The plot to subvert an election; timeline of Russia’s 2016 interference; will Trump classify Mueller’s report?, and more

“It is a slap in the face of the West,” said Peter Pomerantsev, a fellow at the London School of Economics and author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” an account of his time as a television producer in Moscow. Russia, said Mr. Pomerantsev, “gave up a long time ago on trying to convince anybody that it is telling the truth.”
But the Kremlin works hard to confuse and distract, and to convince everyone, whether inside Russia or beyond, that President Vladimir V. Putin is so strong he can set his own truth, no matter how hard it may be to believe.

Trump’s ability to classify Mueller report is greater threat than executive privilege (Kel McClanahan, Just Security)
Ever since Rudy Giuliani suggested President Trump might invoke executive privilege to prevent the public disclosure of any report Robert Mueller might produce at the end of his investigation, pundits and legal experts across the political spectrum have focused on the prospect from almost all angles, analyzing it, attacking it, defending it, and all around beating it to death. However, in my opinion, the real threat to public disclosure is Trump’s ability to unilaterally classify the report.
Simply put, there are currently no restrictions on the President’s ability to reach down into an agency and classify any document on his own authority, whether it be a formal investigative report or a cafeteria menu. The only governing rules are established by Executive Order 13526 – the latest iteration of a long line of Executive Orders on national security information classification. But for reasons explained below, those rules are either so broad as to be relatively meaningless or are virtually unenforceable by anyone seeking to prove that Trump misclassified a document.
Two articles already have been written here at Just Security on the idea that Trump might invoke executive privilege. In the first, Douglas Letter writes that the entire argument is a red herring because Trump could just order Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to officially find that public release of the report is not in the public interest, which would trigger its nondisclosure. In the second, Jessica Marsden and Andy Wright respond to Letter’s offering, arguing that such an order would violate the Article II Take Care clause. They then explain why, in their opinion, a claim of executive privilege would ultimately prove unsuccessful in preventing the public disclosure of the report.
Both of these pieces are well-reasoned, thought-provoking, and pretty well cover all angles of the privilege discussion. However, I don’t think that’s the issue we should be worried about. There is another possible tactic that would be much more difficult to overcome: Trump could just classify the report.
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Full disclosure, I seriously considered not writing this article, since I would not want to be responsible for giving the President this idea, which I think would be a terrible abuse of authority and the perfect example of the need for legislative reform to prevent such abuses. However, as we saw in the last few months with security clearances, one of Trump’s advisers knows the law at least as well as I do, and I think it’s safe to assume that if they haven’t thought of this yet, they will.
So in the end I decided to write this, so that people could be prepared for it should it happen and perhaps devise ways to overcome it. I could be wrong about this, and I hope I am, but I believe we should be far less concerned about Trump claiming executive privilege or ordering Rosenstein not to publicly release the report and far more concerned about him classifying it. That is his smartest play.

We now know more about the apparent poisoning of the Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov (Masha Gessen, New Yorker)
New details have emerged in the apparent poisoning of Russian activist Pyotr Verzilov, a member of the protest-art group Pussy Riot, and they may shed light on the deaths of three Russian journalists who were shot in the Central African Republic in July. Verzilov had apparently been working with the journalists before they travelled to Africa, and before he fell ill he’d been investigating their deaths, which the Russian government said had occurred as a result of a robbery.

Inside the shadowy think tank tied to Paul Manafort (Betsy Woodruff and Lachlan Markay, Daily Beast)
Paul Manafort boasted he was directing the think tank, but a prominent libertarian who was a ‘senior scholar’ claimed he had no idea Trump’s former campaign chair was involved.

Instagram will promote mid-term voting with stickers, registration info (Josh Constine, Techcrunch)
The Russian disinformation attacks could still make users weary to learn about voting from social media. But more turnout means a more democratic society, so it’s easy to see the positive impact of Instagram efforts here.