Truthdig
Hacking the Election: We Should Call Trump's Bluff for a Watergate-Style
Inquiry
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hacking_the_election_we_should_call_trum
ps_20170312/
Posted on Mar 12, 2017
By Bill Blum
Evan Vucci / AP
At precisely 3:35 a.m. EST on March 4, President Donald John Trump-who has
long boasted of his ability to function
(http://www.businessinsider.com/some-people-only-need-a-few-hours-of-sleep-2
016-12) on just a few hours of sleep per night-launched perhaps the most
incendiary tweet-storm
(http://www.snopes.com/2017/03/04/trump-accuses-obama-of-tapping-phones/. ;)
of his tweet-filled career from within the gilt-encrusted confines of his
Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
"Terrible!" Trump typed on his trusty smartphone. "Just found out that Obama
had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the [November election]
victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
After posting two more tweets claiming that Obama's plan to wiretap him had
been "turned down" by a court and that "a good lawyer" could "make a great
case" against Obama-and roughly an hour before taking to Twitter again to
blast Arnold Schwarzenegger for his ratings failures as the new host of
"Celebrity Apprentice"-Trump compared Obama's conduct to "Nixon/Watergate."
The next day, Trump's dutiful press secretary, Sean Spicer, followed up on
his boss' pre-dawn meltdown, sending out a news release
(https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/05/statement-press-secr
etary ) to underscore the "very troubling" nature of Obama's alleged
malfeasance. Spicer urged Congress to expand its existing probes into
Russian interference in the election to include the question of whether
"executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016."
For once, I couldn't agree more with President Trump. Although I suspect the
last thing he, Spicer and the rest of the West Wing gang really want is a
high-profile, Watergate-style investigation-note that Spicer concluded his
March 5 announcement with the declaration that "[n]either the White House
nor the president will comment further until such oversight is
conducted"-this time we should support the chief executive, or, more
accurately, call his bluff.
Anyone who needs a refresher course on Watergate should look at the Senate's
final report
(https://archive.org/stream/FinalReportOfTheSenateSelectCommitteeOnPresident
ialCampaignActivities/Final%20Report%20of%20the%20Senate%20Select%20Committe
e%20on%20Presidential%20Campaign%20Activities#page/n1/mode/2up) on the
scandal, which was released in June 1974. The document still stands, by any
measure, as one of the landmark texts of our constitutional history.
Comprising nearly 1,300 pages
(https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1922) and another 26
volumes of testimony, the report reflects the extraordinarily broad mandate
that the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by
North Carolina's Democratic Sen. Sam Ervin Jr., received to investigate the
June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the
Watergate office building in Washington, D.C., and the subsequent cover-up
by the Nixon White House.
Beyond the break-in and cover-up, the committee also was given the go-ahead
to probe, in the words of the report, "all other illegal, improper, or
unethical conduct occurring during the Presidential campaign of 1972." For
additional historical context, the committee went even further, exploring
the Nixon administration's political practices dating back to 1968,
including the creation of the former president's infamous "enemies list" and
his obsession with opposition to the war in Vietnam.
The select committee held its first public hearing May 17, 1973, and
maintained an exhausting schedule, convening as often as five times a week,
with only two brief recesses until August of that year. Many hearings were
televised, attracting record viewing audiences. When the final gavel came
down, a total of 37 witnesses had been called, ending, as the report
indicates, what was then the longest uninterrupted congressional hearing in
the country's history.
The Watergate hearings were instrumental in bringing about Nixon's
resignation. They were also a civics lesson writ large in a time of grave
national disunity, as well as a collective search for political truth and an
exercise in speaking truth to power.
We need an inquiry of the same magnitude today, convened by either a new
select committee modeled after the one led by Ervin or an independent
commission armed with full federal subpoena power.
At present, both the House and Senate Intelligence committees are
investigating possible Russian influence in the elections. The committees
also are looking into Trump's charges against Obama, with Republican Sen.
Lindsey Graham and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff taking the initiative on that
score. The House panel is slated to take testimony from FBI Director James
Comey on March 20.
Neither chamber's probe, however, is adequate. The existing committees are
too restricted in their jurisdiction to get the job done and conduct too
much of their most important work behind closed doors. The House panel also
is overstaffed with Trump loyalists and lackeys.
In the meantime, questions surrounding the election continue to haunt the
body politic, much as Watergate constituted, according to Nixon's White
House counsel John Dean, a "cancer on the presidency."
The probe we need should be directed at the entire issue of undue influence,
cyber and otherwise, in the 2016 election. It should be a no-holds-barred
affair, offering maximum transparency, with no preconceptions, and guided by
an abiding commitment to follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter
whose reputations are sullied, or whose misconduct or crimes are exposed.
At the very minimum, the new inquiry should look at three crucial questions:
1. Who hacked the computers of the Democratic National Committee, why, and
to what effect?
For the most part, the mainstream media, influential members of
Congress-and at least at one point in early January, even Trump
(http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/08/reince_priebus_says_trump
_accepts_russia_is_to_blame_for_election_season.html) -have stated that
Russia is to blame for hacking the computers of the Democratic National
Committee as well as the emails of John Podesta, the longtime Washington
power broker who chaired Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. In
the mainstream narrative, Russian President Vladimir Putin holds a
deep-seated animus toward Clinton, and at his direction, the fruits of the
election-season hackings were forwarded to WikiLeaks to undermine Clinton,
boost Trump's bid for office, discredit American democracy and diminish
American power abroad.
Such claims, even if probable, have yet to be verified.
In a March 7 essay
(https://theintercept.com/2017/03/07/leading-putin-critic-warns-of-xenophobi
c-conspiracy-theories-drowning-u-s-discourse-and-helping-trump/ ) on the
work of Russian expat and Putin archcritic Masha Gessen, Glenn Greenwald
writes for The Intercept:
Wild, melodramatic claims about hidden Russian plotting and Trump collusion
are routinely and constantly hyped by leading media outlets based on nothing
but their imaginations or, at best, coordinated whispers from intelligence
officials utterly insusceptible to verification, from operatives trained in
disinformation.
To be sure, some mainstream reporting on the Putin-Trump axis has been
impressive, such as the New Yorker's March 6 story
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-w
ar) , "Trump, Putin and the New Cold War." Written by the magazine's editor
David Remnick and two colleagues, the article opens with a discussion of the
"active measures" used by the former Soviet Union as early as 1982 to
disrupt the American political process: the collection of American
governmental secrets, creation of forged documents, dissemination of rumors
and false information, collusion with front groups, etc.
Putin, according to Remnick and company, has imported such techniques into
the digital age with renewed vigor and alacrity. The New Yorker piece makes
a strong circumstantial case for Russian culpability in the 2016 election,
based in part on the declassified report released by Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper before Trump's inauguration. The report declares
that intelligence analysts, including those at the CIA and FBI, have reached
positive judgments about Russian involvement with "high confidence."
Still, as the article acknowledges: "The declassified report provides more
assertion than evidence. Intelligence officers say that this was necessary
to protect their information-gathering methods." In other words, the report
is, to invoke legal parlance, conclusory. Standing alone, despite what you
may hear on CNN and MSNBC every day, it establishes nothing.
Notwithstanding the need to safeguard its methods, the intelligence
community-from Clapper to Comey-has the burden of proof on all matters
relating to Russian influence in the elections. A Watergate-style public
inquiry would hammer this fact home, compelling our spy chiefs to reveal the
identities (even if actual names are withheld) of the hackers, plus their
motives. They and other witnesses also would be asked to assess the impact,
if any, Russian hacking had on the election and to disclose clearly and
unequivocally the content and extent of any communications between Trump
campaign aides and associates and Russian officials, operatives and agents.
2. To what extent did fake news and Comey's "October surprise" influence the
outcome of the election?
Among the trove of subversive techniques that the Clapper report attributes
to Putin is the deployment of the television network RT (formerly Russia
Today) to disseminate false stories about the U.S. Indeed, the report
contains a seven-page appendix titled "Kremlin's TV Seeks To Influence
Politics, Fuel Discontent in US" that discusses the rise of RT in language
that often reads like it was culled straight from one of Joe McCarthy's
vintage anti-communist screeds.
Of particular importance, the report alleges that in the runup to the 2012
election, RT "portrayed the US electoral process as undemocratic and
featured calls by US protesters for the public to rise up and 'take this
government back.' " Perhaps most striking is the report's condemnation of an
RT documentary on the Occupy Wall Street movement that depicted the movement
"as a fight against the 'ruling class,' " and portrayed "the current US
political system as corrupt and dominated by corporations."
Like most Americans, I rarely tune in to RT. When I do, I usually find the
network cheesy, beset by low production values and animated by an amateurish
pro-Russian bias. But I've seen nothing that isn't fully protected by the
First Amendment. And in the case of RT's Occupy coverage, I see nothing that
would qualify as fake news and a lot with which I and millions of
left-of-center Americans actually agree.
This isn't to say that fake news-stories circulated by online and print
media that are intentionally false and created with a purpose to
mislead-doesn't exist. The loony "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory-that Hillary
Clinton ran a child sex-trafficking ring from the basement of a D.C.
pizzeria-is a prime example
(http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/pizzagate-clinton-conspiracy-theor
y-led-dc-shooting-article-1.2899371 ) that it does. The absurd contention,
which originated
(https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fever-swamp-election?utm_term=.ygbx
ROpzM#.bn2YE0GZo) from a white supremacist Twitter account, was first
circulated after Comey's shocking late October disclosure that the FBI was
reopening its Clinton email investigation. Pizzagate had the obvious goal of
adding to Clinton's distractions during the waning days of the campaign.
Nor is fake news the sole province of the right and outlets such as Fox
News, or exclusively the product of internet trolls based in Eastern Europe
or Russia, as is commonly asserted. In his Intercept article on Gessen, for
example, Greenwald singles out (https://www.palmerreport.com/ ;) the Palmer
Report as a source of liberal fake news.
Published by Bill Palmer, whom Greenwald labels "a crazed fanatical follower
of Hillary Clinton," the website circulated false claims during the campaign
that the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks were forged. More
recently, the site has posted articles asserting that the vote totals of the
election were altered, causing, as Greenwald writes, Slate to compare the
Palmer Report to the National Enquirer and prompting The Atlantic to warn in
its February issue of the rise of progressive fake news.
The most important question, then, isn't whether fake news, however defined,
exists, but whether-like alleged Russian computer espionage-it had a
quantifiable impact on the last election. Let a panel of experts offer their
opinions under cross-examination before a newly constituted select
committee. And let's demand that the committee include Comey on its witness
list, given the media whirlwind engendered by his "October Surprise."
3. What was behind Trump's March 4 tweets?
Unwittingly or not, President Trump has raised this question himself, and
as I said at the outset of this column, I agree with him that it must be
answered. We need a Watergate-style investigation to allow him to explain
why he accused his predecessor of personally tapping his "wires" at Trump
Tower before the November plebiscite.
Sadly, since March 5, when Sean Spicer warned that Trump would have nothing
more to say on the subject until an inquiry is over, the president has been
eerily silent. Even his Twitter account has grown bland. On March 13, in his
daily press briefing
(http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/13/politics/sean-spicer-donald-trump-wiretapping
/index.html?adkey=bn) , Spicer added to the confusion, remarking that Trump
may have misspoke when he tweeted about "wiretapping," but "he used the word
to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities ... that there's no
question occurred."
Various news stories
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/04/donald-trump-was-
a-conspiracy-theory-candidate-now-hes-on-the-verge-of-being-a-conspiracy-the
ory-president/?utm_term=.6e3576b72ad2) have suggested that Trump's tweets
stemmed from charges leveled by right-wing radio talk-show host Mark Levin
and Breitbart News. As part of its mandate, a new select committee could
determine whether the charges have any merit.
Toward that end, the committee could provide an overview of wiretapping law,
calling on legal scholars to explain that presidents cannot personally issue
wiretap warrants. Only judges can do that, either incident to a domestic
criminal investigation upon a showing of probable cause, or under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) upon certification of the need
for a wiretap from the attorney general and the director of national
intelligence.
Despite copious denials from Democrats and the intelligence community, we
still don't know definitively whether Trump Tower or any of the phones or
computers housed there or connected to it were bugged before the election,
or what kind of warrants might have been issued beforehand if any searches
took place.
President Trump, however, either knows the answer or could easily find out,
with as little effort as a phone call to his attorney general. And he could
easily show us what he knows. The president, though he may not realize it,
has broad discretion
(http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2006/04/presidential_de.html) to
declassify and release executive-branch material, including any pre-election
search warrants or FISA court orders issued for Trump Tower.
While such disclosures would do much to clear up the mystery behind the
March 4 tweets, only Trump himself could lay the mystery to rest by
appearing in person before the new select committee to answer questions
under oath. Either his wiretapping claims have a basis in fact, or they were
the product of a fevered imagination. Either way, we deserve the truth.
Testifying before Congress is rare for presidents, but not unprecedented
(https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/PresidentVicePr
esident_TestifyBeforeCommittee.htm) . Abraham Lincoln voluntarily appeared
before the House Judiciary Committee in 1862. Woodrow Wilson testified
before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1919. Most relevant,
Gerald Ford explained his decision to pardon Nixon in testimony before a
House Judiciary subcommittee in 1974.
Would Trump accept an invitation from a new select committee to do the same?
Would the invitation appeal to his unbridled ego and narcissism or cause him
to retreat? We know only that he'll be up practically any hour of the day or
night, smartphone in hand, able to reply. We just have to call his bluff.
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