No, Russia Did Not “Hack” Our Election
What we know about Russian interference and its effect on the 2016 Election
Let’s be clear about this right from the start: Russia is no friend of the United States and Vladimir Putin is a scoundrel. Any and all cyberattacks on the U.S. government and U.S.-based firms from antagonistic foreign powers — such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc. — should be thoroughly investigated so effective safeguards can be put in place to better protect the homeland in the future. Period.
Russia is clearly a hostile actor with its own interests and purposes, and these often diverge from the interests and purposes of the United States. This is an indisputable fact and should not be a partisan issue. Unfortunately, it took the rise of Donald Trump for the American left to realize that Russia is a significant geopolitical threat to the United States.
The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for 20 years!
Earlier that same year, Obama was caught on a hot mic with outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev saying that because the 2012 election was his last election, Obama would be able to give the Russians more “space” and “flexibility” on issues such as missile defense, presumably because he would no longer be electorally accountable to the American people once he was safely reelected. Medvedev responded, “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”
The Democratic Party tweeted that Romney’s position on Russia was disqualifying.
Democrats relentlessly mocked a quite sensible, and, as time has borne out, remarkably prescient assessment of Russia’s position in the world. The liberal media establishment — from the pages of The New York Times to the coverage offered at CNN — reveled in Obama’s epic put-down of Romney and praised the President’s appeasement policy toward Russia.
Fast-forward to 2016 and liberals are apoplectic about the geopolitical threat posed by Russia and Trump’s strange and dangerous admiration of Vladimir Putin.
Even more recently, President Obama has ordered a full review of Russian cyberattacks on the U.S. “so Russia doesn’t go unpunished” for their interference with the 2016 Presidential Election. Similarly, Republican and Democrat leaders in the Senate Armed Services committee have called for a bipartisan investigation into Russian hacking and interference.
Some have taken the idea of Russia’s interference a step further, arguing that Russia “hacked the election” itself. The New York Times reported that “a remarkable breach has emerged between Trump and intelligence agencies over claims that Russia hacked the election”. Over at Daily Kos: “By any definition, Russia hacked the election”. Headline for CNN: “Where’s the outrage over Russia’s hack of the U.S. election?”. (Emphases mine.)
The progressive oracle Keith Olbermann upped the ante even further, proclaiming that the United States was the unwitting victim of a Russian coup d’état:
We are no longer a sovereign nation. We are no longer a democracy. We are no longer a free people. We are the victims of a bloodless coup — so far, a bloodless coup — engineered by Russia with, at best, the traitorous indifference of the Republican Party and Donald John Trump.
So now, Russia is not only a significant geopolitical foe, they waged bloodless warfare with the United States by hacking our presidential election and undermined the very fabric of our democracy. What a difference four years can make!
The truth is that Russia was hostile to the U.S. before this year’s election and continues to be hostile now. Russia has repeatedly undermined the U.S. at the United Nations, propped up regimes hostile to U.S. interests in places like Iran and Syria, invaded sovereign territory such as Georgia and Ukraine in violation of international treaties, and more.
Some, including President-elect Trump, are disputing whether Putin and Russia were involved in the hacking. For example, Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton argues that the hacking might have been a “false-flag operation.”
Ultimately, I am a realist when it comes to international relations and foreign policy. I have no reason to doubt the reports that Russia interfered. Russia certainly has a vested interest in the outcome of U.S. presidential elections and foreign interference in domestic power brokering is quite commonplace. For example, last year, the Obama Administration’s State Department sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars to a leftist political group in Israel in an effort to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Their efforts to influence the election ultimately failed as Netanyahu remains in power.
Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that we know with complete certainty that the Russians were involved in the hacking. What exactly did they hack and what was the scope of such hacking? From The Washington Post:
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.
So the hacking we are talking about is private email communication by Democratic National Committee officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. These communications were then exposed on the Internet by WikiLeaks.
The assessment is not about the hacking of electronic voting machines or foreign interference with the vote tally process itself.
There is no evidence at this point that the Russians “hacked the election”. To frame the report’s conclusions this way is highly misleading, and clearly ideologically-driven, since it serves the purpose of attempting to delegitimize the results of our election.
What the evidence points to is that the Russians played a role in the release of private email communications from top-level Democratic Party operatives that were politically damaging to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Again, this is not to say that foreign entities hacking U.S. political parties is not a big deal or that it should not be investigated. The point is that the current evidence for the scope of Russian interference is far more limited than the phrase “the Russians hacked the election” implies.
Many on the left are now suggesting that Hillary Clinton would have won if Russia did not hack the Democrats. Really? This contradicts previous liberal theories for why Hillary lost, which are legion. Was it the FBI Investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information? Was it the impropriety of the Electoral College system? Was it miscounted votes in key swing states? Was it the irresponsible — and, according to the candidate herself, “life-threatening” — proliferation of “fake news”?
No, it was the Russian-orchestrated document dump that cost Hillary the election. That’s the new narrative.
Prior to these reports, almost no one mentioned the effect of the WikiLeaks scandal on the campaign as the decisive factor in Hillary Clinton’s loss. And this is not because the dubious source of the WikiLeaks information was unknown at the time. Indeed, during the third presidential debate, Clinton explicitly referenced that 17 of our intelligence agencies had confirmed that the Russians committed the hacking in an effort to influence the election and that this Russian espionage traced all the way back to Putin himself. The American people knew this prior to the election — Hillary and her supporters had frequently informed them of it!
And just because a foreign actor tries to influence an election does not mean they in fact become the deciding factor in that election, as Obama’s operatives learned during their failed attempt to oust Netanyahu.
If the Russians were trying to use these leaks to convince the American people that Hillary Clinton is a two-faced politician, they didn’t need to do much convincing because the American people already knew that. Are the voters now supposed to have a neutral view of Hillary Clinton because the Russians apparently opposed her?
Although the WikiLeaks scandal certainly did not help the Clinton Campaign, it is not at all clear that it determined the ultimate results of the election.
In legal terms, we call this concept But-For Causation: “But for the Russians/WikiLeaks revealing those emails, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidency.” If all other circumstances were equal except that WikiLeaks never revealed those emails, the “blue wall” of the Midwestern states would have held and Hillary Clinton would have won the presidency.
This assertion is highly speculative as there is no evidence to establish or even suggest that the WikiLeaks scandal was the root cause of those narrow Midwestern losses. In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest that factors other than the WikiLeaks scandal contributed much more to Hillary’s demise.
Russian hacking had nothing to do with the Clinton campaign’s disastrous decisions to devote crucial time and resources to states like Arizona and Nebraska rather than Wisconsin and Michigan. The Democrats reportedly spent millions of dollars in places like Chicago and New Orleans “to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote”!
Russian hacking had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton’s awful likeability and trustworthiness ratings, which were historically bad even before the 2016 election started.
Russian hacking had nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation accepting boatloads of cash from foreign governments and despotic regimes — including Russia!
Russian hacking had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton’s decision to set up an illegal private email server for her State Department communications and had nothing to do with the FBI’s decision to investigate Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material or Anthony Weiner’s mishandling of you-know-what.
In the final days of the campaign, the FBI’s unrelated investigation into Weiner’s sexual misconduct with a teenage minor spawned the revelation that classified material from Hillary Clinton’s illegal private email server ended up on Weiner’s laptop. This, in conjunction with Comey’s letter to Congress regarding the continuing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials, was almost certainly more damaging than all of the revelations out of the WikiLeaks scandal combined. And Russian meddling had nothing to do with any of this.
Although some have made the argument that the FBI Investigation was the deciding factor in the election, I’m not convinced that Hillary Clinton’s email scandal was the “but-for” cause of her election loss. But it is virtually indisputable that the email scandal had a much bigger impact on the 2016 campaign, both overall and in the final days of the election, than the WikiLeaks scandal.
Suffice it to say that it is quite the logical leap to go from “the Russians probably hacked the DNC and Podesta’s emails” to “the Russians hacked the election”.
Not only did the WikiLeaks scandal receive far less media attention than the FBI investigation, it also received less media attention than Trump’s own scandals, such as the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which Trump brags about women letting him get away with grabbing them “by the pussy” because he’s a wealthy celebrity. One study by the Media Research Center found that Trump’s raunchy comments from that tape got 15 times (!) more coverage in mainstream media broadcasts than Hillary Clinton’s WikiLeaks scandal.
The WikiLeaks scandal was not covered by the media as much as it could have been — or should have been — during the 2016 Presidential Election. Yet whatever damage it did cause was not unwarranted; the documents were not Russian propaganda or “fake news”. The WikiLeaks revelations were scandalous precisely because the documents were authentic.
This is not a court of law where a party can move to exclude evidence acquired via unlawful means; the Court of Public Opinion has no rules of evidence. So, although we are talking about information acquired in a dubious way, we cannot discredit its importance or political usefulness on the grounds that we don’t approve of how it was acquired. Establishing that documents were acquired in a troubling way goes no distance toward discrediting or undermining the veracity or relevance of such documents to the American people.
For example, when Megyn Kelly, referencing information revealed through hacked emails released by WikiLeaks, pressed DNC Interim Chairwoman and CNN commentator Donna Brazile on whether she unethically tipped-off Hillary Clinton’s campaign to town hall debate questions in advance, Brazile repeatedly dodged the question, asserting that Megyn Kelly was “persecuting” her and using stolen information “like a thief.” Brazile later resigned from CNN in disgrace.
In the same way that the Access Hollywood tape and the New York Times report on Donald Trump’s tax returns from the 1990s revealed truthful information about Donald Trump via underhanded means, the WikiLeaks scandal revealed truthful information about Hillary Clinton via underhanded means.
In Clinton’s case, one of the most notable revelations from WikiLeaks was a collection of transcript excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions. The former Secretary of State had previously refused to release these transcripts during the Democratic primaries. These transcripts revealed private comments and policy positions that differed from her public comments and policy positions.
Other revelations by WikiLeaks do not come close to matching the impact of previous political scandals and liabilities that dogged the Clinton Campaign from the beginning and simply served to supplement them.
It can be simultaneously true that we should strive to protect the integrity of U.S.-based firms, operatives, and political institutions from having their private communications compromised by hostile actors while also demanding accountability from those firms, operatives, and political institutions when their misconduct is exposed.
Upon seeing these scandalous, yet truthful, revelations, the voters ultimately made of it what they wanted to. No one’s brain got hacked; exposing the voters to truthful information is not tantamount to mind control. Some voters cared about Donald Trump’s lewd comments about women, while others did not. Some voters cared about Hillary Clinton’s private comments to Wall Street and financial institutions, while others did not.
Furthermore, due to negative saturation coverage of Trump from the media and the nature of covering cold document dumps, revelations from WikiLeaks that would have otherwise garnered more news coverage from a hungry and hostile press were largely ignored.
Hillary Clinton was a historically weak candidate with underwater likeability ratings, underwater trustworthiness ratings, and significant scandals separate and apart from anything the Russians may have subsequently revealed through WikiLeaks. And the Democrats not only voted for her as their nominee, the Democratic Party establishment went so far as to tip the scales of their primary process to ensure that Hillary Clinton emerged as the nominee, to the exclusion of other potential candidates like Bernie Sanders.
Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and the liberal media need to resist the urge to look to the comfort of scapegoats for their election woes. They need to grapple with the fact that they chose a historically weak presidential candidate, that they ran a sub-par campaign, that they lost to another historically weak presidential candidate (who was their preferred opponent), and that if they were not engaging in corrupt and reckless behavior — mishandling of classified material, pay-for-play corruption of the Clinton Foundation, DNC playing favorites in the primary, their incestuous relationship with the media — there would not have been much true information damaging enough for the Russians to leak that would significantly harm their political prospects.
Sometimes, the truth hurts.
