Cohen’s Prague mystery; Russia’s secret weapon? America’s idiocracy; America’s long goodbye, and more

What do Mueller and the Kremlin know about Michael Cohen’s alleged Prague trip? (John R. Schindler, Observer)
No aspect of the scandal surrounding President Donald J. Trump’s hidden relations with Russia has been more controversial than the reputed summer 2016 trip to the Czech Republic by Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime consigliere. Now, a confluence of intelligence that’s found its way into the hands of special counsel Robert Mueller may finally provide some long-awaited answers.
As reported in the contested dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, the former British senior intelligence officer and Russia expert, Cohen sojourned to Prague in late August or early September of our election year to secretly parley with Kremlin representatives. In Steele’s telling, Cohen went to the Czech Republic to deliver cash to Russian hackers to help swing the 2016 election Trump’s way. This account, if true, describes unambiguous collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin—exactly what the president has always denied occurred. If Cohen met with Russian spies in the late summer of 2016 to conspire against Hillary Clinton, that’s something a lot of Americans would term treason.
But did it happen? Cohen has always denied it did, while Team Trump have gone out of their way to attack the story, and Steele generally. Except Steele never claimed that everything in his dossier was corroborated. It’s raw human intelligence, taken from sources Steele couldn’t always talk to directly, and it undoubtedly includes some Russian disinformation. In particular, the Kremlin has spread lies about the Prague meeting, which indicates there may be something they’re trying to hide there.
Given its sensational nature, the Cohen-in-Prague story has never gone silent in the two years since it broke, and it jumped back on the front pages yesterday with a McClatchy report asserting that phone records provide evidence that Cohen indeed was in the Czech Republic in the late summer of 2016. Per the story, a mobile phone traced to Cohen “briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area…records show that the brief activation from Cohen’s phone near Prague sent beacons that left a traceable electronic signature.”
Cell phones do create such records that can be traced, but McClatchy’s bombshell doesn’t really add much to what we already know here. Plus it cannot be ruled out that somebody else had one of Cohen’s many phones (in their spring 2018 raid on Cohen’s home and office, the FBI seized 16 phones). When you add into the mix the fact that sophisticated intelligence services can spoof phones, creating false data, the headlines here don’t add up to all that much.
….
…the important part of the McClatchy story isn’t the cell phone data, rather indications that friendly spies had information about the reputed Prague trip. As the report states, “[in] late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague.” In other words, a friendly spy service picked up signals intelligence that may corroborate the Steele dossier.

In the SIGINT world, such tells are called “reflections” and they happen all the time. They’re not hard evidence, yet they are intriguing. If Russians—particularly prominent or well-connected ones—believed that Michael Cohen was visiting the Czech Republic when it’s claimed he was, that’s an important fact, even if far from decisive proof. That unnamed Eastern European intelligence agency shared their Cohen SIGINT report with American counterparts some time ago, my sources tell me, and it’s in the possession of Robert S. Mueller, III and his Special Counsel investigation.
In addition, the National Security Agency, our own eavesdroppers, intercepted at least one similar piece of intelligence back in the late summer of 2016. As an NSA official told me, this SIGINT was highly classified and involved “senior Kremlin types” mentioning that Michael Cohen was in Prague. It was “office chit-chat, really,” explained the NSA official, and it included no details of what Cohen was doing in the Czech Republic, yet “these Russians stated it as a fact” that the Prague trip happened when the Steele dossier said it did.

Multiple intelligence reflections provide tantalizing clues in this mysterious case. Taken together they may indicate that the secret meeting in or around Prague indeed happened. However, Russians being Russians, it cannot be ruled out that this is one more cagey Kremlin ruse to fool Western spies—SIGINT deception does happen sometimes. Yet the NSA official indicated that such deception was unlikely in this case, given the nature of the top-secret intelligence operation that netted the intercept.
This may all come down to what Mueller knows versus what Cohen has told him about the reputed Prague meeting. Mueller really does know everything here, as Cohen tweeted yesterday, and it would be very unwise of Cohen to lie to the Special Counsel investigation about his travels and activities on behalf of his former client—particularly anything involving Kremlin representatives.

This controversial case forms a cornerstone of the Trump-Russia inquiry. Resolving it will go a long way to establishing if there was direct collusion between our 45th president and the Kremlin in 2016. Was the Prague trip the centerpiece of Trump’s clandestine collusion with Moscow—or one more elaborate Russian disinformation scheme to muddy waters and render American politics even more divided and nasty? We may know soon.

Is the Michael Cohen “Prague” story true? (Jonathan Alter, Maxwell Tani, Daily Beast)
The reporters behind it are either the new Woodward and Bernstein—or the new Judith Miller.

A holiday mystery: Why did John Roberts intervene in the Mueller probe? (Nelson W. Cunningham, Politico)
We’re about to find out why the chief justice of the Supreme Court decided to get involved in the special counsel’s investigation.

How Russia’s military intelligence agency became the covert muscle in Putin’s duels with the West (Anton Troianovski and Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post)
Nina Loguntsova arrives at school early to stand at soldier-style attention, and she leaves late after extra classes that have included cryptography. Three different military uniforms hang in her closet.
The 17-year-old student is part of an expanding military-education program at Moscow’s public schools that aims to inculcate respect for security services and boost the math and computer knowledge of potential recruits.
One of the program’s partners is the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU — whose fingerprints, the West claims, are increasingly found on suspected Kremlin-ordered operations around the world.
The list includes hacking into Democratic National Committee emails in 2016, spearheading Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and the nerve-agent attack in Britain earlier this year.
New details uncovered by The Washington Post also show that a GRU unit has been at the forefront of Russia’s psychological-warfare efforts, including an attempt to influence Ukraine policy in Congress in 2015.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin tightens his grip at home and asserts Russian influence abroad, the country’s military intelligence agency — a worldwide network of thousands of officers, special-forces troops and spies — is emerging as one of his most powerful tools.
“A military intelligence agency that used to be strictly military has now become, if you will, universal,” said Nikita Petrov, a historian of Soviet intelligence agencies at Memorial, a history and civil rights organization in Moscow. “What we know about are their failures. But we don’t know about their successes.”
This portrait of the GRU’s reach — from Moscow classrooms to U.S. senators’ offices on Capitol Hill — is based on interviews in Moscow and Washington, public records and information provided by Western intelligence officials. Russia’s Defense Ministry, which oversees the GRU, did not respond to requests for comment.
The agency’s rise reflects the Kremlin’s tactics in its confrontation with the West, analysts say. While Russia is far weaker economically than the United States and Western Europe, Putin has shown a higher appetite for risk and benefited from a domestic public that largely buys into the narrative of a Russia under siege.

Russian interference in U.S. elections far from over – Here’s what to watch for (Liberty Vittert, Fox News)
The arrival of 2019 marks the kickoff of the 2020 presidential election campaign, amid continued worries about foreign influence – particularly from Russia – in our democratic process.
After the lid was blown off Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, we’d be wise to be very concerned about another spate of foreign influence attempts on the upcoming presidential race.
What should we be on the lookout for? Before we look ahead, let’s take a look back.

Russia’s secret weapon? America’s idiocracy (Michael Weiss, Daily Beast)
What the Russian security services have done very deftly is tap into pre-existing pathologies in our society and encourage them, as an enabler might do a drug addict or alcoholic.

The Steele Dossier and the perils of political insurance policies (Jonathan Turley, The Hill)
Some of us have long criticized the secret [FISA] court as operating below the constitutional standard set out in the Fourth Amendment for searches and seizures. In this case, using that secret court, a dossier funded by the Democratic presidential candidate was given to the outgoing Democratic administration to investigate advisers to the Republican challenger and his business dealings. That alone should be deeply troubling, even without the unproven allegations.
Of course, Clinton wasn’t the only candidate seeking political insurance. The controversial Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives was held to hear promised evidence of alleged criminality by Clinton and her foundation; both candidates sought information from Russian sources to undermine each other. That may be unseemly, but it’s not unlawful.
The submission of at least one of Mueller’s reports may be just weeks away. Regardless of whether he finds crimes, it was important for this investigation to reach its proper conclusions. Yet, no matter how it ends, concerns will remain over how it began … as a political insurance plan.

How to wage political warfare (Hal Brands and Toshi Yoshihara, National Interest)
The authors, a professor of global affairs and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, write:

·  If war is politics by other means, then authoritarian political warfare is war by other means. Neither China nor Russia have so far been willing to take on the United States and its allies militarily. For years, however, they have been pursuing revisionist geopolitical ends in part by seeking to weaken and distort rival political systems. … [T]his behavior is rooted in burning ambition and intense insecurity. The resulting campaigns have been expansive and multi-faceted.”

•  “What would an [American counteroffensive] strategy look like? Such an offensive should be multifaceted, hitting an adversary on multiple fronts at once. … It should be multilateral, exploiting cooperation with close allies and partners if possible. … It should also be multi-level, featuring strong leadership from the president and coordinated implementation throughout the bureaucracy. … Additionally, it should be more asymmetric than symmetric, more proactive than purely reactive. … Finally, a political warfare offensive must be calibrated: it must be strong enough to have meaningful strategic impact, but not so aggressive as to have dangerous or counterproductive consequences.”

•  “[T]he United States should pursue four lines of effort. First, Washington should raise the price of authoritarian governance in China and Russia. … A second line of effort involves strengthening dissident or liberalizing currents within Chinese and Russian society. … A third line of effort entails mounting a vigorous counteroffensive against Russian and Chinese efforts to make the world … unsafe for democracy. … Fourth, the United States must enable all these activities by rebuilding its governmental capacity to wage political warfare.”

How a world order ends. And what comes in its wake (Richard Haass, Foreign Affairs)
The author, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes:

·  “The more illuminating parallel to the present is the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century. … That order’s demise and what followed offer instructive lessons for today—and an urgent warning. Just because an order is in irreversible decline does not mean that chaos or calamity is inevitable. But if the deterioration is managed poorly, catastrophe could well follow.”

•  “[T]he rise and fall of major powers determines the viability of the prevailing order, since changes in economic strength, political cohesion and military power shape what states can and are willing to do beyond their borders. … Those changes upended the balance of power that had been the concert’s foundation. … The concert’s great-power comity ended … because of competition on the periphery. … [T]he process of deterioration is often not evident to decision-makers until it has advanced considerably.”

•  “The global order built in the aftermath of World War II consisted of two parallel orders … One grew out of the Cold War … The other … was the liberal order … Both of these orders served the interests of the United States. … [T]oday, both orders have deteriorated.”

•  “Although Russia has avoided any direct military challenge to NATO, it has nonetheless shown a growing willingness to disrupt the status quo … The liberal order is exhibiting its own signs of deterioration. … Today’s world order has struggled to cope with power shifts … Globalization has had destabilizing effects … Nationalism and populism have surged … Meanwhile, effective statecraft is conspicuously lacking. … Given these changes, resurrecting the old order will be impossible. It would also be insufficient, thanks to the emergence of new challenges.”

•  “The deterioration of a world order can set in motion trends that spell catastrophe. … What we are seeing today resembles the mid-nineteenth century in important ways: the post–World War II, post–Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis. Now is the time to make sure one never materializes.”

America’s long goodbye. The real crisis of the Trump era (Eliot A. Cohen, Foreign Affairs).
The author, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, writes:

·  “The president has outlined a deeply misguided foreign policy vision that is distrustful of U.S. allies, scornful of international institutions and indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the liberal international order … The real tragedy, however, … is that his is merely one mangled interpretation of what is rapidly emerging as a new consensus on the left and the right: that the United States should accept a more modest role in world affairs.”

•  “There is an idea behind Trump’s foreign policy … but not a concept of geopolitics … The short-term damage of Trump’s first two years has … been less than what many feared. In the long term, however, his malign influence will not be escaped so easily.”

•  “[H]is antics and rhetoric have undermined U.S. credibility. According to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center … the international public places more faith not only in Macron and Merkel relative to Trump but also in Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. … If U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation … ends with a credible accusation against the president or one of his family members, it will mean a domestic political crisis with spillover effects on foreign policy.”

•  “What’s most dangerous about Trump’s worldview is not its incoherent or erratic elements but its coherent and consistent ones … [H]is worldview is not all that different from that of his predecessor: Trump believes, as Barack Obama did, that most U.S. interventions abroad have been costly and stupid and that the United States should focus on nation building at home. This suggests that Trump’s emphasis on putting ‘America first’ is … an expression of something deeper and more consequential: a permanent shift, among American leaders, away from the dominant postwar conception of U.S. foreign policy.”

Isolation and reconquista: Russia’s toolkit as a constrained Great Power (Marlene Laruelle, Russia Matters)
The author, co-director of PONARS Eurasia at The George Washington University, writes:

·  “Today … Moscow is more isolated from its Western counterparts than at any time since the early 1980s, but also the most active and visible on the non-Western international scene that it’s been since then.”

•  “This is no accident: In the atmosphere of deteriorated trust with the West, Moscow has progressively built a dual strategy of isolation and ‘Reconquista’—seeing and portraying itself at once as beleaguered and newly triumphant, a beacon of hope for those disappointed with the U.S.-led world order.”

•  “This dual strategy aims to buy time to cement Russia’s claims to great-power status, or at least to shift the global balance in that general direction, with a relatively well-assessed cost-benefit analysis: low cost for Moscow, but with effective power projection, and an overstretched U.S. already busy in so many other theaters. This strategy has clear disadvantages over the long term, but may be Russia’s best bet for the next five to 10 years.”

In Russia, 2018 ends you (Amy MacKinnin, Foreign Policy)
Five Reads: The best Foreign Policy stories to help make sense of Russia′s role in the world in 2018.