Posts

Ben Smith Still Doesn’t Understand He Peddled Likely Russian Disinformation

/49 Comments/in , /by

I’m not sure whether it was just chance or whether Ben Smith knew in advance that BuzzFeed would announce the closure of its news division on the same day that he posted an account of publishing the Steele dossier. His account doesn’t explain whether the cost of defending against serial Russian lawfare for publishing the dossier made it harder, in the aftermath, to pay journalists’ salaries, but it’s a question that deserves an answer.

But Ben’s account — which focuses, as most of Ben’s writing does, on insider news media stuff — makes two grave errors.

The first is that — even though he quotes Pete Strzok describing how the dossier framed the Russian investigation, thereby inoculating Trump against accountability for the very real scandalous behavior he had with Russia — Ben falsely suggests that the dossier was the genesis of the public concern about Trump’s ties to Russia.

We had embedded it as a PDF, which meant that it could travel context-free, without our article’s careful disclaimers, and that’s exactly what happened. I watched uneasily as educated Democrats who abhorred Trump supporters’ crude rants about child sex rings in Washington pizza joints were led by the dossier into similar patterns of thought. They read screenshots of Steele’s report; they connected the dots. They retweeted threads about how the plane of a Russian oligarch—previously unknown to them, now sinister—had made a mysterious stop in North Carolina.

[snip]

It had blown wide open a Russia investigation and forced voters to ask just why Trump seemed so friendly with Vladimir Putin.

[snip]

An FBI agent who investigated Trump, Peter Strzok, later said the dossier “framed the debate” in a way that ultimately helped Trump: “Here’s what’s alleged to have happened, and if it happened, boy, it’s horrible—we’ve got a traitor in the White House. But if it isn’t true, well, then everything is fine.”

The notion that Democrats and national security hawks weren’t concerned about Trump’s Russian ties until January 10, 2017 is ludicrous. The effort to understand Trump’s Russian ties went into high gear on July 27, 2016, when he encouraged Russia to attack his opponent and floated recognizing the annexation of Crimea. It never stopped thereafter.

And, as I had to explain patiently to Columbia Journalism Review, even the intense press reporting on Trump’s real ties to Russia started before January 10, because the WaPo was already onto Mike Flynn’s lies about his outreach to Sergey Kislyak by then. Strzok’s point, I think, is that publishing the dossier made it easier for Trump to get away with attempting to undermine sanctions on Russia and all the rest because at least undermining sanctions wasn’t a pee tape.

No one needed the dossier to heighten concerns about Trump’s fondness for Russia. That’s a myth created by Russiagate [sic] peddlers trying to distract from the very real scandal of Trump’s ties to Russia.

Ben’s other silence, though, is irresponsible.

As I have noted, as the Carter Page IG Report makes clear, and as Republicans in Congress have come to agree, there’s abundant reason to believe that Russians started feeding Igor Danchenko with disinformation from the start. Lawyers for Oleg Deripaska were likely the client for a Steele collection effort targeting Paul Manafort in March 2016. According to declassified footnotes in the IG Report, Deripaska likely learned of the dossier project before the second report. And he demonstrably played a double game throughout 2016, getting Steele to feed Bruce Ohr damaging claims about Manafort at the same time as his aide, Konstantin Kilimnik, was exploiting Manafort’s legal and financial vulnerability to get information on the Trump campaign and a commitment to help carve up Ukraine.

This dynamic is utterly central to understanding the dossier. Someone who played a central role in the 2016 Russian operation knew about the dossier project, and had means to know of Danchenko’s collection network, almost from the start. And that makes it likely that at least some of the content of the dossier was tailored to be wrong in ways that benefitted the Russian operation.

Ben’s silence about the likelihood that he unwittingly peddled Russian disinformation is all the more embarrassing given how his post transitions directly from suggesting that John Durham had “poked holes in Steele’s sourcing” to noting that there was something that Trump actually was lying to cover up: the impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal in Moscow.

Simpson then told Ken something he didn’t know: Steele had been working the case of the president-elect, Donald Trump, and he’d assembled evidence that Trump had close ties to the Kremlin—including claims that Michael Cohen, one of his lawyers, had held secret meetings with Russian officials in Prague, and that the Kremlin had a lurid video of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow that would come to be known as the “pee tape.”

[snip]

But although the biggest-picture claim—that the Russian government had worked to help Trump—was clearly true, the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in April 2019 did not support Steele’s report. Indeed, it knocked down crucial elements of the dossier, including Cohen’s supposed visit to Prague. Internet sleuths—followed by a federal prosecutor—had poked holes in Steele’s sourcing, suggesting that he’d overstated the quality of his information.

And there had always been a more mundane version of the Trump-Russia story. Trump was the sort of destabilizing right-wing figure that Putin had covertly supported across Europe. Trump’s value to Putin was related not to a secret deal, but to the overt damage he could do to America. And Trump, BuzzFeed News’s Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold discovered, had a more mundane interest in Russia as well: He had drawn up plans to build the biggest apartment building in Europe on the banks of the Moskva River. The Trump Organization planned to offer the $50 million penthouse to Putin as a sweetener.

That real-estate project wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the dossier. Yet it seemed to explain the same pattern of behavior, without the lurid sexual allegations or hints of devious espionage.

The man responsible for publishing both the Steele dossier and the best reporting on the Trump Tower Moscow deal seems not to understand that false claims about Michael Cohen in the dossier were likely there because of the Trump Tower deal.

Ben invokes what Durham’s failed prosecution revealed about (what Ben mistakenly claims to be) Danchenko’s sourcing, without laying out the import of Danchenko’s ties to Charles Dolan: Dolan gave the source of the Cohen claims in the dossier, Olga Galkina, direct access to Dmitri Peskov, the one man in Russia with proof that when Trump falsely claimed in July 2016 that he wasn’t pursuing real estate deals in Russia, he was lying. Even Durham implied this was the import of Dolan’s relationship with Galkina! Dolan was important because he put Galkina, who was sending dirt on Trump to her childhood buddy, Igor Danchenko, in close touch with Peskov.

The source of the claims that Cohen had secret communications with the Kremlin in the dossier had direct ties to the one guy in Russia, Peskov, who provably knew that Cohen really did have secret communications directly with the Kremlin that he and Trump were lying to hide.

Once Trump publicly lied about chasing real estate deals in Russia in July 2016, it made the notes Peskov’s aide took, showing that Cohen had agreed to work with sanctioned banks and a retired GRU officer as fixer in order to chase one such deal, far more valuable to Russia, particularly after it became clear in the US that the GRU was behind the hack of Hillary. So it is likely not random at all that someone with direct access to Peskov told Danchenko that Cohen — who was lying to hide his real direct contact with the Kremlin during the election — had other, more damning direct contact with the Kremlin. It raised the stakes of Trump’s and Cohen’s lies. It raised the value of Russia’s silence about the earlier conversation with Peskov. To the extent that everyone kept their shared secret — and they did for the entire first year of the Trump Administration — it provided cover for the lies that Cohen would tell to Congress.

From the start, the FBI had warnings that the Cohen in Prague story was disinformation. And it just so happens that the story, which came from someone with ties to Peskov, repeated a true fact that Peskov knew: that Cohen really did have secret communications with the Kremlin, communications that had already compromised Trump and Cohen with Russia before the hacking even started. If the Cohen in Prague story was disinformation (and, again, FBI got warnings it was the day after Ben published the dossier), it was disinformation that made that earlier compromise more powerful.

And Ben Smith, who played a key role in disseminating that likely disinformation, appears to not even understand that, much less want to reflect on his role in being an unwitting mule for Russian disinformation.

The Publisher of the Steele Dossier, Ben Smith, Reports that the Hunter Biden Laptop Was Just a Political Dirty Trick

/44 Comments/in , , , /by

The recent Igor Danchenko indictment and overly credulous reporting on it have created a big new push for former BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith to reflect on his role in the dissemination of the Steele dossier.

In a Sunday column on mis- and disinformation, however, he makes no mention of it.

Instead, his column questions the inclusion of the Hunter Biden laptop story in a media executive seminar on, “help[ing] newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.” Smith claims that treatment of the laptop story is, in fact, proof that the term “media manipulation” means  “any attempt to shape news coverage by people whose politics you dislike.”

A couple of them, though, told me they were puzzled by the reading package for the first session.

It consisted of a Harvard case study, which a participant shared with me, examining the coverage of Hunter Biden’s lost laptop in the final days of the 2020 campaign. The story had been pushed by aides and allies of then-President Donald J. Trump who tried to persuade journalists that the hard drive’s contents would reveal the corruption of the father.

The news media’s handling of that narrative provides “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns,” according to the Shorenstein Center summary.

The Hunter Biden laptop saga sure is instructive about something. As you may recall, panicked Trump allies frantically dumped its contents onto the internet and into reporters’ inboxes, a trove that apparently included embarrassing images and emails purportedly from the candidate’s son showing that he had tried to trade on the family name. The big social media platforms, primed for a repeat of the WikiLeaks 2016 election shenanigans, reacted forcefully: Twitter blocked links to a New York Post story that tied Joe Biden to the emails without strong evidence (though Twitter quickly reversed that decision) and Facebook limited the spread of the Post story under its own “misinformation” policy.

But as it now appears, the story about the laptop was an old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign, and describing it with the word “misinformation” doesn’t add much to our understanding of what happened. While some of the emails purportedly on the laptop have since been called genuine by at least one recipient, the younger Mr. Biden has said he doesn’t know if the laptop in question was his.

And the “media manipulation campaign” was a threadbare, 11th-hour effort to produce a late-campaign scandal, an attempt at an October Surprise that has been part of nearly every presidential campaign I’ve covered.

The Wall Street Journal, as I reported at the time, looked hard at the story. Unable to prove that Joe Biden had tried, as vice president, to change U.S. policy to enrich a family member, The Journal refused to tell it the way the Trump aides wanted, leaving that spin to the right-wing tabloids. What remained was a murky situation that is hard to call “misinformation,” even if some journalists and academics like the clarity of that label. The Journal’s role was, in fact, a pretty standard journalistic exercise, a blend of fact-finding and the sort of news judgment that has fallen a bit out of favor as journalists have found themselves chasing social media.

While some academics use the term carefully, “misinformation” in the case of the lost laptop was more or less synonymous with “material passed along by Trump aides.” And in that context, the phrase “media manipulation” refers to any attempt to shape news coverage by people whose politics you dislike.

Unless Smith considers the two details he cites — some researchers have confirmed that some of the emails are authentic, yet Hunter Biden doesn’t claim to know whether the laptop in question was his — to be proof one way or another that this was a “politically motivated dirty tricks campaign,” he cites no evidence for his conclusion.

Smith doesn’t mention any of the reasons why there was and remains good reason to suspect the laptop — the provenance of which even Glenn Greenwald once proclaimed to be “bizarre at best” — was more than that. From the time President Trump first started extorting an investigation into the Bidens from Ukraine through at least January 2020, Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU was found hacking Burisma, the company with which Hunter had a sketchy consulting relationship that was the initial hook for the laptop stories. Rudy Giuliani not only played a central role in the brokering of the laptop story, but reportedly had been sitting on a copy of the files for some time. Rudy, of course, had played a key role in Trump’s attempt to extort news of a Biden investigation and even during the impeachment inquiry, in spite of warnings from the intelligence community, traveled to Ukraine to meet with Andrii Derkach, who was subsequently sanctioned as a Russian agent. According to Ben Smith’s employer, Derkach’s efforts to deal “misleading information” to Rudy as part of a 2020 election operation are under investigation by EDNY; a parallel investigation into Rudy for serving as an unregistered agent of Ukrainian interests in events that were part of the impeachment inquiry remains ongoing at SDNY. An intelligence report related to the second story hung on the laptop, regarding Hunter’s ties to China, was disclosed to have been attributed to an intelligence analyst whose identity was entirely fabricated, down to his artificially generated face. And the IC’s report on efforts to interfere in the 2020 election includes one conclusion that sounds suspiciously similar to the efforts that led to the laptop story.

A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives–including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden–through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.

If the Hunter Biden laptop story was just a political dirty trick, then it was one that exactly paralleled well-substantiated efforts involving Russian intelligence agents.

We now know, thanks to the investigation into Project Veritas, that the “sister” media package right wing propaganda outlets were pitching, the dissemination of a diary from Hunter’s half-sister in the very same weeks leading up to the election, similarly features a sketchy origin story that — SDNY has shown probable cause to believe — actually serves to hide the theft of the underlying diary. While SDNY has not yet charged anyone much less proven the case, it claims that the story about how reporters came to obtain such a juicy campaign prop was, itself, misinformation hiding theft. That’s another detail that Smith doesn’t mention in his piece.

Even if the similarities between Smith’s “old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign” and the acknowledged interference attempt by Russian agents are mere coinkydink, it nevertheless is the case that the Hunter Biden laptop package was an attempt at media manipulation, part of the reason it was presented to the seminar.

That’s because — again, as even Glenn Greenwald acknowledged — the presumptively authentic emails offered as the dangle in the laptop package provided, “no proof that Biden followed through on any of Hunter’s promises to Burisma.” By offering “authentic” emails and derogatory pictures just before the election, right wing operatives attempted to make a story that had long been reported (and key parts of it debunked by experts testifying under oath as part of the first impeachment) go viral just before the election not by offering any proof of the key allegations, but by waving something “authentic” around that could substitute for real proof.

It briefly worked, too, as high profile journalists disseminated the most inflammatory details in the story — effectively delivering the announcement of a criminal investigation pertaining to Ukraine that Trump demanded from Volodymyr Zelenskyy — and only after that started identifying really problematic parts of the story.

This entire episode was an effort to disseminate something “authentic” that nevertheless lacked proof of the underlying allegations as a way to lead people to believe those allegations. Classic media manipulation, and it nearly succeeded.

And Ben Smith, the man who published a dossier full of unproven allegations that — Republicans in Congress now believe — injected Russian disinformation into what otherwise might have been just an “old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign,” a dossier that (like Hunter Biden’s laptop) long stood as the proxy understanding for a criminal investigation into dramatically different facts, dismisses the possibility that it was disinformation blithely, presenting no real evidence for or against.

It is undoubtedly the case that there remain real questions about the Hunter Biden laptop package, questions that may get renewed attention given the new focus on the Ashley Biden diary package. Maybe one day, Ben Smith will be able to state, as fact, that it was just an, “old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign;” or maybe EDNY will uncover the real provenance of those “authentic” files all packaged up and handed to a guy who made no secret of his willingness to accept and disseminate Russian disinformation.

But at a time when he is actively refusing to reflect on his own actions in disseminating an “old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign” that seems to have been exploited as an easy vehicle for hostile disinformation, Ben Smith might want to be a little more cautious about assuming those lines are so easy to distinguish.