WASHINGTON — A mass of information has emerged in recent months about intensive Russian efforts to influence the coming American presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.
Much of it involves U.S. intersections with Ukraine and some of the most disturbing material shows that the American president is trying to suppress reports about malign Russian actions against the United States.
He has dismissed it all as “fake” stories by his Democratic Party foes in the “liberal” media. However, the information is contained in U.S intelligence reports, in conclusions by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, and in warnings by former government officials and intelligence chiefs, many of them Republicans and by members of the current administration.
Former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, Trump’s top intelligence official from March 2017 until August 2019, told the press he could not shake his “deep suspicions” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “had something” on President Trump, seeing “no other explanation” for the president’s unwavering praise for Putin.
Coats is not the only former senior intelligence official to express such suspicions. Earlier this year more than 70 former top Republican national security officials wrote a letter calling Trump “unfit to lead” and said they support his rival, Joe Biden, in the contest for the presidency.
Among the signatories were veteran former CIA chief, General Michael Hayden. In a video released this month by Republican Voters Against Trump, Hayden, who served both Republican and Democrat Party presidents, highlighted Trump’s record of lying and disrupting relationships with traditional allies.
He said: “Truth is really important, but especially in intelligence. President Trump doesn’t care about facts, doesn’t care about the truth. He doesn’t listen to his experts……..He doesn’t keep the country safe.”
Hayden said although he disagrees with some Biden policies, “I’m supporting Joe Biden. Biden is a good man. Donald Trump is not.”
Whistleblower tells of Trump pressure to distort the truth about Russia
The former head of intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, Brian Murphy, alerted his bosses through official channels – not illegal leaks – about his concerns that since 2018 the Trump administration has ordered alterations and distortions to intelligence documents so they accorded with Trump’s narrative about what was happening.
In his “whistleblower” complaint this summer he said the White House ordered reports on Russian malign activity against America to be watered down.
Murphy said that in May 2020, Trump-appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, told him “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”
Intelligence experts say effective intelligence requires objective, honest analysis of the data gathered, untainted by political considerations or fear conclusions will displease the recipient.
Murphy’s complaint is being investigated but he has since been demoted. His warnings and treatment fit into a pattern of behavior by Trump.
A number of former and serving intelligence personnel described to journalists in August how Trump’s frequent furious outbursts, when confronted with evidence of Russian wrongdoing, has led to information about Russia being watered down or skipped in verbal briefings.
Some people’s careers have been adversely affected and at least one person fired. The effect has been to make some wary of telling Trump the truth and to degrade confidence in some reports.
The sources told journalists how the top-secret” National Intelligence Estimate,” a vitally important document that shapes America’s security posture, with input from every U.S. intelligence body, was altered so as not to displease Trump.
An NIE assessment that Russia favored Trump in the 2020 election was revised after White House pressure and the adjusted version said: “Russian leaders probably assess that chances to improve relations with the U.S. will diminish under a different U.S. president.”
Later, Trump allies used the adjusted report to indignantly argue there was no evidence Moscow was helping Trump but that China was working to support Biden.
Another intelligence report was made public in the summer by Trump loyalist, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.
It concluded, that as with the 2016 election, Moscow is the most active in using covert or underhand means to try to influence the election. Evanina said Moscow wanted to “denigrate” Biden because, as vice-president during Barack Obama’s administration, he championed “policies on Ukraine.”
Biden has promised that if he wins in November, he will increase support for Ukraine including providing lethal weapons.
New task force to fight Russian cyberspace threats
General Paul Nakasone, the leader of both the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, the two agencies leading America cyberspace defenses in September said Russia “uses cyberspace for espionage and theft and to disrupt U.S. infrastructure while attempting to erode confidence in the nation’s democratic processes.”
He said a specialist task force called the “Russia Small Group” had been formed to counter the threat.
The largest social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, have confirmed Nakasone’s assessment that Moscow is working intensively to undermine next month’s election.
Microsoft said that Moscow state-backed hackers are “waging cyberattacks against political parties, campaigns, consultants, and others tied to the U.S. elections.”
Social media companies have identified the Kremlin-controlled Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Russian GRU military intelligence flooding platforms with fake accounts.
Some accounts have artificial intelligence-generated fictional American profiles, including supposed Republican and Democratic supporters. Microsoft said that, as in 2016, the aim is to exacerbate racial and political divisions even as Trump is reluctant to condemn violent white supremacists.
Trump was similarly unwilling to unequivocally condemn an armed militia group arrested Oct. 8 for planning to kidnap, and possibly murder, the Democratic Party governor of Michigan State who has long been a target of Trump’s inflammatory tweets.
The Russian disinformation chimes with many of Trump’s unsubstantiated themes including hat there will be massive voter fraud to steal the election from him.
Those tracking Kremlin malign online activity worry Moscow is planning “an October surprise” disinformation spectacular to damage Biden’s campaign on the eve of the election date.
In August, a Republican-led bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee examining the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference, concluded that Paul Manafort, briefly Trump’s election campaign manager during 2016, had enabled Russia to influence the top layers of Trump’s election campaign.
Although everyone in Ukraine knew about Manafort’s close association with Ukraine’s corrupt, pro-Kremlin, former president, Viktor Yanukovych, the information was a political bombshell in America.
Trump was severely embarrassed and forced to fire him. Trump was further infuriated when Manafort’s connections to Yanukovych and unsavory Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs associated with Putin, became a key part of the Robert Mueller investigation into Trump’s own Russian links.
The Mueller probe led to Manafort being jailed for evading U.S. tax on millions of dollars received from Yanukovych.
The Senate committee concluded that Manafort’s closest associate in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, was a Russian GRU officer and the two tried to get American backing for a Kremlin plan to confer recognition and autonomy on areas in eastern Ukraine under Russian military occupation.
The two also worked to spread the Kremlin narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election – a lie assiduously embraced by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani uses miscreants to spread Kremlin lies about Ukraine
Giuliani used characters regarded as disreputable or as outright Kremlin agents in Ukraine to bolster the false “Ukraine interference” narrative and to resuscitate fake allegations about Biden at the center of Trump’s 2019 impeachment.
Trump’s impeachment was triggered by his attempt to withhold U.S.military aid to Ukraine unless its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, helped to discredit Biden. Giuliani’s most important collaborator in that endeavor is a former KGB agent and pro-Moscow member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andriy Derkach.
Previously identified by U.S intelligence as a “malign actor,” Derkach was designated in September by the U.S. as a pro-Russian operative promoting discredited allegations against Biden.
He has been banned from entering America could face penalties related to illegal foreign interference in the U.S. election. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a key member of Trump’s administration, explained the measures against Derkach were to “counter Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”
Another lifelong Republican, former Congress member, and former CIA chief, and now Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said Derkach worked for “a Russian-directed covert influence campaign centered on manipulating the American political process……….to advance Russia’s malign interests in Ukraine……..designed to culminate prior to Election Day.”
This month another murky Ukrainian collaborator in Giuliani’s schemes, Andrii Telizhenko, who once briefly worked at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington before being dismissed, had his visa to America revoked by the State Department.
Telizhenko, a self-important, cigar-chomping man who craves media attention, seems the parody of a fantasist harboring dreams of momentary fame in a world-class drama.
Telizhenko had hopes, now dashed, to play a star role by repeating lies about “Ukrainian interference” at investigations, one of them in Congress, organized by Trump’s camp and designed to shore up Trump’s assertions that allegations his 2016 campaign benefited from Russian help are a “hoax.” Or at least confuse Americans about what really happened.
In comments to the press, Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Volodomyr Yelchenko, accused Derkach and Telizhenko of attempting to wreck the American bipartisan political support for Ukraine, so vital for the country’s survival since Russia’s 2014 invasion.
“They’ve tried to torpedo our relationship.…… I’m glad the United States has seen them for what they are,” said the ambassador.
Two other Giuliani collaborators, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, born in the former USSR but American citizens, were arrested last year as they tried to leave America with one-way air tickets.
Follow the money
Trump has persisted trying to undermine America’s 17 intelligence agencies as they continue to expose Russian meddling in U.S. politics and Moscow’s surreptitious support for Trump.
He has frequently cast doubt on their unanimous conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Notoriously, he stood publicly alongside Putin declaring he preferred the Russian dictator’s lies over American intelligence assessments.
As the election date has neared, Trump has increased efforts to discredit his intelligence agencies. He appointed, as director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, a person without intelligence experience and has ordered him to declassify and release documents to prop up the Trump-instigated Congressional inquiry.
But the president has complained the investigations are not garnering the publicity he wanted. One of the reasons for that is because Ratcliffe is very obviously feeding documents to fit a Trump scripted version of events that even many Republicans view skeptically.
One document, released on Oct 6, purported to show that in 2016 the CIA director, John Brennan, informed then-President Barack Obama, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team was concocting a scandal to “vilify” Trump for collusion with Russia.
In fact, it became apparent the allegation was not a CIA assessment at all. Rather it was information acquired by U.S. security agencies that seemingly showed Russian intelligence analysts believed the Clinton campaign was concocting such a scandal.
Brennan blasted Ratcliffe for his “appalling selective declassification of information… designed to advance the political interests of Donald Trump.”
He told journalists the documents were his notes when he briefed Obama and his national security council team “about what the Russians were up to and I was giving examples of the type of access that the U.S. intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging.”
There was speculation the Russian analysis might have deliberately been intended, as part of a Kremlin disinformation operation, to fall into CIA hands to discredit Clinton.
But Brennan said that even if the Russian document was genuine and Clinton was going to publicize reported connections between Trump and the Russians, that would not have been illegal.
Ratcliffe, on White House instructions, last month, suspended regular intelligence briefings to Congress that had been promised to inform the electorate about foreign interference in the election.
The Democrats point to that as more evidence Trump is bent on suppressing information about intensive Russian election-meddling.
Both the Senate and Mueller reports questioned Trump’s truthfulness about his Russian business dealings, including large Moscow real-estate projects.
Many have suggested Trump was rescued from bankruptcy by Russian cash.
The only bank apparently willing to lend Trump money is Deutsche Bank, which has paid huge fines in recent years for laundering Russian cash.
Recent revelations that Trump’s debts top $400 million have prompted questions whether some of that is ultimately owed to Russians.
If so, that would go a long way to explaining Trump’s sycophancy towards the man he describes as his “friend” and the “gentleman” who wants to destroy Ukraine – Putin.
