Tag Archives: Benjamin Wittes

Democracy, Republicans

Release of v. 5 of the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is a man bites dog story

The Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released what is probably its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which goes beyond what we learned from the Mueller report. The 966-page fifth volume provides more details and establishes more conclusively that Trump’s claim — “It’s all a hoax” — is a lie.

▪ “The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” (p. 5)

▪ “Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. . . . Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond.

Prior to joining the Trump Campaign in March 2016 and continuing throughout his time on the Campaign, Manafort directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik, Derispaska, and the pro-Russian oligarchs in Urkraine. On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.” (p. 6)

▪ “The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump because the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

[Redacted] WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence effort. The Committee found significant indications that [redacted] …

While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a russion election interference effort” (p. 7)

SSCI report on Russian interference in 2016 election, v. 5, p. vii.

Writing at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes suggests that, in their statement asserting that “the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election,” Senate Republicans on the committee have misrepresented the report they signed off on.

Wittes draws three conclusions from the report: First, the report’s findings validate and go further than the Mueller report. Second, the findings undercut Bill Barr’s efforts to portray the Russian investigation as illegitimate “spying” on the Trump campaign. And, finally [emphasis added]:

Third, while I have contempt for the rhetoric of these Republican senators and I find it almost mind-boggling to try to reconcile the text of this report with their votes in the impeachment only a few short months ago, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the public service they have done here. Yes, they are lying about having done it—pretending they found things other than what they found and did not find the things they actually found. And yes, they are almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found.

But unlike their counterparts in the House of Representatives, they allowed this investigation to take place. They ran a bipartisan, serious investigation. They worked with their Democratic colleagues to insulate it from an environment rife with pressures. And they produced a report that is a worthy contribution to our understanding of what happened four years ago.

This report may represent the most significant example of bipartisanship in American politics in 2020. It is an extraordinarily rare instance of senators working across the aisle on a fiercely partisan issue that has become nearly extinct.

In their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Documenting and illustrating the truth of that conclusion has been the most consistent theme of this blog. As someone who has followed politics since my teenage years in the mid-1960s, it has been fascinating and horrifying to see the Republican Party run itself off the rails. Bipartisanship, a collegial Senate, and even placing U.S. security interests above the Republican party line, are in the last stages of extinction.

Let’s acknowledge that we’re not quite there yet — not 100%.

(Although Marco Rubio now heads the panel, I suspect that we can attribute this milestone to the relationship between Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, and their respective authority as leaders to direct the work of the committee and to make decisions for their side of the party divide, for this success. Just like in the good ole days.)

Note however that this exception reveals the Republican Party’s comprehensive success in evading accountability and truth: Republican voters don’t trust the mainstream media, and will hear (if they hear anything at all of this report) only mischaracterizations on Fox New Channel and in other conservative media. So, the Republican senators who allowed the release of this report could rest assured that their false statement — which relies on “lying,” “pretending,” and “almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found” — will be taken at face value by Donald Trump and his base.

Republicans, in other words, will accept the fraudulent cover story as true. Should the actual substance of the report come to their attention, that will be rejected as “fake news.” In 2020, a singular gesture of bipartisanship doesn’t leave us much to celebrate.

(Image: screengrab of Reuters video.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Should Joe Biden and the Democrats welcome help from GOP Never Trumpers to defeat the President?

“It is possible for Biden to beat Trump without attracting many conservative votes. But it is not possible for him to win in a giant landslide without winning moderate conservative votes.” — Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes in “The Revenge of the Never Trumpers.”

That’s a Yes.

Moreover, a landslide will help deliver the Senate to Democrats — and the more victories in 2020, the more secure the Democratic majority will be after inevitable defeats in less favorable election cycles in the future.

A number of folks on the left side of the political spectrum have criticized the Lincoln Project and John Kasich’s prime time role at the Democratic convention. The most substantive objection is that, somehow, Republican Never Trumpers might gain undue influence over Joe Biden’s agenda, moving him toward a hawkish foreign policy, and away from health care expansion and increases in the corporate tax rate.

I don’t buy it. If a Biden win brings a new Democratic majority to the Senate, it will be the influence of conservative Democratic senators — not Republicans and former-Republicans who joined Democrats in opposing Trump — that shape the breadth and reach of his policy successes in 2021.

Besides — Biden hasn’t won the election. There are 98 days to go until November 3. A lot can happen — and will. Rejecting disaffected conservatives from a broad Biden coalition is foolish.

(Photograph: Voters in line to cast ballots in California’s March 2020 primary.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

Attorney General Barr’s disinformation campaign: the definitive assessment

Quote of the day from Benjamin Wittes, Editor in Chief of Lawfare, who reviews the Attorney General’s wrenching mischaracterizations to protect the President from March 24, when Barr sent his first letter to Congress, to yesterday’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Barr did not lie in any of these statements. He did not, as some people insist, commit perjury. I haven’t found a sentence he has written or said that cannot be defended as truthful on its own terms, if only in some literal sense. But it is possible to mislead without lying. One can be dishonest before Congress without perjury. And one can convey sweeping untruths without substantial factual misstatement. This is what Barr has been doing since that first letter. And it is utterly beneath the United States Department of Justice.

Wittes, who after initially granting Barr the benefit the doubt has concluded that his actions regarding the Mueller report have been catastrophic, analyzes “seven different layers of substantive misrepresentation, layers which build on one another into a dramatic rewriting of the president’s conduct—and of Mueller’s findings about the president’s conduct. It is worth unpacking and disentangling these misrepresentations, because each is mischievous on its own, but together they operate as a disinformation campaign being run by the senior leadership of the Justice Department.” (“The Catastrophic Performance of Bill Barr,” Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic, May 2, 2019)

Years ago I recall hearing an expression, which was attributed to the speaker’s mother: ‘You can tell a lie with what you say and you can tell a lie with what you don’t say.’ Bill Barr, clever lawyer and ruthless political operative, has mastered the latter technique (albeit not altogether convincingly). I regard Benjamin Wittes’ analysis (as of this morning) as the definite assessment of Barr’s disinformation methodology vis-à-vis the Mueller report. I highly recommend spending a few minutes to read it. A couple of brief quotations hardly do the essay justice.

I’ll offer one more quote, where Wittes offers a link to another assessment (also worth a read):

The dishonesty only begins with the laughably selective quotation of Mueller’s report in Barr’s original letter, the scope of which Charlie Savage laid out in a remarkable New York Times article shortly after the full report was released. I urge people to look at Savage’s side-by-side quotations. The distortion of Mueller’s meaning across a range of areas is not subtle, and it’s not hard to understand why Mueller himself wrote to Barr saying that the attorney general’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.”

(Image: Pinocchio via wikipedia.)