The Obama-era intelligence community assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election contained a newly-declassified
claim that the Kremlin “historically” preferred Republican candidates
over Democratic ones — something belied by the actual historical record —
while a key architect of that assessment has made the questionable
contention that Russian actions that year were “unprecedented.”
These two claims seem to conflict with a lengthy Kremlin
record of aggressive active measures targeting numerous U.S. elections
over many decades, with the Kremlin typically, although not always,
seeking to harm Republicans, albeit with at least one instance of the
Kremlin trying to undercut a Democrat who was well known to be a Soviet
hawk.
Obama and Clapper assign the ICA report
The report on Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections
— written at the direction of President Barack Obama and largely
overseen by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
then-CIA Director John Brennan, and since-fired FBI Director James Comey
— was finished in December 2016, with a publicly declassified version released in early January 2017 and a more extensive classified version declassified and released last week.
The version of the ICA which had been highly classified but
which was released this July had a subheading stating that “Putin
Ordered Campaign To Influence U.S. Election.” Beneath that subheading,
the ICA contended
that “the Kremlin has historically preferred Republican over Democratic
candidates, judging that Republicans had been less focused on democracy
and human rights and were therefore easier to deal with.”
Intelligence experts with experience in Russia disagree. Dan Hoffman, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow, told Just the News
that “I never found that to be true at CIA. Not true. They hate all of
us — Republican and Democrat. … They are at war with us — at war with
democracy.”
Hoffman repeatedly suggested the claim in the ICA that the
Russians had a long history of preferring Republicans over Democrats was
baseless.
“During my time at CIA — never saw it, never said it.
During all my time briefing policymakers and Congress, it is not
something I would have ever said,” Hoffman told Just the News. “I’d like to know where they got that from.”
Biden NSC David Shimer, a leftwing scholar who ended up serving on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, and served as his Director for Russian Affairs, wrote a 2020 book, Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference,
which pushed the idea that the Russians had interfered in the 2016
election to help Trump and criticized Trump’s denials over it. The book
also laid out multiple examples of the Kremlin seeking to get Democratic
presidential candidates elected in the past.
“There’s a misperception today that foreign electoral
interference is somehow a political issue — that if you say election
security matters, then you’re a partisan Democrat. History shows that
that is just not so,” Shimer told Yale News.
“During the Cold War, as I detail in my book, the Soviets sought to
destroy the candidacies of Richard Nixon, a Republican, and of Ronald
Reagan, a Republican.”
History shows Russians did not favor one party over another
Shimer, contradicting the assessment touted by Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton, told NPR
that "history clarifies that the threat of foreign electoral
interference is a threat to our nation, not any one political party” and
that “the Soviet Union worked on several occasions to tarnish the
campaigns of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Republicans, long before
Russia worked to help a Republican.”
“The KGB interfered in our 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1984 elections, Shimer told the Intelligence Matters
podcast. “Russia interfered in our 2016 elections. This is a long
running story and that story will continue regardless of whether Donald
Trump is active in American politics.”
There is strong evidence that Democrat-turned-Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace actually colluded with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during the 1948 presidential election.
There is a lengthy record of the Soviets attempting to help Democrats or undercut Republicans, including offering support
to failed Democratic Party nominee Adlai Stevenson as part of their
efforts to oppose Republican Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960; denigrating Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in his race against Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964; proposing financial assistance
to Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey in his race against Nixon in
1968; and attempting active measures against Republican Ronald Reagan
during his unsuccessful primary run in 1976 and his successful reelection in 1984.
The Kremlin also targeted Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson — a vocal critic of the Soviet Union — in his unsuccessful presidential primary run.
The two U.S. presidential races immediately preceding 2016
(the ones in 2008 and 2012) also featured strong Russia hawks in
then-Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Gov. and future Sen. Mitt Romney — and no public evidence has ever emerged that Putin wanted these strong critics of his to win either race.
The gang behind Russiagate faces law enforcement investigation
The notoriously false ICA put together by Clapper, Brennan,
and Comey — at the direction of Obama and relied upon by legacy media
and anti-Trump voters— has come under extreme scrutiny in recent days.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe sent a criminal referral on Brennan to the FBI following a CIA lessons-learned review
on the ICA earlier this month. The CIA review alleged the ICA had made
use of information found in British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s
discredited anti-Trump dossier. Ratcliffe tweeted that “the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process.”
DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified a host of previously-secret information about the ICA, including evidence
that the dossier was used in the ICA. Gabbard similarly sent
declassified evidence to the Justice Department on what she dubbed a “treasonous conspiracy” related to top U.S. intelligence officials allegedly politicizing intelligence on Russia and the 2016 election.
The most highly-classified version of the ICA — shown only
to a small group such as Obama, Trump, and others — has not been
declassified nor made public, but portions of it were quoted in a
years-old GOP-led House Intelligence Committee report which was declassified this week and first obtained by Just the News.
The House report shed more light on the ICA’s claim about
the Kremlin allegedly preferring Republican candidates and criticized
the tradecraft which the ICA drafters had used to reach such a
conclusion, saying that the ICA's claims about the Kremlin and
Republican candidates simply "does not make sense."
“To support the topic sentence, ‘Putin, his advisers, and
the Russian Government developed a clear preference for [Trump]’ the ICA
quotes information from an ‘established source’ but without clarifying
that the ultimate source of the information is unknown,” the House
Intelligence Committee wrote in its newly-declassified analysis.
The House report quoted the most highly classified version
of the ICA as asserting: "The established source with secondhand access
... noted that several members of Putin's inner circle strongly
preferred Republican over Democratic candidates because they judged that
Republicans had historically been less focused on democracy and human
rights ..."
The declassified House analysis said that “the ICA
describes the information in terms that most readers would view as more
evidence that President Putin would have a ‘clear preference’ for
candidate Trump. But this is only accomplished by omitting key context
details.”
Obama's ICA dodges the Kremlin’s long-proven history of meddling
The first key judgment in the version
of the ICA released in January 2017, also stated that “Russian efforts
to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election represent the most
recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the
U.S.-led liberal democratic order,” with the ICA adding, “but these
activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of
activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.”
Clapper, the director of national intelligence under Obama at the time, told
the Senate in early January 2017 that “I do not think that we have ever
encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our
election process than we have seen in this case.”
Clapper went on to call Russia’s meddling efforts in 2016 “unprecedented” when speaking with NPR in 2018.
Mark Kramer, the director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University, released an analysis in mid-January 2017 arguing that the Russian efforts in 2016 weren’t actually unprecedented at all.
“Despite the advent of cyberwarfare, the Russian
government’s attempts to sway the U.S. election in 2016 were strikingly
reminiscent of Soviet ‘active measures’ during the Cold War,” Kramer
wrote at the time. “The notion that Russian intelligence services’
actions in 2016 were unprecedented in scale reflects an inadequate
understanding of the historical context.”
“The reality is that the two main Soviet intelligence and
security agencies — the KGB and GRU (military intelligence) — kept up a
vigorous campaign for several decades to meddle in U.S. politics and
discredit the United States,” Kramer wrote in January 2017. “The ‘active
measures’ used by the KGB and GRU during the Cold War, including
disinformation, forgeries of documents and letters, and the spread of
propaganda through sympathetic individuals and front organizations, were
remarkably similar to the tactics and goals of Russian intelligence
agencies in 2016. Even though the World Wide Web and email did not exist
during the Cold War, the basic methods used by the KGB and GRU in 2016
were simply adapted for the cyber age.”
The version of the ICA publicly released
in January 2017 said that the Russian influence effort "was the boldest
yet in the U.S.” “Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 US presidential
election represented a significant escalation in directness, level of
activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations aimed at
U.S. elections,” the ICA said, adding that “during the Cold War, the
Soviet Union used intelligence officers, influence agents, forgeries,
and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the
Kremlin, according to a former KGB archivist.”
ICA ignored long and relevant history contrary to its narrative
The ICA provided no examples at all of the Kremlin
targeting Republicans, despite the Kremlin’s long history of doing so.
“The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Directorate S (Illegals)
officers arrested in the United States in 2010 reported to Moscow about
the 2008 election,” the ICA said. “In the 1970s, the KGB recruited a
Democratic Party activist who reported information about
then-presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter’s campaign and foreign policy
plans, according to a former KGB archivist.”
There was no mention of any Soviet or Russian influence efforts aimed at harming Republicans. The further declassified version
of the ICA released in July provided a few more details, with key
portions still redacted. Again, there was no direct mention of the
Kremlin seeking to hurt Republicans, although what remains redacted is
not yet known.
“In 2011, U.S.-based Russian officials had a draft plan to
influence the 2012 U.S. presidential election, [REDACTED]. The plan
advocated exploiting the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling
to fund candidates supporting Russian interests, eventually creating a
pro-Russia PAC to openly advance Moscow’s agenda,” the ICA said. “SVR
officers in San Francisco were tasked to compile information on US firms
with ties to Russia, [REDACTED], possibly in support of this plan; we
have no information to indicate the plan was implemented.”
The ICA also said that “in 1999, the SVR’s San Francisco
base developed a plan to use a contact to promulgate Russian views in US
political parties’ campaign platforms and among candidates for the
presidential election in 2000, [REDACTED]” and that “in 2008, all
Russian consular offices were required to report any information about
the likely outcome of the U.S. presidential election, potential cabinet
members of the new administration, the impact of the U.S. economy on the
election, and the new administration’s policies toward Russia,
[REDACTED].”
The USSR supporting liberal Henry Wallace in 1944
Henry Wallace was removed as President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s vice president and was replaced by Harry Truman in 1944,
with Truman becoming president soon after. Wallace was then fired from
being Truman’s commerce secretary in 1946 after criticizing the Truman
administration’s strong stance against the Soviet Union.
Benn Steil, the author of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century, wrote a Foreign Affairs article entitled, “A Genuine Case of Collusion. When an American Presidential Candidate Made a Deal With Stalin.”
“He [Wallace] set out to tar Truman as a warmonger, to
undermine his foreign policy, and to convince the American public that
the nascent Cold War in Asia and Europe might be ended instantly by a
Wallace victory,” he wrote. “That meant working secretly with Soviet
officials—including the Kremlin dictator himself, Joseph Stalin, from
whom Wallace took direction.”
Wallace reportedly
“secretly approached the newly appointed Czech ambassador to the UN,
Vladimir Houdek, asking for his help in making contact with Houdek’s
Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko,” the article said. “Wallace wished
to keep the contact hidden. His effort succeeded. … Wallace met secretly
with Gromyko at the ambassador’s residence in New York.”
The article stated
that “the encounters between Wallace and Gromyko” are found in “Russian
archival documents” and “detailed in a cipher cable that Gromyko sent
to Moscow.”
The cable reportedly said
Wallace told Gromyko that he wished to go to Moscow, leaving open
questions of timing and itinerary, and that Wallace explained that he
“wanted to come to a definite agreement with … Generalissimo Stalin on
all major problems of Soviet-American relations.”
Wallace’s alleged aim,
according to Gromyko, was to use his “conversation with comrade Stalin …
to make a definitive statement to the American people” and Wallace
wanted to show “that in the case of his election [there would be] an
agreement with the USSR on such and such important issues.” Gromyko
reportedly wrote that Wallace stressed “that his Moscow trip would
strengthen his position as a presidential candidate,” but “only if he
actually reached an agreement [with Stalin] on important issues.”
Stalin reportedly worried
that a “trip may do harm” but that “a statement is useful.” Stalin
reportedly believed that it would “better be done by Wallace” and that
Stalin would then “state his sympathy.”
Wallace penned
“An Open Letter to Premier Stalin From Henry A. Wallace” in May 1948,
stating that “The Cold War Must Stop” and “The USA and the USSR must
take immediate action to end the cold war.”
“The wartime cooperation between the two great powers can
be rebuilt and strengthened in time of peace,” Wallace wrote. “There is
no American principle or public interest, and there is no Russian
principle or public interest, which would have to be sacrificed to end
the cold war and open up the Century of Peace which the Century of the
Common Man demands.”
Wallace reportedly read the letter in front of thousands of his supporters at Madison Square Garden in May 1948.
Stalin responded later that month with praise for Wallace.
“I believe that among the political documents of recent
times, which have the strengthening of peace, the furthering of
international cooperation and the securing of democracy as their aims,
the open letter of Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate of the
Third Party in the USA, is the most important,” Stalin wrote. “One can
be for or against these proposals; but no statesman that has anything to
do with the matter of peace and cooperation of nations can ignore this
programme, which reflects the hopes and longing of the peoples for the
strengthening of peace, and which, without doubt, will find the support
of millions of the common people.”
“The FBI, tipped off by a suspicious State Department about
possible collusion between Wallace and Moscow, planted agents at the
print shop where the open letter had been copied and determined that
Wallace had to have had advance knowledge of Soviet public statements,”
Steil wrote. “The collusion was thus proved. But neither the FBI nor the Truman administration took action.”
There is also evidence that Wallace’s proposed vice president — Harry Dexter White — was a Soviet agent of influence.
Soviet support for Democrat Adlai Stevenson in opposition to Nixon in 1960
Reports say the Soviet Union allegedly offered direct
support to failed Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson as
they sought to keep then-Vice President Richard Nixon out of the Oval
Office in 1960.
“Once before, in 1960, the Russians tried — secretly and
without success — to intervene in a presidential contest,” historian
Bruce W. Dearstyne wrote for History News Network.
“They attempted to persuade Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic
presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, to run again and offered to
support him.”
The historian wrote
that “Soviet ambassador Mikhail A. Menshikov invited Stevenson to the
Russian embassy” in January 1960, where “the ambassador plied Stevenson
with drinks, caviar, and fruit” and then “launched into an extraordinary
monologue, telling Stevenson that the message he was about to deliver
came directly from” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev personally.
"In Russia, we know well Mr. Stevenson and his views
regarding disarmament, nuclear testing, peaceful coexistence, and the
conditions of a peaceful world," Menshikov reportedly
said. "When we compare all the possible [presidential] candidates in
the United States, we feel that Mr. Stevenson is best for mutual
understanding and progress toward peace. … We believe that Mr. Stevenson
is more of a realist than others and is likely to understand Soviet
anxieties and purposes. … Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we
in our hearts all favor him.”
The Soviet ambassador also reportedly
asked, "Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson's personal success?
How should press praise him and if so, for what?" Menshikov also asked
if the Soviet press should criticize Stevenson in the hope that it
would generate domestic support for the Democrat, and further asked if
there were other ways that "we could be of assistance to those forces in
the United States which favor friendly relations?" Menshikov reportedly
said that Stevenson "will know best what would help him.”
The historian wrote
that the Soviet ambassador “went on to make clear that the Russians saw
Vice President Nixon, the likely Republican nominee, as being hostile
to their interests.” Stevenson was reportedly “appalled” by the Soviet
offer and turned it down.
John F. Kennedy went on to be the Democratic presidential
nominee that year and narrowly defeated Nixon. Stevenson went on to
serve at the United Nations.
KGB-backed intel agency targets Goldwater in race against LBJ in 1964
An intelligence agency from a Soviet-backed Warsaw Pact
nation reportedly sought to undermine the candidacy of Senator Barry
Goldwater, R-Ariz., as he ran against then-President Lyndon Baines
Johnson in 1964.
“Well before the election of Ronald Reagan, the KGB and
intelligence agencies from countries like Czechoslovakia (now the Czech
Republic and Slovakia) in the Warsaw Pact—the Cold War military alliance
that included the Soviet Union and countries in Eastern and Central
Europe—attempted to influence U.S. politics,” the Center for Strategic
and International Studies wrote.
“In the 1960s, for example, the intelligence service from
Czechoslovakia ran a propaganda campaign against U.S. Senator Barry
Goldwater, the Republican candidate for U.S. president. Moscow was
deeply concerned about Goldwater’s anti-Soviet views, and Soviet and
Czechoslovak agencies orchestrated a disinformation campaign labeling
Goldwater as a racist and a KKK sympathizer. They produced and
distributed printed material in the United States and overseas,” the
report added.
Ladislav Bittman, the former deputy chief of the Disinformation Department of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service, reportedly
said that “it was sent to many journalists and politicians” and that “I
think the result was much more successful in developing countries than
here in the United States.”
The Poland-based Warsaw Institute also said
that “the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
was asked to approve the action plan to put through a series of active
measures to take up a hostile activity against the Republican nominee in
some political milieux by using secret channels of communication in
foreign press outlets to publish articles fueling a negative attitude of
some towards Goldwater.”
The institute said
a memo approving the anti-Goldwater effort was signed by Vasili
Kuznetsov, first deputy minister of foreign affairs for the USSR, and
Vladimir Semichastny, the Chairman of the KGB. The memo “urged officers
to forge content painting a negative image of Goldwater so that it could
be intercepted by the Democrats to help them build a better reputation
in the campaign.”
“The KGB asked the intelligence service from Czechoslovakia
to run a propaganda campaign. … Intelligence agencies produced and
distributed printed material in the United States and overseas through
diplomatic mail,” the institute wrote.
“The material contained some content from U.S. dailies and books to
which forged information was added and then mailed to government
agencies, newspapers, and public figures.”
Johnson crushed Goldwater in the election, where Johnson received 61% of the popular vote, which at the time was the largest share of the popular vote since 1820.
Soviets offered to subsidize Humphrey's campaign against Nixon in 1968
Kramer wrote
in his January 2017 critique of the ICA that “in 1968, the Soviet
Politburo strongly favored the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey,
out of fear that the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, who had been
known as a vehement anti-Communist in the 1950s, would take a harsh
stance against the Soviet Union” and that “Soviet leaders ordered their
ambassador in Washington, DC, Anatoly Dobrynin, to approach Humphrey
with an offer of clandestine funding for his campaign.” Humphrey turned
it down.
Anatoly Dobrynin, a former USSR ambassador to the U.S., wrote
in his memoir about the alleged Soviet offer to Humphrey to support and
subsidize his campaign against Nixon. “During a diplomatic reception in
the White House … Hubert Humphrey told me privately that he was
inclined to try his luck at the presidential election and was going to
announce his candidacy soon. Humphrey said he had always considered
U.S.-Soviet relations as a major factor influencing the prospects for
war and peace and that he had always tried to improve them,” Dobrynin wrote.
“To Moscow, Humphrey certainly was preferable to Richard
Nixon, who had founded and built his career on opposing communism and
was considered profoundly anti-Soviet.”
“Our leadership was growing seriously concerned that he might win the election,” Dobrynin also wrote.
“As a result the top Soviet leaders took an extraordinary step,
unprecedented in the history of Soviet-American relations, by secretly
offering Humphrey any conceivable help in his election campaign —
including financial aid.”
Dobrynin wrote
that he personally “received a top-secret instruction” from Andrei
Gromyko, then the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and Dobrynin
said that he “did my utmost to dissuade him from embarking on such a
dangerous venture, which if discovered certainly would have backfired
and ensured Humphrey’s defeat, to say nothing of the real trouble it
would have caused for Soviet-American relations.”
Dobrynin wrote that “Humphrey, I must say, was not only a
very intelligent, but also a very clever man. He knew at once what was
going on. He told me that it was more than enough for him to have
Moscow’s good wishes which he highly appreciated … The Politburo always
watched American presidential elections closely for their potential
effect on Soviet-American relations and usually had a preference but
rarely expressed it or took sides by offering diplomatic or other help.”
Humphrey did not, as far as history shows, cooperate with
the USSR, and would later lose to Nixon in a tempest-tossed year that
saw the murders of RFK, Martin Luther King and riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Soviets targeted Democratic hopeful “Scoop” Jackson ahead of 1976
Kramer also wrote
in his January 2017 critique of the ICA that “in 1976, the Soviet Union
again secretly adopted measures to influence a U.S. presidential
election. Early in the year, the KGB warned the Soviet Politburo that
Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, D-Wash., known for his fierce opposition
to the Soviet Union, stood a good chance of gaining the Democratic
nomination. Jackson’s victories in the Massachusetts and New York
primary elections heightened these concerns.”
Jackson counted military contractor Boeing as one of his
most important constituents, so much so that he was sometimes referred
to as "the senator from Boeing."
“Service A prepared a wide-ranging set of measures to
discredit Jackson, especially by falsely portraying him as a homosexual.
The KGB sent forged FBI letters to leading U.S. newspapers and
journalists claiming that Jackson was a closeted gay,” Kramer wrote.
“Even after Jackson’s campaign faltered and he dropped out of the 1976
race, Service A kept up its homophobic war of disinformation against
him, hoping to prevent him from ever again becoming a viable
presidential candidate.”
The Warsaw Institute similarly wrote
that “when the KGB started an extraordinarily wide-ranging search for
compromising information, its leadership concluded that Jackson’s
reticence about his private life possibly indicated some sexual problems
he purportedly had faced” and so “the KGB stated that Jackson was a
closet gay.”
The institute said that the KGB “decided to fabricate it in
an active measure codenamed operation ‘Porok’ (Prophet)” and “in 1976,
Service A forged an FBI memorandum, dated June 20, 1940, in which J.
Edgar Hoover reported to the Assistant Secretary of Justice that Jackson
was a homosexual.” The KGB made sure that “photocopies of the forgery
were sent to The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Topeka Capital, and Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters” in an effort to undercut Jackson.
The USSR made efforts to hurt Republican Reagan in 1976 and 1984
Kramer further wrote
in his January 2017 critique of the ICA that “in 1983, amid severe
tensions in U.S.-Soviet relations, the KGB proposed measures to try to
undermine Ronald Reagan’s position in the 1984 U.S. election.”
The Harvard professor added: “But the proposal never got
very far because the prolonged illness and eventual death of the Soviet
leader Yurii Andropov meant that a wide range of steps were put on hold.
Moreover, by 1984 the cables coming in from Ambassador Dobrynin left
little doubt that Reagan was going to win in a landslide no matter what
the Soviet Union did — a prediction that was amply borne out.”
Walton wrote
that “during his unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in
1976, the KGB undertook a wide-ranging quest for compromising material
on Reagan” and that the Soviets did “plant some anti-Reagan articles in
the foreign press outside the U.S.”
The Harvard historian provided further details
on the significant Soviet efforts against Reagan. “During his first
presidential election campaign, the KGB unsuccessfully attempted to find
kompromat (compromising material) on Reagan and forged documents
suggesting that he had been an FBI informant in Hollywood in the 1950s;
these documents were quickly shown to be falsified,” Walton wrote.
“Then, during Reagan’s bid for a second term in 1984, the
Moscow Centre instructed its three KGB residencies (stations) in the
United States to recruit agents in the headquarters of either party,
Democratic or Republican. Any candidate, from either party, would be
preferable to Reagan. The KGB tried to galvanize anti-Reagan sentiment
in the United States by publicizing slogans such as ‘Reagan Means War,’
and on at least one occasion it orchestrated an anti-Reagan public rally
in a major U.S. city, San Francisco—a chilling precedent for Russia’s
meddling in 2016.”
“The FBI publicly denounced a Soviet forgery that surfaced
in the United States in January 1984. The forgery, dated 1947, purported
that Ronald Reagan was working in collusion with the FBI and the House
Committee on Un-American Activities concerning Communist infiltration
into the Hollywood film world,” the FBI report said. “This forgery was designed to discredit President Reagan by raising the issue of ‘McCarthyism’ during an election year.”
The FBI report, which said that the Soviet Union “relies
extensively” on the Communist Party USA and “other front organizations”
to support its active measures campaigns, noted
that the Communist Party USA “announced in 1984 that nothing was more
important than the defeat of President Reagan. They utilized their front
organizations and publications to attempt to convince the American
public that the reelection of President Reagan would be a grave mistake
and would have significant political and economic ramifications.”
CSIS wrote
that “Reagan officials — along with U.S. intelligence agencies — were
acutely aware of KGB planning and activities to influence the 1984
election.” One classified White House report reportedly concluded, “The
Administration is harboring a growing concern about Soviet attempts to
intervene in the American election process and the effects this has on
the international climate.”
A classified 1982 assessment
by the CIA had as its subject “The Soviets and the 1984 U.S.
Elections.” That assessment said “It won’t be long before various Soviet
activities and proposals are regarded, at least by some, as part of a
scheme to tip the 1984 U.S. elections,” the CIA said. “The Soviet grasp
of the U.S. political system is better than ever. Hence, the Soviet
capacity for influencing [American] votes is higher.”
2008 election — longtime Russia hawk McCain vs. Obama
John McCain, a former Navy pilot who was imprisoned and
tortured in a North Vietnamese prison for more than five years, ran
against then-Sen. and now-former President Barack Obama in 2008. McCain
was a decades-long critic of the Soviet Union and of the Russian
government which followed it. Despite the ICA’s claim about the Kremlin
historically preferring Republicans, there is no evidence supporting
that idea, and little if no reason to think that Putin would have
preferred McCain.
McCain’s harsh rhetorical response to Russia’s incursion
into Georgia during the 2008 election seemingly forced both the sitting
president and his Democratic opponent to issue tougher statements too.
“While virtually every other world leader called for calm
in Georgia last Thursday morning, John McCain did something he’s done
many times during his career in public life: He condemned Russia,” Ben
Smith of Politico wrote
in August 2008. “Within hours, Barack Obama sharpened his own statement
to include more direct criticism of the regime of Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev. Soon after, President Bush
and an array of foreign leaders also began to place the full
responsibility for the war on Moscow.”
In the first presidential debate between McCain and Obama, McCain accused
Obama of “a little bit of naivete” over Russia, saying that Obama
“doesn't understand that Russia committed serious aggression against
Georgia. And Russia has now become a nation fueled by petro-dollars that
is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government. I looked into Mr.
Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters, a ‘K,’ a ‘G,’ and a ‘B.’ And
their aggression in Georgia is not acceptable behavior.”
By 2003, with Putin now leading Russia, McCain gave a speech
declaring that “the United States cannot enjoy a normal relationship,
much less a partnership, with a country that increasingly appears to
have more in common with its Soviet and Czarist predecessors than with
the modern state Vladimir Putin claims to aspire to build.”
The McCain presidential campaign sent out an August 2008 statement
titled “McCain Campaign Press Release - John McCain ‘Prescient’ On
Russia And Putin” which contained a host of McCain quotes and press
clips about the Russia threat. The press release included a link to a video from a GOP primary debate between McCain and Bush from February 2000.
“I know what’s going on in Russia… We know that he was an
apparatchik. We know that he was a member of the KGB. … I’m very
concerned about Mr. Putin.”
Romney vs. Obama in 2012: “The 1980s are calling…”
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, sought to sound the alarm about Putin and Russia in the 2012 presidential race after Obama, unaware that the microphones were on, told Russia’s then-President, Dmitry Medvedev,
“This is my last election. And after the election, I’ll have more
flexibility.” Medvedev said he’d deliver the message to Russia’s
then-Prime Minister, Putin.
“Russia, this is, without question, our number-one
geopolitical foe,” Romney said in March 2012. “They fight every cause
for the world’s worst actors. So the idea that he has more flexibility
in mind for Russia is very troubling indeed.”
The Democratic Party in response shared a tweet
approvingly quoting Medvedev pushing back on Romney’s comments, where
the Putin ally said that "we are in 2012 … not the mid-1970s."
Joe Biden, then Obama’s vice president, derided
Romney for those comments a month later. “Gov. Romney is mired in a
Cold War mindset,” Biden said at an April 2012 campaign event, calling
Romney a “Cold War holdover” with an “apparent determination to take
U.S.-Russian relations back to the 1950s.”
Biden was even more dismissive in an interview that month on CBS News' Face the Nation.
“He acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on, Russia is still our
major adversary. I don’t know where he has been,” Biden scoffed. “We
have disagreements with Russia, but they’re united with us on Iran. …
They are working closely with us.”
Obama famously knocked Romney on Russia in an October debate, saying,
“Gov. Romney, I’m glad you recognize that al-Qaeda is a threat, because
a couple of months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest
geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. And the 1980s are
now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War
has been over for twenty years.”
Romney held his ground.
“Russia, I indicated, is a geopolitical foe. And I said in the same
paragraph that Iran is the greatest national security threat that we
face,” he said. “I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear
rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia or Mr. Putin.”
Despite the suggestion in the ICA, there is no evidence that Putin preferred Romney over Obama.
It was about creating chaos, not helping Trump or anyone else
Bill Priestap, then the assistant director of the FBI’s
counterintelligence division and a key member of the Crossfire Hurricane
team, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017.
“I think the primary goal in my mind was to sow discord and
to try to delegitimize our free and fair election process,” Priestap
said of Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election. “I also think another of
their goals, which the entire United States intelligence community
stands behind, was to denigrate Secretary Clinton and to try to help
then — current President, Trump.”
Priestap was asked if the Kremlin had denigrated a specific
candidate and/or tried to help another candidate in previous U.S.
elections, and the FBI official replied, “Yes, ma'am, they have.” But
when asked which prior elections he was referring to, he didn’t have an
answer — despite the Kremlin’s long history of election meddling.
“Oh — I'm sorry,” Priestap said. “I know there — I'm sorry,
I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but even though —
all the way through the Cold War, up to our most recent election, in my
opinion, they have tried to influence all of our elections since then,
and this is a common practice.”
Clapper told
the Senate Armed Services Committee in early January 2017 that ”the
Russians have a long history of interfering in elections, theirs and
other people’s — and there is a long history in this country of
disinformation.”
“This goes back to the 1960s, you know, the heyday of the
Cold War — funding that they would share or provide to candidates they
supported, the use of disinformation,” Clapper said. “But I do not think
that we have ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to
interfere in our election process than we have seen in this case.”
Clapper noted “of course, the cyber dimension and social
media and all these other modes of communication that did not exist in
the Cold War.”
The Obama intelligence chief then joined an NPR podcast
in 2018 where he not only claimed that Russia’s meddling had been
“unprecedented” but that he believed it had impacted the 2016 election —
something for which the intelligence community has never provided any
proof.
More experts disagree with Clapper's characterization and statements to Congress
“Having some understanding of the massive effort, the
multi-dimensional effort, aggressive effort, unprecedented, that the
Russians embarked on in the run up to our election, to me — and when you
consider the election was settled on less than 80,000 votes in three
key states and you look at the volume and sophistication of the messages
and the messaging that the Russians did — to me it stretches logic and
credulity to think all that they did had no impact,” Clapper said.
Calder Walton, the assistant director of the Belfer Center's Intelligence Project at Harvard University, disagreed with this.
“The media frequently labeled the operation
‘unprecedented.’ The social media technologies that Russia deployed in
its cyber attack on the United States in 2016 were certainly new, but
Russia’s strategy was far from unusual,” Walton wrote.
“In fact, the Kremlin has a long history of meddling in U.S. and other
Western democratic elections and manufacturing disinformation to
discredit and divide the West.”
The newly-public House Intelligence Committee report which was declassified
this week criticized the way the most highly-classified and
still-secret version of the ICA assessed that Putin preferred
Republicans over Democrats.
The House report said this claim about Putin and the
Kremlin was among other “substandard reports” contained in the ICA,
noting that “CIA professionals originally declined to publish this
information when it was acquired and only did so in response to DCIA's
[Director Brennan’s] post-election ‘full review’ order.”
The declassified House report revealed, “The information
was acquired from the source via a secondhand source in [REDACTED] 2016,
but was not published until 19 December 2016. The ultimate source of
the information is unknown. … While the established source received it
from an identified subsource, the ultimate source of the information is
not known, which the ICA failed to clarify.”
“It is unclear if the original source actually had access
to Putin's private statements or those of his inner circle, or if this
was the subsource's personal opinions of Putin's personal thoughts, if
this was a garble or misunderstanding, or if this reflected some other
unknown person's opinions,” the declassified House analysis said.
The House report said that the “ICA also misquotes the
report to indicate that Putin and his inner circle ‘strongly preferred
Republicans.’ … The phrase ‘strongly preferred Republicans’ does not
appear in the raw intelligence report.”
Obama's ICA narrative doesn't make sense in light of history
“The unknown subsource said that ‘historically’ the
‘Kremlin had found it easier to reach agreements with U.S. Presidents
from the Republican Party’ and that this was because Republicans were
‘less concerned with issues that were unpleasant for Russia such as
democracy and human rights.’ The ICA did not take the basic analytic
step, however, of comparing the plausibility of the unknown subsource
claims to the documented policies of the past three Republican
Presidents, all of whom featured democracy and human rights as
cornerstones of their foreign policies,” the declassified House analysis
said.
The House report said that “it brings to mind” President
Reagan's famous quote, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” or President
George W. Bush's comments on “the axis of evil” — it is a stretch for
anyone cognizant of history to claim that Republican presidents such as
Reagan and Bush did not care about democracy or human rights.
“The information does not appear to make sense in the
historical context, further raising the question of the reliability of
the unknown subsource,” the declassified House report said.
“By both obscuring that the reporting is from an unknown
source with unknown access and that the information does not make sense,
the ICA leaves the reader unaware of the weakness of the evidence cited
to support the major judgment on Putin's intentions.”
