When the DNC email hack occurred during the campaign, the Democratic Party tried to use misdirection to confuse the public. So rather than having to talk about the conduct at the DNC, Party officials instead decided to focus on the made-up bogeyman of Russia being behind the hack. Andrew Cockburn, the Washington Editor for Harper’s Magazine, joins Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio to discuss this topic.
Transcription of the above video:
Papantonio:
Andrew, outbreak of peace with Russia. That concerns a lot of elements of US politics as I look at this story that you’ve done. It just captures it remarkably well about some of the issues that we have a sense of. We have a sense of it’s a little too cute, maybe it’s a little too tight of an analysis that was coming from Hillary Clinton and John Podesta and Harry Reid about Putin. I had the vision of Putin sitting in the back room with earphones on and directing hackers to go after emails. I think you did pretty even-handed analysis of this. The Red Scare is the title of the article, and I think the idea of what you’ve laid out here is well done.
I just want to say, what is your take? I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I simply want to ask what I just prefaced this week. That’s my observation, not yours. Did I state it wrong, or correct me if I’m wrong-
Cockburn:
No, I think it’s absolutely right. I think the whole idea of Putin personally, which is what the Clinton people and the Democrats and most of the press were alleging, was that Putin was somehow personally directing Russian intelligence to hack into John Podesta’s emails and Democratic National Committee’s emails and various other people’s. Then craftily to relay that on to Julian Assange of Wikileaks, sitting in his upstairs room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It’s self evident. I can go into it a little bit more.
Papantonio:
No, I want you to. Look, I’ve read several takes on this issue, Andrew, but I really think you got it. You did the best job laying out, first of all, the historical aspect of the Red Scare. We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen a defense industry that has been like hogs at a trough every time. Even when we don’t have a scare, they figure out how to make a lot of money.
I do want to hear. I’d rather hear what you have to say about the bigger picture, because I don’t think it’s been rounded out that well in other articles.
Cockburn:
Okay, let’s go into it. The proposition is that in all these emails that suddenly appeared on the internet and all this inside information about what the Democrats are up to from their own communications is all the work of Russian intelligence. And this is all accepted. Once this was announced, it was accepted by the press. Then finally, when the Director of National Intelligence came out and said, ‘Yes, this has been directed at the highest levels, and only had been authorized at the highest levels in Russia,’ again, it wasn’t questioned.
But to believe that, you have to believe that Russian intelligence are really, really stupid and incompetent.
Papantonio:
That they would leave a trail, is what you’re saying.
Cockburn:
They left an incredible trail. The idea that they left a trail. If it was them, that they were so stupid as to, first of all, use a Russian internet service provider, Yandex. It was done through Yandex, which is the Russian Google. That one of the internal codings was actually signed in Russian characters with the name of the founder of the Russian secret police.
Papantonio:
One thing, Andrew. There are so many parts to this article. Everybody should read this article now. I say that because hopefully we can stop the progress of this insanity, but you raise in the article Vladimir Fomenko. Basically he’s an entrepreneur. He’s based somewhere in Siberia or something.
Cockburn:
Yes, he’s a kid in Siberia.
Papantonio:
Okay. He sells space to everybody. Anybody can come in. They can say, ‘I want to buy, rent, have this space,’ and he really doesn’t have any oversight of it at all, but I think what was interesting about what you wrote in this article that really struck me is Vladimir Fomenko said, ‘When all of this was happening, nobody really came to me from the US and complained. There was no government that contacted me. I wasn’t contacted by the NSA or the FBI or anybody,’ but that was during a time when the gin up of the story was at its very highest. We had Harry Reid, if you can imagine, on the floor saying, ‘The Russians are coming,’ basically.
Cockburn:
Yes. Actually, Vladimir Fomenko, he had quite interesting information which he shared with me, which he said he would’ve been happy to give to the FBI if they’d ever bothered to contact him. Because he rents space on his servers, which are around the world in various countries. There’s even one in this country. He rents space and he just waits to get paid and that’s it, so he had some information about not the actual identity of people who’d rented space on his server to do this attack on the election system, but what payment methods they’d used, what language they spoke (English). All sorts of things, but the FBI never bothered to contact him. And he, as you probably saw, he’s complained that the people who’ve rented the servers stiffed him for part of the bill. He’s very indignant.
Papantonio:
I’m interested in some aspect, I’ve seen you write in the past issues that tangentially involve the press and the failure to do things or not get it right sometimes. This last election, I think the media was paid $10 billion or some ungodly number close to that. The numbers are still being crunched so I can’t stand behind that number for sure, but it was a big amount. Part of the way that that happened were these little subplots that would develop during the election. Every day, you go to any of the major sites, ‘Trump did this,’ ‘Trump did that.’ What was the story of the day?
This story really took hold for quite a period of time because of the Russian scare aspect of it. Did you sense that or am I overstating?
Cockburn:
Oh, yes, and what was, again, I thought pretty obvious was why the Clinton people were pushing it. Because they didn’t want people to read what was in the actual emails. They tried to pretend that they said, ‘Oh, we can’t guarantee that they’re authentic.’ They certainly were authentic because they never pointed to anything that was fake. They didn’t want people reading what was in there, which was kind of embarrassing.
Papantonio:
It is misdirection, especially when you start seeing what they did to Bernie Sanders,
trying to attack him on his religion. Where we see this love affair with Wall Street banks. Where we see Hillary Clinton saying the damnedest things about Saudi allies and ISIS. You go, no, I wouldn’t want to talk about that either. Of course, the spin masters of this whole thing were smart enough to understand we really have to distract the content. We have to talk about something the average American can grasp ahold of and that is the Russians are coming. Ignore the guy behind the curtain right here. That that’s where the story really is. They were successful, weren’t they?
Cockburn:
Yes, I’m afraid to say a lot of success depended on the laziness of the media. What I’ve been saying and what I write wasn’t that hard to find out. I found Vladimir Fomenko in half an hour on my laptop.
Papantonio:
I gotta tell you, that was such a powerful part of the story. It really was. As I look through this article, what I thought was so important was the way that you laid out the ‘Where are we really?’ If we’re to talk about the Red Scare, where are we with arms issues? Where are we with the weapons match-up between Russia and the US? Is there really a scare here, and if so, what does it really come down to?
Cockburn:
Yes. The thing is for years, if you remember back to the Cold War, we were always told how the Russians are coming and they have a bigger army than us and bigger missiles and bigger this and bigger that. Then the Russians collapsed in 1991 and still, in terms of capability, they’re so far behind what they were then in terms of numbers and size of their forces. What we’re pretending and we’re being told that we’re facing the old mighty Soviet Union, which had a huge, huge army. They don’t have a big army now. They have an army that’s a bit bigger than ours, but most is filled up with draftees who were there for one year which means they’re not much use to anyone. They’ve got these rickety planes and their early-warning satellite network is almost completely defunct. This is really a very minor threat.
