At Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump asserted that nobody has any idea who is behind the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and top Clinton aide John Podesta — despite the US intelligence community having officially blamed Russia.
“She has no idea whether it's Russia, China, or anybody else,” Trump said. “Our country has no idea.”
This makes sense for Trump: The private emails from the hacks, made public by WikiLeaks, have been fairly embarrassing for the Clinton campaign. Trump doesn’t want to admit that he’s benefiting from a Russian operation to interfere in the US election, so he just denies Russian involvement.
Except his timing couldn’t have been worse. Just Thursday morning, damning new evidence emerged linking Russia to the hacks. Once again, Trump has put himself on the wrong side of the facts — and he’s helping a Russian attack on American democracy in the process.
What the evidence says
We previously had good evidence that Russia was involved in the hack of the DNC. The new evidence, detailed at Vice, relates to the attack on Podesta — the hack that, among other things, revealed excerpts from Clinton’s much-discussed speeches to big banks. These included some embarrassing-sounding revelations, including Clinton saying that politicians should have “both a public and private” position on policy and a line suggesting she’d like to create an open borders and free trade agreement for the entire Western Hemisphere.
The hack that got Podesta is something called a “phishing” attack. In a phishing campaign, hackers send emails that are dressed up to look like something from a trustworthy source — in Podesta’s case, Gmail security. The emails tell the recipient to click on a link or attachment, which seems authentic but actually contains some nasty code that gives the hacker access to the target’s email account. Podesta fell for the phishing scam, hook, line, and sinker (if you’ll pardon the pun).
Generally, these attacks are highly effective, because they rely on human gullibility: our willingness to trust things that basically look legit. They’re also hard to trace, because there’s usually nothing in the email to give away the source.
But the Russian hackers messed up. The link they got Podesta to click on used an account from a public link-shortening service, Bitly, which the cybersecurity firm SecureWorks had been tracking. That Bitly account, according to SecureWorks, belonged to Fancy Bear — a hacking organization that’s known to be a front for Russian intelligence.
The hackers’ laziness, or lack of caution, exposed their operation — negating one of the core advantages of a phishing attack.
“Unless you screw up and make your phishing campaign linkable like this group apparently did, it is very hard to attribute to any given actor,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, tells me via email.
Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at King’s College London, sees this as conclusive evidence that Russia is behind the hack.
“We are approaching the point in this case where there are only two reasons for why people say there’s no good evidence,” he told Vice’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai. “The first reason is because they don’t understand the evidence — because they don’t have the necessary technical knowledge. The second reason is they don’t want to understand the evidence.”
That’s the line the US government is taking as well. Thursday morning, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pushed back on Trump’s debate comments from the night before, reaffirming that the hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivation of Russian directed efforts.”
Trump is covering for a Putin plot against American democracy
Trump’s attempts to cast doubt on Russian involvement in the hacks aren’t harmless. In fact, they’re helping Vladimir Putin cast doubt on the legitimacy of American democracy itself.
The scariest thing Trump said at Wednesday’s debate was that he might refuse to accept the results of the election because they might be “rigged.” This type of talk is a serious threat to America’s open political system. Political scientists who study democratic decline believe that for the system to keep functioning, everybody needs to accept the legitimacy of the basic electoral process, so losers concede once the vote totals come in.
Trump has thrown that into doubt, which could make it harder for Republicans to accept the legitimacy of a Clinton presidency (if, as seems likely, she wins), setting up the US political system for vicious infighting and gridlock. It’s even possible that we see post-election violence or mass unrest from Trump supporters who don’t believe the result was legitimate.
“By talking preemptively about a ‘rigged system’ that may well lead to a ‘stolen election,’ Donald Trump is weakening his voters’ faith in elections in a way that could prove extremely dangerous,” Shane Bowler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, writes in an essay for Vox.
Russia’s strategy of disclosing private emails via WikiLeaks is designed to do the same thing. The more we find out about secret actions by the Clinton campaign and their allies, released only because hackers and WikiLeaks took some initiative, the more it seems like US politics really is a dark conspiracy.
The disclosures bring to light information that makes it seem like the process is fundamentally illegitimate. The emails usually show normal behind-the-scenes maneuvering and activity. Examples include Neera Tanden, head of the ideologically friendly Center for American Progress, emailing the Clinton campaign to talk about coordinating their arguments on a 2015 Supreme Court Obamacare case, and the full transcripts of three Clinton speeches to Goldman Sachs.
There's nothing illegal or improper in the emails or speeches, but given the sheen of secret information and cynical interpretations from Clinton opponents, it comes across as a secret conspiracy to a lot of Trump supporters.
The press, by signal-boosting these disclosures, makes these accusations more credible to voters who don’t really understand that these disclosures, however problematic, don’t bear on the fundamental fairness of the November election. They just see plotting and conspiracy.
This appears to be one of Russia’s main goals here: to embarrass the United States and undermine the legitimacy of democracy as a system of government. Putin is personally paranoid about the risk of a revolution at home, and wants to limit the US’s ability to check his ambitions abroad. Weakening and embarrassing America’s political system kills both birds with the same stone.
“A primary objective of Russian actions here is to delegitimize the democratic processes of the United States,” Herb Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told me in a chat earlier this month.
Fiona Hill, an expert on Russia at the Brookings institution, agrees.
“The information from the DNC files underscores for the Russian public, and the outside world, that US party politics is just as dirty as in Russia or anywhere else,” she writes in a piece for Vox. “A US president who is elected amid controversy and recrimination, reviled by a large segment of the electorate, and mired in domestic crises will be hard-pressed to forge a coherent foreign policy and challenge Russia.”
There’s a kind of symbiotic relationship with Trump here. Trump says the election is rigged. Trump reads reporting on the WikiLeaks disclosures because they make Clinton look bad — he has literally said “I love WikiLeaks” on the stump. He then cites the disclosures as proof that Clinton is fundamentally corrupt and only a corrupt system could elect her.
And then he covers up the fact that the whole thing is a Russian operation aimed to do exactly that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the controversy. This magnifies the damage done by the disclosures, as they’d be easier to dismiss if everyone agreed that it was a Russian plot against America.
“There’s only one candidate right now that’s complaining about American democracy,” Lin said. “The most important thing to do is to repudiate the sentiment that the election is gonna be rigged.”
During one particularly heated exchange last night, Clinton called Trump “Putin’s puppet.” It turns out this isn’t as outlandish as it sounds.