Russia's Stroke of Genius

I'm not sure exactly when Russia decided to hack the DNC's and the Clinton campaign's emails, but in retrospect I think it has to be regarded as one of the most successful intelligence operations of all time. This is because it had devastating effect despite revealing almost no embarrassing material. I can't think of a single revelation that, read in context, would have made a bit of difference to anyone. I may be forgetting something, but the most "embarrassing" revelation I remember reading is that liberal Catholic Democrats were emailing each other to complain about the conservative direction of the Church. This was reported as an all-out attack on Catholics, and therefore treated as a huge problem for Clinton, but in reality it was nothing.

So why the devastating effect? Clinton struggled to explain why she had used a private server for her emails while serving as Secretary of State. A lot of voters, including Donald Trump, had a very hard time understanding the distinction between these emails and the emails that the Russians hacked. So every time the hacked emails made headlines, many voters thought that the hacked emails were from Clinton's server. And this was a daily occurrence, because they were dribbled out one by one by WikiLeaks in a blatant attempt to elevate Donald Trump to the White House. (As a side note, a small but notable failure of the media was its frequent use of the word "leaked," rather than "hacked," to refer to the means by which the emails became public, giving it the appearance of a whistle-blowing situation. Some people on the far right and the far left do in fact believe, or purport to believe, that the DNC emails were leaked by Seth Rich, but this is a conspiracy theory that has no basis in reality.)

Of course this was no accident—last year the Intercept published a very good story documenting the astounding degree to which WikiLeaks has become an arm of Putin's Russia, colluding with the Trump campaign, the Brexit movement, and the Catalan separatists. Of course WikiLeak's moral bankruptcy wasn't exactly news to me, but it wasn't until I read the Intercept's reporting that I realized just how low the organization had sunk. For instance, I had not realized that, presumably at Putin's behest, it tried to discredit a witness to the assassination of the anti-Brexit politician Jo Cox.

And then of course there came Comey's notorious letter to Congress related to Clinton's email server. Again, in the public imagination these emails were conflated with the emails that had been hacked, and so the stories merged in the public imagination.

So in other words, of the many ways Russia could have interfered in the U.S. election, hacking Democratic emails was amazingly fruitful. It was probably more effective than, say, assassinating a major Democratic politician (although who knows, with WikiLeaks' help that might have turned into a propaganda bonanza as well). I can't imagine any other intervention that could possibly offer the same value per ruble spent.