What do we talk about when we talk about spreading distrust?

"I said NO PEPPERONI!"

Sometime in the fall of 2017, Russian television picked up an Onion-style story from a French satirical website according to which the Danish government had legalized animal brothels, that there was a place you could go in Copenhagen and pay to have sex with an animal, with a picture of a dog dressed as a prostitute, only in the Russian media it was presented as a true story, pingponging ultimately outside the country to Belarus and Georgia, according to my source, Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security, a report from the minority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued January 10.

That story doesn't seem to have gone too far, but you never know. On November 2 2016, the equally Onion-esque story of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta running a child prostitution ring out of a DC pizzeria, piggybacked onto the FBI's startling announcement of State Department emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, which had blown up out of almost nowhere with a Facebook post not even mentioning pizza from one Carmen Katz—

"My NYPD source said its much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner's device. The email DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend's plane, the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls. . . . We're talking an international child enslavement and sex ring."

—and through thousands of Twitter accounts, made it onto Alex Jones's Infowars show.

The folks from Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, as recounted by Amanda Robb in Rolling Stone, which you totally have to read,

ran our entire sample against the list of accounts linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency. We found that at least 14 Russia-linked accounts had tweeted about Pizzagate, including @Pamela_Moore13, whose avatar is, aptly, an anonymous figure wrapped in an American flag; that account has been retweeted by such prominent Trump supporters as Donald Trump Jr., Ann Coulter and Roger Stone, the political operative who recommended Paul Manafort as Trump's campaign manager....

The campaign's engagement went far deeper. We found at least 66 Trump campaign figures who followed one or more of the most prolific Pizzagate tweeters. Michael Caputo, a Trump adviser who tweeted frequently about Clinton's e-mails, followed 146 of these accounts; Corey Stewart, Trump's campaign chair in Virginia, who lost a tight primary race for governor in June, followed 115; Paula White-Cain, Trump's spiritual adviser, followed 71; Pastor Darrell Scott, a prominent member of Trump's National Diversity Coalition, followed 33. Flynn's son, Michael Flynn Jr., who followed 58 of these accounts, famously took the bait and was ousted from the Trump transition team in early December after tweeting, "Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story."

(Note, in that list, how many are connected to Russia on other dimensions of the investigation: Junior, Stone and Manafort, Caputo, Flynn and Flynn Jr.)

Whether the "Pizzagate" story had any effect of its own on the election results we'll never know, but something certainly did that week: Nate Silver, who thinks the decisive thing was James Comey's October 29 letter to Jason Chaffetz announcing the resumed Clinton email investigation, has done the math and finds that the moment was the turning point between Clinton's certain victory and possible loss.

It certainly wasn't just the Comey letter, though, but the whole conversation started by the Comey letter on the professional media and in the social media; the revelation that Anthony Weiner's laptop was what Comey was talking about was surely an important element of it. And the pizza thing, ridiculous as it was on its face, contributed grotesque imagery to the vague feeling of corruption that you felt at the thought of Weiner's laptop, and the overall disgust, if nothing more, that remained after Comey revealed that the investigation didn't actually find any new evidence.

I remember when Pizzagate showed up in my own Twitter feed, from what I now understand was definitely a Russian bot account—I was spending a lot of blog space on the critique of lunatic anti-Hillary theories at the time under the label "Is Hillary Clinton the Worst Human Being in the Universe?" and I was thinking, exhausted and with rocks in my stomach, Jesus, do I have to write a blog post about this? Which I decided I really couldn't do.

And that weekend, I believe I've never told you guys this, I had lunch with a very dear old friend from drugs and rock and roll days I see once every five or ten years, not to talk about politics, though we might get into theology as the conversation ranges, and as we walked toward the subway afterwards he told me he was going to vote for Trump, not out of any trust in Trump, but because Hillary was "so totally corrupt". Which wasn't referring to the pizza, or anything else specific, but to that same generalized disgust that,  as we now understand, the trolls of the Internet Research Agency in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's home town of Sankt-Peterburg had been working hard to create. I still didn't imagine she could actually lose, but it was deeply dispiriting to think she'd become president in such a poisonous atmosphere that this sweet and innocent and after all pretty highly educated guy should be infected by it.

After which, son of a bitch, she really did lose.

Nigel Farage emerges from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, March 9 2017, after spending 40 minutes inside. Approached by BuzzFeed News as he left to get into a car waiting round the corner, Farage said he couldn't remember what he had been doing in the building. Asked specifically if he had gone to the Knightsbridge building to meet with Assange, Farage said: "I never discuss where I go or who I see." (BuzzFeed)

That report from the Democrats' side of the Foreign Relations Committee discusses Russian intelligence operations in 19 European countries, using fake news and social media as well as money for local rightwing anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Europe agitators; from socialist Scandinavia, where it has almost no reach, for reasons the authors summarize—

when it comes to exhibiting strong immunity against Russian malign influence operations, the Nordic states are also exemplary. Several factors contribute to their resilience. First, Russia’s favorability ratings among the populations of the Nordic countries are lower than anywhere else in the EU. In addition, the Nordic states have extraordinary educational systems that emphasize critical thinking skills, as well as relatively high levels of interpersonal trust and extremely low levels of corruption (of the 176 countries ranked in Transparency International’s 2016 corruption index, all four Nordic countries ranked within the six least corrupt countries). While correlation does not prove causation, it would not be surprising if the absence of Russian corrupt influences, as well as strong critical thinking skills that inoculate against the effects of disinformation, are major contributing factors to the low opinion of Russia held among Nordic populations. In addition, the Nordic states have dealt with Moscow’s aggression for decades, and their populations arguably have a built-in skepticism of and resistance to the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns and other malign influence operations. 

—and France, where Russia has financially backed the neo-fascist Front National and helped propel its candidate Marine Le Pen to a second-place finish in the recent presidential election, to rightwing Hungary, where warm relationships with the Russian government and personal attachment between Prime Minister Orbán and President Putin leaves the Russian destabilizing operations to work, even in ways that advantage Orbán's (even farther-right) rivals such as the openly anti-Semitic and racist Jobbik party and extra-political neo-Nazi groups, with impunity.

A finding that's kind of new to me is the work Russian intelligence may have done in the UK to further the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, taking advantage of lax rules on campaign contributions reporting, serious enough that the British government is investigating it too, as we learn from the Guardian version:

This opacity, the report suggests, “may have enabled Russian-related money to be directed with insufficient scrutiny to various UK political actors”.

“Investigative journalists have also raised questions about the sources of sudden and possibly illicit wealth that may have been directed to support the Brexit ‘Leave’ campaign.” The UK Electoral Commission has already launched an investigation into the issue.

And the same kind of social media presence, indeed in many cases the same accounts, as we saw in our presidential election:

They reference University of Edinburgh research showing more than 400 Russian-run Twitter accounts that had been active in the US election had also been actively posting about Brexit. In addition, the senators noted that research conducted by a joint team of experts from the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University reportedly identified 150,000 Twitter accounts with various Russian ties that disseminated messages about Brexit.

The report also points to the vast flow of Russian money into the UK, including the London property market. It records how the Metropolitan police noted that a total value of £180m in properties in the UK had been put under investigation as possibly purchased with corrupt proceeds by secretive offshore companies.

I should note that there were Twitter accounts posting on both sides of the issue, meant not so much, some have said, to promote the Brexit as "to sow discord and division in society".

That can't be said of what looks like the Russians' main political client in Britain, former MEP Nigel Farage of the racist and anti-European Ukip, who is an open fanboy of Putin's, like his American friend Dana Rohrabacher of California, and possibly getting instructions from Russia from a Malta-born staffer, Kevin Ellul Bonici, who was known in Brussels when Farage was serving there as a frequent visitor to the Russian embassy, I mean really frequent:

“I was told in June 2015 that this gentleman had a relationship with the Russian embassy in Brussels and that every time he came back from the Russian embassy he would return with a bootload of propaganda,” one former staffer told the Guardian.  

Farage, in turn, is said (by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS!) to have spent an unusual amount of time visiting the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he may or may not have communicated something on a thumb drive from somebody to Julian Assange.

Naturally the Conservative Party leadership and government, committed to pushing Brexit through, is downplaying these reports. As Washington Post quoted Labour's Ben Bradshaw in November,

“I don’t know whether they are doing this because they would be concerned to do anything that might cast doubt on the legitimacy of the very close referendum result,” Bradshaw said. “Or they may be nervous about doing anything that could embarrass the U.S. president, particularly when they seem to be pinning all of their hopes after the disaster of Brexit on some fantasy trade deal from the White House.”

Though the US president is rapidly becoming as as much of a problem for the UK as he is for us.

In more amusing days, from The Independent, January 2017..

When Brother Procopius, who lives in Southeast Asia himself and has been reading this space for a really long time, complains in regard to the new Mueller indictment that the things the Russian troll factory is accused of doing, "Spreading distrust against the candidates and against the system itself," don't sound like a very big deal, he has a point, I think, though not in the long run a useful one. It doesn't sound like a big deal. The indictment is a legal document with a very narrow scope, as I've said, dealing only with the activities of Russia's Internet Research Agency in connection with the 2016 US presidential election, and none of the other Russian actors in the events, and intended not to persuade anybody of anything, but to lay down as clearly as possible the limits of its coverage.

It might be more useful to look at the statement from the Senate staffers of what the president of the Russian Federation is alleged to have done overall, as exemplified in the various attacks on those 19 countries, which is meant to convey an idea of its seriousness:

Democracies like the United States and those in Europe present three distinct challenges to Mr. Putin. First, the sanctions they have collectively placed on his regime for its illegal occupation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine threaten the ill-gotten wealth of his loyalists and hamper their extravagant lifestyles. Second, Mr. Putin sees successful democracies, especially those along Russia’s periphery, as threats to his regime because they present an attractive alternative to his corrupt and criminal rule. Third, democracies with transparent governments, the rule of law, a free media, and engaged citizens are naturally more resilient to the spread of corruption beyond Russia’s borders, thereby limiting the opportunities for the further enrichment of Putin and his chosen elite.

Mr. Putin has thus made it a priority of his regime to attack the democracies of Europe and the United States and undermine the transatlantic alliance upon which Europe’s peace and prosperity have depended upon [sic] for over 70 years. He has used the security services, the media, public and private companies, organized criminal groups, and social and religious organizations to spread malicious disinformation, interfere in elections, fuel corruption, threaten energy security, and more. At their most extreme, the Russian government’s security services have been used to harass and even assassinate political enemies at home and abroad; cheat at the Olympic Games; and protect and exploit cybercriminals in Russia who attack American businesses and steal the financial information of American consumers. Mr. Putin resorts to the use of these asymmetric tools to achieve his goals because he is operating from a position of weakness—hobbled by a faltering economy, a substandard military, and few followers on the world stage.

The disinformation campaign mounted out of the Internet Research Agency since 2014 in the US is just a cog in that machine, and not what you'd generally expect to be the most serious one. And yet its activities are criminal under US law (secretly making campaign contributions in kind, conspiring to evade the Foreign Agents Registration Act, using forged documents to obtain visas and social media accounts, etc.) and is possibly a good handle to tie the case to some of the American criminals in the Trump campaign. And it may turn out to have been in fact the thing that tipped the election.