American Media and Russian Hacking Reports

As James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, put it, Watergate “pales” in comparison to the current political scandal surrounding the White House.

  New Yorker

While it may indeed outstrip Watergate, I object to the overwhelming reliance these days on James Clapper for any information. James Clapper famously lied to the Senate, for which he should be shunned, not held up as the official truth.

In advance of Trump and Putin’s first meeting, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, I decided to ask Russia’s sharpest and most experienced political journalists and investigative reporters what they thought of [American media] coverage [of Russian interference in the US election].

[...]

[Given the] many constraints, Russia is nevertheless home to a coterie of talented and self-motivated journalists, who produce work that is courageous and illuminating.

[...]

On the whole, said Mikhail Zygar, a political journalist and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men,” a well-sourced insider look at the cloistered world of Russian politics, the way the U.S. media has covered the Russia scandal has made “Putin seem to look much smarter than he is, as if he operates from some master plan.” The truth, Zygar told me, “is that there is no plan—it’s chaos.”

Welcome to the 21st century.

Putin seems to consider the intervention [in Syria] a success, because it outmaneuvered Western attempts to isolate him and elevated him to the position of global statesman; but, whatever the achievements, they came out of an absolutely slapdash policy, according to Zygar. “Nothing was calculated,” Zygar said. “There was no strategy, no preparatory work, no coördination with Iran, none with Turkey either, which is how we almost ended up in a war—not to mention the huge amount of money that was simply stolen in the course of this operation.”

Welcome to the 21st century.

According to Zygar’s sources, Putin forced Russia’s military prosecutor into retirement, in April, before he could deliver a report to the country’s upper house of parliament that would have revealed substantial financial losses in Syria due to corruption.

[...]

He retold the story of how Putin showed Oliver Stone a video that was supposedly of Russian forces bombing ISIS fighters—“our aviation at work,” Putin told Stone—which turned out to be a lifted clip from 2013 of U.S. pilots attacking Taliban positions in Afghanistan.

[...]

There is little concrete information available regarding the world of Russian state hackers, with reporting on the subject somewhere between difficult and impossible. Some of the best reporting appeared in an investigation last winter by Danya Turovsky, a correspondent for Meduza, an online publication that is based in Riga, Latvia, in order to circumvent the pressure and attempts at censorship faced by newsrooms in Moscow. [...] Turovsky identified private companies that had lucrative cybersecurity contracts with Russian intelligence agencies, uncovered Russian military-recruiting videos for would-be hackers, and documented a case of Russian officials testing a DDoS attack.

[...]

[H]e said that the [US media's] general understanding “is correct, but, all the same, there isn’t really much in the way of real evidence.” It’s one thing to say Russia has both the motive and, with its cyber forces, the technical ability to hack U.S. accounts, Turovsky told me—but, after that, things get very murky.

[...]

Even as Turovsky was cautious about some of the more sweeping allegations directed at hackers working for the Russian state, he acknowledged that the chances of the claims being true were just as high as the chances of them being false—that is the hall-of-mirrors reality of reporting on Kremlin plots and intrigue.

[...]

Turovsky is suspicious of the level of specificity in U.S. reporting on Russian hackers. For example, the way that the terms “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear”—nicknames for hacking units linked to Russian intelligence services—entered the American journalistic lexicon gave him pause. “As I understand, there aren’t really groups, just a lot of different people who do this work; it’s pure conjecture to think they form into discrete, particular squads that you could call this or that,” Turkovsky said. He told me that, during the course of his reporting, he was struck by how technologically backward much of the Russian state’s security apparatus appeared—a nuance he said that he hasn’t often observed in American press coverage of the situation.

[...]

I also spoke with Roman Shleinov, an investigative editor at Novaya Gazeta.

[...]

The most important thing that U.S. reporters should remember, Shleinov told me, is that “money is fleeing Russia in all directions, people are trying to invest anywhere they can, to get their assets out before the secret services or their competitors show up and try and take them all.” On the whole, Shleinov said, a wealthy Russian—even a politically connected one—is likely buying real estate abroad “as a place to run to,” not on Putin’s orders.

[...]

Shleinov was more intrigued by the meeting, last December, between Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a White House adviser, and Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, or V.E.B., a Russian state bank. [...] The White House said that Kushner was acting in a political capacity. V.E.B. said that the meeting was about business interests. Shleinov called the very fact that the two sat down at Trump Tower “curious—now that’s interesting, something to actually talk about.” [...] “All these state banks are not really businesses, they are meant to carry out state functions. If the head of V.E.B. was talking about possibly financing projects connected to the son-in-law of the President of the United States, that was certainly discussed on the highest levels here in Moscow.”

Jared must be nervous, in addition to being very quiet these days.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.