July 10

Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (2018)
By Michael Isikoff and David Corn

I have wondered: Why does Donald Trump so publicly praise Vladimir Putin? Why does he ignore Putin's human rights abuses, his takeover of Crimea, and his cyber attacks on our democracy?  Is it all about his wish to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, and his need to obtain Putin's blessing - or is it more than that?  A recent book examines connections between Putin and members of Trump's campaign.

One reason for Trump's admiration for Putin might be Putin's dislike of Hillary Clinton. During the 2011 Russian presidential election, voter fraud was rampant: stuffing of ballot boxes, observers harassed, their websites cyberattacked.   As US Secretary of State, Clinton noted these concerns at a meeting on Afghanistan held in Bonn shortly the Russian election.  Thus, when the Russian people protested the suspicious election results, Putin appeared to place the blame (and his hatred) upon Clinton.

Yet, Putin had clearly been on the attack - against both the US, and other democratic nations. In February 2013, the chief of staff of Russia's armed forces had published an article recommending Russia adapt its military strategies to the modern world - e.g., cyberattack.  One example that played out in 2008 was Russian operatives seeding bazaars where US soldiers shopped with thumb drives embedded with malware.  Once one soldier plugged the drive into a laptop hooked up the the US Central Command network, the Russians had access to US military battle plans.  Additionally, mysterious killings and poisonings of Russian nationals in other nations (Litvinenko in UK, Timoshenko in Ukraine, etc), as well as the more obvious arrests/deaths within Russia (e.g., Sergei Magnitsky in 2009), all pointed to Putin.

Back in the US, as the presidential conventions drew near, New York businessman Paul Manafort offered his services to Donald Trump, who made Manafort his campaign manager and chief strategist on May 19, 2016.  (Manafort had maintained a very lucrative lobbying business for the likes of such corrupt foreign leaders as Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Jonas Savimbi of Angola.  [Savimbi, for example, has been accused of recruiting child soldiers and raping and torturing civilians.]  Manafort had met with US congressional aides and convinced them that the accusations against these leaders were overblown and that they deserved US government support.  More relevant is the fact that Manafort had also earned millions of dollars working for a Ukrainian pro-Russian political party tied to Russian oligarchs, a fact he concealed.)

Just before the Democratic convention in 2016, WikiLeaks dumped damaging DNC emails showing favoritism to Clinton, enraging the Sanders campaign.  Evidence pointed to Russia (and hacker Guccifer 2.0) as providing the intelligence to gather the DNC emails.  Closer to the election in November, WikiLeaks dumped thousands of John Podesta's emails, while Russian trolls hacked Facebook and other social media with conservative pro-Trump propaganda. (The Trump campaign mined data from Cambridge analytics, owned by Republican financiers Robert and Rebekah Mercer.)

After a lengthy investigation, the US Intelligence Community report stated that "Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.  Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency", most likely because he blamed her for the 2011 Russian protests and begrudged comments she'd made about his years before.  The operation included cyberattacks, information dumps thru WikiLeaks, creation of phone online personas (e.g., Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks), use of state propaganda outlets, etc.

This book was written by two journalists and appears to be well-documented.  Perhaps we will have to await the results of the Mueller investigation to fully understand the connections (or not) between the White House and the Kremlin.  One thing is certain: our democracy, and our free elections have been attacked - and they are in danger.