President Trump’s call for Russian hackers to break into the Hillary Clinton campaign and find her “missing” emails wasn’t the most damaging statement he made during the 2016 Russian campaign to throw the election. A new Senate intelligence committee report shows his comments calling the election “rigged” had a big impact on how Obama administration officials talked to the public about the threat from Russia. So why did Trump’s comments make Obama officials so hesitant to call out Vladimir Putin and what does it mean for 2020?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Rigged: Trump famously invited Russia to hack his rival Hillary Clinton when he turned to the cameras during a July 2016 press conference and said “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The statement revealed a lot about Trump’s tolerant attitude towards Russia’s dirty tricks, but by that point the DNC and Clinton campaign had hardened their digital defenses and there’s no evidence Russian hackers responded to Trump’s invitation.
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Instead, it was another statement from Trump that affected the course of Russia’s 2016 meddling campaign and the Obama administration’s lackluster response to it. In October, facing plummeting poll numbers after a leaked tape showed him bragging about sexually assaulting women, Trump tweeted that, “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD.” The next day he took the fake claim even further with another tweet that read: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”
One of the goals of the Russian meddling campaign, according to a newly released intelligence assessment, was “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process,” a theme that Trump’s tweets played into.
It was that “heavily politicized environment” that Obama administration officials blamed for making them gun-shy when it came to sounding the alarm more about the threat from Russia. “They were concerned that warning the public about Russian efforts would be interpreted as the White House siding with one candidate,” the report concluded. As a result, the Obama administration didn’t tell the public more about what Russia was up to, making its covert influence campaign less noticeable in the eyes of its intended audience.
Not just history: Trump’s penchant for crying foul when he’s losing is more than an explanatory footnote in the history of the 2016 election. It’s a possible repeat problem in 2020.
Right now, it’s far from clear who the Democratic nominee will be in 2020 or whether he or she can run a competitive campaign against Trump. But one thing we do know is that President Trump isn’t great at processing loss or accepting defeat when it does happen. He said Senator Ted Cruz “stole” the Iowa caucus when Trump came in second and demanded a new vote and “the results nullified.” When confronted with the fact that Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes, Trump has retreated to a fake claim that “millions of people” voted illegally for Clinton in 2016.
In other words, there’s a decent chance that the same environment that made Obama administration officials hesitant to call out Russia in 2016 could exist in 2020. This time, however, the people who would have to communicate about any election interference will actually work for Trump.
About that “wake up call”: The Senate report makes clear that senior officials in the Obama administration thought the Russian hack of the DNC was “within the bounds of traditional espionage” even after WikiLeaks and the Russian persona “DCLeaks” had already dumped hacked Democratic campaign materials. So what finally got the Obama administration’s attention and made them realize it was a large-scale influence operation?
By the Senate’s telling, it was a highly redacted intelligence “wake up call” that changed the administration’s mind. “It was not until additional information was obtained by senior administration officials in late July 2016 that the administration received what it called its ‘wake up call’ on Russian operations.”
The report contains 18 redacted lines footnoted to conversations with then Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice and then CIA Director John Brennan about how “[Redacted] intelligence was the ‘wake up.’” The intelligence was considered unusually sensitive and the receipt “of the sensitive intelligence prompted the [National Security Council] to begin a series of restricted [principals committee] meetings to craft the administration's response to the Russians' active measures campaign.”
The redactions make it unclear what the “wake up call” intelligence referenced in the Senate report consists of. The timing and sensitivity of it, however, lines up with when the CIA received a report from a human source it had recruited and first began briefing it to a small group of White House officials. The Washington Post first reported that in early August the CIA hand-delivered envelopes with the source’s reporting that Vladimir Putin was personally directing an election influence operation with the goal of damaging the Clinton campaign and helping Trump.
The CIA reportedly whisked the source out of Russia in May 2017 for his own protection and resettled him outside of Russia, according to CNN. In September 2019, The Daily Beast visited the home of a Russian man who matched the description in the CNN report only to be photographed by two men in an SUV who promptly drove away. Neighbors said the man moved to his home in 2018 but said he was unemployed, despite the recent million dollar real estate purchase.
The CIA’s source proved controversial among Republicans, who cast doubt on his claims that Putin had intended not to sow chaos generally in 2016 but to help Trump specifically. Attorney General William Barr launched an inquiry into the Russia investigation last year which has sought to cast doubt on the merits of the intelligence community’s actions in 2016 and reportedly tried to gain access to the CIA’s Russian sources in the course of the review.
