Thread by @thomasafine

There is so much missing from this. Where's Torshin and Butina? Where's Rykov? Klyushin? Dugin?

https://twitter.com/selectedwisdom/status/1120310209098993665

And don't think for a minute that Rykov was an early name that turned into a non-story. He ran a large, well-funded, well-organized campaign to promote Trump in Russian media.

He simply has no direct connection to the campaign, so he's not in the news right now.

But he played a critical role. We know that he sponsored a book about Trump. Hired Katasonova as a provacateur. Marshalled dozens of bloggers and news people in creating pro-Trump content in Russian. Worked with Putin's lackeys Malofeev and Dugin.

He's allegedly connected to non-IRA troll factories, as is his buddy Klyushin. Developed software to track their impact on mainstream news in real time. And he worked with Russia's top AI expert to do... unknown things.

But whatever those unknown things were, the AI expert got top billing when Rykov threw his big party on election night.

Likewise, the role intended for Butina and Torshin was huge. Most likely their goal was to compromise our most powerful political lobby (the NRA), and then use that to compromise as many politicians as possible.

As I've said for a long time, Butina's efforts originally had nothing to do with Trump, and may never be directly connected. But it was one part of a very large Russian effort, even back when most Russians thought Trump could only be a spoiler.

There's also an important principle about Putin that people should understand: he usually assigns important jobs to more than one group, and lets them compete against each other for success (and for Putin's favor).

Here's the point I'm getting at: right now we're obsessed with Trump (and rightly so). But Russia's efforts with respect to Trump are tiny fraction of their entire effort. Trump is simply their splashiest success.

We haven't even GLANCED at how Russia has been entangling itself in critical U.S. energy and technology security industries, both financially, and in management, and in joint ventures.

I suspect some of the tech they use against us was funded by U.S. venture capital money.

Former Russian ambassador @McFaul agrees with me on the whole: "They did not analyze all aspects of the Russian interference campaign."

(But I don't expect him to go on the record about some of the details I've offered above.)
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…