Considering the reception that I received because of my diary about Bernie Sanders’ comments about the Russia investigation to Jane Lindholm of Vermont Public Radio, I’ve been doing a bit of Hamlet-like dithering on Politico’s Saturday morning report that Sanders may have perpetuated a false narrative in that VPR interview.
In light of that diary, which I followed up with a transcript of the relevant portion of that interview, I want to stick with what reporting says prior to my rather involved—and hopefully succinct— commentary,
First of all, the claim in Politico’s headline that ‘’Bernie Sanders promoted false story on reporting Russian trolls.’’
The gist of Sanders’ claim is that a volunteer from the Sanders campaign saw something that looked like Russian bot activity and reported it to the Clinton campaign; apparently, per instructions that he received from the Sanders campaign, such that ‘’the Sanders campaign’’ existed at that time.
Mattes told Politico that he did this reporting to ‘’the Clinton campaign’’ on his own and neither Sanders himself nor the Sanders campaign had anything to with it.
It turns out that the purported Sanders’ staffer who said he tried to sound the alarm was a campaign volunteer who acted on his own, without any contact or direction from the Vermont senator or his staff. When the volunteer, John Mattes of San Diego, said he communicated with the Clinton campaign in local press accounts, he was confusing it for a super PAC supportive of Clinton.
He also doesn’t know why Sanders is taking all the credit. “I’m going to send him a bill for my back pay,” Mattes joked.
“He could have called me,” Mattes added. “He maybe doesn’t have my phone number.”
Mattes’ claims, made in two phone interviews with POLITICO, came after Sanders and staffers offered numerous and conflicting answers in the span of a few hours on Wednesday about what he did about Russian meddling. Sanders and his top aide were at turns defiant and defensive during and after his interview with a Vermont radio station, even initially disputing special counsel Robert Mueller’s finding in his indictment last week that the Russians backed his campaign.
What Mattes seems to be taking issue with here is that is that Senator Sanders, when speaking about who contacted whom about Russian bots and when, implied that this contact was initiated by some unidentified higher-ups in the ‘’Sanders campaign’’ as opposed to Mattes doing it on his own...well, the implication is there (after all, I would assume that something of this magnitude would be referred to higher-ups as SOP) but Sanders said nothing like ‘’my staff suggested that Mattes and/or others contact the Clinton campaign with their findings’’ in his Meet The Press interview or in his interview with Vermont Public Radio.
Sanders should have, at the very least, cited a critical November 8, 2016 story by Buzzfeed where Mattes detailed to Buzzfeed what he and other Sanders volunteers were finding in their various pro-Sanders social media feeds.
In the Politico report, Jeff Weaver acknowledges that none of these various reports were verified.
Mattes also told Politico precisely who he contacted
Mattes acknowledged, though, that he didn’t come to suspect Russia was involved until weeks after the Clinton campaign publicly raised concerns about Russian hacking. He said he never talked to anyone on the Clinton campaign itself, though he believed that the researcher he spoke with at the pro-Clinton American Bridge PAC, run by David Brock, was tantamount to reaching the campaign.
“David Brock was all I knew of the campaign,” Mattes said. “No one at American Bridge said, ‘Call up Hillary, call up John Podesta or anybody.’ …. If they weren’t sharing it with Hillary, that is their responsibility.”
Mattes is adamant that anyone who claims that American Bridge was not tantamount to the Clinton campaign is being naive, though campaign finance laws prohibit interaction between entities such as those.
(lol, Mattes was really a Bernie supporter, wasn’t he?)
OK, John Mattes isn’t merely some low-level campaign volunteer. From his Wikipedia bio
John Mattes is an investigative journalist who has won 5 Emmys, one Golden Mike award, one Edward R Murrow award and 10 press club awards for exposing fraud and corruption in government.
and...contacting American Bridge is the best that John Mattes, award-winning investigative journalist could do at the time?
Are you kidding me?
Frankly, the headline of this Politco story is grossly over-the-top, wrong-headed and their reporting generates more questions than answers.
I don’t think that Bernie Sanders told any untruths in his interviews with Chuck Todd and Jane Lindholm but he sure left out a lot of critically important context (context that was...and is available in OSR) and utterly failed to verify critical aspects of what he has said in interviews regarding specific actions that he or his campaign took to address the Russian bot/troll problems.
And as for John Mattes, himself (who came off as far more likeable in his interview on Ari Melber’s show than the dick-ish Clinton surrogate Phillippe Reines),...I can only throw up my hands in exasperation.
I can only grade this portion of the story to be a crispy hot mess that’s murkier than I might have thought.
The only decent grades on this story belong to Buzzfeed...for one additional reason.
— — — — — — — — — —
Returning to the Lindholm-Sanders transcript:
Lindholm: So, if you knew that Russian bots were promoting your campaign versus—
Sanders: I did not know that Russian bots were promoting my campaign. Russian bots were not promoting my campaign—
Russian bots may or may not have been promoting the Sanders campaign but we do know that Russian trolls certainly were (and, yes, I looked it up).
Again Buzzfeed had that report as well from earlier this month on the 6th; that Buzzfeed story was diaried here by Kossack wagatwe...so we have seen this reporting here at The Great Orange Satan.
This portion of the Buzzfeed story:
The pro-Sanders content kept coming: In mid-2016 4mysquad called out the media for not giving fair coverage to a Sanders rally that drew more than 20,000 people. Another postshowed an archival photo of a college-age Sanders being arrested by police in Chicago at a civil rights demonstration.
“This is why Bernie has my vote,” wrote the troll(s) behind 4mysquad. “He’s not some old White man who just decided that #BlackLivesMatter yesterday. He’s BEEN fighting. STILL fighting, 40+ years later.” The post generated over 112,00 notes.
Those two links in the excerpted portion of that Buzzfeed story contain commentary that explicitly promotes Senator Sanders.
So I have to disagree with Sanders’ assertion that various content that has been shown to be authored by Russian bots or Russian trolls was merely attacking Hillary Clinton.
Some of that content was promoting his candidacy; I have no idea how successful it was.
And now we get to the hard part…
First of all, I could care less about the 2016 Democratic primary at this time. I can see that it’s still not out of some people’s systems...and it may never be...but I could give two shits about that.
My eye is more on what Sanders, himself, told Lindholm...that the Russians are likely to be involved in the 2018 mid-term elections in some capacity.
I very highly doubt that our federal government will do anything about Russian interference in the midterm elections and this federal government may even be supporting it, for all that I know.
I am susceptible to a propaganda campaign like that. (And I will assert here that I see no real difference between ‘’propaganda’’ and ‘’spin’’’...our political culture is awash in it...and the word ‘’propaganda’’didn’t always have negative meanings)
So are you. (h/t Natalie Nougayrede at the Guardian)
In terms of the other pie fights that go on here…
The first posting of this column with this specific title, I stated
I am a progressive.
I am a skeptic.
I am a cynic.
Those three simple sentences probably best describe my approach to politics and my philosophy and practice of life. I describe myself thus being quite aware of the ancient and contemporary connotative and denotative meanings of the words.
That remains true.
There isn’t a politician that has come up for regular discussion here that I have not criticized; in fact, my most recced diary at DK is a criticism of Bill Clinton...but for some reason, whenever I set out to examine the claims of Bernie Sanders or the claims of Sanders supporters, I get the flying monkeys treatment…
If I have a bias toward any thing or institution, it would probably be to the ideal of media as opposed to any political candidate and I always read or watch media with a critical eye even if I don’t catch every nuance that’s in a particular story.
Just...just...stay the fu*k out of my sunlight, will you?
And ‘’you’’ know who you are.
The sheer magnitude of the daily incompentence and unmitigated prevarications of this Administration compels me to begin writing this column once again.
I never wanted to abandon this column. But now, more than ever, at a time where everything that called reality seems to be challenged by regimes based on ‘’alternative facts’’ or, at the very least, seems to be reflected into distorting mirrors and where gaslighting seems to be the norm, I need to sound off on a regular and disciplined basis. Too many events are happening too fast, few or none of these events are agreeable.
And I am unsure where we (and by ‘’we’’ I mean all Americans) go from this point in time.
With a few corrections, the goal of this column that I articulated the first time I wrote it stands
Of course, the title of this new weekly column, As I Da*n Well Please, is a homage to George Orwell and his column “As I Please”, which was featured in the socialist-leaning Tribune magazine from 1943 to 1948. Appropriating this title also means that I am, in part, taking on the literary mantle of George Orwell; an author that I have enjoyed reading for decades. Do not read this as an endorsement of every position that Orwell took on political and literary matters. Do read this column as an appreciation of the range of subjects that Orwell discussed in a plain-speaking literary style.
Also read the title of this column as an act of defiance. Repeatedly over the years people tend not to like what minorities seem to say or how we say it. We’re simply too sensitive, deluded, we don’t have enough information, and all other matter of things. It comes from all sides of the political divide.
Like Orwell’s AIP column, I expect that the majority of the topics in this column will be literary matters or about the intersection of literary or political matters. Occasionally, I will veer off in to something frivolous. Maybe you’ll get to know a more about how macabre the mind of a man that was raised, in part, reading various mystery magazines belonging to Mom.
(My goal for the present time is for this column to appear every Sunday around...noon-ish or so.
Occasionally, I might publish more than one of these columns a week, as news events and/or my interests warrant but...I do need the discipline of a weekly column, at the very least.)
And now maybe I can settle down and read my newly arrived copy of In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany Vol. 1 1957-1969; I paid enough for the book, that’s for sure.
I’ve been a big fan of Delany’s non-fiction with my favorite being his essay ‘’Wagner/Artaud.’’ I remember reading that essay in my mid-20’s and that essay influenced me to get into the work of Richard Wagner more than any other...haven’t read that essay in a long time, though.