Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Russian documents reveal desire to sow racial discord — and violence — in the U.S.
Russian documents reveal desire to sow racial discord — and violence — in the U.S.
The revelations come as U.S. intelligence agencies have warned of probable Russian meddling in the 2020 election.
LONDON — Russians who were linked to interference in the 2016 U.S. election discussed ambitious plans to stoke unrest and even violence inside the U.S. as recently as 2018, according to documents reviewed by NBC News.
The documents — communications between associates of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked oligarch indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for previous influence operations against the U.S. — laid out a new plot to manipulate and radicalize African Americans. The plans show that Prigozhin’s circle has sought to exploit racial tensions well beyond Russia’s social media and misinformation efforts tied to the 2016 election.
The documents were obtained through the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative project funded by Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky. NBC News has not independently verified the materials, but forensic analysis by the Dossier Center appeared to substantiate the communications.
One document said that President Donald Trump’s election had “deepened conflicts in American society” and suggested that, if successful, the influence project would “undermine the country’s territorial integrity and military and economic potential.”
The revelations come as U.S. intelligence agencies have warned of probable Russian meddling in the 2020 election.
The documents contained proposals for several ways to further exacerbate racial discord in the future, including a suggestion to recruit African Americans and transport them to camps in Africa “for combat prep and training in sabotage.” Those recruits would then be sent back to America to foment violence and work to establish a pan-African state in the South, particularly in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
There is no indication that the plan — which is light on details — was ever put into action, but it offers a fresh example of the mindset around Russian efforts to sow discord in the U.S.
The blueprint, entitled “Development Strategy of a Pan-African State on U.S. Territory,” floated the idea of enlisting poor, formerly incarcerated African Americans “who have experience in organized crime groups” as well as members of “radical black movements for participation in civil disobedience actions.”
The goal was to “destabilize the internal situation in the U.S.”
Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI and an NBC News contributor, who reviewed the documents, said that they offer a warning to the U.S.
“Regardless of whether or not these plans are an amateurish thought experiment, the fact that these people are talking about doing this should disturb Americans of all stripes,” Figliuzzi said.
“The unfortunate reality is that we’re seeing an adversary that will consider virtually anything to get what it wants, and if it means violence or splitting America along racial lines or eroding our trust in institutions, they’ll do it.”
Some of the documents appear to have been sent by Dzheykhun “Jay” Aslanov, an employee of the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based troll farm that played a key role in the 2016 Russian meddling campaign. Aslanov was one of 13 Russians indicted by Mueller in February 2018 for his role with the IRA.
The plan was shared with Mikhail Potepkin, a Russian businessman, who then circulated it more widely, according to communications reviewed by NBC News.
Both Aslanov and Potepkin have been linked to Prigozhin, a Russian catering magnate often described as “Putin’s chef.” Prigozhin was also indicted by Mueller for funding the IRA. Widely perceived as a Kremlin operative, he has been connected to a shadowy mercenary outfit known as the Wagner Group, whose guns-for-hire are reported to have been involved in Russian military operations in Syria and Eastern Ukraine, according to U.S. military officials.
The Mueller report exposed how Russian trolls, employed by associates of Prigozhin, deliberately inflamed racial tensions by spreading false and incendiary stories to African Americans via social media. Among the objectives was to suppress black turnout in the 2016 U.S. election.
Another of the newly obtained documents is a map of the U.S. overlaid with information about African American population size in seven southern states. Also included are the number of subscribers to websites and social media accounts that were set up by Russian trolls at the IRA to spread race-baiting rhetoric, the latter of which were later removed by the social media companies.
Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., who was briefed on the documents, said they highlight how ongoing racial issues in the U.S. can be used in misinformation efforts.
“Russia understands how critical the African American vote is to determining the outcome of elections,” said Demings, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. “And because we have not effectively dealt with racism as a country ourselves, I believe we've made ourselves vulnerable to foreign powers like Russia to continue to try to undermine.”
The documents also discuss how to expand Russia’s clout on the African continent and win business there, from arms sales to mining contracts. They outline propaganda efforts to target Africans and stir up negative opinions about Europe and the U.S.
Cooking up elaborate interference schemes is standard practice within Prigozhin’s circle, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian intelligence and author of “The Red Web,” a book on Russian information warfare.
“This is typical of the way Prigozhin and his team operate,” Soldatov said. “They come up with pitches, some of them very ambitious. They discuss many possible ideas and then send the pitches to the Kremlin to be authorized or rejected. It’s their modus operandi.”
The idea of African American statehood has an intellectual precedent in Russia. During the early 20th century, communists in America proposed forming a “black-belt nation” in the South. Some party members traveled to the Soviet Union for training.
“Even though these kinds of initiatives from the Russians aren’t new to us, what is new is the rapidity with which they can get this message out on social media and saturate the American consumer with these kinds of thoughts,” said Figliuzzi, the former FBI official. “That puts the Russian initiative on steroids and should scare all of us.”
The Electability Argument Is Really About Party Unity Moderate Democrats need to pledge to vote for the party nominee, even if it is Warren or Sanders.
IIn these last days before the Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders has enjoyed a surge in the polls that has thrown moderate Democrats into a panic. A poll released on Wednesday by Crooked Media/Change Research puts Sanders at the top of the field with 27 percent, trailed by Pete Buttigieg (19 percent), Joe Biden (18 per cent), Elizabeth Warren (15 percent), and Amy Klobuchar (10 percent). In national polls, the gap between the Biden and Sanders continues to narrow. In the aggregation of polls by Real Clear Politics, Biden stands at 28.4 percent to Sanders’s 23 percent. It’s easy now to see a path for victory for Sanders: He could win the first three states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada), which would give him enough momentum to overtake Joe Biden (whose supporters are much less committed than Sanders’s loyal base).
The prospect of Sanders being the nominee has unnerved moderate Democrats as well as their allies among Never Trump Republicans. This panic has led a Super PAC (Democratic Majority for Israel) to start pushing anti-Sanders ads. It’s also produced a spate of nervous columns warning of the risks of a Sanders candidacy in New York magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate.
Jonathan Chait’s New York piece is the most valuable example of this genrebecause it contains a revealing contradiction. Chait rehearsed the familiar litany of concerns about Sanders: the unpopularity of the socialist label that Sanders has embraced, Sanders’s history of associations with radical groups like the Socialist Workers Party, the indiscreet sexual writing Sanders did as a young man, and the success that Democrats have had in fielding moderate candidates in the 2018 midterms compared to the failure of more progressive candidates in the same election cycle.
All of these are serious concerns, although many of them can convincingly be shown to be less worrying than Chait thinks. For example, Chait argues that in 2018, “while progressives managed to nominate several candidates in red districts—Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Richard Ojeda in West Virginia, and many others—any one of whose victory they would have cited as proof that left-wing candidates can win Trump districts, not a single one of them prevailed in November.” But as Princeton historian Matt Karp notes, even though Ojeda lost, he did 25 percent better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
The Method in John Bolton’s Madness
“ What is John Bolton thinking?
The former national security adviser has indicated that he would testify in the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump if subpoenaed. Leaked passages from the manuscript of his forthcoming book indicate that, contrary to assertions by Mr. Trump and his defenders, the president unequivocally conditioned the release of foreign assistance to Ukraine on whether its government would investigate Democrats, including Joe and Hunter Biden, and furnish politically damaging information about them.
The revelations have bolstered the Democrats’ heretofore flagging case for calling witnesses in the trial — Mr. Bolton in particular — and produced fissures between the White House and congressional Republicans.
Mr. Bolton, an often vituperative and very hawkish conservative Republican, is ostensibly a political ally of Mr. Trump’s. It’s complicated, of course: Mr. Trump fired Mr. Bolton, reportedly because of the latter’s overly aggressive views regarding Iran; then again, Mr. Trump ordered the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran, a move that Mr. Bolton presumably supported. So Mr. Bolton’s motives for potentially undermining the president position may, at first blush, seem confusing. But there may be a method to the madness — four of them, in fact.
The first is patriotism. Although Mr. Bolton does hold extreme views about the use of American power, there is little doubt about his basic fealty to the United States constitutional system and to established American institutions. Having come of political age during the Cold War, he is a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and an opponent of Russia’s revanchism under President Vladimir Putin.
When Mr. Trump mused about withdrawing the United States from the NATO alliance in 2018, Mr. Bolton was reportedly distressed and rallied to keep it from happening. And, in questioning fellow Republican Jon Huntsman’s decision to serve as ambassador to China in President Barack Obama’s administration in 2011, Mr. Bolton said, “There is no patriotic obligation to help advance the career of a politician who is otherwise pursuing interests that are fundamentally antithetical to your values.” In other words, Mr. Trump’s frequent demeaning of the Atlantic alliance, his obtuse bromance with Putin, and his apparent acquiescence in Russian interference with the American electoral process may have persuaded Mr. Bolton to desert the president on principle.
Then there are his professional principles. Mr. Bolton, unlike Mr. Trump and some of the fiercest members of his inner circle, is a seasoned government professional with an informed respect for the institutional architecture and ethos of American foreign policy. Before becoming Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Mr. Bolton served as acting ambassador to the United Nations, undersecretary of state, assistant secretary of state and assistant attorney general.
Mr. Bolton reportedly characterized Mr. Trump’s meddling with aid to Ukraine as a “drug deal” — a crude metaphor for actions that violate his sense of foreign policy professionalism. He also disdained the president’s circumvention of normal diplomatic channels by informally enlisting Rudolph Giuliani, his personal lawyer, whom Mr. Bolton called a “hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.” Separate from his sense of patriotic duty, Mr. Bolton may have felt that Mr. Trump had so demeaned the integrity of the foreign policy structure that something radical had to be done.
Well, maybe. Another explanation is personal indignation and greed. Mr. Bolton spent much of his career dreaming of the national security adviser job, and reportedly lobbied the president for it for years. And, of course, his book is due to come out March 17, and these revelations are sure to make it an instant best seller (a fact not lost on the president: Mr. Trump’s backers have predictably cast him as a “disgruntled” former employee, and Mr. Trump himself has accused him of merely trying to sell books).
Let’s not judge John Bolton too harshly, though. He lasted almost a year and a half in a job under a famously mercurial president, and toward the end was reportedly unhappy in it. And his book, for which he received a reported $2 million advance, didn’t need this revelation to make it a hot item or line his pockets. So while I’m sure Mr. Bolton doesn’t mind a taste of revenge and higher book sales, in all likelihood the two more honorable factors feature more heavily in Mr. Bolton’s decision-making.
But there’s one more motive: personal ambition. This is not a man known for his humility. Don’t forget that Mr. Bolton harbors presidential dreams; he came close to a run in 2015, and he maintains a political action committee, through which he doles out money to Republican politicians. And even if Mr. Bolton has let that particular dream die, it’s unlikely that he has hung up his government spurs — instead, he may judge that the Trump ship is sinking and figure that Mr. Bolton might as well accelerate the process and try to position himself for a post in the next administration.
That short-term calculation of Mr. Trump’s political fortunes may not be sound, and Mr. Bolton may be a ruthless pragmatist. But if he does end up further exposing Mr. Trump’s duplicity, in the fullness of time Mr. Bolton will end up, however fortuitously, on the right side of history. That’s a better legacy than he might have secured merely as the third of Mr. Trump’s four (and counting) embattled national security advisers. If nothing else, this week’s revelations show Mr. Bolton, even after being unceremoniously fired by his president, is still one of the cagiest political fighters in town.
Jonathan Stevenson is a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival. He was the National Security Council director for political-military affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.”
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