by Robert Manne
In the immediate aftermath of his election, Trump maintained his position. On 14 January 2017, Trump proposed a deal with Russia, perhaps involving mutual nuclear weapons reduction, that “would include lifting of economic sanctions”. More recently, the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, claimed that if relations were, as hoped, to improve, Russia needed to withdraw its troops from Crimea and end its renewed aggression in eastern Ukraine. As with so much else in Trump’s foreign policy, the future of the Ukraine-related sanctions is presently clouded in complete confusion.
In his memo of 10 August 2016, Steele wrote of the details his informants had provided about the tensions inside the Kremlin over its intervention in the US election campaign. Because Russia was being widely blamed in the United States for the hacking operation, the Putin government had decided that no new material would be released to WikiLeaks for the time being. By mid-October, however, according to the dossier, attitudes towards the release of hacked emails had apparently changed. Steele outlined the views of a “senior leadership figure” and of a Russian Foreign Ministry official who claimed that Putin and his colleagues were “surprised and disappointed” that the hacked emails published by WikiLeaks had not had greater impact. They had therefore decided “that the stream would continue through October and up to the election”.
This is precisely what happened. Between early October and 8 November, WikiLeaks released by drip feed a stream of DNC emails obtained from the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta. Three separate studies have shown their impact. Judd Legum on the independent progressive news site ThinkProgress learned that in the month before the election, Trump referred to WikiLeaks 164 times and showered it with the highest praise. Harry Enten on statistics-driven news site FiveThirtyEight found that in that month Google searches for WikiLeaks were double the number of searches for the FBI, which had announced a new investigation into Clinton’s misuse of her private email for State Department business. Nick Fernandez and Rob Savillo on progressive research site Media Matters showed with convincing evidence that in the five weeks before the election of Trump, “evening cable and broadcast news, major newspapers, and the Sunday morning broadcast network political talk shows combined to flood the media landscape with the coverage of hacked emails released by WikiLeaks”. The Kremlin no longer had reason for disappointment.
On 10 August, one of Steele’s informants provided details of a conversation with an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who had explained Moscow’s strategic thinking in the cultivation of Trump. The Kremlin hoped Trump would “help upset the liberal international status quo”. Trump was regarded as “an anti-establishment figure” and as a “pragmatist” with whom one could do business. Following Trump’s election, these hopes were not disappointed. In an interview with London’s Times and Germany’s Bild, Trump described NATO as an “obsolete” alliance and praised the Brexit decision of the British people. Despite the Russian election hacking, which Trump first denied and then reluctantly conceded, the president described his close relations with Putin as an “asset”, not a “liability”. In his interview with the Times and Bild, he placed his relations with Angela Merkel and Putin on an identical footing. “Well, I start off trusting both – but let’s see how long that lasts.” And in an interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, he countered the claim that Putin was a murderer and a thug with the assertion that such types were readily found among American leaders as well. Even Trump’s most loyal conservative supporters, for whom American goodness is an article of faith, were startled.
Trump’s initial articulation of his Russia policy and his attitude towards Putin stands in starkest contrast with his policy towards China. Trump’s choice as secretary of state was Rex Tillerson. He has been awarded Russia’s highest civilian honour, the Order of Friendship; has spoken of his “very close relationship with Putin”; and, as head of ExxonMobil, once struck a $US500 million deal with Rosneft. In his confirmation hearing, Tillerson threatened US military action over Beijing’s South China Sea island policy. In the early days of his administration, Trump himself raised the possibility of American recognition of Taiwanese independence, thereby challenging the most fundamental element underpinning relatively amicable Sino–American relations since 1979. On China, Trump is an extreme hawk and on Russia an extreme dove. He has never even attempted to explain why.
The politically most explosive element of the Steele dossier, however, came in two memos towards its conclusion. Steele reported that, according to a “Kremlin insider”, Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had replaced Manafort as the key figure in the joint Trump–Putin anti-Clinton campaign. Cohen was now “heavily engaged in a cover-up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of Trump’s relations with Russia being exposed”. Two memos reported a meeting in Prague between Cohen and unnamed Russians. The meeting is said to have taken place in late August or early September. Its purpose was “to sweep (the campaign) … under the carpet and make sure no connections could be fully established or proven”, to decide how deniable cash payments could best be made to the hackers, and how the links between the Putin regime and the Trump team, in the case of a Clinton electoral victory, could most effectively be covered up. It was claimed that “the operatives involved had been paid by both Trump’s team and the Kremlin”. Were this claim eventually to be verified, it would almost certainly constitute grounds for the impeachment of the US president.
Cohen has strenuously denied ever visiting Prague. He has claimed (without anything that looks like evidence) that he has been confused with another Michael Cohen and, oddly, has provided journalists with a photo of the cover but not the inside pages of his passport. Even these pages might not be definitive proof that he was not in Prague. The Czech Republic is part of the EU’s Schengen Area. Visitors do not need a separate stamp in their passport on entering the Czech Republic. Accordingly, if Cohen wants to prove that the claims in the Steele dossier about his meeting in Prague are false, he will need to demonstrate that he did not visit any country inside the Schengen Area between mid-August and mid-September 2016.
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There are two outlier cases that might be made about the reliability of the information contained in the Steele dossier. The first is that the information it contains is entirely or almost entirely accurate. This seems extremely unlikely.
The dossier relied on a series of unnamed people who were working for Steele and who, presumably, he had come to know and trust either during his time as an MI6 operative in Moscow or subsequently as the head of MI6’s Russia desk in London. In turn, these people spoke to fifteen or twenty well-placed sources inside Russia and then reported back to Steele what they had been told. How exactly these sources had learned what they told Steele’s people cannot be known on the basis of the dossier. Some of the information might have been acquired by first-hand experience. Some might merely be gossip or speculation. It is almost impossible to believe that everything they reported to Steele’s people occurred precisely as claimed. Inaccuracy, exaggeration, misjudgement or even deliberate disinformation cannot be ruled out. Likewise, the chain of reporting – from the dossier’s sources to Steele’s people in Russia and from them to Steele in London – makes it likely that some trivial or even serious errors in transmission – “Chinese whispers”, as it were – occurred.
The second outlier suggestion – advanced by Trump, Putin, Julian Assange and their supporters, and also by several commentators, such as Bob Woodward of Watergate fame – is that the dossier is a malicious invention. This is an even less likely possibility.
After the dossier’s publication, several journalists spoke to former colleagues of Steele. Almost unanimously, all regarded him as a consummate professional of undoubted integrity. Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, noted: “I do know Christopher Steele and in my view he is very professional and thorough in what he does.” A former member of the British Foreign Office, who had known Steele for twenty-five
years, told the Guardian: “Chris is an experienced and highly regarded professional … He could not have survived in the job he was in if he had been prone to flights of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way.”
As we have seen, independent evidence or corresponding information exists for many of the claims contained in the dossier. Moreover, recently evidence has emerged that proves beyond reasonable doubt that the dossier is not a concoction. On 10 February 2017, Jim Sciutto and Evan Perez of CNN reported a matter of great significance. American intelligence officials had told them that US agencies had intercepted communications between Russians mentioned in the Steele dossier that confirmed that “some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier”. Unless several US intelligence officials are lying to CNN, the Steele dossier is not, as Trump, Putin and Assange have all claimed, a fake.
The officials did not reveal to CNN any conversations between these Russians and Americans. Shortly after the CNN report, however, four current or former US intelligence officials told the New York Times that there already existed extensive information, based on overseas communications interceptions, of “repeated contacts” between Trump associates, including Manafort, and Russian intelligence officers during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign. They did not reveal the contents of these communications. With his characteristic eloquence, Spicer immediately denied any grounds for suspicion existed. “There’s nothing that would conclude me … that anything has changed with respect to that time period.”
Such denials are now meaningless. As the resignation of Flynn and the recent CNN, New York Times and Washington Post reports have shown, some members of US intelligence are presently sufficiently alarmed about the relations between Trump and Putin that they are openly, under conditions of anonymity, willing to leak details of their domestic and overseas communications interceptions to the mainstream American media. To my knowledge, in the history of US intelligence such a situation is unprecedented.
At least three investigations into the Trump team’s relations with the Russians have been established. On 15 October 2016, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted a warrant sought by a number of US intelligence services that allows them to investigate the exchanges between two Russian banks and three American citizens involved in the Trump election campaign – Manafort, Page and the Republican activist Roger Stone. The FBI is conducting a separate inquiry into the Steele dossier. In addition, an investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election has been established by a committee of the US Senate.
If, between them, these inquiries conclude that Trump’s team colluded with Russia in the hacking and the publication of the DNC emails and, even more, if it can be proved that it helped fund the operation, an impeachment hearing of the recently inaugurated US president seems the only constitutional course.
Weekend Australian, 18–19 February 2017
JULIAN ASSANGE: LAURA POITRAS
When Julian Assange launched a campaign against Alex Gibney’s hostile documentary on WikiLeaks, We Steal Secrets (2013), he argued that Laura Poitras – another documentary filmmaker, best known for her fierce criticism of post–September 11 US foreign policy – was making a far better film. Not long after, Poitras found greater fame as one of the two people Edward Snowden turned to when he decided to reveal the depth and range of the National Security Agency’s spying operations inside America and beyond, and then as the director of the Academy Award–winning film about him, Citizenfour (2014). In May 2016, at the Cannes Film Festival, Poitras released an early version of Risk, her film about WikiLeaks and Assange. Apparently, it was broadly sympathetic. In 2017, she released the final version. Assange regards this cut as both a personal betrayal and a threat to his freedom. It is not difficult to see why.
Poitras’ Assange is obviously a highly intelligent abstract thinker. In one of the only amusing moments of Risk, a bemused and bored Lady Gaga interviews Assange in his cramped quarters at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. She asks him whether he loves his mother. He does. Does he love his father? As Assange grew up without his natural father he replies that that’s a more abstract question. Lady Gaga misunderstands him. Like father, like son, is her take. Although there are in Risk fragments from an interview where Assange discusses aspects of his theorising on global revolution in the age of the internet, the shape of his thinking is never revealed.
Poitras’ Assange is also undeniably courageous. He tells Poitras that life offers individuals both risks and opportunities. Although in general he doesn’t believe in martyrdom, the risk of inaction is high. We do not live for many days. All is lost if opportunities for action to improve the world are not seized. There is nothing in Risk that causes us to doubt that Assange has lived according to his word. Late in the film Assange and his most important supporter at that time, the young Englishwoman Sarah Harrison, calculate the length of his prison sentence if extradited to the United States. The figure arrived at is 142 years.
Beyond abstract political intelligence and courage, however, there is little about Poitras’ portrait of Assange that is attractive. The Assange we see is paranoid. Poitras shows him talking to one of his legal team in the safety of forested grounds in Norfolk, bristling with suspicion that, even there, they are being spied upon. Poitras, who knows a great deal about the need for security, tells us that Assange runs WikiLeaks as an intelligence agency and that “he’s teaching me things about secrecy I didn’t realise I needed to know”. Poitras’ Assange is vain. We see his small team of supporters in Norfolk circling him, taking turns to cut his hair. On several occasions, Assange examines his appearance in a mirror closely. We witness his frisson of pleasure before an audience of admirers or when being filmed. Poitras’ Assange is, in addition, a bully. When one of his people, as he calls them, tells him that she agreed to be interviewed by three FBI agents inside a car, he tells her what a fool she is. He is also notably self-important. In the opening scene of Risk, filmed in 2010, Assange has convinced Harrison to ring the US Department of State and ask to speak to Hillary Clinton, to warn of the imminent release of 250,000 unredacted diplomatic cables. Eventually, he hears back from one of Clinton’s lawyers. Assange lets him know that he is doing the then secretary of state a favour. “We don’t have a problem,” he explains portentously. “You have a problem.”
Apparently it is only in the final version of Risk that Poitras has included an interpretative narration expressing her deepening disillusion with Assange. In this narration Poitras wonders why Assange has allowed her to film so freely when he doesn’t appear to like her. There is in fact no mystery. The kind of intimate access she was given was based on Assange’s assumption about the kind of panegyric she would make. Poitras tells us of nightmares where she has betrayed Assange. In the context of their relations, indeed she has. Poitras explains why her attitude to Assange has changed. “This is not the film I thought I was making. I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was wrong. They’re becoming the story.”
What then are the contradictions? The disillusion with Assange seems principally to concern his relations with women. The most memorable scene in Risk involves a discussion between Assange and one of his legal advisers, Helena Kennedy. She tells Assange that, in relation to the alleged sexual assault of two women in Sweden, his line has to be that, while he recognises the seriousness of rape, he is not a rapist. She warns that he mustn’t treat the case as some mad feminist conspiracy. In public, Assange agrees to toe this line. In private, however, he informs Kennedy that he regards himself as a victim of “a thoroughly tawdry radical feminist political positioning thing”. In explanation, he points out that one of his accusers started “a lesbian nightclub in Gothenburg”. Kennedy is angry and exasperated. “What’s setting up a lesbian nightclub got to do with the price of fish?” Later, a male supporter who has gone to Sweden
to assess the lie of the land is told that everything would be speedily settled if Assange agreed to meet the women. Assange’s response implies that they are simply spurned lovers. Is he being sarcastic? No, is Assange’s reply.
Late in the film we discover that Assange’s most important collaborator, Jacob Appelbaum, with whom we learn Poitras had a brief affair, has been accused of serial sexual misconduct, one of his alleged victims a close friend of Poitras. Revulsion over Appelbaum seems to have compelled Poitras to confront the contradictions in Assange’s character and behaviour – intelligent, courageous and charismatic certainly, but also vainglorious, arrogant and exploitative – that she had previously been struggling not to see.
We also learn that Poitras and Assange fell out badly after the Edward Snowden leaks. Poitras broke contact with Assange for some months following her arrival in Hong Kong to film Snowden. For his part, from his room in the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange rather miraculously engineered Snowden’s escape. He despatched Sarah Harrison to Hong Kong; she then accompanied Snowden to Moscow and negotiated his asylum. Assange wanted to publish the Snowden files in Poitras’ possession. “I tell him I can’t be his source,” Poitras says in voice-over. “I don’t tell him that I don’t trust him. He’s still yelling as I hang up the phone.” Assange’s desperation to have the Snowden files and Poitras’ denial of access are the only significant facts revealed in Risk not previously known.