Non-state meddling and conclusions; 'Lawfare' summary of Senate Intel. Concluding Report (Vol.V)
https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find
A Collusion Reading Diary: What Did the Senate Intelligence Committee Find?
By Todd Carney, Samantha Fry, Quinta Jurecic, Jacob Schulz, Tia Sewell, Margaret Taylor, Benjamin Wittes
Friday, August 21, 2020, 4:41 PM
The fifth and final volume of the Select Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is an incredibly long and detailed document. At a whopping 966 pages, volume 5 alone is more than twice the length of the Mueller report, and it covers a great deal more ground.
It is important for another reason: Along with the shorter volumes 1-4, the Senate’s report is the only credible account of the events of 2016 to which Republican elected officials have signed their names. McConnell, in the same press release, echoes the statements of Acting Committee Chairman Marco Rubio, stating that “[t]heir report reaffirms Special Counsel Mueller’s finding that President Trump did not collude with Russia.”
It is a bit of a mug’s game at this point to fight over whether what either Mueller or the Intelligence Committee found constitutes collusion and, if so, in what sense. The question turns almost entirely on what one means by the term “collusion”—a word without any precise meaning in the context of campaign engagement with foreign actors interfering with an election.
So rather than engaging over whether the Intelligence Committee found collusion, we decided to read the document with a focus on identifying precisely what the committee found about the engagement over a long period of time between Trump and his campaign and Russian government or intelligence actors and their cut-outs.
Whether one describes this activity as collusion or not, there’s a lot of it: The report describes hundreds of actions by Trump, his campaign, and his associates in the run-up to the 2016 election that involve some degree of participation by Trump or his associates in Russian activity.
One overarching note: There is a fair amount of overlap between this document and the Mueller report. But the Senate report covers a fair bit more ground for a few reasons. For one thing, it was not limited to information it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court, as Mueller was. Just as important, the committee included counterintelligence questions in its investigative remit—whereas Mueller limited himself to a review of criminal activity.
So the document reads less like a prosecution memo and more like an investigative report addressing risk assessment questions. This volume is an attempt to describe comprehensively the counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities associated with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. So it’s inherently a little more free-wheeling and speculative.
As we read, we summarized each section of the report in the order in which it appears. As of Sept. 3, the summary is now complete.
It is important for another reason: Along with the shorter volumes 1-4, the Senate’s report is the only credible account of the events of 2016 to which Republican elected officials have signed their names. McConnell, in the same press release, echoes the statements of Acting Committee Chairman Marco Rubio, stating that “[t]heir report reaffirms Special Counsel Mueller’s finding that President Trump did not collude with Russia.”
It is a bit of a mug’s game at this point to fight over whether what either Mueller or the Intelligence Committee found constitutes collusion and, if so, in what sense. The question turns almost entirely on what one means by the term “collusion”—a word without any precise meaning in the context of campaign engagement with foreign actors interfering with an election.
So rather than engaging over whether the Intelligence Committee found collusion, we decided to read the document with a focus on identifying precisely what the committee found about the engagement over a long period of time between Trump and his campaign and Russian government or intelligence actors and their cut-outs.
Whether one describes this activity as collusion or not, there’s a lot of it: The report describes hundreds of actions by Trump, his campaign, and his associates in the run-up to the 2016 election that involve some degree of participation by Trump or his associates in Russian activity.
One overarching note: There is a fair amount of overlap between this document and the Mueller report. But the Senate report covers a fair bit more ground for a few reasons. For one thing, it was not limited to information it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court, as Mueller was. Just as important, the committee included counterintelligence questions in its investigative remit—whereas Mueller limited himself to a review of criminal activity.
So the document reads less like a prosecution memo and more like an investigative report addressing risk assessment questions. This volume is an attempt to describe comprehensively the counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities associated with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. So it’s inherently a little more free-wheeling and speculative.
As we read, we summarized each section of the report in the order in which it appears. As of Sept. 3, the summary is now complete.
C. The Agalarovs and the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower Meeting
G. Trump's Foreign Policy Speech at the Mayflower Hotel
H. Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin
I. Allegations, and Potential Misinformation, About Compromising Information
L. Other Incidents and Persons of Interest
==================================
J. Influence for Hire, pp. 663-694
The committee next
examines the extent to which foreign-based influence companies played a role in
shaping the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—either directly or
through American counterparts. It looks specifically at three
companies—Cambridge Analytica, Psy-Group and Colt Ventures—each of which had
some sort of foreign ties and had contact with the Trump campaign.
Each of these three companies either aspired to apply, or actually did apply, microtargeted social media
messaging techniques “comparable to those employed by Russian information
operatives with the Internet Research Agency.” In other words, while we
know that Russia attacked the U.S. election directly through the Internet
Research Agency, the
committee also looked at whether the government of Russia worked as well
through any of these companies.
The “Committee found no convincing
evidence that Russia’s government or intelligence services worked with or
through any of these companies in furtherance of Moscow’s 2016 U.S. election
interference,” the report states.
Cambridge Analytica was a U.K.-based data analytics firm and political
consultancy founded in 2013 as an offshoot of an existing U.K. data analytics firm and
consultancy, Strategic
Communication Laboratories (SCL). Cambridge Analytica attempted to
solicit business from a number of Republican Party candidates for president in
2016, working first for
Ted Cruz and then for the Trump campaign.
The report found
that Cambridge Analytica had “a degree of intersection with and proximity to Russia, and specifically
Russia’s intelligence services.” The report states that “[a]ccording to open source information, during the campaign, [head of Cambridge Analytica Alexander] Nix emailed Julian Assange, the ostensible head of WikiLeaks, about the possible release of Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails.”
Christopher Wylie, who had been an
employee of SCL, alleged that Cambridge Analytica engaged in the “procuring
[of] hacked material for the benefit of its clients,” the use of “specialized
technologies and intel gathering services from former members of Israeli and
Russian state security services,” and the management of information operations
on behalf of pro-Russian parties in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
The report states
that the committee’s work was hindered by certain limitations the committee
faced, including not having access to “numerous essential witnesses” like Nix
(the non-U.S. citizen CEO of Cambridge Analytica) and Michael Flynn (who
exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination).
In addition,
the committee noted, “testimony specific to certain events and relationships is
either inconsistent across witnesses, or appears to purposely minimize the
witnesses’ knowledge or recollection.” The committee was also unable to obtain
the corporate communications of Cambridge Analytica or SCL.
This section describes a free-for-all landscape for use
of data in electoral politics in America. Most Americans are certainly not keenly aware of the role they
play in the lucrative
“international marketplace for digital services to shape popular
sentiment and electoral outcomes.” These “services,” many of which are based
overseas, use “an array of
personal information to build targeted messaging profiles.”
Of course,
the use of messaging to sway voter sentiment is not new, the report points out,
but “it is now enabled by advanced data analytics and algorithmic targeting,
the globally expansive reach of social media, and user-generated data and
personal information that is often unwittingly provided or illicitly obtained.”
However, it remains unclear whether this work is effective—a claim many
researchers have disputed—and the committee writes that it “did not examine the effectiveness of the work”
done by Cambridge Analytica and other companies described in this section of
the report.
The general question
of how pervasively various actors are seeking to use personal data to shape
electoral outcomes is beyond the scope of our examination here, as is the more
general question of foreign influence in U.S. elections. Our sole focus in this post is what
Trump, members of his campaign, and his associates did vis à vis Russia.
On that question, the report’s findings are suggestive but ultimately not
concrete.
Steve Bannon, who performed various roles in the Trump
campaign (including as campaign manager) and later in the Trump White House,
was responsible for connecting the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica. Bannon met Nix in the
2013-2014 time frame while doing investment due diligence for Robert Mercer, a politically conservative
hedge fund owner who later spent $25 million in the 2016 campaign and backed
Trump.
Mercer believed that SCL data analysis capabilities and relationship
with Cambridge University presented an investment opportunity and set about
creating a U.S. entity that would be, in part, operated by SCL data scientists,
including Nix. With Bannon’s help, Cambridge Analytica was established in 2013
with an initial $15 million investment by Mercer, who held a corresponding 90
percent ownership share of the company. Mercer served as president of Cambridge
Analytica, Bannon was the vice president, Jennifer Mercer was the treasurer and
Nix was named to the company’s board.
Bannon described his
own role with Cambridge Analytica as that of a “typical investment banker,”
conducting due diligence on behalf of Robert Mercer. Bannon later introduced
the Trump campaign to Cambridge Analytica as a potential client. According to Wylie,
in spring 2014, Bannon
approved proceeding with Cambridge Analytica-sponsored focus groups concerning
Vladimir Putin and Russian expansionism as part of work on a “predictive
response model.”
Wylie said that Bannon and Konstantin Kilimnik—the Ukrainian political operative who
pops up again and again in the committee’s report with established ties
to a Russian intelligence service and a protracted working relationship with
Paul Manafort—were two of three individuals likely responsible for this idea. In the 200 “predictive response models” that Cambridge Analytica was developing
in the United States, Vladimir Putin was the only world leader addressed and
Russian expansionism was the only foreign topic contemplated.
The report raises a
number of Russia-connected figures that seem to create smoke, but not fire,
when it comes to Russian interference by means of Cambridge Analytica. The report notes
that Samuel Patten, a
U.S.-based foreign political consultant who in 2018 pleaded guilty in connection with
helping steer foreign money to Trump’s inauguration, worked for Cambridge Analytica and SCL in at least
five countries, including the United States. Patten also once ran a business
with Kilimnik.
The report also describes another Cambridge Analytica
employee, Aleksandr Kogan, an American data scientist who began working at
Cambridge University in 2012 as a research associate and university lecturer. Wylie described Kogan’s work as consisting of “research projects undertaken in
Russia.” According to Wylie, the Russian government sponsored some of Kogan’s
research, and Kogan traveled to Russia in this context to deliver presentations
on the work he was doing at Cambridge Analytica—unbeknownst to his colleagues
at Cambridge Analytica.
Bannon told the committee that he had no personal
knowledge of Patten’s work as an employee or contractor of Cambridge Analytica or SCL, nor
did he have any awareness of work Kogan performed for the Russian government. The report also
outlines Cambridge
Analytica’s connections to Lukoil, a Russian multinational corporation
headquartered in Moscow and the second largest company in Russia.
According to Wylie,
from spring 2014 through
2015, Cambridge Analytica representatives met with representatives of
Lukoil. “The publicly stated reason for the meetings was the potential design
of a Lukoil customer loyalty card to be used in Turkey,” but Wylie told the committee
that Nix’s presentations entailed “discussion of rumor and disinformation campaigns and undermining
confidence in institutions.”
In May 2018 testimony to the Senate
Judiciary Committee, Wylie stated that “Lukoil has formal information sharing
agreements with the Russian
Federal Security Service (‘FSB’) and is known to conduct intelligence
gathering on behalf of the FSB.” The report has this to say about Lukoil:
"Although the scope
and nature of the work Cambridge Analytica attempted to pursue with Lukoil is
unclear, the Committee did not independently corroborate allegations that
Lukoil intended to use Cambridge Analytica to impact elections. However, the
Committee is concerned about the role Lukoil may play in effecting Russia’s
efforts to interfere in foreign elections generally."
According to Wylie,
Cambridge Analytica “aspired to use data-driven models for social change by
identifying the subsets of a given population susceptible to particular
messaging.” Its
work was predicated on changing the minds of the five percent of the population
on the fringes of an issue on the rationale that five percent can be
determinative of most voting outcomes. (Again,
it’s worth recalling that the committee did not weigh in on whether Cambridge
Analytica’s work actually changed any minds.)
Wylie outlined for
the Committee the active, hands-on
role Bannon and Robert Mercer played in co-founding the company in order to
compete for political clients in the United States. Wylie suggested that
Bannon engaged SCL Group and became Vice President of Cambridge Analytica in
order to “build an arsenal of informational weapons [that] he could deploy on
the American population.”
According to Kaiser,
almost every client meeting she had during her time at Cambridge Analytica that involved a political
figure “was preceded by an introduction by Bannon, Rebekah Mercer, or Kellyanne
Conway,” who was “an advisor to the Mercers at the time.” Conway was
“very involved” in negotiating Cambridge Analytica’s transition from working
for the Cruz campaign to supporting the Trump campaign.
Rick Gates said the campaign made a decision to use
Cambridge Analytica shortly after the Republican National Convention. Jared
Kushner told the
committee that the Mercers aggressively advocated for the Trump campaign’s use
of Cambridge Analytica, and the campaign engaged with Cambridge Analytica in
order to secure the
Mercers’ support for then-candidate Trump. Brad Parscale told the
committee that Cambridge
Analytica performed work in support of the Trump campaign’s data efforts
but that he declined Cambridge Analytica’s offer to use the company’s
“psychographic profiling” services.
But then there’s
this: Throughout the committee’s investigation, the report states: [T]estifying
witnesses associated with the Trump Campaign consistently minimized the role that Cambridge Analytica
played in the execution of the campaign. Nevertheless,
the testimony of witnesses not attached to the Trump Campaign and materials produced to the
Committee suggest that Cambridge Analytica’s data scientists and messaging
specialists were intimately tied to the Trump Campaign effort.
The committee states
that it obtained documents that suggest “Cambridge Analytica’s data may have
been used in support of the Trump Campaign, and the Campaign may have leveraged
Cambridge Analytica’s ‘psychographic analysis' capabilities.”
The report concludes
its analysis of Cambridge Analytica on an odd note—whether its operations live
on in some form. The
company went bankrupt in May 2018, a few months after it and Facebook were
“publicly embroiled in a data-harvesting scandal
that compromised the personal information of up to 87 million people.” But Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer
are on the board of the successor entity, “Emerdata,” which
characterizes its business as “[d]ata processing, hosting, and related
activities.” But, the report states, “little is known about the actual
activities of the company.”
The report briefly
addresses two other entities that pitched their services to the Trump campaign.
Psy-Group, which also was in bankruptcy proceedings in
Israel as of
December 2018, was an intelligence company specializing in social media
manipulation and online reputation and perception management. Psy-Group
representatives “engaged with Trump Campaign senior officials in 2016 for a
contract to perform work on behalf of the Campaign,” but “these engagements,
which included multiple proposals and presentations, purportedly never
materialized into any Campaign work.”
The report describes
the scope and capabilities of Psy-Group as well as three “projects of note.” One was to improve the
online reputation of Erik Prince. Prince exercised his Fifth Amendment
right against self-incrimination in electing not to appear before the
committee. He did submit a personal statement and documents on Nov. 22, 2017,
but, the report states, “Prince’s statement contains conspicuous omissions and
partially contradicted claims.”
Another was to obtain derogatory information on
an Austrian company on behalf of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who had a
dispute with the company. (This portion of the report contains numerous
redactions.) The third was
an “intelligence project” in 2016 for Dmitry Rybolovlev—another Russian
oligarch—relating to a dispute with an art dealer in which Psy-Group was
contracted to find derogatory information.
In the spring of
2016, the report states, Psy-Group
pitched an influence and intelligence project to the Trump campaign through
Rick Gates and an American international political consultant, George
Birnbaum. Among other things, Gates asked Psy-Group about using technology to
identify and influence Republican delegates as “pro-Trump, anti-Trump, or ‘on
the fence,’” and about using publicly available information to conduct
opposition research against Hillary Clinton and those close to her.
Although the report
documents lots of back-and-forth about the proposal, named “Project Rome,” it did not result in a contract
with the Trump campaign. Birnbaum recalled that “this just kind of
disappeared and died, and nothing came of it.”
But a few months
later, one of the founders
of Psy-Group, named Joel Zamel (an Australian living in Israel), approached the
Trump campaign with a somewhat similar project. This time, Zamel engaged
the Trump campaign “with George Nader, an advisor to the United Arab Emirates,
who had raised the possibility of his (Nader’s) financing a social media effort by Zamel
targeting the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Zamel and Nader met several
times, including in St. Petersburg in June 2016. Zamel told the
committee that, several days later, Nader sent him a picture of Nader with
Putin, which Zamel understood was meant to demonstrate Nader’s access.
The project Zamel
pitched, however, was different. Although the two-page summary document was
titled “Project Rome” and dated May 2016, its content was described in the
report as follows: The document outlined a suite of services Psy Group would
make available to a client, including “generat[ing] influence through various
online and offline platforms, assets and techniques,” and the creation and
promotion of “tailored third-party messaging directed toward optimizing impact
and acceptance within the target audience(s).”
The proposal overview noted that
Psy Group’s services “focus on select voter groups/segments that may not be
susceptible to campaign messaging originating from the candidate or
organizations known to be affiliated with the candidate.” The proposal also
identified minority communities, suburban female voters, and undecided voters
as being among the prospective targeted voter segments.
Shortly thereafter,
in early August 2016,
Zamel, Prince, and Nader met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in New York.
According to Zamel, Prince led the meeting. Prince and Trump Jr.
discussed issues pertaining to the campaign, and Nader raised issues pertinent
to the Middle East. Stephen Miller joined halfway through. Near the end of the meeting,
Zamel explained “very briefly” the work of his private intelligence firms and
asked Trump Jr. whether Psy-Group’s conducting a social media campaign—paid for
by Nader—would present a conflict for the Trump campaign.
According to Zamel,
Trump Jr. indicated it would not, and that a Psy-Group social media campaign
would not conflict with the Trump campaign’s own efforts. (Trump Jr. told the
committee the conversation was about “combatting fake news.”) Thereafter: Zamel indicated that
in the weeks after the August meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Nader
“circumvented” Zamel and began to communicate directly with Trump Jr., leaving
Zamel “cut out.”
Asked
whether Erik Prince ever encouraged Nader to pay Psy Group to undertake the
project Zamel and Nader were considering, Zamel responded affirmatively
and indicated that Prince made a statement along the lines of “[y]ou should pay
him.” Zamel quoted a price of “five to ten [million dollars]” to Nader for the work and in
response Nader indicated he would be willing to pay five million dollars to begin the work. The
Committee did not find or receive information probative of the source of the
five million dollars referenced by Nader.
It is significant
that it is unknown where
Nader’s funds for the project came from. Nader is currently facing charges of helping to funnel
illegal foreign contributions to both the Hillary Clinton campaign and Donald
Trump’s inaugural fund. (He has already pleaded guilty to transportation
of a minor boy for purposes of illegal conduct and possession of child
pornography.)
Following an
intriguingly titled but completely redacted subsection, “Additional
International Activity,” and another subsection describing Zamel’s contact with Michael
Flynn, the report traces the voluminous efforts of Colt Ventures and VizSense,
a Dallas-based social media and “micro-influencer” company to get a
data-related contract with the Trump campaign, including something related to
overseas voters. Thereafter, a subsection on overseas voters is totally
redacted. Because of these redactions, the import of the detailed discussions
of Colt Ventures and VizSense is unclear.
In any event, the
final subsection describes machinations
in which Michael Flynn, among other things, provided Steve Bannon a summary of
results from what appears to be a social media messaging operation conducted on
October 8-10, 2016, by VizSense. The central narratives of the messaging
campaign were denigrating Hillary and former President Bill Clinton, and
depicting the latter as “a rapist.” It describes various other messaging
operations as well.
Eventually, the report indicates, Colt Ventures was paid $200,000 by the Trump
campaign for “data management services,” a portion of which was remitted
to VizSense for work it performed as part of the agreement between Colt
Ventures and the Trump campaign.
One of the clever features of the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is the committee’s apparent decision to draw no conclusions, merely to
recount facts. This
allowed the entire committee, irrespective of party or fealty to the president,
to join in the factual findings. Even Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, who
opposed the committee’s formal adoption of the report, did so not because he
objected to any of the findings the committee made but because he objected to its failure to find explicitly
that there was “no collusion”:
“[T]he Senate Intelligence
Committee’s bipartisan Russia investigation found no evidence that the Trump
campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election,”
he claimed. “The
facts presented in Volume 5 make this conclusion abundantly clear, however I
voted against the report because it fails to explicitly state this critical
finding.” The factual findings are, for all intents and purposes, unanimous;
the absence of any interpretive conclusions allowed the committee to achieve
that substantial accomplishment.
This strategy also, however, allowed
each member, or group of members, to draw their own conclusions. The committee
leadership during the investigation—Sens. Richard Burr and Mark Warner—both
decorously sat out from this jockeying. But a group of Republican senators
wrote additional views to emphasize their conclusion that while “the Russian
government inappropriately meddled in our 2016 general election in many ways[,]
then-Candidate Trump was not complicit.
After more than three years of
investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no
collusion.” And Democratic members wrote separately to state their conclusion
that: The
Committee's bipartisan Report unambiguously shows that members of the Trump
Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.
It recounts efforts by Trump and his team to
obtain dirt on their opponent from operatives acting on behalf of the Russian
government. It reveals the extraordinary lengths by which Trump and his
associates actively sought to enable the Russian interference operation by
amplifying its electoral impact and rewarding its perpetrators—even after being
warned of its Russian origins.
And it presents, for the first time, concerning evidence that the
head of the Trump Campaign was directly connected to the Russian meddling
through his communications with an individual found to be a Russian
intelligence officer.
Our
own conclusions are notably closer to those of the Democrats than to those of
the Republicans. To read these thousand pages and
come away with the conclusion that they amount to evidence of “no collusion” really involves a
protestation of faith, not a dispassionate assessment of presented
evidence.
As we said at the outset, debating what constitutes “collusion” is
not worth anyone’s time, given that the word has no agreed-upon meaning in this
context and that to say that there was none of it doesn’t answer in any event
the more important question of what the facts amount to. Here are the
conclusions we believe the Intelligence Committee’s evidence supports:
- The Trump campaign and
Donald Trump himself were certainly aware in real time of Russian efforts
to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. The campaign had a heads-up that Russia had stolen Democratic
emails. And Russian operatives sought and received a meeting with senior
Trump campaign officials promising “dirt” on Trump’s opponent.
As the campaign wore on, and the Russian efforts were increasingly made public, Trump personally and publicly encouraged them. - The Trump campaign was run for a time by a man with an ongoing
business relationship with a Russian intelligence operative, to whom he
gave proprietary internal polling data.
- The Trump campaign did not discourage Russian activity on its
behalf. In fact, it sought repeatedly to coordinate its messaging around
WikiLeaks releases of information. The campaign, and Trump personally, sought to
contact WikiLeaks to receive information in advance about releases
and may well have succeeded.
- The campaign sought to obtain disparaging information about Hillary
Clinton from actors who either were Russian operatives or it believed were
Russian operatives. It did so through a number of means—some of these
efforts were direct. Some were indirect.
- The Russian government
and affiliated actors clearly regarded the Trump
campaign as a prime
target for influence and recruitment. Russia targeted a diverse
array of people associated with Trump for contact and engagement through
an astonishing variety of avenues.
Some of these attempts were rebuffed. Many of them were successful. The result was a sustained degree of engagement between the campaign, and later the transition, and Russian officials and cutouts. - Trump’s personal and
business history in Russia provided a significant
opportunity for kompromat.
Such material was very likely collected. There is less evidence that it
was ever deployed, though Trump’s mere awareness of his vulnerability gives rise to
substantial counterintelligence concerns.
- Trump’s active pursuit of
business deals in Russia while running for president and denying any such deals created significant counterintelligence
risk.
- Trump’s campaign, and later transition, were filled with a remarkable number of people
who had secret interactions with Russian actors, about which they
lied either in real time or in retrospect.
- All of this activity,
particularly cumulatively, amounts to a grave set of counterintelligence
concerns, in which any number of Trump campaign
figures—including the candidate himself—exposed themselves to potential
coercive pressure from an adversary foreign actor.
- Trump to this day will not criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin or acknowledge unambiguously Russian intervention in the 2016 election.
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