The Russians Hacked our Election

America was attacked.  Now we are getting upset about it.

The attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into World War Two.  It was an outrage that galvanized public opinion.  It was a "day of infamy."   People argue over how America could possibly have been caught so flat footed.

But one thing was sure:  it was an attack on America.   Hawaii was an island territory, hard and expensive to get to, not a state.  It had been an independent foreign country until less than fifty years prior.  Hawaii was distant and exotic.  It was an outpost.  It was a naval base. People there were dark skinned.  In many US states miscegenation laws prohibited their residents from marrying "normal" (i.e. white) Americans.  Still, this was an attack on America.

Click Here: Bloomberg Article

At no time did this attack on American warships fundamentally endanger the idea of America, or its Constitution, or its sovereignty.  America itself was intact and indeed the very essence of it grew stronger and coalesced because of the attack.

In 2015 and 2016 Russia made decisive efforts to disrupt the US election.  Their goals were twofold.  They hoped to weaken the chances of Hillary Clinton's election by supporting the better candidate, Trump,  the one less hostile to Russia.   They--like nearly all other supposedly credible experts--considered Hillary's election near certain, so they had the secondary goal of generating general distrust of the validity of the American election system and the winner it generated.  This would weaken America's standing in the world as an exemplar of democratic leadership chosen through credible elections.

The US failed to sound the alarm back in 2015 and 2016 when we began to have evidence that Russia was hacking into our voting records and attempting to create havoc, and even after the election there was little sense of outrage.   I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts one month after the election and witnessed Marcel Lettre give a talk to 40 students at the JFK School of Government.  Lettre was the man in charge of Defense Department intelligence, the equivalent of the person in charge of the guards protecting the Pearl Harbor Naval Base.     The interesting thing to me about the presentation was what did not happen.  No one asked why he was not in prison.  No one asked why he was not sweating in front of Congressional Hearings attempting to explain a gross negligence.

Here is how I wrote about it:

Click Here for the November 8, 2016 post

The Kennedy School students included lots of military officers getting advanced training. There were Congressional staff people and State Department and other foreign service people in mid career, people in their late thirties.  There were people on sabbatical in leadership positions in foreign countries.  These were not shy naif undergraduates, fresh from the dairy farms of Wisconsin.  They had a key decision maker in this disaster in front of them for 90 minutes of off the record discussion and they did not ask the question.

Why?  Americans--and this class--did not know we were at war. We knew about the Russian hacking then, but at that time it was considered "political", part of the fight between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and old business, rather than a heating up of the cold war rivalry between the US and Russia.   We thought it was just partisan politics.

Trump and Republicans are struggling to keep that the subject of the discussion.  There is a major messaging battle taking place.  The GOP message:  Democrats are sore losers.  Democrats need to "move on."   Democrats are still just complaining about the lost election.  Democrats should have campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.  It is all a witch hunt, Trump said.   There is no proof of direct collusion between Trump himself and the Russians.  Stop whining, you Democrats.

This position is getting harder to maintain.

Fox News is helping to sell this story, that this whole mess with Trump is just sore-loser talk from the Democrats.   But news and events are messing with that message.

There is new information that Russians did not just manipulate public opinion with fake news stories to be circulated on Facebook and selective leaks from the DNC.   They also attempted to change voting records so election day would be an operational catastrophe and it involved some 39 states.   This is not a skirmish. If they just changed minds, well, at least their minds were changed from thinking Hillary was OK to thinking she was crooked, or a pedophile or that she murdered people.  People are entitled to vote their opinions, however they are shaped.   

But tampering with election rolls is a different matter. This is an attack on constitutional government.   Republicans who want to stand by the sore-loser story are in a bind.  People who hold office by election do not want to see elections rigged.  Elections are at the heart of constitutional government, and Russia is a familiar foe.  The Russia collusion story is changing the message frame.  People involved with the campaign might have been colluding with a foreign power doing an act of war.  This requires looking into, regardless of the party of the person in the White House.  Republican officeholders have cover if the story is just political but they need to act if the story is about war.     

As a practical matter it has constrained Trump's ability simply to fire the Special Investigator and shut down the whole investigation.  Republicans publicly, and no doubt privately, signaled to Trump to back off the trial balloon of firing the Special Investigator.   Insofar as it is "just a political distraction" then Trump could shut it down on the basis of "getting back to the serious business of bringing jobs to America."  The situation has changed.   Now he would be shutting down an examination of a sneak attack.  Republicans could not go along.

Even the pro-Trump Washington Examiner passed along the bad news to Trump, that he needed to back off.  We cannot have another Saturday Night Massacre in order to stop an investigation into an act of war.

Washington Examiner

A premise of this blog has been that Trump's extraordinary ability to frame the debate and get out his message would slowly erode.  The burdens of actual governing would cause  undeniable reality to overwhelm persuasive advocacy.  It is easier to sell potential in a campaign than it is to sell the inevitable disappointments of hard choices.  Hillary was the "hard choice" candidate; it was the title of her book.  Trump sold hope and change, a change back to an imagined bright past, and that was the winning message.

The investigations will go forward.  Russia will be shown to have been malevolent.  The story will be about Trump associates and suspicious activities.   No Democratic candidate has succeeded in creating an alternative message to Trump and none look credible yet.  But events are doing that work for them.  Events are creating the alternate, persuasive message.

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