The Absurdity of Russiagate

It was easy to miss, which I am sure was the newspaper's intention, tucked as it was in the interior of last Tuesday's science section, but Benedict Carey's story about the first serious academic study on fake news -- "‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests" -- pretty much demolishes "the Russians stole my election" narrative pushed in the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and by U.S. intelligence agencies:

[N]ow the first hard data on fake-news consumption has arrived. Researchers last week posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thousands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories, and what real news those people were seeing at the same time.

[snip] 

In the new study, a trio of political scientists — Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College (a regular contributor to The Times’s Upshot), Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter — analyzed web traffic data gathered from a representative sample of 2,525 Americans who consented to have their online activity monitored anonymously by the survey and analytic firm YouGov.

The data included website visits made in the weeks before and after the 2016 election, and a measure of political partisanship based on overall browsing habits. (The vast majority of participants favored Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton.)

[snip]

“For all the hype about fake news, it’s important to recognize that it reached only a subset of Americans, and most of the ones it was reaching already were intense partisans,” Dr. Nyhan said.

“They were also voracious consumers of hard news,” he added. “These are people intensely engaged in politics who follow it closely.”

Given the ratio of truth to fiction, Dr. Watts said, fake news paled in influence beside mainstream news coverage, particularly stories about Mrs. Clinton and her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Coverage of that topic appeared repeatedly and prominently in venues like The New York Times and the Washington Post.

In other words, the alleged victims of fake news are cagey news junkies and political partisans who consume a lot of product overwhelmingly from corporate chains.

Can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

Many times over the last year I thought "The Russians Did It" campaign would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity -- was there any serious mainstream engagement with the assertion that the compromising information from the Democratic National Committee came from a leak (via thumb drive) and not a hack (because of online download speeds)? -- but it has chugged along all the same. It is even accepted in toto in the hipster weekly paper of my hometown.

Each week The New York Times publishes a "bombshell" front-pager purporting to document that Trump should be indicted any day now. My guess is that most people have given up reading these stories. The headlines get read, and I'm sure elite partisans continue to read everything, but for the most part Russiagate has become just noise.

And for good reason because that is what it is -- a deep state disinformation campaign targeting its domestic population. If you read Friday's "Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation" by Michael Schmidt you know that the Mueller investigation is boiling down to next to nothing. There is no evidence of collusion with Russia, and chicken shit when it comes to obstruction:

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation, declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said the president has fully cooperated with the investigation, and they have expressed confidence that the inquiry will soon be coming to a close. They said that they believed the president would be exonerated, and that they hoped to have that conclusion made public.

Legal experts said that of the two primary issues Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating — whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice while in office and whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — there is currently a larger body of public evidence tying the president to a possible crime of obstruction.

But the experts are divided about whether the accumulated evidence is enough for Mr. Mueller to bring an obstruction case. They said it could be difficult to prove that the president, who has broad authority over the executive branch, including the hiring and firing of officials, had corrupt intentions when he took actions like ousting the F.B.I. director. Some experts said the case would be stronger if there was evidence that the president had told witnesses to lie under oath.

Once again, can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

An interesting development is the GOP's decision to go on the offensive with a criminal referral to the DOJ on Christopher Steele, and the FBI's re-opening the Clinton Foundation corruption case. Trump delivered the tax cut and with midterms looming, Republicans are circling the wagons.

I  hope that things get interesting. The problem is that Democrats have very little game.