The real scandal involves the Russian hacking operation against the Democratic National Committee. This was a genuine crime, a meaningful theft, which led to a series of leaks that were touted by the Republican nominee for president often enough that we can assume that Donald Trump, at least, thought they contributed something to his victory. The fact that members of his family and inner circle were willing and eager to meet with Russians promising hacked emails, the pattern of lies and obfuscation from the president and his team thereafter, and the general miasma of Russian corruption hanging around Trump campaign staff — all of this more than justifies Robert Mueller’s investigation, and depending on what his team ultimately reports it might even justify impeachment.
.. the broader ambition of widening our internal fissures, inflaming our debates, making our imperium more ungovernable at home and thus weaker on the global stage.
.. Such conduct is certainly worthy of indictment, legal and rhetorical. What it is not worth is paranoia and hysteria, analogies to Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks, and an “America under attack”/“hacking our democracy” panic that give the Russian trolls far too much credit for cleverness and influence and practical success... Because on the evidence we have, nothing they did particularly mattered. The D.N.C. hack was genuinely important because it involved a real theft and introduced a variable into the campaign that would not otherwise have been present. But the rest of the Russian effort did not introduce anything to the American system.. The protests and counterprotests they ginned up after the election were marginal imitations of the all-American crowds that showed up for Trump rallies and later for the Women’s Marches... on the evidence we have most fake news is political pornography for hyperpartisans — toxic in its own way, deserving of concern, but something driven more by panting, already polarized demand.. the people obsessing about how Russian influence is supposedly driving polarization and mistrust risk becoming like J. Edgar Hoover-era G-men convinced that Communist subversives were the root cause of civil rights era protest and unrest... the proper question should still be: How was it that close to begin with?.. Should this re-emergent nationalism be conciliated and co-opted, its economic grievances answered and some compromises made to address its cultural and moral claims?Or is it sufficiently noxious and racist and destructive that it can be only crushed, through gradual demographic weight or ruthless polarized mobilization?
.. it does us no good to pretend the real blow came from outside our borders, when it was clearly a uniquely hot moment in our own cold civil war.
President Trump, if You’re Innocent, Why Act So Guilty?
4. Trump picked people with ties to Russia. He named as a foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who was investigated by the F.B.I. as far back as 2013 for possible ties to Russian intelligence
To run his campaign, Trump selected Paul Manafort, who had long experience working for Russian interests and once wrote a memo offering a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin Government.”
Trump’s aides also tweaked the Republican Party platform in a way that would please Moscow.
6. Trump aides secretly met with Russians. In June 2016, Russia offered the Trump campaign “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.” Instead of calling the F.B.I., Donald Trump Jr. responded, “I love it,”
.. 7. A Trump ally secretly communicated with a Russian mouthpiece. In August 2016, Trump ally Roger Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0, believed to be an outlet for Russian military intelligence. Separately, Stone tweeted that “it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in a barrel”; seven weeks later, WikiLeaks began releasing emails Russia had hacked from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.
.. 8. … more secret contacts. WikiLeaks, presumably representing Russian interests, engaged in secret correspondence with Donald Trump Jr.
.. 9. Kushner met a Putin ally. Jared Kushner met in December 2016 with a Russian, Sergey Gorkov, who is close to Putin. Kushner also privately asked the Russians about using Russian equipment to establish a secret communications channel to the Kremlin.
.. 10. Trump aides falsely denied contacts. Campaign officials denied innumerable times that there had been any contact with Russia. “Of course not,” said Mike Pence shortly before the inauguration. “Why would there be any contacts?”
.. 11. Russia is still at it. Russian bots are joining Trump supporters in tweeting hashtags like #MAGA and #FullOfSchiff. These same Russian bots are promoting Fox News links that disparage the Russia investigation.
.. 12. This is not normal!
Actually, I doubt that there was anything so straightforward as a secret quid pro quo. Indeed, some of these links are so blatant that they seem confusingly exculpatory: Why would anybody conspiring with Putin raise suspicions by publicly praising him?
.. Frankly, it’s suspicious that Trump is throwing up so much dust and trying so hard to delegitimize the investigation.
He is not acting innocent.☐
The G.O.P.’s Bonfire of the Sanities
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Or, for that matter, the very idea that the F.B.I. is dedicated to destroying the Trump presidency. Recall this is the same bureau that, wittingly or not, probably did more than any other arm of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled F.B.I. field agents were intent on forcing James Comey to reopen the Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election.
.. None of this would have surprised Hofstadter, whose essay traces the history of American paranoia from the Bavarian Illuminati and the Masons to New Dealers and Communists in the State Department. “I call it the paranoid style,” Hofstadter wrote, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” What better way to describe a Republican Party that thinks America has more to fear from a third-tier F.B.I. agent in Washington who doesn’t like the president than it does from a first-tier K.G.B. agent in Moscow who, for a time at least, liked the president all too well?
.. The paranoid style, he noted, was typically a function of powerlessness. “Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.”
.. Today, Republicans control every branch of government, and nearly every aspect of the Russia investigation. Robert Mueller, a Republican, was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, another Republican, and a Trump appointee. Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, supposedly accuses the F.B.I. of anti-Trump perfidies in a secret four-page memo, but he won’t share the memo with the director of the F.B.I. — who’s also a Trump appointee.
.. The principal lesson of paranoia is the ease with which politically aroused people can mistake errors for deceptions, coincidences for patterns, bumbling for dereliction, and secrecy for treachery.
.. The failure to know the difference, combined with the desire for a particular result, is what accounts for the paranoid style.
.. America already has one party that’s lost its mind. We don’t need another.
Fighting Fake News Is Not the Solution
One is a large study of the reach and impact of fake news; the other is opinion-poll data on the tax-reform bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in December. Together, they burst the two-bubble theory by showing that most Americans are better informed and less gullible than you might think. That, in turn, suggests that fighting “fake news” is not the solution, or perhaps even a solution, to our current political problems.
.. The economists’ study suggested that every American adult had been exposed to at least one fake news story in the leadup to the 2016 election, but relatively few people—roughly eight per cent—actually believed them.
.. About ten per cent of news consumers sought out more fake news, and they read an average of 33.16 fake stories, according to the political scientists.
.. rather than two bubbles, there was one, positioned far to the right of the political spectrum. A majority of Americans, the study showed, get their news from a variety of different media. They are routinely exposed to opinions they don’t share; they do not live in an echo chamber.
.. “Not only was consumption of fact-checks concentrated among non-fake news consumers,” the authors wrote, “but we almost never observe respondents reading a fact-check of a specific claim in a fake news article that they read.”
.. language had a way of migrating from Breitbart into the mainstream media.
.. The authors identified the two topics that dominated false conspiratorial narratives—Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the threat posed by immigration—and traced the mainstream media’s disproportionate focus on these topics to the fake-news sites’ obsession with them.
.. ineffectual fact-checking pieces might have been a primary vehicle of that migration—such as, for example, when the Post fact-checked Trump’s claim, made in an interview with the conspiracy-theory purveyor Sean Hannity, that Clinton’s e-mails caused the death of an Iranian defector.
.. Opinion data on Trumpian tax reform is real-life proof that most Americans share a fact-based view of reality.