Trump's Election Spoils Putin's Narrative To

The Russian People

Russian President Vladimir Putin makes his New Year’s address to the nation in Moscow’s
Kremlin, December 31, 2016. / AFP / Sputnik / Mikhail KLIMENTIEV (Photo credit should read
MIKHAIL KLIMENTIEV/AFP/Getty Images)

As outgoing President Barack Obama imposed additional

(largely symbolic) sanctions on Russia and the Senate
scheduled hearings on Russian interference in the US
elections, Vladimir Putin decided not to respond with
counter sanctions. Some bloggers used treason to
characterize President-elect Donald Trump’s praise of
Putin as “smart” for not letting Obama’s last-minute
sanctions obstruct negotiations over the “unsatisfactory
state of relations” between Russia and America.

We should all be paying attention. Russian cyberwarfare and propaganda are integral to the
Russian military doctrine of hybrid war. The main target is the Russian people, who must be
convinced that Russia is under imminent threat from the decadent hegemonic West. Russia’s
information technologists target external enemies — NATO and EU countries– through
disinformation and assistance to Russian-friendly parties. Wherever disorder threatens, Russia
is there predictably to fan the flames.

Watch On Forbes: Don’t Presume That Tillerson Will Be Soft On Russia

Until 2016, US politics, with its two major parties and billion dollar elections, seemed
impenetrable. The Kremlin’s foreign media arms, RT and Sputnik, attracted small US
audiences, and only fringe parties heeded the Kremlin’s siren call. Almost 60 percent of
Americans consider Russia an unfriendly power.

Despite these facts, Russia played a major role from the start to finish of the 2016 campaign.
Trump campaign officials, who had consulted for Russian-friendly clients, were forced to
withdraw, while Clinton’s top campaign officials with similar ties were left alone. Trump’s
campaign comments about Putin, NATO, and ISIS opened him to charges of pro-Russian
leanings. Few took notice of RT’s 2013 revelation of Clinton’s private email account that
reinforced her reputation for dishonesty two years later. WikiLeaks’s release of thousands of
damaging DNC, Podesta, and other private accounts starting in June left Hillary with the weak
defense that “the Russians did it; pay no attention.”

With the shocking election of Trump, some Democrats now blame Russian intervention for the
upset. A cooperative media has concluded, as the New York Times put it, that “Russian
hacking was meant to help elect Mr. Trump.” The political establishment has thus concluded
that the Russian state hacked the emails to elect Trump, who will cancel sanctions, weaken
NATO, and betray Ukraine. Per this line of thinking, Russia’s intervention thus invalidates
Trump’s presidency.

Trump’s unexpected 2016 election was a monumental intelligence/media/political failure that

deserves serious non-partisan investigation of the following open questions:

Did Putin order the hacks?

Putin has repeatedly denied ordering any cyber-attack on US politics. He maintains that “the
complexity of modern hackers made it ‘extremely difficult’ to definitively say who was
responsible for the leak, and suggested that they can disguise their activities and ‘leave their
mark,’ or even the mark of others.” Putin is a known liar; so we should not take his word
seriously, but we should listen to what he says.

In past “black “operations, Putin has maintained space between himself and the actual
perpetrators to disguise his involvement. The Anna Politovskaya and Boris Nemtsov murders
involved complicated layers of sub-contractors, hired killers, Chechen clans, and Russian
underworld. The Russian mercenaries fighting in east Ukraine were purportedly paid by a
Russian oligarch, not the Kremlin. The London judge in the Litvinenko polonium poisoning
could only conclude that Putin was a “likely” defendant because a murder in a foreign country
would have to be approved “at the highest levels.”

Obama invoked the same logic in justifying new sanctions for Russian hacking: “Not much
happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin…. this happened at the highest levels of the Russian
government.” A CNN assessment, based on intelligence leaks, claims that “the use of the
advanced tools suggests Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the hacks…. But
neither of the sources said they knew of specific intelligence that directly ties Putin to the
attack.”

The likely result of a serious investigation would be a strong suspicion that Putin ordered the
hacks because such operations “require high-level approval.” The Kremlin will continue to
invoke “plausible deniability,” and we may have to increasingly take action in the absence of
certainty of guilt.

Who carried out the cyber attacks?

After the DNC hack, a cyber firm (Crowdstrike) was hired by the Democratic National
Committee to investigate. Crowdstrike promptly assigned blame to two cyber organizations
purportedly associated with Russian intelligence. According to the released FBI-DHS Grizzly
Steppe report “two different RIS [Russian Intelligence Service] actors participated in the
intrusion into a U.S. political party.” They used simple spearphishing and then extracted
material with a high level of sophistication. Notably, the FBI-DHS report asserts that Russian
intelligence cast a broad net of 1000 targets. Another hacker (or hacking organization), calling
itself Guccifer 2, with suspected ties to Russian intelligence, claimed that it hacked the DNC
and Clinton Foundation and turned the material over to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks itself has denied
that it obtained the material from Russia but from a disgruntled insider. We need more detailed
intelligence reports to determine whether multiple cyber-attackers are claiming the same hack.

The US intelligence community, according to leaks, appears convinced that Russian

governmental agencies are behind the hacks because of their sophistication. At least one tech
company claims that the hackers used outdated codes that are widely available for download.
Another unanswered question, therefore, is why such sophisticated hackers left traces to
identify them almost immediately? Could this, as cautioned by Rolling Stone’s “Something
About This Russian Story Stinks,” turn out to be a historic intelligence failure: “The problem
with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized
environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds
up.”

Was the motive to elect Donald Trump?

To be true, reports of “incontrovertible evidence” that Putin wanted Trump elected require that
our spies know Putin’s innermost thoughts. If so, they know more than all of Russia.

What would have been Putin’s primary motive? As I have written on numerous occasions,
WikiLeaks was a godsend for Putin to “show corruption in American politics.” The Kremlin
media has regaled the Russian public with the US press’s own accounts of a rigged election,
conspiracies against Bernie Sanders, of Soros, Goldman Sachs, and the Saudi princes
determining the election outcome, the cozy relationship between the Clinton campaign and the
press, and the Clintons growing rich from their political connections. Putin could now ask: Who
gives these Clintons the right to criticize me and my elections? What more revenge against
Hillary Clinton could Putin ask for?

The use by Russian media of WikiLeaks for domestic consumption makes a very strong case
that Putin wanted the hacked emails to bolster his tenuous hold on domestic power. The impact
on the US election was secondary.

Would Putin have seriously thought he could help elect Trump? As noted by none other than
Henry Kissinger, Putin, like everyone else, would have expected a Clinton victory, perhaps
even a landslide, based on the polls. For Putin “to antagonize the president-to-be by getting
into an open support of the opponent doesn’t make any sense to me. They were hacking, but
the use they allegedly made of this hacking eludes me.” The answer to Kissinger’s question:
The hacking was meant for a domestic audience.

Would Putin have preferred a Clinton or a Trump? A victorious Clinton would offer Putin hostile
predictability, but her base would restrain her from an aggressive military and foreign policy.
Trump would be unpredictable, would build up US armed forces, and have to make strong
deals to meet his electoral promises. Even worse for Putin, Trump would promote US energy
development and drive down the energy prices on which Putin’s Petrostate rests.
Trump’s election spoils Putin’s narrative

Russian propagandists, fully expecting a Clinton victory, played up Trump as the Don Quixote
candidate – a shining knight fighting against all odds — about to be rolled over by the crooked
American political establishment. The unanticipated consequence of his surprise victory,
therefore, is an unwelcome affirmation of American democracy for the Russian people. Not
only did Putin’s rubber-stamp parliament celebrate Trump’s victory. Ordinary Russians used
the occasion to take a drunken holiday. Russia’s enemy lost and Russia’s “friend” won.

The 2016 election shows Russians that, in America, a candidate can come out of nowhere –
a David to slay the Goliath of crooked American politics. This is contrary to Putin’s narrative of
a decadent, greedy, and aggressive US establishment that uses its political monopoly to cut
down a Trump-like candidacy. This is the last message Putin wants delivered to the Russian
people with his own carefully-orchestrated election scheduled for 2018.

Trump’s election leaves Putin with a choice. He can use his propaganda to turn Trump into a
monster on par with George Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton or he can use the brief
window of a positive US presidential figure to explore whether there are real opportunities to
repair US-Russian relations. Putin must decide whether his regime can survive without the US
as enemy number one.

The WikiLeaks release of Clinton-camp emails has readied an indifferent America for a serious
discussion of the worldwide threat of Russian aggression through both soft and hard power.
Unfortunately, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem intent on turning such an investigation
into a political football from which we learn nothing, while Putin’s nuclear saber rattling makes
such a study even more urgent.

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