The Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan report punctures several Trump denials.

 

WASHINGTON POST

An exhaustive investigation led by members of the president own party portrays his 2016 campaign as posing counterintelligence risks through its myriad contacts with Russia, eager to exploit assistance from the Kremlin and seemingly determined to conceal the full extent of its conduct during a multiyear probe. The long-awaited report contains dozens of new findings that appear to show more direct links between Trump associates and Russian intelligence, Greg Miller, Karoun Demirjian and Ellen Nakashiima report. 

The report describes Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s receptivity to Russian outreach as a “grave counterintelligence threat” that made the campaign susceptible to “malign Russian influence.” The committee determined that Putin personally directed the hack-and-leak campaign and concludes that members of Trump’s transition team probably fell prey to Russian manipulation that they were too callow to recognize. Kremlin operatives “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report says. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”

“In one of its most startling passages, the report concludes that one of Trump’s core claims of innocence cannot be credited. In written testimony to the team of federal prosecutors led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump insisted that he could not recall ever discussing the WikiLeaks dumps with political adviser Roger Stone or any other associate. ‘Despite Trump’s recollection,’ the Senate report said, ‘the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.’

“The document describes Trump and associates of his campaign as often incapable of candor. It offers new proof that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, raises troubling questions about Manafort’s decision to squander a plea agreement with prosecutors by lying to Mueller’s team, and accuses Blackwater founder Erik Prince of ‘deceptive’ accounts of his meetings with a Russian oligarch in the Seychelles weeks before Trump was sworn into office. The overall portrait that emerges from the report’s 966 pages is of repeated encounters between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, but no formal collusion. The two sides shared the same objective — the defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — and basked in one another’s admiration. But more because of ineptitude than any principled commitment to the sanctity of American democracy, the partnership was never consummated, the committee determined. …

“A Russian lawyer who met with Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower before the 2016 election also had more ‘significant connections’ to the Kremlin than has been previously reported, the Senate probe concludes. … The Intelligence Committee’s report notes that it had made referrals to the Justice Department ‘for potential criminal activity’ suspected during the course of its investigation. … Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort were among those flagged to federal prosecutors because the committee believed that their testimony was contradicted by information unearthed by Mueller. It is unclear whether the Justice Department took action on the referrals. …

“The document would read more like a harrowing historical account were it not for mounting evidence that many of the same forces of disruption are lining up for the 2020 election. … Attorney General William P. Barr has intervened in criminal cases against Trump allies Stone and Flynn. And Trump supporters on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), have reportedly accepted material from Russian-tied sources to discredit [Biden].” 

The report is the first to flatly identify Konstantin Kilimnik, [above] a longtime partner of Manafort, as a Russian intelligence officer. It cites evidence that that Kilimnik may have been directly involved in the Russian plot to break into a Democratic Party computer network and provide plundered files to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. His name is mentioned over 800 times, David Stern reports. Kilimnik started working with Manafort in the mid-2000s as his primary interpreter, when Manafort was hired to run the political campaigns of Viktor Yanukoych, a Kremlin-linked politician from eastern Ukraine. The report concludes that Kilimnik “likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services, and that those services likely sought to exploit Manafort’s access to gain insight into the Campaign.” Kilimnik may also have been key in spreading the false narrative that the Ukrainians interfered in the 2016 election. 

Election 2020

Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is trying to help his campaign

It is not clear what form the Russian assistance to Sen. Bernie Sanders has taken. President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also been informed about Russian interference in the Democratic presidential contest.

• By Shane Harris, Ellen Nakashima, Michael Scherer and Sean Sullivan

Bloomberg says he will release women from three nondisclosure agreements

After increasing pressure from his fellow presidential candidates, the former New York mayor said Friday he will permit his company to release women who accused him of sexual harassment from their non-disclosure agreements.

• By Colby Itkowitz and Michael Scherer
• • 
    

Trump embarks on expansive search for disloyalty as administration-wide purge escalates

Johnny McEntee, President Trump’s former personal aide who now serves as director of presidential personnel, has begun combing through various agencies with a mandate from the president to force out political appointees who are not seen as sufficiently loyal.

• By Toluse Olorunnipa, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey
• 
  

Paul Harkin, director of harm reduction at GLIDE, hands out naloxone and fentanyl detection packets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. (Nick Otto for The Post)

Drug overdose deaths rise in the West while they drop in the East

National progress in reducing fatal overdoses has stalled as illicit fentanyl, a synthetic drug that is roughly 50 times as powerful as heroin, floods California and other states west of the Mississippi.

• By Joel Achenbach

The Real News Crisis Isn’t Fake News A recent study suggests that online disinformation campaigns have had only a limited impact on voters.

NEW REPUBLIC





In the aftermath of the twin shocks of 2016—Brexit on one side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump on the other—many in the media identified “fake news” as the culprit and as one of the emergent evils of the modern world. It was invoked the way terrorism was after 9/11: shadowy, stateless, destabilizing. It’s no surprise that, by June 2019, 50 percent of Americans viewed it as a bigger threat than terrorism, with 70 percent saying that it was greatly affecting trust in government institutions.

“Fake news,” of course, has led a double life. The term describes the spread of disinformation by Russian troll farms. It is also one of Donald Trump’s favorite phrases, which he barks at the reporters who document his corrupt administration. Charges of fake news once discredited figures like Trump—if the election that brought him to power was tainted by bots slinging propaganda, he cannot be a legitimate president—but they are also now used to discredit news organizations trying to hold the powerful accountable.


Still, fake news in the original sense is an abiding concern. We have been inundated with statistics documenting the millions of fake news stories on Facebook and Twitter and who was likely to fall for them. There have been congressional hearings about fake news, and Fiona Hill, a former foreign policy adviser in Trump’s White House, warned about foreign election interference during her testimony at November’s impeachment hearings. Disgust with fake news has led to a sharp drop in popularity for companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have been rightly blamed for doing too little to stop its spread on their platforms.


For all its ubiquity, though, fake news itself is not particularly well understood. We’re finally beginning to get studies about its actual efficacy. And the early academic literature suggests that the fear of fake news’s uniquely destructive power may be overblown.


In February 2018, Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan looked at the emerging academic work and concluded that, while “much more remains to be learned about the effects of these types of online activities,” we “should not assume they had huge effects.” In general, there is little evidence suggesting that fake news has had a major impact on how people view current events. Furthermore, fake news is most likely to reach “heavy news consumers,” whose opinions have already been set.


A study published last week bolsters Nyhan’s conclusions and offers another badly needed dose of reality for those who see fake news as an existential risk for liberal democracies. Authored by eight Duke University academics, the study finds few instances of Russian trolls turning voters into frothing Trumpers. “While there are myriad reasons to be concerned about the Russian trolling campaign—and future efforts from other foreign adversaries both online and offline—it is noteworthy that the people most at risk of interacting with trolls—those with strong partisan beliefs—are also the least likely to change their attitudes,” the authors write.


“In other words,” they say, “Russian trolls may not have significantly polarized the American public because they mostly interacted with those who were already polarized.” These trolls may play a role in keeping us polarized, but there is no evidence that they turned voters into Trump voters or, for that matter, that they played a major role in the extraordinary polarization of American society that now defines political life.

The fake news bots are still a polluting nuisance, of course. They are made worse by the business models of Facebook and Twitter, which reward idiotic and harmful discourse at the expense of thoughtful and reported work. But the real fake news problem is the one that we’ve had for more than a generation: a right-wing news ecosystem that has become unmoored from reality. Conservative outlets, whether they be Fox News or Breitbart, have consistently fed their readers a steady diet of propaganda.



As Yochai Benkler, one of the authors of the study, said in an interview with The Washington Post:

On the right, because audiences do not trust or pay attention to outlets outside their own ecosystem, there is no reality check to constrain competition. Outlets compete on political purity and stoking identity-confirming narratives. Outlets and politicians who resist the flow by focusing on facts are abandoned or vilified.… This forces media and political elites to validate and legitimate the falsehoods, at least through silence, creating a propaganda feedback loop.

None of this is to say that more shouldn’t be done to stop the bots and trolls that are already preparing memes for the 2020 elections. But they are a symptom of our polarized political environment, not the cause of it. There are ruthlessly propagandistic actors working tirelessly to mislead the public. But they’re not a troll army from Saint Petersburg. They’re Americans working at right-wing media outlet