David Corn: Sleepwalking Toward the Election [View all]

https://link.motherjones.com/public/35024105

My fear—at least, one of them—is that we’re sleepwalking toward a crisis with the 2024 election. Actually, make that plural, crises. We saw what Donald Trump did last time, falsely declaring victory, spreading the lie that the election was stolen from him, then trying to steal it through assorted (and indictment-worthy) schemes, and, inciting an insurrectionist riot. There could be reruns of any or all of that. And Republicans and conservatives are certainly cooking up plans to suppress votes and to skew the election by other means. But what I have in mind harkens back to the original plot that helped Trump reach the White House: information warfare mounted by an overseas adversary.

My spidey-sense was especially triggered this past week when I read an article by Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, slamming his employer for allegedly pushing liberal groupthink and driving away a chunk of its audience. The piece spurred a kerfuffle within the media world, and, in my view, misdiagnosed what ails public radio. But putting that aside, what surprised me was his complete misunderstanding of the Trump-Russia scandal of 2016. In citing examples of NPR’s supposed transgressions, Berliner presented its coverage of this issue as Exhibit A, claiming the outlet’s reporting on this front was shown to be a flop when special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of criminal collusion between Trump and Russia. This, Berliner says, shattered trust in NPR.

What’s alarming is that Berliner, who I don’t know but who I assume is a well-read and reasonably informed person, has so faulty an understanding of what’s often derided as “Russiagate” and has bought into Trump’s it-was-all-a-hoax line. Though there was often an overemphasis on the question of direct collusion, the heart of the matter was that Moscow attacked the election—with a covert hack-and-leak operation and a clandestine social media campaign—to undermine Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump. And that Trump and his campaign aided and abetted Vladimir Putin’s assault by falsely claiming it wasn’t happening. (I know, I know. I’ve explained this many times before.)

Russia did attack, and Trump did engage in a foul act of betrayal. But he and his henchmen have hid behind the collusion issue (and the controversy over the Steele dossier) to duck accountability for this unprecedented treachery. And they have created such a smokescreen that the Russian assault—a significant factor in Trump’s victory—is a barely remembered footnote to the 2016 election. By the way, the matter of collusion, as I noted recently, is not a dead horse. An exhaustive 2020 Senate intelligence committee report on the Russian intervention disclosed that during the election Paul Manafort, a top Trump campaign aide, had indeed colluded with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been involved in the Russian hack-and-leak scheme.

*snip*