Civics: “Manipulated by whom? And to what end?”

Matt Bivens:

Could a single, late-breaking corruption allegation really have dictated a presidential election’s outcome? 

Yes, and it has happened before. The 2020 election was razor close — but four years earlier, in 2016, the election had also been razor close, and many later blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on the FBI’s last-minute announcement that she was back under investigation for improper handling of official e-mails. Clinton herself, in her memoirs, used a prison metaphor to say FBI Director James Comey “shivved” her; statistician Nate Silver is among those who assert that the Comey surprise cost Clinton the presidency. 

Comey and the FBI were clearly embarrassed and haunted by that possibility — Comey has called it “a nightmare I can’t awaken from” — and making matters worse, many top FBI officials loathed their new and unexpected boss Trump. (Comey in his memoirs says he just assumed Clinton would win.)

So it was Comey’s fault. 

Or maybe it was the Russians? Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, in the final days of the Obama-Biden White House, the intelligence community — meaning, Comey & colleagues — handed down a major report that alleged broad-based Russian interference in our affairs. 

This was the first big public report, the one that kicked off a cottage industry of government publications and investigations about “Russian meddling in our democracy” in the years since. Yet more than half of this grand report was just a prolonged, petulant sulk about ingrates around the world who, on YouTube, seemed to actually prefer English-language Kremlin television over BBC and CNN

In fact, our intelligence community continued, Kremlin-sponsored television had garnered such popularity by reporting on things like fracking damage to the environment and “alleged” Wall Street greed that it was now more popular in London than CNN. (It was still Russia-run television, though: it got very unpopular very quickly after the invasion of Ukraine).

The intelligence community was indignant about all of this, and the FBI, cheered on by a wildly delusional press corps, soon opened a new chapter in the story of American xenophobia. They would spend years investigating (or manufacturing) some ludicrous propositions: that Donald Trump was a Russian sleeper agent; that Russia had compromised the 2016 election by posting a tiny amount of totally obscure clickbait ads of no possible logical significance.

Fast forward to 2020. After years of hyperventilating that Russians are trying to control us through our social media and “hack our elections”, representatives of FBI and CIA now seemed far better placed to do that instead.

Jonathan Turley:

Not unexpectedly, Gadde and Baker would play prominent roles in the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandal. There was hardly a need to round up “the usual suspects” in the suppression scandal when Musk took over the company. Both lawyers swatted down internal misgivings to bury a story that could well have made the difference in the close 2020 election.