I really enjoy writing about politics in Jefferson County. The opportunity to learn and better connect with the people and issues that matter to us is deeply appreciated and I have mostly resisted the urge to write about national politics. But after a quarter century working in Washington, DC, I have failed to fully escape the gravitational pull of the nation’s capital.
President Trump made some ham-fisted remarks during his visit to Helsinki, Finland to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He squandered a valuable opportunity to call Putin to account for myriad provocations in Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
Trump’s handling of the issue of Russian attempts to sway the 2016 election was inexcusable and represents the low point of his administration to date. But the comparisons of his faux pas to Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, and treason are no less a nadir for the president’s opponents who are grossly overplaying their hand. This was the greatest missed opportunity in Helsinki.
Suppose for the sake of argument that the dozen Russian operatives indicted earlier this month for a variety of misdeeds during the 2016 election cycle are guilty. These guys went to a lot of trouble to impact the election results. They set up their operations, cloaked their identities and hacked their way into the servers of the Democratic National Committee and others. They stole a lot of information and promoted a lot of propaganda.
After all that, Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced on July 13 that there is no evidence that Russian mischief resulted in tampering with any votes or vote counts. None. There is no evidence of these Russians working with any Americans in this enterprise. None.
We know who failed to pull it off, we know how they tried and failed to do it, we know it failed to alter a single vote, and we know it failed to enmesh any Americans. This Russian caper was a goat rope of galactic proportions. Not only did it fail in every respect but US intelligence learned a lot about Russian operatives, their methods and their techniques, facts which are absolutely vital in detecting and preventing future meddling.
This is what President Trump should have said in Helsinki, or at least an abbreviated version of it. I do not work for the man anymore so I have the luxury of kibitzing from the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula.
Rosenstein’s conclusions also support the more intuitive notion that nothing could have possibly interfered with vote tallies in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin. These four states voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008, but were lost by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and their combined 64 Electoral Votes put Trump over the top. Nobody with an IQ exceeding room temperature can believe Russian spies were busy faking vote tallies in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, or Green Bay.
So why are we wrapped around the axle of “Russian Meddling”? The alarm expressed by the media and others reflects something between callow naïveté and indefensible ignorance. This isn’t news as much as it’s history. Russian meddling two years ago was no more successful than previous efforts.
Soviet agents offered to fund the campaign of Hubert Humphrey in his race against anti-Soviet hardliner Richard Nixon in the 1968 election. Humphrey declined the offer just as the Trump campaign declined overtures from Russia.
Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev was a big fan of Adlai Stevenson and offered to support Stevenson should he decide to run for president in 1960, the offer being made through the Soviet ambassador to the United States. Stevenson thanked Khrushchev for the offer and then declined it, just as Trump rebuffed the Russians.
Washington state’s own Henry M. Jackson was targeted by Russian operatives who feared his anti-Soviet policies. In an effort to help Jimmy Carter win the Democrat nomination in 1976, Soviet operatives orchestrated a smear campaign against Jackson, forging documents suggesting he was a closeted homosexual. The documents were provided to certain media and the Carter campaign, but whether this doomed Jackson’s bid we’ll never know.
Add to these episodes the uncounted efforts of Soviet and Marxist-backed political groups operating within the United States and what emerges is a history of Soviet-Russian meddling spanning more than a century. It’s what these guys do, every four years.
Most of the important questions about Russia’s fooling around in the 2016 election have been answered but there are still a few unknowns, one of which is why then-President Barack Obama ordered the cyber-warriors of his National Security Council to stand down when they knew about Russian meddling in the summer of 2016. Russia’s efforts could have been stopped then and there but Obama decided against doing so.
If anybody thinks this is being seriously investigated, I have some oceanfront property in Arizona I’d like to sell you.
Scott Hogenson
Scott Hogenson is a prize-winning journalist who has been a member of the academic staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he lectured in the School of Journalism and served as managing editor for the Wisconsin Public Radio News Network. Scott has also been a contributing editor for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., a broadcast editor for United Press International, and a news director for radio stations in Virginia and Texas.
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