How did the man with the pink champagne make this guy President?
There has been intense hyperventilating in the run up to the Electoral College vote, about Russian interference in the US Presidential Election. Much of it just doesn't make any sense. I will try to look at the stories and evidence and pick out the most plausible mechanisms by which Russia may have manipulated US politics to influence the election. In particular, the threat of remote hacking has been substantially exaggerated, while the evidence for a mole inside the campaign has been almost entirely ignored.
Election Hacking
Before the election we heard a lot from all sides about rigging the election. DHS even indicated it was taking extra measures to assure that foreign (read Russian) powers could not 'hack' the voting apparatus. Since the election, we have heard very little about this, and Obama has opined that every vote that was cast (not including provisionals, of course!) was counted. It was never likely that a foreign power could hack the vote counting apparatus, since it is so widely dispersed. At best, a hacker could do something like the infamous 'man-in-the-middle' attack that Karl Rove found so helpful, but that requires some collusion from state officials to outsource the tabulation of votes to the correct 3rd parties.
WikiLeaks Emails
One of the main targets for current charges of Russian hacking revolve around the various releases of emails from Clinton, the DNC, and John Podesta. I consider this a red herring that distracts from the real issues. First of the many leaks/hacks, only the Guccifer 2.0 releases of DNC and Colin powell emails have been even vaguely associated with Russia, and those by means of crude 'fingerprints' that a sophisticated state actor would not leave unless they wanted to be found. The other email caches were most likely taken and leaked by people with inside access. This seems most likely not only because of reports of insider access, but also due to the fact that external hacking would leave a trail the NSA could follow and reveal without compromising secret methods. The NSA hasn't done this. Note that this scenario doesn't eliminate the possibility of a Russian mole.
The Podesta emails were clearly accessed by a simple phishing attack which managed to get his password (it was p@ssw0rd), and the existence of Clintons unsecured home server is well known. With security like this, it would be more reasonable to ask who hasn't hacked them.
The main reason to consider the WikiLeaks information a distraction is because they are exceedingly unlikely to have made a difference in the election outcome. First, they didn't reveal anything significant that wasn't already generally known/strongly suspected, like the fact that the DNC and MSM ganged up on Bernie, or that the MSM was remarkably obedient to Clinton campaign talking points, or that the Clinton Foundation and the various high-priced speeches were basically a cover for influence peddling. While the details were damning, and provided tons of fodder for bloggers following the campaigns obsessively, they did not really break into the mainstream discussion. Even the revelation of Donna Brazile and CNN cheating Bernie by providing Clinton with debate questions barely made ripples. Most of the WikiLeaks revelations provided an opportunity, lapped up and regurgitated ad nauseum by the press, to paint Trump as a Russian puppet.
The Clinton campaign's strategy of shooting the messenger and avoiding the contents of the emails was successful, and this was completely foreseeable. WikiLeaks is a favorite punching bag for gov't authoritarians; they are red meat that no one can resist attacking, which makes them a perfect vehicle to distract and deflect. When the Clinton campaign painted them as tools of Putin, it is natural that various anonymous 'CIA sources' and obsequious IT security contractors with an eye to winning favor in the next administration would pop up to provide cover for these charges. It seems just as likely that the effect of WikiLeaks on the electorate was to convince them that Trump worked for Putin as it was to convince them that the DNC or the Clintons were corrupt.
Finally we must ask, does anyone really believe that all those working class Obama voters really stayed home or voted for Trump because of revelations in WikiLeaks? Obama sure doesn't:
“You know, I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points,” Obama said. “There are some counties maybe I won that people didn’t expect because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.”
Indeed, focussing all the concern about Russian interference on WikiLeaks basically discredits the entire claim. Who benefits from that?
Ada: The Brain of the Campaign
Clearly Obama believes that Clinton lost because the campaign didn't show up where it should have. This judgement echoes concerns expressed by insiders, including the Big Dog himself, that the campaign was ignoring 'white working class' voters, and displaying dangerous overconfidence in key states in the midwest. But why would the campaign make such basic mistakes? How could their polling be so off? Much of the responsibility may lie with their 'analytics' system, named Ada:
Ada is a complex computer algorithm that the campaign was prepared to publicly unveil after the election as its invisible guiding hand. Named for a female 19th-century mathematician — Ada, Countess of Lovelace — the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads — as well as when it was safe to stay dark.
The campaign's deployment of other resources — including county-level campaign offices and the staging of high-profile concerts with stars like Jay Z and Beyoncé — was largely dependent on Ada's work, as well.
While the Clinton campaign's reliance on analytics became well known, the particulars of Ada's work were kept under tight wraps, according to aides. The algorithm operated on a separate computer server than the rest of the Clinton operation as a security precaution, and only a few senior aides were able to access it.
According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too.
What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.
It is notable that Ada was run on a separate server 'as a security precaution'. This ostensibly makes sense when one considers the appalingly poor IT security that led to the DNC, Clinton and Podesta email breaches, but it does not necessarily imply better external security. After all, if they could better secure that server against external attacks, why wouldn't they take the same precautions with the rest of their servers? The separate server with access restricted to 'a few senior aides' suggests that the campaign was concerned more with internal security, which supports the theory that the earlier leaks came from insiders with access rather than external hackers.
So the campaign became dependent on software for its decision making, and seemingly ignored the concerns of experienced professionals.
SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.
Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.
Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.
“They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”
The campaign was so reliant on Ada and so overconfident based on its rosy predictions that they were more concerned with a trick to 'fool Donald Trump into campaigning' in Iowa than holding on to a crucial state that they lost to the Sanders campaign despite their own polling showing they had a strong lead there. This hubris not only misallocated resources, but may have actively discouraged voters:
The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).
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“It was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they’re going to do it. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,’” said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. “But in terms of activists, it seems different, it’s maybe they don’t care about us.”
Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.
“There’s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,” said a former Obama operative in Michigan. “They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn’t provide people anything to do until GOTV.”
So the model and the polling was wrong, but no one realized it:
Most importantly, multiple operatives said, the Clinton campaign dismissed what’s known as in-person “persuasion” — no one was knocking on doors trying to drum up support for the Democratic nominee, which also meant no one was hearing directly from voters aside from voters they’d already assumed were likely Clinton voters, no one tracking how feelings about the race and the candidates were evolving. This left no information to check the polling models against — which might have, for example, showed the campaign that some of the white male union members they had expected to be likely Clinton voters actually veering toward Trump — and no early warning system that the race was turning against them in ways that their daily tracking polls weren’t picking up.
People involved in the Michigan campaign still can’t understand why Brooklyn stayed so sure of the numbers in a state that it also had projected Clinton would win in the primary.
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Brooklyn’s theory from the start was that 2016 was going to be a purely base turnout election. Efforts were focused on voter registration and then, in the final weeks, turning out voters identified as Clinton’s, without confirmation that they were.
Marshall, at Mook’s direction, had designed a plan that until the final weeks was built around holding Pennsylvania and winning just one more state — electoral math that would have denied Trump the presidency on the reasonable assumption Michigan and Wisconsin were Clinton’s.
So not only did the model cause Brooklyn to rebuff important field operatives, it also systematically excluded important independent feedback, creating its own special bubble of complacency. Talk about epistemic closure, this system of top-down AI control of the campaign is not only an obvious primary cause for the loss to Trump, but also a huge technical vulnerability; a single point of attack that could, if manipulated, derail the whole campaign.
The Brain Behind the Brain
Ada is the brainchild of Elan Kriegel, perhaps the most powerful part of the Clinton campaign that you have never heard of:
To understand Kriegel’s role is to understand how Clinton has run her campaign — precise and efficient, meticulous and effective, and, yes, at times more mathematical than inspirational. Top Clinton advisers say almost no major decision is made in Brooklyn without first consulting Kriegel. He was one of her first hires and is among her highest-paid, and yet he remains virtually unknown outside the cloistered community of political number-crunchers. “I can’t think of anybody who has as much impact as Elan who has as little name recognition with the national press,” said Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN, which manages the voter file used by every major Democratic campaign, and who has worked with Kriegel for years.
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When Clinton operatives talk about their “data-based” campaign, it’s invariably Kriegel’s data, and perhaps more importantly his models interpreting that data, they are talking about. It was an algorithm from Kriegel’s shop — unreported until now — that determined, after the opening states, where almost every dollar of Clinton’s more than $60 million in television ads was spent during the primary.
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One Democratic strategist, an Obama veteran with knowledge of the Clinton campaign, marveled at Kriegel’s sway in Brooklyn. “I have never seen a campaign that’s more driven by the analytics,” the strategist said. It’s not as if Kriegel’s data has ever turned around Clinton’s campaign plane; it’s that her plane almost never takes off without Kriegel’s data charting its path in the first place.
“From our schedule to our voter contact to where our organizers spend their time, almost everyone here interacts with his work and their work is influenced by his insights,” Mook said, calling Kriegel’s analyses the campaign’s “invisible guiding hand.”
So Ada, and by extension Kriegel, were the brain and central nervous system of the Clinton campaign. Their dominance also made itself felt during the primary campaign, where the Clinton campaign was able to run up an early delegate lead in red states that led the to primary victory of a candidate who nevertheless polled poorly against Trump and other GOP contenders. The operation was focussed on getting maximum 'flippable' delegates per advertising dollar by computing relative costs and reaches of television markets:
If that all sounds simple enough, it’s not. Every TV market reaches a different number of voters in a different number of districts, with her support in each a different estimated distance from a delegate threshold. Calculating where dollars would go furthest, per delegate, was an incredible statistical undertaking that was months in the making.
In the end, whatever the algorithms spat out, the campaign pretty much bought. “We relied almost entirely on them,” Mook said.
So in states that Clinton won lopsidedly, Kriegel’s algorithm still had them spending big.
The breakdown of the buy in Texas, powered by Kriegel’s modeling, shows how Clinton’s TV ads budget hunted for delegates, not votes. Texas is the rare state that used state legislative districts to award delegates, and Clinton spent $1.2 million on broadcast and cable ads even as she won the state by 32 percentage points. Sanders spent $0. She spent more on ads in tiny Brownsville ($127,000) and Waco ($142,000), ranked as the 86th and 87th largest media markets in the country, as she did in Houston ($105,000), the 10th largest, according to ad data provided by a media tracker.
It paid off: In Texas alone, Clinton netted 72 delegates more than Sanders — a margin that more than offset all the Sanders’ primary and caucus wins through March 1.
The politico article quoted above is from Sept. 7. It reads like a hagiography of Kriegel, but includes a suggestive tidbit about Kriegel's first contact with Clinton and her campaign staff:
Ten years ago, the idea that Kriegel would be a senior Clinton adviser would have seemed unthinkable. Yes, he was studying Clinton’s public movements closely then. But that was only because his first job in politics was as a producer for Bill O’Reilly, the conservative Fox News host and Clinton antagonist.
Recipe for A trump Presidency
Given that the influence of WikiLeaks content on the election was basically negligible, their provenance is irrelevant. While the unsupported claims of their Russian origin have been debunked, no one has provided proof of their actual origin. Since they are such a great lightening rod for attacks, and thus a great distraction from other matters, from the actual contents of the leaked emails, to other vulnerabilities in the Clinton campaign, it is easy to see that both the campaign, and any external forces seeking to undermine it would benefit from media attention on WikiLeaks. As a result, one can argue that the presence of some crude Russian fingerprints in the Guccifer 2.0 information may be an intentional misdirection, or may conversely be an intentional calling card left by otherwise competent Russian intelligence services. Either way, the material is a red herring.
What, then, are the real factors that led to the election of Trump and thus to reduced military pressure on Russia in Eastern Europe and Syria, and what authorship can we infer for them?
The obvious first step in the election of Donald Trump is his victory in the GOP primary. As we learned from WikiLeaks, his primary campaign was aided by massive free media coverage, which was driven at least partially by the DNC and its media allies with their plan to get an 'unelectable' GOP candidate to run against. This went mostly right, except, of course, for the unelectable part.
The next step in the election of Donald Trump was, ironically, quite similar: force out the most popular politician in America and assure that the 'electable' Hillary Clinton had her turn as the nominee, then as president. This also worked out, except, of course, for the 'electable' part. It was also carried out by the DNC in collusion with their medial cartel allies. As we have seen, another critical part of this puzzle was former Fox News producer Elan Kriegel. And speaking of former foxes working the Democratic henhouse, we can't neglect to mention David Brock, the right-wing dirty tricks artist who headed up the Clinton campaigns 'Million Dollar Troll Army' to disrupt and attack the Sanders campaign on social media and online forums. The role of these two newly converted democrats in the Clinton campaign's removal of the Sanders threat to the Trump campaign (polling showed him beating Trump handily, as opposed to Clinton) cannot be understated.
With the ground set, Clinton nominated by the Democratic Party, Trump by the GOP, the last part was was to sabotage the campaign. The best way to do this would be to corrupt or confuse the digital brain of the campaign, Ada. Doing this would require someone with high-level access. I can't say that either Brock or Kriegel would have access to the emails, or the technical saavy to copy the emails and get them to WikiLeaks without leaving a trace. Nor is it clear that Kriegel would need to openly corrupt Ada, when it was apparently sufficient to feed Ada misleading raw data, and assure that the feedback from operatives on the ground was severed. Who could do that? Answer that question and you have a prime suspect for Russian mole.
Some suggest Robby Mook (would a native english speaker pick a fake name like that?) has the access and wherewithal to steal and leak the emails, providing a distraction, and to collude to get Trump and of course, Clinton nominated, and to blind Ada and the campaign. Is Mook the russian mole?
Others suggest that Abedin, whose father was ran an islamist publication in London that was likely involved with some intelligence services, may have been compromised by the FSB.
We may never know who the mole in the Clinton campaign was, and how exactly they managed to place Trump in office, but we ignore the likelihood of Russian influence this election, or limit our consideration to the meaningless WikiLeaks emails at our own grave peril.
