Fair Criticism of the Trump-Russia Narrative
For those that don’t know me, I am very opinionated on my perception of the “Trump-Russia” narrative. I have collected a decent database of news articles over the entire course of the Mueller investigation. I am interested in discussing discrepancies and fair criticisms as a means to provide a full picture to what actually happened.
Fair Criticism: Intelligence Communities history of lies and spying
We all know that it was the NSA, CIA, and FBI that had made a document titled “ICA_2017” which concluded, with high confidence, that Russia was trying to influence the election via a social media campaign, Russian news outlet, and by hacking the DNC. Throughout the entire Mueller investigation, Trump made allegations that he, or members of his campaign, may have been wiretapped. The intelligence community, and various media outlets alike, denied these allegations claiming them to be baseless conspiracies. Each organization has a reputation for lying to the public under the guise of “national security”. For instance, we know the NSA has a long extensive history of spying on foreign leaders abroad and the average citizen in America [1]. On September 17th of 2013, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington due to concerns of being spied on. Reports came out, around the same time as the Snowden leaks, that the NSA snooped on her emails, texts, and phone calls. The US explained that they were merely looking for terrorist activity rather than prying into personal communications [2]. A report released by Wikileaks, around July 9th of 2015, suggested that the NSA spied on Angela Merkel and her staff far longer and more widely than previous realized. Wikileaks had suggested the NSA targeted long-term surveillance for 125 phone numbers of top German officials. The NSA repeated their position that it does not undertake foreign intelligence unless there are specific and validated purposes related to national security. Further analysis reveals that Edward Snowden was a key suspect due to being the source for Wikileaks, but many of his friends denied the connection [3].
Many people will want to argue that the NSA was going by proper procedures. It might even be worth noting that the public might argue that privacy is for criminals. Nonetheless, government officials have been on record defending dragnet spying from the NSA or flat out denying it. Wired took the time to analyze at least six misstatements about NSA spying. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) said that the NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place on August 23 of 2013. It was found that her statement was contradicted by James Clapper when he says the NSA was unable to conduct any oversight itself. NSA Chief Keith Alexander claimed the NSA had executed its national security responsibilities with respect for civil liberties and privacy. Along with him, Eric Holder made statements that the government was unable to gain access to metadata unless a document purpose was made. The foreign intelligence surveillance court declassified enough records to indicate that the NSA had carried out thousands of inquiries without any court order designed to protect Americans from illegal government surveillance [4].
It wouldn’t be unreasonable at this point to discuss exactly how the NSA, or any intelligence agency, was granted this particular ability. From my understanding, Executive order 12,333, signed by President Reagan in 1981, is/was the authority primarily relied upon to gather foreign intelligence outside of the US. Next in line, we have The Patriot Act, signed by the Bush administration shortly after 9/11, which gave the government a sweeping authority to collect a record of every single phone call made by every American on an ongoing daily basis. FISA Amendments Act of 2008 gives the NSA almost unchecked power to monitor Americans international phone calls, text messages, and emails under the guise of targeting foreigners abroad. The ACLU warned that Section 702, of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, would be used to eavesdrop on Americans private communications [5].
Even though the majority of my sources talk about abuse of power particularly within the NSA, the other two intelligence agencies (FBI and CIA) are not off the hook. CNN had published a story, July of 2016, talking about the FBI’s rules allowing them to spy on journalists in order to determine their contacts. Of course, these journalists are only targeted if they release information that is deemed classified [6]. Overall, I would say that Trump’s allegation regarding possible wire-tapping is very tangible. The intelligence community has proved numerous times that they will spy on certain people and lie to the public when accused of spying on certain people.
Fair Criticism: Russia had little impact on the 2016 election
The Trump presidency was known for many things. Among those things were daily bombshell revelations. For instance, New York Times released an article with the title “The Fake Americans Russia Created To Influence The Election”. Most of the article proceeds to talk about Russia creating bots on both Facebook and Twitter, the amount of money, $100,000, spent on Facebook ads, and their suspicion that Russia hacked the DNC simply because the intelligence community blamed Russia for it [7]. Twitter followed suit by notifying everyone that they had sold $270,000 of ads to accounts associated with Russia Today [8]. Even though it may sound like a threat to Democracy, $370,000 in ads is merely a drop of water in a bucket when compared to the advertisement spending of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Vox had found that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spent $81 million on advertisements across all social media platforms [9]. Blaming Russians for being behind Anti-Clinton/Pro-Trump content had a certain backlash too. Twitter would go on to create algorithms to search for accounts that were likely to be associated with Russia. In the process of looking for these accounts, Americans would be caught in the crossfire [10]. Jack Dorsey had admitted that the algorithms was not always impartial stating that more than 600,000 accounts, including some members of congress, had reduced visibility because the algorithm categorized these accounts as “Russian bots” [11].
We must keep in mind that Russians wasn’t blamed for just efforts on social media. Russians were blamed for a hacking campaign against the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Some sources that I can easily point to is the Republican-led investigation which concluded Russia hacked the DNC and Mueller's investigation in which it was concluded Russia hacked the DNC. Despite that, there are still allegations that the hack was actually a leak. Of course, we can easily verify that the family involved denies any such conduct. The family makes sure to call these allegations as baseless and lies [12]. If you read the interview from which NPR conducted (source 12), you will notice a particular part about Ed Butowsky hiring a Fox News commentator as a source for his private investigation. Rumors would believe that this commentator is Ellen Ratner [13]. It would seem that the NPR article makes it seem like Ed Butowsky and Ellen Ratner were merely pulling their entire narrative out of thin air. The Lawyer, Ty Clevanger, noted that Ellen Ratner met with Julian Assange and fed Ed Butowsky information that a leak did occur. Sometime in December, Ed Butowsky notified the family involved. The father claimed to already know of the involvement, but only wanted to know the killer. The Family didn’t want to go public with true information based upon fear of public scorn for electing Trump [14]. Now, it should be noted that Ty Clevanger did make at least one mistake in his blog. He make a correction stating that the brother was never talked about [15].
Providing Ty Clevanger is telling the truth, this would mean Russia was not in coordination with Wikileaks. It would effectively mean Russia likely didn’t attempt to hack the DNC either. Of course, I don’t expect that Ty Clevanger will be met with open arms. Most credible outlets will likely dismiss his claims as lies.
