I missed the report of another plea deal with Special Prosecutor Mueller, which Lawfare (Sarah Grant, Quinta Jurecic, Matthew Kahn, Matt Tait, and Benjamin Wittes) helpfully supplies in their summation of the same indictments I covered (although they are, of course, much more professional than this software engineer):
The charges of wire and bank fraud appear related to a second set of court documents released Friday by the special counsel’s office: the plea deal of Richard Pinedo, whom Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged with one count of identity fraud (18 U.S.C. §1028). According to the statement of offense, Pinedo operated an online business called “Auction Essistence” from 2014 through the end of 2017, through which he sold services designed to circumvent the security measures of online payment companies. Reuters reports that Pinedo allegedly provided the services used by the Internet Research Agency to purchase political ads and pay for rallies through PayPal. (Pinedo’s attorney said in a statement that his client “had absolutely no knowledge of the identities and motivations of any of the purchasers of the information he provided.”)
From their legal expertise:
The indictment fills in a number of critical elements in the timeline of L’Affaire Russe. The document is what prosecutors term a “speaking indictment”; that is, it describes facts about the defendants’ activities beyond what is strictly necessary for the counts it charges. The purpose of a speaking indictment is more than to simply list charges; it is to tell a story, and the story this one tells is of the Russian side of the bigger picture—specifically, the Russian side of events that took place outside of the Russian government and intelligence agencies.
But they have a different motivation for the Russian activities:
The indictment doesn’t shed light on why the Internet Research Agency might have chosen to meddle in the 2016 election in 2014—long before either Clinton or Trump announced their intent to run. But notably, the dates in the indictment coincide with the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of early 2014. Amid unrest against Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-aligned politician who was president of Ukraine at the time, Russian officials accused the United States of covertly supporting Ukrainian protesters and seeking to undermine the Kremlin’s influence in the region. So a reasonable person might wonder, reading the indictment, whether the beginning of the operation was a retaliation for perceived U.S. meddling in Ukraine.
They may be right, but it doesn’t really change my conclusion – that the United States has lost a battle in a surreptitious war. And while they also agree there’s no collusion mentioned here, but it isn’t exculpatory, either, they go a step further:
What this indictment does, rather, is establish part of the predicate for a later claim of collusion. That is, the indictment details part of what it was that any Americans might have been colluding with.
That almost sounds like a threat, doesn’t it? Or a warning. But I’m not sure that Trump’s lawyers are experienced enough to realize that.
And while Lawfare points out that the indictment makes no attempt to measure the success or failure of this covert and illegal operation, they point out this:
Here’s what is clear, as U.S. intelligence officials emphasized in Senate testimony earlier this week: The danger described in the indictment is not going away anytime soon. As Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats put it: “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target.”
If the Russians thought their efforts were a failure, would they repeat them? Our intelligence agencies report finding indications that the Russian operation may be repeated – so we can assume that the Russians really did believe their efforts influenced the past election.
What is their goal in the upcoming election?
By contrast, Andrew McCarthy’s column on National Review appears to be painfully naive:
The Russians are engaged in “information warfare” against the United States. That was the big soundbite at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s press conference Friday afternoon, announcing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s election-meddling indictment against 13 Russians and three Russian businesses.
That is certainly a fair assessment of what the indictment alleges. The account is disturbing, but its form leaves many of us underwhelmed. Our government says Russia is levying war. It is attacking a foundational institution — the electoral system of our democratic society and, more basically, our society’s cohesion as such. Our response should not be, nor appear to be, the filing of a lawsuit. That is provocatively weak.
If this were all about reprimanding Russia for its actions, I might agree. It’s not. It’s about informing the citizens of the United States on a polarizing and divisive issue, namely whether or not Russia attempted to influence the election using illegal and unethical means. The President of the United States has categorically stated that they did not, despite the testimony of his own intelligence agencies. This indictment gives objectives, means, names, and details. It destroys the President’s assertion.
In other words, this is a healing document. It tries to resolve an active and painful division. Before we can move forward and perhaps take action against Russia, we need to come together, recognize that our election was tainted, leaving us with a bumbling incompetent who may, in fact, be beholden to Russia, and decide what to do. Andrew advocates for more direct action, but the truth of the matter is that if we don’t educate our own citizens on what happened and how it happened, it’ll just happen all over again. McCarthy’s response doesn’t look to the future. It’s a visceral response that ill-regards the citizens.
McCarthy’s in a tough spot. He wants to advocate for a conservative position, but his banner-holder is Trump, palpably a failure by McCarthy’s own standards with respect to China and Russia, as well as myriad other subjects other than the federal judiciary – and perhaps even McCarthy recognizes Trump’s failures in this area. I don’t read McCarthy on a regular basis.
Source: Gallup
So I think McCarthy decided to follow the strong conservative tradition of attacking when attacked, and advocated a cyber-warfare response without considering the possibility of providing the citizenry with more information. The latter response would run a risk for the conservatives, because many of them are not as well informed as their liberal counterparts. If they were to become better-informed, whence will they sail? It’s a serious question for a conservative position which has lost quite a lot of support over the last couple of years, despite or even because of its Congressional dominance. In the Gallup poll to the right, the 2-7 Jan 2018 poll suggests 22% of Americans consider themselves Republican, a 3 point drop since December, while the Independents are down to 44%, a 2 point drop, and the Democrats are up to 32%, for a 5 point gain. In late 2016, the numbers were 28-39-29, respectively. It’s a discouraging trend for what calls itself the conservatives these days – and may be quite telling as to the current makeup of the conservatives.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight throws some cold water on the Russian exercise:
The indictment alleges that an organization called the Internet Research Agency had a monthly budget of approximately $1.25 million toward interference efforts by September 2016 and that it employed “hundreds of individuals for its online operation.” This is a fairly significant magnitude — much larger than the paltry sums that Russian operatives had previously been revealed to spend on Facebook advertising.
Nonetheless, it’s small as compared with the campaigns. The Clinton campaign and Clinton-backing super PACs spent a combined $1.2 billionover the course of the campaign. The Trump campaign and pro-Trump super PACs spent $617 million overall.
In terms of headcounts rather than budgets, the gap isn’t quite so dramatic. The “hundreds” of people working for the Internet Research Agency compare with 4,200 paid Clinton staffers2 and 880 paid Trump staffers.3Russian per-capita GDP is estimated at around $10,000 U.S. dollars — about one-sixth of what it is in the U.S. — so a $1.25 million monthly budget potentially goes a lot farther there than it does here. The Russian efforts were on the small side as compared with the massive magnitudes of the campaigns, but not so small that you’d consider them a rounding error.
And, yet, it’s worth remembering that the tale of David and Goliath is more than just a fairy tale, it’s an emblematic story of something that can always happen – the small defeating the large because they’re smarter and/or better equipped. Measuring strictly by budget ignores the many other factors involved, of which I’ll pick out just one.
Assumptions. I’ve been thinking about the discussion I had with a reader over the last few weeks concerning the free press and free expression, and whether or not foreign entities should be permitted to participate. I answered No, because they do not have America’s best interests at heart. But I’ve discovered another reason to bar them. Americans make certain assumptions when we have political discussions, or at least we should, and one of those assumptions is that whatever the writer is saying, he does have an interest in the United States prospering. That is, we may disagree strongly on the path forward – but we do agree there should be a path forward.
Not so foreign nationals. Largely by definition, they adhere to their country and wish it to prosper, and if that does not coincide with American interests, tough shit.
So when we evaluate the free speech of foreign nationals, especially those who fraudulently assume American identities, we will be mislead in our interpretations of their free speech. It’s a mockery of free speech, in reality, and that becomes a wild-card factor in the evaluation of their impact. Nate is quite correct that the Russians were heavily outspent – but it may not matter, because they were playing a game with the naive Americanskies, from the rural hamlet inhabitant to the downtown Manhattanite, and we didn’t know the rules.
Nate may be assuming a linear impact based on funding. I don’t think that’s accurate. But Nate is saddled by the burden of proof, frankly, while I’m free to wave my hands quite frantically.
