Putin’s Ultimate Goal – The New York Times

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Have the Russians already won?

That’s the question my colleague Reid Epstein and I were discussing this morning as we looked at the presidential candidates’ responses to a new series of reports over the past few days revealing, yet again, a campaign of Russian meddling in American elections.

Most of the specifics remain fairly hazy: A report on Thursday said intelligence officials had warned House lawmakers that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected. The next day, there was a report in The Washington Post that American officials had briefed Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont a month ago that Russia was attempting to help his presidential campaign in the Democratic contest.

And then yesterday, intelligence officials disputed the reports about Russia’s helping Mr. Trump, saying that House members might have misheard or misinterpreted the briefing, and that Russia was intervening in the election but not necessarily to help the president.

We don’t know exactly what the Russians are doing or how they are doing it, though we can make some assumptions based on their 2016 effort, which many cybersecurity experts believe never stopped operating after the last election.

But we do know how some of the candidates have reacted to this serious threat to democracy: by adding to the confusion and disinformation.

Mr. Trump responded to revelations about the briefing with lawmakers by berating Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, then replacing him days later with Ambassador Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist with little experience in intelligence or in running a large bureaucracy. Later, Mr. Trump blamed Democrats for spreading a “hoax.”

Mr. Sanders, for his part, moved quickly to denounce Russia, calling President Vladimir V. Putin an “autocratic thug” and warning Moscow to stay out of the election. Yet, he has also alluded to the idea that there is a domestic conspiracy afoot, playing into the kind of theories Moscow is eager to promulgate to undermine the news media and our political system.

When asked why the disclosure about Russia’s attempted assistance came out on Friday, Mr. Sanders said: “I’ll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus. Why do you think it came out? It was The Washington Post? Good friends.”

The candidates are doing to one another what the Russians are trying to do to the election: weaponize the information. With Russia seemingly pulling levers from behind a curtain, they’re attempting to create a narrative about whom Mr. Putin might support or oppose.

Mr. Trump suggested at a rally in Las Vegas that Mr. Putin would prefer Mr. Sanders, claiming that Mr. Sanders and his wife had “honeymooned in Moscow.” (The couple did travel to the Soviet Union after their wedding, and have jokingly called the trip their honeymoon, but they had a more traditional honeymoon the next year in the Caribbean.)

Michael Bloomberg’s aides made a similar argument: “Trump himself and now the Russians are indicating that Senator Sanders is the candidate they want to run against,” Dan Kanninen, a campaign official, told reporters on Monday.

And Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said he had not been informed of any specific intelligence about Russia and his campaign, said he was the candidate Mr. Putin most hated.

“The Russians don’t want me to be the nominee,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “They spent a lot of money on bots on Facebook, and they’ve been taken down, saying Biden is a bad guy. They don’t want Biden running. They’re not — no one’s helping me to try to get the nomination.”

Turning disinformation into just another political football is exactly the kind of reaction Russia hopes to foster. The point of Moscow’s campaign is not necessarily to help Mr. Trump or Mr. Sanders get to the presidency in 2020; it’s to sow discord and undermine the institutions of American democracy, making presidential elections here seem no more credible than the ones keeping Mr. Putin in office.

One small solution might be to clarify the threat for voters by creating a protocol to monitor and notify both government agencies and the public about disinformation efforts — similar to a system set up in Canada last year. Right now, most of the information coming out in public is through leaks to the news media, very likely for political gain. That gives voters little clear information about what to watch out for when they log onto Twitter or Facebook.

“What’s so worrying to me right now are the unclear reports,” said Laura Rosenberger, a former Bush and Obama administration official who now leads the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which works to counter foreign interference campaigns. “It’s hard to even know the scale of the issue when we don’t know really what the scope of the problem is.”

Welcome to 2020, when disinformation is clouded in … disinformation!

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Are you in New York City? Join me and the New York Times politics team on March 4 — the day after Super Tuesday — as we dive into all of the winners, losers and head-scratching moments of the race. Get your tickets here.


We asked you, On Politics readers, to tell us how the results in Iowa and New Hampshire affected your view of the race. And, boy, did you have thoughts!

For Barbara Sloan of Conway, S.C., the early results changed her view — and vote.

“Living in South Carolina, I had expected Biden to do better and thought his candidacy might be inevitable,” she said. “Obviously, Iowa and New Hampshire showed that is not the case. At the same time, I got to see more of Amy Klobuchar and she grew on me,” Ms. Sloan continued. “This week, I voted in-person absentee for her in the South Carolina Democratic Primary.”

For John Sanderson, the results raised his concerns about Senator Elizabeth Warren.

“I live in North Carolina, and I have never given Sanders or Buttigieg any chance whatsoever of winning here, and I still don’t,” he said. “I have also had serious doubts about Warren’s chances all along, and her performances in Iowa and New Hampshire only reinforce my doubts about her electability overall.” He said a Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar ticket might fare best.

Lydia Simmons of San Francisco said the early states underscored how quickly the race could change.

“New Hampshire could be considered a case study of why one result doesn’t guarantee another,” she said. “Amy Klobuchar did not stand out in Iowa. She came in fifth. One strong debate later, she came in third,” she continued, adding that Ms. Warren and Mr. Biden could not be counted out. “Ultimately momentum needs to be maintained, and that requires strong performance in far more than two small states.”

And Joyce Tarantino questioned why Iowa and New Hampshire have so much power, anyhow.

“To place such importance on having two small states, with a very small amount of delegates, and unrepresentative of the nation and the Democratic Party as a whole, being the first to vote cannot continue,” she said. “We are wasting valuable time and financial resources at the early stage of a very important campaign with no discernible return on investment, except confusion.”


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