Susan B. Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on Twitter @sbg1.

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One of the goals of the Kremlin’s social media disruption campaign, special counsel Robert Mueller unequivocally demonstrated in his recent indictment of 13 Russians, was to elect Donald Trump. Another, according to the indictment, was even simpler: “to sow discord in the U.S. political system.”


Ten days later, the response to the Mueller charges—and the partisan brawl over dueling memos from Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee—has once again proven how wildly successful Russia’s still-ongoing efforts to sow discord continue to be.

Just ask Laura Rosenberger and Jamie Fly, an unlikely bipartisan duo who teamed up a year ago on a Washington think-tank project to combat the Kremlin’s influence campaign but now find themselves right in the midst of escalating American battles over the Mueller investigation, Trump, Russia and even the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.

Rosenberger, who worked in President Barack Obama’s National Security Council then became Hillary Clinton’s campaign foreign policy adviser, and Fly, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration who advised GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, make the case that, as Rosenberger put it in a new interview for The Global Politico, “America is under attack, has been under attack, remains under attack, and … the U.S. government is not doing enough about it.”

The website they set up to track the Russian campaign, called Hamilton 68 after the eloquent warning in the Federalist Papers from Alexander Hamilton to beware of foreign efforts to hijack U.S. elections, has documented in recent days how even an American tragedy like the Florida school shooting has become fodder for the network of 600 Russia-linked social media accounts the group’s software is following. The trolls, Fly said, were pushing inflammatory pro- and anti-gun control messages within hours of the killings, with “Russian accounts that were jumping on both sides, basically egging Americans on, making everyone angrier, trying to divide us rather than bring us together in a moment of crisis.” The Hamilton findings were widely cited by news organizations from the New York Times to CNN.

But now the group, whose formal title is the grand but vague Alliance for Securing Democracy, is itself part of the backlash, reflecting the weird new alliances and strange political partnerships the Kremlin has managed to generate in American politics. Over the past few days alone, Glenn Greenwald of the left-leaning website The Intercept repeatedly trashed the group on Twitter, calling it a “secretive” claque of Republican neocons and “Dem hawks” that is not debunking propaganda but is actually spreading “disinformation” about Russia to a “gullible” national media. The conservative website The Federalist agreed, citing Greenwald’s tweets in an article that argued the “secretive” group is being used to advance claims of a “vast conspiracy between President Trump and Russia.”

For what it’s worth, Rosenberger and Fly disclose their methodology on their website and say they can’t reveal the list of the 600 accounts they are following or the Russians will simply shut them down. Other researchers with whom I’ve spoken say the tweets and messages found by Hamilton 68 certainly are consistent with what they’ve seen from Russian-linked accounts. Rosenberger, who spent years in the Obama White House and State Department, laughs at the idea she’s a neocon plant, though it is true that their advisory board contains both liberal Russia experts like former Obama Ambassador to Moscow Mike McFaul as well as a favorite Greenwald bête noire, the original neocon Bill Kristol.

Trump, of course, is what the fight is really all about. Mueller’s investigation has forced a massive political realignment on Russia, with public opinion polls showing Republicans have followed Trump’s lead in dramatically reversing their previous skepticism toward Russia and its strongman President Vladimir Putin, while Democrats have turned sharply more hawkish when it comes to Moscow.

Ever since the new Mueller charges, Trump and his defenders have stopped for the most part outright denying the Russian meddling in 2016 took place and switched to claiming both that allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election are overblown and inconsequential, and also that President Obama was too weak in responding to it. The confusing, contradictory and blame-gaming approach was perfectly summed up by a Trump tweet posted Saturday: “this whole Witch Hunt is an illegal disgrace,” he wrote, “and Obama did nothing about Russia!”

To Fly, Trump is selling a “damaging narrative” that conflates the Mueller investigation with the broader problem of Russia’s aggressive information-warfare campaign inside the United States.

“What the president is missing and what those on the right like those at The Federalist are missing is we’re not drawing any conclusions about collusion,” Fly told me of groups that had long been his ideological partners until the divisive 2016 race. “Those on the right who are just trying to cloud this issue and tie it to a broader debate about whether Donald Trump is our legitimate president—I think they’re just trying to distract from this very real national security challenge.”

The real-world effects are obvious. Earlier this month, America’s top intelligence officials testified to Congress that Trump had not ordered them to take any direct action in response to the election meddling. On Capitol Hill, Fly and others have lobbied Republican leaders, to no avail, as he acknowledged in our conversation, to put up for consideration various bipartisan bills, including one co-sponsored by Fly’s former boss Rubio and several Democrats, to take measures to beef up election security and capacity to respond to cyberhacking.

“There’s very little sign, other than some tough talk and the National Security Strategy from administration officials like Gen. McMaster about the threat,” Fly said, “that they’re actually doing anything practically to close off these vulnerabilities.”

Meanwhile, the shouting and the finger-pointing (“partisan bickering,” says Rosenberger; “wallowing,” adds Fly) have escalated, and not just about Trump’s election. The critics’ new argument is that groups like theirs have launched America into a kind of 21st century Red Scare, with a Russian bot lurking behind every partisan brawl.

At one point in our conversation, I asked Rosenberger whether she thought the Russian propagandists really had affected the outcome of the election, a subject of renewed hot debate across social media ever since the Mueller indictments.

“It’s the wrong question to be asking,” she insisted. “Because, to me, the reality is that the Russians are attacking our country. … And so I think that defining this in terms of the election and trying to parse whether or not this tweet reached that many people and could it have affected X, Y and Z, I mean, the reality is we’re still learning the entirety of this thing. We may never know the entirety of it.”

***

Bipartisanship is a rare thing in Washington these days, and getting rarer. And in that sense I found talking with Fly and Rosenberger a refreshing change, especially on a subject like Russia, which under Trump has once again become a polarizing subject as divisive as at the height of the Cold War.

The duo — who met on the foreign policy equivalent of a blind date after the election when Rosenberger brought her idea for the Alliance to the German Marshall Fund and sought a Republican to team up with — was refreshingly candid about their own party’s failings on policy toward Russia in recent years, sidestepping the Trumpian formula of either Obama or Trump is right in favor of at least an effort to acknowledge that Democrats and Republicans alike were slow to recognize Putin’s aggressive policies and the extent of his plans to target the U.S. directly.

“Our project starts with the premise that both parties and presidents of both parties have made mistakes vis-à-vis Russia over the last several decades,” said Fly.

Rosenberger said she was particularly struck by her experience at Obama’s NSC in the period after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, when his White House debated how aggressive the U.S. should be in responding. “My own feeling coming out of that experience [was] that we failed and that we had failed on two levels,” she said. “There was both a policy failure [and] an intelligence failure. And that intelligence failure, I think, carried over into what we saw in the slowness to realize what was happening in 2016.”

“And it wasn’t just the Obama administration’s fault,” Fly said.

Later, he added, “I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this would be something that would actually be turned against America. And I think it’s a failure of imagination that unfortunately many in our national security community had about this. There was always this perception that there was some red line that Putin would never cross.”

In the current climate of zero-sum finger-pointing, it might have been the most bipartisan thing I heard all week.

