A blockbuster document purportedly from the Kremlin raises lots of questions -- about itself

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Politics • Analysis

A blockbuster document purportedly from the Kremlin raises lots of questions — about itself

By Philip Bump
National correspondent
July 15, 2021 | Updated today at 1:03 p.m. EDT

Since the Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election first emerged that year, there’s been a lot of blurriness about the two main activities it involved. There was the social media push, centered on elevating and exacerbating existing tensions in American society, particularly on race. Then there was the hacking of the email account of a senior staffer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the computer networks of the Democratic Party. The latter, that hacking, was quickly linked to the Russian government; the former — what many people think of as the critical interference effort, incorrectly — more belatedly was tied to a Kremlin-linked business executive.

There's no serious question it happened, particularly in the wake of subsequent investigations into the interference. There is some question, though, about how it all worked.

On Thursday morning, the Guardian published a document which, if authentic, would answer some of those questions. It purports to be an internal Kremlin memo prepared for a January 2016 meeting and focused on establishing an effort to interfere on Donald Trump’s behalf in the November elections.

Why? For the same reason that the social media effort was apparently undertaken: “A Trump win ‘will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system’ and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts,” according to the Guardian’s Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh.

{snip}

But it's hard not to be skeptical of the document, for a number of reasons.

{snip}

UPDATE

This article was updated to note that Russian hackers were detected in the DNC system in 2015.

By Philip Bump
Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. Before joining The Post in 2014, he led politics coverage for the Atlantic Wire. Twitter https://twitter.com/pbump

[Chainfire]

1. As of today, I have the bombshell document filed under wait and see.

Generally when something is too good to be true, it is.

[mn9driver]

2. There have been more "blockbuster" smoking gun types of things than I can count.

Over the last 40 years or so. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of them are planted by GOP operatives so that they can be discredited and people will stop looking in that direction.

I expect this will be the same sort of misdirection.