(no subject)
May. 9th, 2019 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThoughts on the Mueller Report, after having spent long chunks of the last two weekends reading it end to end:
It seems extremely clear after reading that Russia's intelligence services specifically targeted our elections with criminal actions designed to damage the American electoral system. Mueller describes two connected but separate operations- one was a massive Russian trollfarm ginning up support for Trump on twitter/facebook/etc... The other was an effort to hack the DNC, DCCC, and Clinton Campaign servers to retrieve documents that could be used to embarrass Clinton.
Ancillary members of the Trump campaign may have known about these efforts, but it does not appear that the main players did. The investigation reveals reactions of campaign staff consistent with them not knowing anything about the Russian operational planning. That said, it also reveals that some members of Trump's campaign staff were incredibly stupid and greedy. The legendary June 9th meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. skates dangerously close to soliciting an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign government entity, and the only thing that saved him from prosecution was that the Russian government lawyer he met with didn't actually give them any of the material he was looking for, and Mueller didn't know whether he could prove the law's intent requirement that DJT Jr. knew that what he was doing was soliciting an illegal campaign contribution. And meanwhile Paul Manafort seems to have been selling himself to various Ukrainian oligarchs as a potential ally in a Russian takeover of Eastern Ukraine, not to win the election but so that once the election was over, he'd be positioned for personal gain. Shockingly stupid and greedy.
As to the Russian efforts themselves, I personally find it hard to know what to think about them. Like, the Russian trollfarm is clearly against US law, but that's not necessarily always a signifier that something is morally wrong, right? The law it violates is a law that bans foreign agents from spending money campaigning for US political candidates. In other words, they did things that are perfectly legal for Americans to do, and the only thing criminal about it is that they were not Americans. And looking at what ISP did, there isn't a lot qualitatively different between the Russian trollfarm and various efforts by US corporations to sell us things online. Political advertising and commercial advertising work on the same principles and in some cases at the same scales. Some people think that any advertising like this is immoral. The most convincing version of the argument, in my opinion, goes something like this: Human brain chemistry is sufficiently deterministic, and recent social science research is sufficiently sophisticated about understanding ways to exploit it, that using these exploits against us is able to manipulate group opinions extremely effectively. If you spend enough money in the right ways, you have access to cheap, large scale mind control and that should be controlled. [The most convincing counterargument, it seems to me, is: But Replication Crisis! ]. If you accept this argument, fine, but then trying to regulate it runs into both difficulties of values and difficulties of pragmatism. First of all, how do you regulate something that so slipperily and immediately involves our basic rights to free speech in a Democracy? What kinds of laws can you make banning types of political or commercial advertising speech without massively overstepping into regulation of essential online communication? The basic pragmatic stickiness of the Russian trollfarms is that their actions looked exactly the same as those of unpaid, feral, homegrown American trolls. The basic values stickiness is that regulating corporate free speech inevitably tends to implicate regulating the free speech of the individuals who comprise the corporation.
And even if we accept some version of a principle that sufficient interference-by-malicious-speech in a US election funded by a foreign government is bad, there's also some insufficient interference that isn't problematic. For example, imagine if Vladimir Putin had gone on Russian television and announced that he preferred it if Donald Trump became President. Potentially a bad diplomatic decision on his part, but there's nothing criminal about it, and nothing morally problematic about it.
Or imagine a version of this story where Bill Gates was the one funding ISP rather than an agent of Vladimir Putin. Is that story any better for our democracy? No. It would be literally the exact same scenario in just about every way that matters. But would it have involved any crimes? Probably not, though there are some disclosure laws that might or might not be involved in that determination. Also, it seems possible that our national intelligence services attempt to interfere in Russian elections in similar ways to what ISP did, and personally, if I found out that they had, I'd only be angry that they got caught.
Therefore, you can imagine a version of this story where a Presidential candidate was told after the fact that Russian intelligence had spent a considerable amount of money trying to indirectly influence the US election by means of data-driven political campaigning on their behalf, and the Presidential candidate thought seriously about the issues involved and concluded it wasn't that big a deal, or if it was, it wasn't a problem they could address. I think that could potentially be a reasonable response. That's not what happened here, Trump is fundamentally not a serious thinker, and it seems that his basic impulses are corrupt, but it makes it hard to me to sort my own feelings about the criminality of the Russian contacts with the Trump campaign.
The hacking part is more significant on its own, because it doesn't implicate our First Amendment values in the same way, and it involves the theft and release of valuable information in order to damage the Clinton campaign and interfere in American politics. If Americans had done it, it would still be a crime. That's just straightforward spycraft, and it's bad and it would be incredibly troubling if anyone of the Trump campaign were involved in any way in soliciting or using that stolen information. That said, the Mueller investigation found no evidence of involvement, and only circumstantial evidence of mostly unsuccessful efforts by the Trump campaign to exploit the stolen information. So all we're left with is the unsatisfying reality that the Russian government successfully, criminally interfered with out election in a reasonably significant way. Is this the reason Trump is president now? It could be. He only won some of the key battleground states by tiny margins, conceivably people were influenced by some of the Podesta emails, we'll never know for sure.
Thus, there's no question that things were done involving the election and Russian intelligence that were criminal. Much of Mueller's sources for this are redacted because presumably US counterintelligence determined the truth of this statement using methods that they don't want disclosed publicly, but Mueller seems extremely confident of this fact. And this provides to one of the most important lead-ins to Volume II. There was a legitimate investigation being conducted, first by the FBI and later by the Special Counsel, into the interference of Russian intelligence in the US election, and many of Donald Trump's actions seemed designed to interfere and obstruct that legitimate investigation. Some people have the sense that obstruction of justice only applies if you obstruct an investigation into yourself, but this is plainly not the case, both as a matter of law and a matter of moral intuition. If you interfere with a criminal investigation in a way that benefits a friend or political ally, you are just as culpable as if you interfere to benefit yourself.
That said, there is some trickiness here because there's no obstruction if Trump is doing it for legitimate governance reasons. And I think you can at least attempt the argument that if Trump believed that the Russia investigation as it was being run was interfering with his ability to handle sensitive negotiations with Russia, he is within his rights, noncorruptly, as President to interfere with the investigation to make sure that he can fulfill his constitutional role in dealing with foreign powers. But Mueller spends a lot of time presenting evidence that this was not the only reason Trump was interfering with the investigation, and that Trump's other reasons were personal and arguably corrupt.
Yet the Mueller account of Trump's obstruction is in some ways oddly comforting. Trump is presented as a lawless egomaniac with a deep comfort with the techniques one uses to skate on the edge of legality and deniability for whatever personal advantage it may produce, and yet he was apparently surrounded by people who valued the institutions of American democracy more than he did. Repeatedly, Trump tried to interfere with Mueller's investigation and repeatedly his advisers prevented him from succeeding, in some cases by threatening to resign or by ignoring his instructions and hoping he'd change his mind. If anything makes saying that Trump obstructed the investigation difficult, it's not Trump's plain intent to obstruct, it's his lack of success.
There's a scene from the report of an encounter between White House Counsel Donald McGahn and Trump, as well as the White House Chief of Staff. Trump had previously pressured McGahn to go to see Attorney General Sessions and pressure him to unrecuse himself from the investigation, presumably because Trump believed that a Sessions-managed investigation would be more favorable to him, or that Sessions would be more vulnerable to future pressure from Trump to manage the investigation more favorably to him. Upon being questioned by the Special Counsel, McGahn had testified about this conversation with Trump. Word had gotten back to Trump about this testimony, so Trump sought to pressure McGahn to backtrack from this testimony and to create a (false) written record that Trump had not told McGahn to threaten to fire the Attorney General.
McGahn then turned around and testified to the Special Counsel about this new conversation. "Did I say the word fire?" Trump asked, as if illegality is about the use of magic words. Repeatedly, Trump pressed McGahn to act like, since Trump hadn't used the magic words, they should both pretend that they didn't understand the clear subtext of the first conversation. McGahn refused. As a believer in the importance of the Deep State, I find this incredibly heroic.
I talk about the Deep State a bunch. It's probably worth explaining how I understand the concept, because I am being somewhat ironic and irony confuses goyim.
The idea of the Deep State is a largely anti-semitic conspiracy theory that the secret masters of the universe have installed agents in the government who make sure the government does what they want it to do. Voting, therefore, doesn't matter. Whoever you vote for, Republican or Democrat, the primary interest of the Deep State in perpetuating itself and preserving the Jewish-led Ruling Class. And if by luck a Republican or Democrat who isn't beholden to the Deep State is elected, they will be thwarted at all stages by the agents of the Deep State.
I do not believe in this version of the Deep State. But I do believe strongly in the Burkean ideal of institutions resistant to radical change in any direction, and when I winkingly praise the Deep State, that's what I am talking about. The US government is a massive civil service bureaucracy with powerfully established norms of operation, and it has defense mechanisms against challenges to those norms. If you have a conspiratorial mindset, or if you are yourself advocating for any kind of radical change to the American system, that can look like the conspiracy idea of a 'Deep State', but these defense mechanisms are important. They're the difference between a stable democracy and a chaotic one with a tendency to devolve into autocracy. America as an imperfect but perfectible union depends on the inertia of its governing bodies.
The Mueller Report is a narrative of the battle that the civil service has been waging against Donald Trump, because Donald Trump has been trying to operate against the norms of the American government. And my long-held suspicion is that he filled his cabinet with people who also were trying to operate against those norms. But the Mueller Report suggests this has not been the case, that even people like Corey Lewandowski and Steve Bannon were much more reluctant to violate the norms of the American government than Trump was. I find this comforting.
In any case, how should we respond to the Mueller Report? I think the subtext is pretty clear in the concluding passages that Mueller would have prosecuted Trump for obstruction if not for the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel rule against prosecuting a sitting president. Of course, not prosecuting people who commit criminal behavior is bad, broadly speaking, for institutional stability and public confidence, so as long as Trump stands unpunished it inherently weakens our democracy and encourages future corrupt behavior. Conceivably the DOJ waits until he leaves office and then prosecutes him, but that seems like institutionally bad practice in so many ways. Ideally the House of Representatives holds impeachment hearings, the evidence is litigated in public view, and the representatives of the American people decide what they make of the evidence. But I don't think removal from office is a likely end result. Censuring the president and moving on seems like it's probably the institutionally safest approach, in my conservative opinion.
It seems extremely clear after reading that Russia's intelligence services specifically targeted our elections with criminal actions designed to damage the American electoral system. Mueller describes two connected but separate operations- one was a massive Russian trollfarm ginning up support for Trump on twitter/facebook/etc... The other was an effort to hack the DNC, DCCC, and Clinton Campaign servers to retrieve documents that could be used to embarrass Clinton.
Ancillary members of the Trump campaign may have known about these efforts, but it does not appear that the main players did. The investigation reveals reactions of campaign staff consistent with them not knowing anything about the Russian operational planning. That said, it also reveals that some members of Trump's campaign staff were incredibly stupid and greedy. The legendary June 9th meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. skates dangerously close to soliciting an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign government entity, and the only thing that saved him from prosecution was that the Russian government lawyer he met with didn't actually give them any of the material he was looking for, and Mueller didn't know whether he could prove the law's intent requirement that DJT Jr. knew that what he was doing was soliciting an illegal campaign contribution. And meanwhile Paul Manafort seems to have been selling himself to various Ukrainian oligarchs as a potential ally in a Russian takeover of Eastern Ukraine, not to win the election but so that once the election was over, he'd be positioned for personal gain. Shockingly stupid and greedy.
As to the Russian efforts themselves, I personally find it hard to know what to think about them. Like, the Russian trollfarm is clearly against US law, but that's not necessarily always a signifier that something is morally wrong, right? The law it violates is a law that bans foreign agents from spending money campaigning for US political candidates. In other words, they did things that are perfectly legal for Americans to do, and the only thing criminal about it is that they were not Americans. And looking at what ISP did, there isn't a lot qualitatively different between the Russian trollfarm and various efforts by US corporations to sell us things online. Political advertising and commercial advertising work on the same principles and in some cases at the same scales. Some people think that any advertising like this is immoral. The most convincing version of the argument, in my opinion, goes something like this: Human brain chemistry is sufficiently deterministic, and recent social science research is sufficiently sophisticated about understanding ways to exploit it, that using these exploits against us is able to manipulate group opinions extremely effectively. If you spend enough money in the right ways, you have access to cheap, large scale mind control and that should be controlled. [The most convincing counterargument, it seems to me, is: But Replication Crisis! ]. If you accept this argument, fine, but then trying to regulate it runs into both difficulties of values and difficulties of pragmatism. First of all, how do you regulate something that so slipperily and immediately involves our basic rights to free speech in a Democracy? What kinds of laws can you make banning types of political or commercial advertising speech without massively overstepping into regulation of essential online communication? The basic pragmatic stickiness of the Russian trollfarms is that their actions looked exactly the same as those of unpaid, feral, homegrown American trolls. The basic values stickiness is that regulating corporate free speech inevitably tends to implicate regulating the free speech of the individuals who comprise the corporation.
And even if we accept some version of a principle that sufficient interference-by-malicious-speech in a US election funded by a foreign government is bad, there's also some insufficient interference that isn't problematic. For example, imagine if Vladimir Putin had gone on Russian television and announced that he preferred it if Donald Trump became President. Potentially a bad diplomatic decision on his part, but there's nothing criminal about it, and nothing morally problematic about it.
Or imagine a version of this story where Bill Gates was the one funding ISP rather than an agent of Vladimir Putin. Is that story any better for our democracy? No. It would be literally the exact same scenario in just about every way that matters. But would it have involved any crimes? Probably not, though there are some disclosure laws that might or might not be involved in that determination. Also, it seems possible that our national intelligence services attempt to interfere in Russian elections in similar ways to what ISP did, and personally, if I found out that they had, I'd only be angry that they got caught.
Therefore, you can imagine a version of this story where a Presidential candidate was told after the fact that Russian intelligence had spent a considerable amount of money trying to indirectly influence the US election by means of data-driven political campaigning on their behalf, and the Presidential candidate thought seriously about the issues involved and concluded it wasn't that big a deal, or if it was, it wasn't a problem they could address. I think that could potentially be a reasonable response. That's not what happened here, Trump is fundamentally not a serious thinker, and it seems that his basic impulses are corrupt, but it makes it hard to me to sort my own feelings about the criminality of the Russian contacts with the Trump campaign.
The hacking part is more significant on its own, because it doesn't implicate our First Amendment values in the same way, and it involves the theft and release of valuable information in order to damage the Clinton campaign and interfere in American politics. If Americans had done it, it would still be a crime. That's just straightforward spycraft, and it's bad and it would be incredibly troubling if anyone of the Trump campaign were involved in any way in soliciting or using that stolen information. That said, the Mueller investigation found no evidence of involvement, and only circumstantial evidence of mostly unsuccessful efforts by the Trump campaign to exploit the stolen information. So all we're left with is the unsatisfying reality that the Russian government successfully, criminally interfered with out election in a reasonably significant way. Is this the reason Trump is president now? It could be. He only won some of the key battleground states by tiny margins, conceivably people were influenced by some of the Podesta emails, we'll never know for sure.
Thus, there's no question that things were done involving the election and Russian intelligence that were criminal. Much of Mueller's sources for this are redacted because presumably US counterintelligence determined the truth of this statement using methods that they don't want disclosed publicly, but Mueller seems extremely confident of this fact. And this provides to one of the most important lead-ins to Volume II. There was a legitimate investigation being conducted, first by the FBI and later by the Special Counsel, into the interference of Russian intelligence in the US election, and many of Donald Trump's actions seemed designed to interfere and obstruct that legitimate investigation. Some people have the sense that obstruction of justice only applies if you obstruct an investigation into yourself, but this is plainly not the case, both as a matter of law and a matter of moral intuition. If you interfere with a criminal investigation in a way that benefits a friend or political ally, you are just as culpable as if you interfere to benefit yourself.
That said, there is some trickiness here because there's no obstruction if Trump is doing it for legitimate governance reasons. And I think you can at least attempt the argument that if Trump believed that the Russia investigation as it was being run was interfering with his ability to handle sensitive negotiations with Russia, he is within his rights, noncorruptly, as President to interfere with the investigation to make sure that he can fulfill his constitutional role in dealing with foreign powers. But Mueller spends a lot of time presenting evidence that this was not the only reason Trump was interfering with the investigation, and that Trump's other reasons were personal and arguably corrupt.
Yet the Mueller account of Trump's obstruction is in some ways oddly comforting. Trump is presented as a lawless egomaniac with a deep comfort with the techniques one uses to skate on the edge of legality and deniability for whatever personal advantage it may produce, and yet he was apparently surrounded by people who valued the institutions of American democracy more than he did. Repeatedly, Trump tried to interfere with Mueller's investigation and repeatedly his advisers prevented him from succeeding, in some cases by threatening to resign or by ignoring his instructions and hoping he'd change his mind. If anything makes saying that Trump obstructed the investigation difficult, it's not Trump's plain intent to obstruct, it's his lack of success.
There's a scene from the report of an encounter between White House Counsel Donald McGahn and Trump, as well as the White House Chief of Staff. Trump had previously pressured McGahn to go to see Attorney General Sessions and pressure him to unrecuse himself from the investigation, presumably because Trump believed that a Sessions-managed investigation would be more favorable to him, or that Sessions would be more vulnerable to future pressure from Trump to manage the investigation more favorably to him. Upon being questioned by the Special Counsel, McGahn had testified about this conversation with Trump. Word had gotten back to Trump about this testimony, so Trump sought to pressure McGahn to backtrack from this testimony and to create a (false) written record that Trump had not told McGahn to threaten to fire the Attorney General.
McGahn then turned around and testified to the Special Counsel about this new conversation. "Did I say the word fire?" Trump asked, as if illegality is about the use of magic words. Repeatedly, Trump pressed McGahn to act like, since Trump hadn't used the magic words, they should both pretend that they didn't understand the clear subtext of the first conversation. McGahn refused. As a believer in the importance of the Deep State, I find this incredibly heroic.
I talk about the Deep State a bunch. It's probably worth explaining how I understand the concept, because I am being somewhat ironic and irony confuses goyim.
The idea of the Deep State is a largely anti-semitic conspiracy theory that the secret masters of the universe have installed agents in the government who make sure the government does what they want it to do. Voting, therefore, doesn't matter. Whoever you vote for, Republican or Democrat, the primary interest of the Deep State in perpetuating itself and preserving the Jewish-led Ruling Class. And if by luck a Republican or Democrat who isn't beholden to the Deep State is elected, they will be thwarted at all stages by the agents of the Deep State.
I do not believe in this version of the Deep State. But I do believe strongly in the Burkean ideal of institutions resistant to radical change in any direction, and when I winkingly praise the Deep State, that's what I am talking about. The US government is a massive civil service bureaucracy with powerfully established norms of operation, and it has defense mechanisms against challenges to those norms. If you have a conspiratorial mindset, or if you are yourself advocating for any kind of radical change to the American system, that can look like the conspiracy idea of a 'Deep State', but these defense mechanisms are important. They're the difference between a stable democracy and a chaotic one with a tendency to devolve into autocracy. America as an imperfect but perfectible union depends on the inertia of its governing bodies.
The Mueller Report is a narrative of the battle that the civil service has been waging against Donald Trump, because Donald Trump has been trying to operate against the norms of the American government. And my long-held suspicion is that he filled his cabinet with people who also were trying to operate against those norms. But the Mueller Report suggests this has not been the case, that even people like Corey Lewandowski and Steve Bannon were much more reluctant to violate the norms of the American government than Trump was. I find this comforting.
In any case, how should we respond to the Mueller Report? I think the subtext is pretty clear in the concluding passages that Mueller would have prosecuted Trump for obstruction if not for the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel rule against prosecuting a sitting president. Of course, not prosecuting people who commit criminal behavior is bad, broadly speaking, for institutional stability and public confidence, so as long as Trump stands unpunished it inherently weakens our democracy and encourages future corrupt behavior. Conceivably the DOJ waits until he leaves office and then prosecutes him, but that seems like institutionally bad practice in so many ways. Ideally the House of Representatives holds impeachment hearings, the evidence is litigated in public view, and the representatives of the American people decide what they make of the evidence. But I don't think removal from office is a likely end result. Censuring the president and moving on seems like it's probably the institutionally safest approach, in my conservative opinion.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-09 09:38 pm (UTC)