GRU Hacking Directed at the Clinton Campaign
If the active measures section of the report is exonerating of Trump and his campaign, the section that follows it—the Russian hacking section—is not. It is much worse than is commonly understood for Trump. Just how damning it is has gone somewhat unnoticed for, I think, four reasons. First, like the social media discussion, the hacking section to some degree tracks material already in a Mueller indictment—in this case, the GRU indictment—so what is new is woven in among already familiar material. Second, as with the IRA discussion, there is no ultimate decision to charge anyone on the U.S. side with participation in the hacking. Third, a key portion of this section is significantly impaired by redactions. Anf finally, the story Mueller is telling here is one that's a little different from the one everyone was looking for. The result of these four factors in combination is that the full story Mueller presents has not quite come through.
So let’s tease it out, because it’s actually a whopper.
On the Russian hacking itself, the report contains a lot of new detail but not a lot that fundamentally changes our understanding of the Russian operation. And yes, Mueller does not appear to have developed evidence that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking operation itself.
But here’s the thing: it wasn’t for lack of trying. Indeed, the Mueller report makes clear that Trump personally ordered an attempt to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails; and people associated with the campaign pursued this believing they were dealing with Russian hackers. Trump also personally engaged in discussions about coordinating public relations strategy around WikiLeaks releases of hacked emails. At least one person associated with the campaign was in touch directly with the Guccifer 2.0 persona of the GRU. And Donald Trump, Jr. was directly in touch with WikiLeaks itself—from whom he obtained a password to a hacked database. There are reasons none of these incidents amount to crimes—good reasons, in my view, in most cases, viable judgment calls in others. But the picture it all paints of the president’s conduct is anything but exonerating.
This was not “no collusion.” It was Keystone Kollusion—and the incompetence of it is likely the reason no crime was committed.
The first important point here is that the GRU and the Trump campaign—including Trump himself—were not operating in parallel worlds but in interative interaction with one another. On July 27, 2016, Trump in a speech publicly called for Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s missing server emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The reference here was not to the hacking the GRU had done over the past few months but to the hypothesized compromise of Clinton’s private email server some time earlier—an event which there is no particular reason to believe took place at all.
The GRU, like many Trump supporters, took Trump seriously, but not literally. “Within approximately five hours of Trump’s announcement,” Mueller writes, “GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office.” In other words, the GRU appears to have responded to Trump's call for Russia to release a set of Clinton's emails the Russians likely never hacked and thus did not have by launching a new wave of attacks aimed at other materials.
Trump has since insisted that he was joking in that speech. But the public comments mirrored private orders. After the speech, “Trump asked individuals affiliated with his Campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails," the report states. "Michael Flynn . . . recalled that Trump made this request repeatedly, and Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.”
Oh.
Two of the people contacted by Flynn were Barbara Ledeen and Peter Smith. Ledeen had been working on recoving the emails for a while already, Mueller reports. Smith, only weeks after Trump’s speech, sprang into action himself on the subject. The result was the operation about which Matt Tait wrote a first-hand account on Lawfare. “The investigation established that Smith communicated with at least [campaign officials] Flynn and [Sam] Clovis about his search for the deleted Clintoin emails,” Mueller writes, though “the Office did not identify evidence that any of the listed individuals initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” Ledeen obtained emails that proved to be not authentic. Smith, for his part, “drafted multiple emails stating or intimating that he was in contact with Russian hackers”—though Mueller notes that the investigation “did not establish that Smith was in contact with Russian hackers or that Smith, Ledeen, or other individuals in touch with the Trump Campaign utlimately obtained the deleted Clinton emails.”
In other words, it wasn’t that Trump was above dealing with Russian hackers to get Hillary Clinton’s emails. He not only called publicly on the Russians to deliver the goods on his opponent, he privately ordered his campaign to seek the material out. He did this knowing himself—clear from his public statements and very clear from the actions of those who acted on his request—that Russia would or might be the source.
The reason there’s no foul here is only that the whole thing was a wild conspiracy theory. The idea that the missing 30,000 emails had been retrieved was never more than conjecture, after all. The idea that they would be easily retrievable from the “dark web” was a kind of fantasy. In other words, even as a real hacking operation was going on, Trump personally, his campaign, and his campaign followers were actively attempting to collude with a fake hacking operation that wasn't going on.
It is not illegal to imagine stolen emails and try to retrieve them from imagined hackers. But it’s morally little different from being spoon-fed information by Russian intelligence. The Trump campaign was seeking exactly the spoon-feeding it was accused of taking; it just couldn’t manage to find the right spoon, and it kept missing when it tried to put any spoons in its mouth.
As to the real hacking operation, that one didn’t need Trump’s help. The Guccifer 2.0 persona had direct contact with Roger Stone (whose name is redacted in the description in the report) in August and September of 2016, Mueller reports. But the GRU had its own distribution mechanisms and didn’t need to engage directly with the Trump campaign or its surrogates. As the operation progressed, Wikileaks handled the distribution, and both the campaign and the GRU dealt with WikiLeaks—and thus didn't have to deal directly with one another.
The full parameters of the relationship between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, as described by the report, remain obscure because of redactions. The redacted material involves the activities of Roger Stone, whose case is pending and who purported to serve as the intermediary between the campaign and WikiLeaks. That said, words readable between redactions make clear that:
“by late summer of 2016, the Trump Campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.”
“While Trump and Gates were driving to LaGuardia Airport,” there was a phone call of some kind, and “shortly after the call candidate Trump told Gates that more release of damaging information would be coming”; and
Donald Trump Jr. had direct communications with WikiLeaks, which gave him the password to the website of an anti-Trump PAC and suggested social media material to promote.
In short, while this section does not describe Trump campaign conspiracy in the Russian hacks, it does describe direct engagement between the GRU and Stone; it describes both the campaign and the GRU seeking to coordinate with WikiLeaks on the release of information; and it describes the campaign being eager to retrieve what turned out to be fictitious emails and its agents being willing to deal with Russian hackers to get them. The president personally was involved in these latter two episodes, Mueller reports.
It’s a remarkable story, and it's not a flattering one. If nobody ran afoul of the law, the likiest explanation is the dumbest of dumb luck.