Schiff Memo update: Two conspiracies?

Doom Patrol 96 (June 1965). Via.

Following up on yesterday's post:

1. Marcy has spoken, and she doesn't think there's much new stuff for us to learn from the Schiff memo, except for the one thing, or set of things, about international man of mystery George Papadapoulos, the mook whose boasting with High Commissioner Downer in the Kensington Wine Rooms in May 2016, reported by Downer to his government that July, launched the FBI's investigation of Trump campaign collusion with the (already known) Russian efforts to mess up the 2016 presidential election.

The question of what emails Joseph Mifsud and the Russians he introduced Papadopoulos to in April 2016 were talking about, the "thousands of emails" that were going to damage the Clinton campaign; Marcy is now convinced that, as I speculated in December, Papadopoulos wasn't told at all what they were, only that they could be helpful to Trump. He could have imagined it had some connection with the emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server in 2012 when she was leaving the State Department, which in the fantasies of rightwingers would have concealed all sorts of evidence of corruption, but we have no evidence that he did.

This allows me to go on assuming that the Russians were talking at that point about about the emails stolen from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's computer, which the Fancy Bear team had just concluded with that March (as opposed to the theft of the Democratic National Committee emails, which which was mostly from April and May), and which were ultimately published by WikiLeaks (more or less simultaneously with the revelation of the Trump Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing monologue) and weaponized into use as evidence (with material from the transcripts of Clinton's paid speechmaking of 2013-14) of Clinton's supposedly corrupt ties to the banking industry and generally evil neoliberal intentions, as a way to discourage people on the left from voting for her or voting at all.

But that Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russians were thinking of releasing it to help Trump is news, important news. It means the discussions of setting up increasingly senior levels of meetings between Russia and the Trump campaign took place against the offer of help in the form of released kompromat [against Clinton].

Which, particularly given the evidence that Papadopoulos shared that information with the campaign, makes the June 9 meeting still more damning.

That is, we now are looking at two pieces of hard evidence—the other is Junior's letter ("If it's what you say, I love it, especially in the summer")—that the whole dance of the Trump campaign with various agents of Russia, from the first Papadopoulos-Mifsud encounter through the June 9 Trump Tower meeting to the Cleveland convention, was exactly what it looks like, the development of a conspiracy in which the Russian government would supply the Trump campaign with stolen documents that could be used to injure Clinton, and the Trump campaign would work to eliminate US sanctions against Russia over the Ukrainian war and seizure of territory—signed and sealed and set in motion, as it were, when the Trumpers took over the platform committee at the convention (supervised by smiling Sergei Kislyak) to make it Russia-friendly, to show they were serious about cooperating, and WikiLeaks put the whole of the DNC emails online, in almost immediate response.

2. It strikes me that maybe we should be starting to talk in terms of two entirely distinct conspiracies, independent of each other, both under the direction of the Putin government but with different goals and personnel and timelines, and involving different wings of the Trump campaign; the Manafort angle beginning in March 2016, with Fancy Bear and WikiLeaks, aiming specifically at electing Trump to get rid of the sanctions; and what we might call the Bannon-Mercer angle, with the Internet Research Agency and roots back in 2014, aiming at destabilizing the US government and promoting fascism (aka "populism") in general through Facebook and Twitter and other activities before sliding into Trump campaigning directly, with collaboration with the Cambridge Analytica firm beginning in the summer of 2016.

The division of labor in this second conspiracy would be that the Russian troll factory and Bannon and his Breitbartlets provided the fakenews content, the Russians maintained their thousands of bots, and the Cambridge Analytica firm (hired in June 2016 for the Trump campaign by Jared Kushner and his digital guy Brad Parscale) arranged for the microtargeting of messages through their gigantic database as suggested by Sean Illing for Vox:

we do know that Trump’s digital operation was shockingly effective. Samuel Woolley, who heads the Computational Propaganda project at Oxford’s Internet Institute, found that a disproportionate amount of pro-Trump messaging was spread via automated bots and anti-Hillary propaganda. Trump’s bots, they reported at the time of the election, outnumbered Clinton’s five to one.

Pro-Trump programmers “carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day.”

Martin Moore, director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College, told the Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr that Trump’s campaign “was using 40-50,000 variants of ads every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response.”

These online ads were spread primarily through bots on social media platforms. The ads that got liked, shared, and retweeted the most were reproduced and redistributed based on where they were popular and who they appealed to. 

The benefit of this kind of data is that it allows data companies like Cambridge Analytica to develop more sophisticated psychological profiles of internet users (more data points means more predictive power).

Cambridge Analytica was also able to use this real-time information to determine which messages were resonating where and then shape Trump’s travel schedule around it. So, if there was a spike in clicks on an article about immigration in a county in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, Trump would go there and give an immigration-focused speech.

The conduit would be General Flynn, a noteworthy member of the Breitbartian lunatic fringe (as is his son, Michael Jr.), whose relationship with the Russian government goes back to the spectacular RT banquet in Moscow in December 2015, and whose relationship with Cambridge Analytica is known from a fascinatingly vague thing last August, when Flynn gave the White House an amended version of the financial filing he'd given them in March, after he was fired in February:

The amended disclosure shows that just before the end of the campaign, Flynn entered into a consulting agreement with SCL Group, a Virginia-based company related to Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analysis firm that worked with Trump's campaign.

The person said Flynn didn't perform work or accept payment as part of the agreement with SCL Group. The details of Flynn's role with SCL weren't fully laid out, the person said, noting that Flynn terminated his involvement shortly after Trump won the presidency. (AP via Chicago Tribune)

Though the filing itself says he served SCL "from" November 2016 "to" December 2016, which doesn't sound exactly the same.

In either case, the period when he was not doing this work for no payment was when the programmers were "disabling activities after Election Day" and Flynn himself, as incoming National Security Adviser, was frantically exchanging calls with Ambassador Kislyak and getting himself taped by the NSA; if he did something to bring the Americans and Russians together into Conspiracy no. 2, it was part of what he was being paid for by the Trump campaign back in the summer. The point isn't to suggest that Flynn was actually working for Cambridge Analytica instead of the Trump campaign, just that they have a relationship with them whose meaning is very unclear. (Could money have flowed through his LLC between the Mercers and the Russians?)

So who knows? It may seem like a pretty weak basis for a conspiracy theory, but given that the stuff actually happened, as we know in much more detail for the Russian side since the Internet Research Agency indictments, and that such an appropriate cast of characters was standing around looking busy as it happened, it's easy to believe. Mueller knows, though.

The dual conspiracies theory would help to account for an oddity Yglesias was noting the other day:

• Many of the Russian government’s political interventions abroad are clumsy and inept (see the anti-Macron stuff from the 2017 French presidential election and the bulk of the “troll farm” stuff). But the WikiLeaks email drops of 2016 were very well-executed and well-timed to step on two major stories: first the Democratic National Convention and later the Access Hollywood tape. Perhaps the Russians got lucky (twice) or they executed well because they were helped by an expert American political operative.

It makes more sense if you ascribe it to two different groups of Russians working with two different groups of Americans, the Bannon wing for the clumsy and inept material, some of which originated right in the USA, and the Manafort wing for the sophisticated "expert American political operative" stuff.

Of course it's wise to remember that what Matty means by "clumsy and inept" is "not calculated to please the press and the intelligentsia". The troll farm output is badly written and designed, full of easily disproven falsehoods, or just ridiculous. The press resolutely ignored it. And are still ignoring it, because, as with the Brexit referendum campaign, ridiculously little of it was done with ad buys:

Like Twitter, Facebook has also only made public information about paid ads, not unpaid posts. The Russia-linked Internet Research Agency paid for three ads, totalling 97 cents, that reached 200 newsfeeds, Facebook said. It has not responded to requests from UK politicians to analyse whether Russia-linked groups were active around Brexit or the general election last year. Fake news — or what the researchers call ‘junk news’ — may have had far more influence on the Brexit referendum, Ms Narayanan argued. Almost half of all the political news and information was not spread by professional news organisations, and the number of articles shared was seven times greater than the news shared from Russian sources.

—wrote Financial Times in December, before it was clear (from last week's indictments) how vastly much more energy the Internet Research Agency spends on propaganda disguised as voluntary local posts than on ad buys. These things were meant to pass under the press radar, directly to the unlettered petite-bourgeoisie, and voluminously shared among them, and they were, while the pundits said they wouldn't give any coverage to such idiotic nonsense.

Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks output is well produced, convenient for the press with its searchable databases, exhausting to argue against, easier to treat as a respectable alternative opinion. That's what the press is meant to notice, and did, reaching young intellectuals fearing they would never experience the heroic life Boomers knew in the Vietnam War days and disappointed that the Sanders political revolution hadn't come off, and I'm afraid more than a few nostalgic Boomers themselves, .

But really, in all the fuss over what brought about the Trump "victory", and how much Russians had to do with it, there's plenty of credit to share around.