There Is No Doubt The Russians Are At It Again-- And There Is No Doubt Trump Is Mentally Incapable Of Dealing With That

Julian Barnes and Adam Goldman, reporting for the NY Times Friday-- FBI Warns of Russian Interference in 2020 Race and Boosts Counterintelligence Operations-- wrote that FBI director Wray warned about Russia’s continued meddling in American elections, calling it a 'significant counterintelligence threat.' The bureau has shifted additional agents and analysts to shore up defenses against foreign interference, according to a senior F.B.I. official." Trump might not be concerned but there are at least some in his administration who have "come to see that Russia’s influence operations have morphed into a persistent threat. The F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have made permanent the task forces they created to confront 2018 midterm election interference, senior American national security officials said." Didn't anyone watch all those seasons of The Americans? That warning about how many foreign operatives are living in America today before The Enemy Within?

“We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game,” Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said Friday in a speech in Washington, citing the presence of Russian intelligence officers in the United States and the Kremlin’s record of malign influence operations.

“So we are very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020,” he said.

Mr. Wray’s warnings came after the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, laid out in hundreds of pages of detail the interference and influence campaign carried out by Russian operatives in the 2016 election.

While American officials have promised to continue to try to counter, block and weaken the Russian intelligence operations, they have complained of a lack of high-level coordination. President Trump has little interest or patience for hearing about such warnings, officials have said.

Mr. Trump views any discussion of future Russian interference as effectively questioning the legitimacy of his 2016 victory, prompting senior officials to head off discussions with him. Earlier this year, the White House chief of staff told Kirstjen Nielsen, then the homeland security secretary, not to raise the threat of new forms of Russian interference with Mr. Trump, current and former senior administration officials have said.

But outside of meetings with Mr. Trump, intelligence officials have continued to raise alarms. Officials including both Mr. Wray and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, have said Russia has aimed its influence campaigns at undermining faith in American democracy.

“What has pretty much continued unabated is the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas, etc. to spin us up, pit us against each other, to sow divisiveness and discord, to undermine America’s faith in democracy,” Mr. Wray said on Friday. “That is not just an election-cycle threat. It is pretty much a 365-day-a-year threat.”

In response to growing threats from Russia and other adversaries, the F.B.I. recently moved nearly 40 agents and analysts to the counterintelligence division, the senior bureau official said in an interview earlier this month. Many of the agents will work on the Foreign Influence Task Force, a group of cyber, counterintelligence and criminal experts. Initially formed on a temporary basis before the midterm elections, officials have made the task force permanent.

The Department of Homeland Security made its midterm election task forces permanent, folding them into an election security initiative at their National Risk Management Center. The National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command have also expanded and made permanent their joint task force aimed at identifying, and stopping, Russian malign influence, officials said.

Intelligence officials have said Russia has kept up its interference operations since the 2016 election, continuing through the midterms and most likely to intensify during the next presidential campaign-- albeit with new tactics.

Some intelligence officials believe Russia intends to raise questions in the aftermath of future elections about irregularities or purported fraud to undermine faith in the result. During the midterm elections, Cyber Command conducted an operation to temporarily take offline the most prominent Russian troll farm to keep its operatives from mounting a disinformation operation during voting or vote counting.

Mr. Trump’s continued hostility toward discussing Moscow’s malign influence campaigns, as well as his broader attitude toward Mr. Putin and Russia, puzzles many national security experts.

“The way Trump spoke about U.S. foreign policy, with a particular focus on Russia, NATO and some other cardinal aspects of U.S. foreign policy views were out of kilter with traditional, mainstream foreign policy thinking,” said Andrew S. Weiss, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

...The aftermath of the 2016 election and Russia’s attempts to try to influence the American government illustrates the dangers of a loose, ad hoc approach to foreign policy that Mr. Trump embraced during the transition, and still favors to a degree former national security officials said.

“If you can be led by the nose by foreign governments, that is the simplest definition of what a successful influence operation looks like,” Mr. Weiss said. “All sorts of leaders figure out there are ways to work with the Trump team that stressed informal channels, flattery and a freewheeling approach.”

Campaign officials with little security background looking to make impromptu deals are particularly vulnerable to Russian intelligence operations, said James M. Olson, a former chief of C.I.A.’s counterintelligence unit and author of To Catch A Spy.

“They are dilettantes, no question about it. They have no intelligence or national security background and they shouldn’t be playing in a game they don’t understand the rules of,” Mr. Olson said. “These people are jumping into deep water and they don’t even know how to swim.”

What Russia has gained from its influence campaign remains subject to debate. The strong sanctions against Russia remain in place, toughened by congressional action. Funding for American military presence in Europe increased under the Trump administration. The United States has kept up its support for the Ukrainian government and has made no official move to recognize Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

But Mr. Trump’s skepticism of the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and his occasional wavering over the mutual defense pact have strengthened Mr. Putin’s hand in Eastern Europe.

Former officials and other experts agree with Mr. Wray’s assessment that Russian intelligence has also contributed in sowing chaos in political systems, undermining faith in democratic voting systems and potentially further polarizing already divided electorates.

“My hunch is Putin feels pretty good about how it’s going for him,” Mr. Olson said.

Pete Williams, reporting for NBC News, noted that Russian efforts to influence American public opinion are not confined only to periods around elections and that Wray said "It's pretty much a 365-days-a-year threat. And that has absolutely continued" and that it consists of constant use of social media, with "fake news, propaganda, false personas, et cetera, to spin us up, pit us against each other, sow divisiveness and discord, and undermine Americans' faith in democracy."

So why no interest in any of this from Trump-- other than to deride it? Mental health professions issued their own report on the Mueller report that should help us answer questions like that. "While the information in the Special Counsel’s report has been deemed insufficient for criminal determination," declares the report, "it provides, even in redacted form, a wealth of relevant information regarding the President’s mental capacity. Not having the mental capacity to make sound decisions and to refrain from violence, whether by encouraging, recommending, or inciting it on the part of his followers, whether or not he meets the criteria for being diagnosed as mentally ill, is dangerous as long as he remains President and constitutes a medical emergency that health professionals are obligated to respond to.. [T]he office of president requires, at the very least, the ability to make sound, rational decisions based on reality and the ability not to place the nation in grave danger. The final determination of 'competency' is a judicial decision usually made by the courts, while capacity is a medical assessment that psychiatrists, and especially forensic psychiatrists or other appropriately trained forensic mental health professionals, contribute to courts as expert witnesses to aid them in making their legal decisions. Similarly, presidential fitness is a political decision, but just as the courts routinely rely on physicians’ and other experts’ assessments for competence, disability, and fitness for duty, political bodies should not be denied access to the same medical and professional information and expertise that the judicial system benefits from. We therefore offer our analysis as potentially valuable data, as a part of our professional obligation to protect public safety and wellbeing." One conclusion is that Trump is a clear and present danger to America because of his mental incapacity demonstrated in "patterns" on behavior.

[T]he Report outlines how the Russians systematically and sweepingly attacked America before and during the 2016 election. There were dozens of connections, meetings, reaching out, visits, and phone calls between Russians and the President’s circle. While the Special Counsel was not able to find the final legal proof of an actual agreement between Russians and the President, the Report indicates that some witnesses destroyed evidence, gave false testimony, pleaded the Fifth Amendment, lied, claimed false privilege, or used encryption applications or programs that did not preserve long-term records. The Report also makes clear that the President knew about, expected, and received benefit from Russian actions (Vol. I, pp. 4-10). Given the President’s continued refusal to acknowledge the severity of these attacks, we can see that his comprehension and ability to absorb important information from his own intelligence agencies, whatever the reason, is impaired. If he cannot protect the nation against a hostile force that has attacked us, it also points to dangerousness. While a criminal act (actus reus) could not be established beyond reasonable doubt, a criminal intent (mens rea) is extensively well documented in the discussion of the intentions behind many of the President’s actions in Volume II. This, combined with the evidence of mental incapacity, heightens dangerousness.

The mental health professionals believe the Mueller report indicates that Trump is "predisposed to rash, short-sighted, and dangerous acts, without consideration of consequences, motivated by self-protection to the degree that he does not appear capable of considering national vulnerability; and surrounded only by the most informal and personal resistance around him to curtail those acts, until the pressure of his predisposition pushes out the advisors. It is clear that the course of events could have gone either way if those surrounding the President had yielded to the pressures to fire Mueller, or if they had spoken directly to Attorney General Jeff Sessions about limiting the scope of the Special Counsel instead of Sessions’ Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn pocketing the message. The President’s investment in a certain “reality” (that the Russian attack was insignificant) and his refusal to accept critical information or advice hence augment the dangers that our nation faces.

...After refusing for more than a year to be interviewed by the Special Counsel (p. C-1), the President finally agreed to respond to questions only in written form. Even with the help of his lawyers, however, his responses were not able to bring up substantial details that would be useful for the investigation but mostly state that he “on more than 30 occasions ... does not ‘recall’ or ‘remember’ or have an ‘independent recollection’” (p. C-1). By contrast, he rarely lacks certainty in his public statements, even with highly questionable content, and touts himself as having “the world’s greatest memory” or “one of the great memories of all time.” Making oneself impossible to indict by failure or refusal to recall does not prove innocence or guilt but can be valuable data: overall, in his remarkably brief answers (often the questions are longer than the answers), there is not a single question or part of a question that he answers without some variation of “I do not recall” or “I do not remember” (pp. C-11 to C-23) — to the point that his testimony merely demonstrated “inadequacy of the written format” (p. C-1).

Again, the patterns are more informative than individual instances, and the form of his testimony is significant in terms of: (a) the near absence of content, which indicates an extreme reluctance or inability to offer information; (b) a written language so starkly removed from the president’s ordinary manner of parlance, that it reads like “legalese” (or a lawyer’s language, which is a client’s legal right, but in mental health is a possible indication of high levels of contrivance and therefore likely unreliability); and (c) with his failure to “recall” substantial information (regarding Donald Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting, Russian hacking that includes WikiLeaks, the Trump organization’s Moscow project, and Russian contacts during the campaign and the transition), there are only two possibilities: either he truly does not remember, or is making a total fabrication—and either is pathological and highly worrisome with respect to a president’s capacity to serve, warranting an evaluation.

Avoiding interviews or answers that would make oneself indictable is comparable to a mentally impaired person avoiding doctors and hospitals at all cost so as not to be diagnosable. Whereas in criminal justice it is a legal right, in mental health it is valuable information regarding one’s mental state. A lack of genuine effort with respect to an issue of national security, when the country was unequivocally and effectively attacked by an enemy nation, is alone a sign of severe incapacity to fulfill the duties of the presidency.

...Tendencies that place oneself or others in danger are also core components that indicate a lack of capacity to serve. We know of numerous reports of the President placing the nation and the world in danger, with empirical studies documenting an unprecedented rise in hate crimes, schoolyard bullying, white supremacist killings, assaults directly implicating the President, and the extraordinary pipe bomber who sent sixteen explosives to the President’s most prominent critics, and most recently the mosque shootings in New Zealand citing “common purpose” with the President. In addition, the emotional characteristics noted above, including impulsivity, recklessness, and an inability to consider consequences of his actions, created a particularly dangerous situation in the nuclear age, where thousands of thermonuclear weapons are under his sole command without an adequate set of formal checks or balances. Apart from these, and apart from the minimization of Russia’s attack on the United States’ 2016 elections, including siding with the enemy nation’s leader over his own intelligence agencies and the attempt to block investigations into Russia’s attack, there is evidence from the Report that indicate general evidence of danger.

We know, from the first months of the Trump administration, in response to concerns about his potential for rash and dangerous acts, there was much talk about the protection provided by key associates such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Reince Priebus’ replacement as White House Chief of Staff, John Kelley, and Michael Flynn’s replacement as National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster. The Report corroborates these claims and further confirms that the country has been protected against directions to the Assistant Attorney General to fire the Special Counsel or directions to the Attorney General to announce that the Special Counsel limit his investigation to future elections, not by forceful assertion of national interest, but by the passive resistance of those around the President, often in an attempt to protect the President from himself. Still, the President has ousted these moderating forces rather than listen to them. Former President Ronald Reagan, who some have suspected of having suffered from the early stages of dementia while still in office, at least surrounded himself with capable personnel. The current President seems unable to do this; rather, only a few capable staff remain in spite of the President. With the President’s apparent symptoms worsening in plain public view, such as his “tweeting” angry messages over fifty times over the course of twenty-four hours a few days ago, a departure from his already escalating pattern of “tweets,” the likelihood of grave danger to national and international security can no longer be overlooked.

We know, from the first months of the Trump administration, in response to concerns about his potential for rash and dangerous acts, there was much talk about the protection provided by key associates such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Reince Priebus’ replacement as White House Chief of Staff, John Kelley, and Michael Flynn’s replacement as National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster. Without the limitations on the President’s rash, impulsive and sometimes downright dangerous decision-making that the Report attributes to these individuals, generally regarded as distinguished and formidable, the national interests of the United States and, indeed, the world, would have been placed at much greater risk by the mental functioning of the current President.

Mental capacity does not relate simply to a person’s specific psychiatric diagnosis; in other words, the presence of a mental disorder does not render a person incapable of making rational and realistic decisions. This is the most dangerous kind of leadership possible. Given the clear documentation we have summarized in the Special Counsel’s report of the President’s impaired capacity to make responsible decisions free of impulsivity, recklessness, manipulation of advisors, a degree of suspiciousness that leads him to believe that he needs to defend himself against betrayal or persecution, an absorption in self-interest that precludes attention to the national interest, inability to consider consequences before taking action, detachment from reality, paranoid reactions, creation of dangerous conditions, and cognitive and memory difficulties, there is compelling medical evidence that he is lacks the capacity to serve as president. We would still recommend a proper, in-person evaluation, which the President should be able to agree to, if he believes he is fit to serve. Otherwise, we find the information in the Report to point overwhelmingly toward incapacity.