Elections and Media

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic e-mails and spreading of false or damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed. Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly tore into President Trump’s voter commission for reneging on a promise to fully disclose public documents before a July 19 meeting, ordering the government to meet new transparency requirements and eliciting an apology from administration lawyers.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly of Washington said the Election Integrity Commission released only an agenda and proposed bylaws before its first meeting at the White House complex. But once gathered, commissioners sat with thick binders that included documents the public had not seen, including a specially-prepared report and a 381-page “database” purporting to show 1,100 cases of voter fraud, both from the Heritage Foundation, and also received a typed list of possible topics to address from the panel vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Judge Kollar-Kotelly said the panel’s after-the-fact argument was “incredible” when it said it did not believe documents prepared by individual commissioners for the July meeting had to have been posted in advance.

On Aug 25, a judge in south Florida dismissed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, brought by people who accused it of committing fraud during the 2016 primary to the detriment of Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Neither the DNC nor ousted chair Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) responded to the dismissal when asked to comment. Within hours, the attorneys who bought the suit, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, were providing updates on the case to the blogger and fantasy author H.A. Goodman. Calling out the people and outlets who they believe had covered them unfairly, the Becks described a legal system so corrupt that there could be no fair accounting for what the DNC did. It would be up to alternative media to get the truth out.

YouTube, with its easy use, free storage, and possibility of global reach, has become an agora of 2016 primary bitter-enders. YouTube previously played the same role for far right; in reporter John Herrman’s read, it made mini-celebrities out of “monologuists, essayists, performers and vloggers who publish frequent dispatches from their living rooms, their studios or the field, inveighing vigorously against the political left and mocking the ‘mainstream media,’ against which they are defined and empowered.” Something similar, but smaller, has grown up around the people who want to prove that the 2016 primary was stolen from Sanders. Over the weekend, there was no TV coverage of the case; it was easy to spend hours, instead, absorbing punditry on YouTube. The case against the “mainstream media” was easy to make, anyway as the Becks’ lawsuit drew little national attention.

Outside groups, such as super PACs and their more secretive brethren politically active nonprofits, spent more money during the first eight months of the 2018 election cycle than over the same period in any previous cycle. Outside groups have spent nearly $48 million as of August 24 – or more than double the $20.7 million the groups spent at this point during the 2016 presidential elections and the $18 million doled out at this point in 2014, the last midterm cycle.

The record $48 million should be considered the minimum total, however, given the FEC doesn’t require groups to disclose spending on ads discussing issues and those mentioning candidates for office outside of the agency’s reporting windows (30 days before a primary election; 60 days before a general election). Some of the usual suspects are fueling the record spending. Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited contributions from wealthy donors, contributed $22.3 million – nearly doubling the $11.8 million they had spent at this point in 2014. Similarly, the $7.4 million spent by politically active nonprofits is nearly four times the roughly $2 million spent by those groups at this point in 2014.

A top executive from Donald Trump’s real estate company e-mailed Vladi­mir Putin’s personal spokesman during the US presidential campaign in 2016 to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow, according to documents submitted to Congress Aug 28. Michael Cohen, a Trump attorney and executive vice president for the Trump Organization, sent the e-mail in January 2016 to Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s top press aide.

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower - Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote Peskov, according to a person familiar with the e-mail. “Without getting into lengthy specifics the communication between our two sides has stalled.” “As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote. Cohen’s e-mail marks the most direct interaction yet documented of a top Trump aide and a similarly senior member of Putin’s government.

President Donald Trump continues to try to raise money by framing his presidency as a fight for the people against the corrupt establishment abetted by the news and entertainment media. In a fundraising e-mail over his signature, the President said: "Look, Hollywood and the media are going to hate us no matter what we say or do. Their goal is to take us down." He said the problem was not with his policies, which he suggested had resulted in a booming economy, a wall at the southern border that was going to get built, a "BIG LEAGUE" reduction in illegal immigration, energy on the rise and more. The problem, he said was self-serving politicians trying to obstruct and who wanted him to be a "puppet" for the political class.

A week after the President talked about bringing the country together after Charlottesville (VA), he indicated who might be excluded from that inclusiveness: "They say I’m isolated by lobbyists, corporations, grandstanding politicians, and Hollywood. GOOD! I don’t want them," he wrote, asking for a dollar donation.

In this first tumultuous summer of the Trump Administration, the Trump International Hotel has cemented its status as a gathering spot for prominent conservatives and a place for the president’s supporters to see, be seen and curry favor with people in power, one $24 chocolate cigar at a time. (The selfies are free.) The hotel — a melting pot for Trump family members, Trump surrogates, tourists, YouTube celebrities, journalists and the occasional white nationalist — has earned that status in no small part because it is home to the only Washington restaurant that President Trump visits.

His company also earns a cut — about $20 million over 15 months, according to financial disclosure forms — which has outraged ethics experts and led to various lawsuits, including one filed in January against the Trump administration by a group of lawyers. They accused the president of violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other businesses to accept payments from foreign governments. Several visits in August by reporters for The New York Times confirmed that some of the swamp’s most prominent Republicans come out at night and gather in the lobby of the 263-room hotel, conveniently located on Pennsylvania Avenue five blocks from the White House.

The Campaign Legal Center and Issue One, two political “watchdog” organizations, filed Federal Communications Commission complaints against two Georgia TV stations, alleging violations of the rules that govern the documents that need to be placed into a station’s public inspection file regarding political “issue advertising".

FCC rules require that stations place into their public files information concerning any advertising dealing with controversial issues of public importance including the list of the sponsoring organization’s chief executive officers or directors. Section 315 of the Communications Act requires that, when those issues are “matters of national importance,” the station must put into their public file additional information similar to the information that they include in their file for candidate ads, including the specifics of the schedule for the ads including price information and an identification of the issue to which the ad is directed. The complaints allege that, while the stations included this additional information in their public file, the form that was in the public file stated that the sponsors of the ads did not consider the issues to be ads that addressed a matter of national importance, despite the fact that they addressed candidates involved in the recent highly contested election for an open Congressional seat in the Atlanta suburbs.

[Commentary] The rise of what we might call “cheap speech” has fundamentally altered both how we communicate and the nature of our politics, endangering the health of our democracy.

The path back to a more normal political scene will not be easy. In the old days, just a handful of TV networks controlled the airwaves, and newspapers served as gatekeepers for news and opinion content. A big debate back in the 1980s and earlier was how to enable free expression for those who did not own or work for a media company and wanted to get a message out. It seems cheap speech, despite its undeniable benefits, has come with a steep price for our democracy.

[Richard L. Hasen is the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine]

Journalists, congressional committees, and a special counsel are probing the details of what happened during the 2016 election. But two new books contend that the large lines of the problem are already clear. As in the eighteen-seventies, we are in the midst of a technological revolution that has altered the flow of information. Now, as then, just a few companies have taken control, and this concentration of power—which Americans have acquiesced to without ever really intending to, simply by clicking away—is subverting our democracy.