinton; sow overall discontent among Democrats by saying Bernie Sanders had gotten a raw deal; discredit Clinton on a host of issues.
All of this was also useful in supporting the core goal: to broadcast the dysfunction and corruption of American democracy. Watts explains that Russia’s actual hacking of voter databases was likely more to erode American confidence than to change or even to exploit any American information. And, he added, the Russians probably feared the U.S. response if they actually tried to affect the vote.
It wasn’t surprising that in October 2016 the overarching theme of the Russian campaign had become the rigging of the election and voter fraud. We now know WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange was already suggesting this theme in messages to Donald Trump, Jr. Even with a Clinton win, the Russians could still achieve many of their objectives if Trump simply called foul.
There were certainly sympathetic echoes from Trump himself. In October he was routinely telling campaign crowds, “Remember, we are competing in a rigged election. They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.”16
The candidate frequently tweeted on the topic.
Beyond the candidate’s sympathetic ear and voice, the Russians were abetted in all these endeavors by their theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The embarrassing correspondence was pushed through platforms like WikiLeaks and DCLeaks where it was scooped up, interpreted, and amplified by (sometimes) unwitting but (always) enthusiastic bloggers, tweeters, and even the mainstream media.
Russian public news outlets—flashy, high-tech Sputnik and RT—would also pick up the stories, and although they had few actual viewers in the United States, they would add to the buzz and create high-quality English-language news hits that were then posted to YouTube and other social media sites where they enjoyed a wide following (even if the sourcing was often murky and unattributed).
One former reporter from Sputnik news says that he was told to “push narratives that the US government is hypocritical, corrupt and lacks the moral standing to confront Putin’s dictatorship on human rights.”17 He was specifically encouraged to push the conspiracy theory about the killing of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
Despite the seemingly elegant synchronization, Watts was quick to tell me that the Russian effort wasn’t always tightly orchestrated. His explanation seemed to me to echo the differences between American football and what the rest of the world calls football: soccer. Both are choreographed, but the former is characterized by a strategic planning conference every thirty-five seconds (a huddle) to assign specific tasks and detailed duties to every player, whereas the latter assigns general roles to be followed as the game demands and players respond.
The Russian effort was clearly the latter, but their efforts were always alert to sympathetic vibrations within the American information universe when American news outlets, such as Fox News, picked up on their themes. Max Boot, a “never Trump” Republican neocon, points out how Sean Hannity, Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs, and even Fox commentator and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich all seemingly bought into the Rich conspiracy, a dynamic that allowed the Russians to reinforce and reenergize their narrative. Boot railed against the Fox network as “Trump TV,” Trump’s “own version of RT,” and its prime-time ratings czar Sean Hannity as “the president’s de facto minister of information.”18 Boot later added that Trump often repaid the debt by retweeting their work favorably to his vast Twitter following.
My own sample set of Fox News these days is fairly limited. That’s the product of my own (regrettable) self-filtering, I suppose, but I do recall a day in August 2017 as CNN and MSNBC were in high pitch about North Korea, but at the moment in commercial break, when I tuned my car’s satellite radio to Fox only to hear a rather detailed story about gun rights being under assault in the process of adopting children. It seemed a perfect metaphor for the broader trend.
There are some genuine heroes on the Fox network like Shepard Smith, Chris Wallace, Charles Krauthammer, Bret Baier, Dana Perino, and Steve Hayes (the last three, personal friends), but for the most part I agree with Boot. Hannity, for example, enthusiastically gave a platform to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange shortly before Trump’s inauguration, traveling to London to interview him at the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange had taken refuge from authorities following a Swedish rape allegation.
When Hannity asked how he had obtained the DNC emails, Assange responded that “our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.”19 Hannity later told Fox News, “I believe everything [Assange] said,” and lavished praise on the Internet activist.20 He also seconded the Assange/Russia/Trump themes about corrupt America and fake news: “What we learned in this election is how deeply corrupt . . . the level of our politics is, and collusion between media outlets and campaigns. There is not objective journalism in America. And of course, the media doesn’t want to cover that story.”21
President-Elect Trump—a Fox News junkie and Hannity fan—picked up on the exchange to quickly tweet, “Julian Assange said . . . Russians did not give him the info!”
That comment, of course, was like mother’s milk to a president-elect jealous of his electoral legitimacy and only two days away from an American intelligence briefing (the January 6 briefing at Trump Tower described in chapter 4) that would tell him quite the opposite.
It all worked, at least for some. In that Pittsburgh back room I visited, one participant noted Assange’s denial that he got the DNC emails from the Russians. His word (and the Trump tweet) seemed enough for her, and my observation that Assange was a known liar and unlikely to even know the ultimate provenance of the emails didn’t seem to matter. “Truth” was what was trending, a classic case of a Russian acolyte (Assange), a Trump acolyte (Hannity), the Russian media machine, twitterverse trends, and Trump tweets aligning to create an unbreakable narrative.
The Fox/Trump/RT alliance resurfaced in the fall of 2017, this time pivoting off the TV testimony of Bill Binney, an NSA technician who quit the agency in protest in late 2001. Binney had taken a technical difference within NSA and turned it into a moral crusade against alleged criminal surveillance by the agency, a story told in some detail in my book Playing to the Edge.
Not surprisingly, Binney has become something of a regular on Fox as the network traded its traditional conservative, national security credentials for a brand of Trump populism. Binney was on air ten times in the twelve months after September 2016, largely pushing his theory of indiscriminate surveillance, including, conveniently enough, the surveillance of Trump Tower.
In March 2017, he began to push the theory that the DNC hack could well have been a CIA “false flag” operation with American intelligence using its technological wizardry to masquerade as the Russians. It was the deepest of deep state plots, a renegade IC mucking with an American election and blaming it on a foreign power, a theme also pushed by conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and Russian news outlet Sputnik.22
Then in August, Binney made the unfounded claim to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in a nonchallenging, uninterrupted, obediently nodding, near-cheerleading interview that the download speed of the DNC hack would not have permitted it to be done remotely. It had to have been an inside job (a variation of the Seth Rich plot).
President Trump watches Fox and consults with Hannity, and it wasn’t long before he was leaning on CIA chief Mike Pompeo to check out Binney and his theory. The theory, after all, aligned nicely with his own views on what the Russians did (or, more accurately, did not do).
Pompeo, understandably, demurred. Approaching Binney would have given status to someone whom most in the IC thought was a wack-a-doodle. And of course, there was always the option of simply asking NSA if Binney’s published technical theory was even feasible. Even several members of Binney’s own circle, the conspiracy-minded and usually united Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, believed this one to be a crackpot theory.
Pompeo meeting with Binney would give his views gravitas beyond their merits and stoke the fires of conspiracy theorists nationally, which is perhaps what the president wanted, since he insisted, and Pompeo finally heard out Binney at CIA headquarters for an hour in late October. By early November the entire affair was public, with Binney being interviewed at length by RT.
RT!
In that interview Binney said he believed his audience with Pompeo had been driven by his Fox News hits and the president’s desire “to get some facts” because, in Binney’s view, the intelligence agencies weren’t telling the president the truth, as usual changing their “story to fit their agenda.” He also condemned the “emotionally generated, agenda-driven dribble” that characterized the Russia story in the press. RT quickly posted the interview on YouTube.23
Binney continued his accusations in a second interview on RT America with Ed Schultz, former MSNBC talk show host, praising the president and Pompeo but again railing against the continued dishonesty of the press and the intelligence community.24
Pompeo could not have welcomed any of this. It threatened to compromise him with his workforce, who had their own views of Binney and, as far as the president’s attitude toward the Russians was concerned, had their own views of him, too. The agency press office dutifully repeated its support for the original intelligence community assessment: the Russians did it.
Within a few days, Pompeo would again have to pledge his commitment to the assessment, this time following a Trump-Putin pull-aside on the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vietnam. Trump came out of that meeting saying that Putin really believed his own denials, and Trump seemed to agree when he condemned Obama-era intelligence leaders responsible for the Russian report as “political hacks” and then added, “I mean, give me a break. So you look at it, I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper, and you have Comey. Comey is proven now to be a liar and he is proven now to be a leaker.”
The president’s charge of “political hacks” at the head of the American intelligence community was part of a broader pattern. When the institutions of the American government refuse to kowtow to the president’s transient whim, he sets out to devalue and delegitimize them in a way rarely, if ever, seen before in our history. A free (but admittedly imperfect) press is “fake news,” unless, of course, it is Fox; the FBI is in “tatters,” led by a “nut job” director and conducting a “witch hunt”; the Department of Justice, and particularly the attorney general, is weak; the intelligence community, in addition to being led by political hacks, is “Nazi”-like; the courts are manned by “so called” judges. Even the National Football League and the Boy Scouts of America have had to defend their integrity against presidential attacks designed solely to protect the president’s brand.
In this case, the president had to walk back a bit the next day, saying, “As to whether I believe it or not, I’m with our agencies, especially as currently constituted. As currently led, by fine people, I believe very much in our intelligence agencies.”25
But that did more harm than good, since it assesses the reliability of the intelligence community based on the personal political loyalty of its leadership. That dynamic, which shows every sign of continuing, is horribly destructive. If that takes hold, it will take a generation for these institutions to claw back their reputations for objective, fact-based analysis in some future administration.
I often wonder if the president is aware of the dynamic, or even cares. And has anyone in or near his inner circle, more aware of the consequences, tried to explain it to him?
I do not envy the IC leadership. The jobs are inherently tough without the added burden of working in a minefield of politics and ego. And when the IC leadership speaks publicly, it is sometimes hard to craft language accurate enough to please the workforce but tuned politically enough not to anger the White House.
DCIA Pompeo had to dig out of such a hole when he told a D.C. think tank audience that “the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” a line that mirrored the Trump line since the fateful January 6 meeting at Trump Tower, but which the intelligence community never said or supported. “Too tough to call” had always been their view.26
The full context of the interview makes Pompeo’s quote less stark than reported, and the Agency was quick to issue the standard clarification: “The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed, and the director did not intend to suggest that it had.”
And in a later interview the CIA chief warned, “This threat is not going to go away. The Russians have been at this a long time, and I fully expect they’ll continue to be at it.”27
But all this highlights the challenge of publicly sustaining analytic precision in the face of presidential language that was far from precise and language that has often been echoed by Moscow via the Twitter accounts of Kremlin-linked groups. #ReleaseTheMemo—supporting a Republican effort to discredit the FBI—was the top-trending hashtag for those groups in January until it was overtaken by #SchumerShutdown, a reference to the president’s description of that month’s three-day government stoppage. #ReleaseTheMemo came back to the top of the charts after the government shutdown ended. So rather than the president condemning the Russians for what they have done, we have the strange phenomenon of Russia often amplifying what the president says.28
With that kind of dynamic and a president who has imposed an overpowering cult of loyalty on his administration, the ghost of politicization is always lingering close by for sincere but conflicted senior officials.
It has also become the habit of President Trump, drained of his moral authority by repeated untruths, to rely on that of his key subordinates. And in so doing, he adds the erosion of personal reputation to the damage he is doing to the institutions of government. Thus we saw highly regarded Chief of Staff John Kelly, retired Marine general and Gold Star father, defend the president’s behavior during a bereavement call to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger.
I understand Kelly’s motivation. No one who has ever been required to make this most difficult of calls would criticize a president who has. I was also offended that Congresswoman Frederica Wilson—who was not an intended recipient of the call, but overheard it—decided to talk about it publicly. And General Kelly in his White House press room remarks gave a soaring account of how the remains of American service members are honorably handled.
But, sadly, he then conducted a Trumplike, blistering, unnecessary, and (it turns out) inaccurate ad hominem assault on the congresswoman for her alleged behavior during the dedication of an FBI building in Miami in 2015. Of course, nowhere in his remarks could he refer to the president lying about the contents of the call since, despite Trump’s denials, there was now agreement that he had actually said, “He knew what he signed up for,” when he referred to Sergeant Johnson.29
To round things out, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders pushed back against later criticism by saying it would be “highly inappropriate” to get into a debate with a four-star general. It was as if Kelly’s rook had just been used to neatly castle Trump’s king.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen noticed, later telling ABC News that “John’s politicizing the death of his own son . . . is indicative of the fact that he clearly is very supportive of the president no matter what. And that, that was really a sad moment for me.”30
Very strong words, but I’ve heard similar concerns from other former senior officers with whom I have spoken, and I had my own example of General Kelly being “very supportive” of the president. Two days after the president tweeted his infamous “Obama wiretapped me” charges, Kelly (then secretary of homeland security) was asked by Wolf Blitzer about it and responded with what seemed to me to be both true and a perfect safe haven: “I don’t know anything about it.”
Case closed. Or at least it should have been.
But General Kelly then volunteered his reputation to protect the president: “If the President of the United States said that, he’s got his reasons to say it. He must have some convincing evidence that took place.” And then for good measure he issued a slammer against Barack Obama: “I don’t pretend to even guess as to what the motivation may have been for the previous administration to do something like that.”31 Protection of the president? Protection of the office? Perhaps, but none of it borne out by any facts.
National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster is junior to Kelly in rank, age, and experience. No one questions his intelligence or courage, but little in his career prepared him for this task. He is probably the best exemplar of Mullen’s caution that this is “a foreign environment to all of them and so they’re trying to get their job done while operating in a political environment that they’re adjusting to.”
With his years of experience in the SITROOM, Mullen cautioned that the role of the national security adviser was “to really just present options,” not pitch policy internally or externally, and feared that McMaster “got out a little early on policy.”
In one infamous example, McMaster found himself where no national security adviser would ever want to be: uncomfortably (and from all appearances reluctantly) providing political top cover to the president, in this case trying to rebut charges that the president had shared sensitive intelligence given to the United States by a third party with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. McMaster claimed that the sharing was routine and appropriate and available from open-source reporting while also maintaining that the president “wasn’t aware of where this came from. He wasn’t briefed on the source of the information.”
His explanations were undercut the next day when the president cited his “absolute right” to release “facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety” and the White House declined to push back on stories that the administration had actually asked for a damage assessment from the intelligence community on the president’s revelations to the Russians.32
McMaster later found himself forced to defend/endorse/validate the president’s comments on Charlottesville (“bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides”),33 the president’s apparent criticism of British security forces in the midst of a terrorist attack (the terrorists “were in the sights of Scotland Yard . . . must be proactive and nasty”),34 and his incendiary words on North Korea at the United Nations (“totally destroy . . . Rocket Man . . . suicide mission”).35
In early December, McMaster was again called on to defend the president, this time over his retweeting of three videos purporting to show gruesome Muslim violence against innocents that had been originally produced and captioned by a fringe anti-immigrant British group whose leader had been convicted of a Muslim hate crime. The Dutch embassy in Washington said that one of the videos showing its citizens was patently false, and British prime minister Theresa May condemned all of them, at the same time rebuking Trump for endorsing them.
The tweets really smacked of the red-meat anti-Muslim language of the campaign. It was Trump after dark at his most vile and thoughtless. It looked the product of an ungoverned id emitting vindictive thoughts to stoke an undiscerning base into fear and thus support.
Chris Wallace asked McMaster on national TV, “General, why did President Trump send out those videos?”
McMaster at first deferred: “Well, President Trump is the best judge of why he did that.”
That was a good and true answer and the general should have left it there. But the White House would have anticipated the question on this Sunday and would have prepared talking points that paralleled Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s earlier in the week. And would have expected the national security adviser to use them. So McMaster continued: “But I know it was his intention to highlight the importance of creating safe and secure environments for our citizens—to make sure that we have the right laws in place, enforcement mechanisms in place, to ensure that, at this critical time, when ISIS is being defeated in the Middle East, that there is no return of terrorists and extremists who can pose a risk to the American people, or to our allies and partners.”
All that seemed a remarkable task for three little violent videos without any recommendations, proposals, or programs attached. So Wallace continued by asking why inaccurate fringe videos would be useful for those purposes.
McMaster repeated that the videos highlighted a real risk (a doubtful proposition given their provenance) and that they could be used to fight the false narrative that this was really a war of religion, a statement unhinged from the actual videos and their impact. Indeed, one of the videos showed a statue of the Virgin Mary being destroyed. Then, in the moments that followed, McMaster talked about the need to break the cycle of “ignorance, hatred, and violence,” a cycle to which the three unprovoked videos had almost certainly just contributed.
That prompted Wallace to immediately and forcefully ask, “But his tweets were all about anti-Muslim—about Muslim violence, he was making it . . .”
McMaster sidestepped that in favor of some unrelated points on attacking terrorist governance and ideology and working with allies and partners across the world.
There simply was no real defense for the president retweeting the vile videos, and McMaster had to know that. In 2006, then-colonel McMaster had conquered and pacified the Iraqi town of Tal Afar through innovative tactics, hard fighting, and “developing relationships, by action, by dialogue with people and by addressing local grievances.”36 It would have required a brain and personality transplant for H.R. to judge the president’s actions as warranted, useful, or even worthy of the office or the nation. And yet here he was on a Sunday morning feeling obliged to apply his considerable talents and reputation to defending the indefensible.
John McLaughlin—the iconic former head of CIA analysis, deputy director, and then acting director of the Agency—had earlier told me of his fear that “[t]he lie will become the truth and people who normally tell the truth will end up explaining the lie.”
Michael Gerson was even more harsh: “Trump has made a practice of forcing people around him to lower their standards and abandon their ideals before turning against them when their usefulness ends.”37
Tom Bossert, the administration’s highly regarded homeland security adviser and Bush administration veteran, was another regular on Sunday talk shows, especially as a series of hurricanes hammered the U.S. mainland and Puerto Rico. Seemingly without fail Bossert would be called on to explain or defend a presidential tweet when all he wanted to talk about was wind speed, rainfall, and recovery efforts. He did his best.
In July he was ambushed with a video the president had just tweeted of Trump taking down CNN à la a WWE brawl. The Sunday hosts pressed him about the president encouraging violence against the press.
Bossert rejected the thesis: “No, I certainly don’t. I don’t think so.” Fair enough, although the point is debatable, but then Bossert went on to stress the White House’s political theme of the president as victim: “There’s a lot of cable news shows that reach directly into hundreds of thousands of viewers, and they’re really not always very fair to the president.” And then to give him a character reference: “He’s a genuine president expressing himself genuinely.”38
CNN’s Ana Navarro, never one to shade her views, characterized the video as an incitement to violence and then reflected on Bossert: “You could see that he is ceding his principles. . . . You can’t stand here and say the difference between right and wrong? He is surrounded by enablers that do nothing, but shake their heads and nod their heads in agreement.”39
That was harsh, but an intelligence community veteran emailed me the same day, “I saw the clip this morning and just put my head in my hands. This is how decent people are ruined.”
Bossert was put into pretty much the same position a month later after Charlottesville and the president’s ambiguous condemnation of the actors there. He cited the president’s general comments about the level of violence and hatred in the country and finally, pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper, offered a personal view: “I think you’ve belabored it, so let me say I condemn white supremacists, and Nazis, and groups that favor this type of exclusion.”40
Two weeks later Bossert was on ABC and this time was forced to defend the president’s preemptive pardoning of Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, the face of harsh crackdowns against illegal immigrants, although some would say all immigrants and others would simply say Hispanic-looking people. The pardon was an unadulterated sop to the president’s political base.
Bossert simply commented that all presidents end up with some controversial pardons, and he didn’t think it was fair to the president “to characterize him as not caring about the rule of law.” He also repeated the White House talking points about Arpaio’s veteran status and “lifetime of service.”41
It was probably the least he could do and still be in good standing in the West Wing on Monday morning. The president was doing more than just harming institutions. He was harming people, good people, American heroes, who deserve our gratitude.
That was clear in February when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee approved a memo written for and signed by their chairman, Devin Nunes, charging the FBI and the Department of Justice with malpractice and politicization for using the notorious Steele dossier to get a FISA warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Most folks like me condemned the memo’s thin four pages, especially its injection of hyperpartisanship into what has historically been a matter between career intelligence or law enforcement professionals and the federal courts. The memo was also misleadingly silent with regard to other evidence presented to the FISA judge beyond the Steele dossier and was almost immediately contradicted by press reports that the judge had indeed been aware of the political motivation behind those bankrolling Steele.
Not surprisingly, the memo was met with enthusiasm by a president anxious to undercut the Russia probe as a “hoax” and the Special Counsel’s investigation as a “witch hunt.” The president tweeted: “The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans.” And then, “A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves.” Casting aside concerns from within his own government about real damage to dedicated people and important institutions and processes, the president opted for what best served his personal legal and political needs of the moment.
Full credit to FBI director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for pushing back against the House intel committee Republicans and the White House. Fighting release of the memo, the FBI warned about “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy” and afterward Director Wray reminded his workforce that “talk is cheap” and they still needed to “tackle hard.”
But it was a little surprising and even more disappointing that other voices in the executive branch were not heard in support of Wray, even via “informed sources” or “people familiar with the thinking of . . .” After all, there should be no reason to think they or their people would be immune from arbitrary presidential shaming in the future, and this was especially true of the intelligence community, since information from other agencies like CIA and NSA is routinely included in FISA applications and this particular FISA was part of a counterintelligence investigation that comes under the broad responsibilities of the director of national intelligence.
There was reporting that DNI Coats did push back privately in the West Wing against the memo, and as a former member of both the House and Senate, he must have been appalled at this example of “oversight.” But whatever objections he had were not heeded by either branch of government.
Which gives greater urgency to the question: At what point do even good people stop being buffers and guard rails and simply became enablers and legitimizers? And at what point do they have to leave or suffer permanent damage to their character and reputation?