The Russia Bounty Story Was Always Murky

The intelligence community is inundated with ‘low to moderate confidence’ information frequently. Why did this get so much attention?

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During a briefing Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked whether the Biden administration thinks “Russia placed bounties on American troops.” Her answer demonstrated why this storyline, which garnered much press during the 2020 presidential campaign, was always dubious. 

“Well, I would say, first, that we felt the reports were enough of a cause of concern that we wanted our intelligence community to look into those reports as a part of this overall assessment,” Psaki replied.  “They assessed … with low to moderate confidence … that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan.”

“Low to moderate confidence” doesn’t mean that the story was a complete “hoax,” as President Trump claimed. There was some intelligence behind this reporting. 

It does mean that then-candidate Biden was far too strident in his critiques of Trump. For instance, Biden said it was “absolutely despicable” that Trump didn’t challenge Putin on the allegations. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Bill McDavitt

    Dear Mr. Joscelyn,
    Thank you very much for all of your excellent reporting and sharing your insights with Vital Interests. Admittedly, this is a bit of a long shot, and I have no doubt you are busy, but there is a side of me that thinks, just maybe, this will be worthwhile link to share. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies has compiled interviews with the previous 8 ambassadors to Russia starting with Jack Matlock in 1987 and going through Jon Huntsman in 2019. Fingers crossed this is a worthwhile link to share: https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/monterey-initiative-russian-studies/ambassadorial-series
    Best and again, many thanks for all your work with The Dispatch.
    Sincerely, Bill McDavitt

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  2. CatoTheElder

    I strongly suspect, as I did at the time, that the story grew legs in response to its movie-style scenario that was not just different from the usual Taliban-blows-up-[insert site here]-in-latest-anti-American-attack event, but different in some of the ways things on the big screen often differ from reality: simplicity; evil superpower; bounty for murder/mayhem; an ‘upping of the ante’ in the Mafia-style wars; and more.

    I certain that the headlines, such as this from the NYT: ‘Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says’, drew much more interest than would have something like ‘Afghan Militants Still Seeking to Kill U.S. Troops’, or even ‘U.S., Allied Intelligence Says Afghan Militants Sought to Kill U.S. Troops’. This is a new plot line, as it were. Bounties! Russia! Putin! Money! Murder! Tune in next Monday at 9 for the series premiere of ‘Putin and the Bounty’. And let’s remember—it’s all about the clicks. Advertisers pay for clicks. Clicks provide the endorphin fix for marketing department heads. News? If it generates clicks, it’s news—and the more clicks, the more “America wants know”, and thus more ‘reporting’.

    Reinforcing the cycle is the scuttlebutt factor. I’m continuously surprised by the number of people who have no idea what a scuttlebutt is, or at least once was. No, it’s not an overweight, dumpy-looking, hurrying-about sycophant. A scuttlebutt was the water cask aboard ship at which sailors would gather to slake their thirst—and whisper, mutter, and more about the latest rumor, innuendo, myths, and lies. Over time, the word became a mass noun meaning the rumor, innuendo, gossip, myths, fantasies, and lies shared at the office water cooler. I am certain that many people found the Russian bounty story to be an easy, attractive, dramatic stimulant to water fountain, over-coffee, and break room discussions.

    The story, given its dramatic and inflammatory nature, deserved some attention. What it never really got was decent reporting, at least after the first wave of things. It generated clicks, and the reporters and editors rode that horse to the ground, but any in-depth work to nail the thing to the wall was presumably too difficult, too expensive, too complex, too...unattractive...to get a headline.

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    1. CatoTheElder

      Oh, and one added ingredient that made it simply too good to pass up: Trump and his response. Everything Trump touched, tweeted, and talked about was good for clicks—and this had the added attraction of furthering emotional attachment to the story, through partisan fervor.

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    Victor Clairmont

    You know I was just thinking about it and I realized something.

    How convenient it is that the Russian Bounty story was just easily tossed aside and debunked by the mainstream outlets that peddled it for a long time and quoted each other saying the sources were true, as Biden is now president.

    It was inconvenient for the current administration that has to deal with Russia now, so why have that (now obvious lie) out there?

    I would say I am shocked but after all the lying from many “sources” and journalist, I am not.

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    Pat Riot

    The news here was not the report itself, it was the fact that a report like this could surface and the sitting president of the United States would absolutely ignore and downplay it.

    And sorry Republicans, but a former president being compromised by a foreign enemy remains big, big news.

    The report has always been just that: a report. There is still a question about Russian involvement in Afghanistan: what are they doing there *at all*?

    And by the way, the other thing that came out this week was the final and absolute proof that there *was* collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign--and Trump's absolutely unconscionable pardon of Paul Manafort demonstrates that he most undoubtedly knew about it.

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    Paul Montagu

    This was the first time I heard that the confidence level was "low to moderate". Before that, we knew that the CIA learned of the allegation and that the NSA couldn't confirm it. Nevertheless, the CIA was concerned enough to put in in an intelligence briefing.

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    George.Skinner

    People paid attention to this because the implications were so outrageous - Trump allowing a foreign country to get away with paying others to kill American troops - and the fact that it wasn't inconsistent with Trump's record of talking tough, failing to take meaningful action, and being weirdly deferential to Russia. It's a bit like having a teenage kid with a history of leaving laundry all over the house. You come home to find laundry on the stairs, and you're primed to come to the conclusion that your kid left it there again. Then you reprimand the kid for leaving laundry laying around again only to have the kid flip out because THIS TIME, it actually because the dog was rooting around in their laundry basket. Partisans have a history of going off half-cocked on this sort of thing - they conflate the truthiness of something with it actually being true. Of course, the targets of this sort of thing should probably keep in mind that even if they were falsely accused this time, they've managed to develop a reputation that make the accusations credible in the first place...

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      TimNYC

      Classic "Boy who Cried Wolf" story, isn't it?

      Also, vaguely relatedly, this may be amusing to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66SQKEf7UIs

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  7. Acre00

    I see a lot of comments here that basically boil down to "Trump was terrible, and therefore the reporting was ok". I strongly disagree with this sentiment.

    Trump was a bad president, and his personal demeanor was disgraceful. None of that excuses the media. It was a BS story with zero evidence behind it. Running this story, in conjunction with a lot of other damaging stories ran against Trump and other republicans(60 Minutes, anyone?), only serve to support his assertions that the media is not to be trusted. There were a ton of terrible things Trump and his administration did; the media didn't need to make stuff up about him.

    Why did it get so much attention? It was an election year, and Trump is a republican running for office. That was all that was needed for them

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      Pat Riot

      The story was that Trump ignored an IC report saying there were indicators that this was going on and **Trump completely ignored this and downplayed it**.

      The report itself is *not* the story (and no, "the media" didn't make up the IC report, it in fact existed).

      In a normal, non-Russian-compromised presidential administration the president would have said something to the effect of, "we find these reports troubling and we are looking into it" and there would be no story, but Trump's reaction was the opposite of that, adding further evidence that he was under the control of the Russian government which *is* very big news.

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    2. Avatar photo
      Rochejaquelein

      Serious question for you: you are using "the media" in singular. Nevermind Fox, Sinclair's local news is not woke and talk radio outside of NPR and Pacifica leans heavily and aggressively left.

      You may be old enough, as I am, to remember three networks, PBS, a quality (if you were lucky) regional newspaper and the WSJ and the NYT being the core media world. And you if you grew up conservative in that world as I did you may remember watching Dan Rather and the NYT editorial page for the (inevitable) shading of bias. Coming from a virulently anti-Communist background, I remember in particular precious tube TVs being periodically threatened by the risk of a glass being hurled through them when the nightly news did a piece on Nicaragua based on the nuances of how the leftists rebels/guerrillas/terrorists/soldiers.

      We do not live in that world. Doing the old network pretense of objectivity makes a 24/7 cable channel boring, and CNN tested that to destruction to the point it could be described as the "oatmeal dull news plus CELEBRITY TRIALS network". Fox made millions by chucking the pretense of objectivity at the same time the "mainstream" legacy media was having its core economics gutted by Craigslist and advertising market changes.

      By 2016, Fox was the established giant in cable "news", the right dominated talk radio, local TV news to the extent it covered national affairs at all was as likely to be rightish Sinclair as anything else, Fox had idiot baby siblings so you could channelsurf over to Newsmax without ever being polluted by the libs and regional papers were dying so that as a practical matter only the NYT, WSJ and Washington Post mattered, so the right had one out of three.

      Do you seriously think, hand on heart, that it makes sense to talk about "the media" given that? And if so, is it fair to talk about the occasional (and real!) excesses and idocies of the NYT/CNN/Boston Globe without addressing, to take a wild example, the fact that large chunks of the right wing media with an audience in the double figures millions relentlessly pushed a parade of lies about the results of the 2020 election?

      Thoughts? Genuinely curious.

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      1. Acre00

        You are correct, of course, that "The Media" isn't a singular entity and is far more fractured today than it has ever been before. It's a tangled mess of entities each striving for viewers/readers with their own views of what should be reported and how. I'm not old enough to remember only three networks and two papers, but I did grow up before the internet and without cable/satellite, and the only paper we got was The Baltimore Sun, so I think I got a reasonable analogue of that era. Fox is indeed a juggernaut in the media world, but it is only so because it is the lone right leaning network of note(I refuse to call it Conservative). WSJ's editorial board definitely leans conservative, but the reporting is remarkably centered - I've even seen a number of left leaning stories from them. Given that, I do think it's fair to label "The Media"(again, with the understanding that that doesn't actually exist) as predominantly leftist.

        The right was certainly on some kind of crack during the 2020 election, but just like Trump's flaws don't absolve the left's, neither do the right media's. My basic position can be summarized as "A pox on both your houses!". More seriously, my answer is to call both out when they fuck up and stop the childish "He started it!" or "The other side is way worse! Why don't you criticize them and leave me alone!". You haven't heard that from me about the right on this site because others have been doing that far more eloquently than I ever could.

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        Pat Riot

        That's the running joke of Republicans blaming everything on "the media": Republicans control half of our media viewers every single day and are the furthest thing in the world from being "censored".

        In other words, routinely you will hear, on the #1 cable news channel, "you can't the media!".

        Now you know who clicks on those ads that say, "click here to learn the secret way of getting ahead in the stock market that nobody else knows about"...

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      Kmregan7

      Why did it get so much attention? Because no one actually trusted Trump and it was entirely possible it was a true story and he'd lie about it.

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        Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

        That doesn't excuse the media for poor reporting. They do call it journalism, and not sensationalism for a reason.

        It got attention because it fit a narrative, not because it had been properly vetted.

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          Pat Riot

          What exactly was "poor" about the media's reporting in this regard?

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  8. Seth

    This is the kind of balanced and well-reasoned perspective I appreciate from The Dispatch.

    I try to assess any politically-advantageous controversy with some skepticism. I think this is a case where both sides of the partisan divide rushed to posturing beyond the evidence. Plenty of that going on today, unfortunately.

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    The Stray Goose

    I have no sympathy for Mr. Trump. This is another example of how his imprecise speaking lead to more trouble for him (and the country). The Democrats were more than happy to take political advantage of it - that's politics. He would have helped himself with a better response - a response that any assemblyman in a town council would know how to put together. He was an amateur.

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      Kevin Johnson

      I agree with you on no sympathy for T. However, I have loads of sympathy for the American people, who, already being lied to by a clownish Con-man, were continuously lied to by most media, who spun unfounded tales from the Steele dossier and other political hit-pieces and totally discredited themselves. The reality of the idiot in chief was bad enough. He was, in the short-term, helped by dishonest, ideological and partisan “news” organizations who bolstered his claims of persecution and convinced good people they had to support him to fight the corrupt system. He’s gone (we hope) now, but the damage he did, and the damage the extreme and dishonest resistance did, live on. I applaud efforts to call the media out for its distortions, which continue. Some openly defended distortions to defeat the idiot, but one wonders if the abandonment of objectivity can be turned off now...

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        Pat Riot

        "The media" did not create the Steele dossier, some intelligence consultant did and they never intended to make it public (John McCain gave it to BuzzFeed).

        https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2019/03/18/new-details-senator-john-mccain-role-trump-dossier-detailed-deposition-david-kramer/3205658002/

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    Rochejaquelein

    Part of the problem here is that the Trump administration was so chaotic and Trump himself so committed to a "always attack, never explain" approach to any question that the normal process broke down. And lets be clear, watching his presidency from the disgrace in Helsinki to the appalling Super Bowl "we have killers to" interview to the eminently impeachable Ukraine behavior made it very easy to believe that he was intensely relaxed about Muscovite thuggery and murder.

    Almost all of the "media was the worst ever to Trump" narratives would have gone away if he had behaved with a modicum of respect for the office and the American people. from the beginning:

    "I am deeply shocked and surprised at the revelations about my former campaign manager Paul Manafort -- who, by the way, I was totally right to fire and I never really liked -- and General Flynn, who lied to Mike Pence's face about contacts with the Russians and who apparently was working in cahoots with the Turks to. So I'm going to be cooperating, because I think there are alot of Democratic sore losers who are going to make this about me, and its not. And I'm also going to be releasing to a select committee some details about my business dealings with Russian nationals, which wasn't alot and is exactly what anyone would expect from someone like me"

    "Personally, I asked my Generals to look into this as soon as I heard, and although there may not be much to it I'm certainly going to raise it with Mr. Putin if we don't get some satisfactory answers. Let me clear -- any foreign power that aids and abets the murder of American service members and thinks they can get away with it is very much mistaken"

    Not that hard, and would have undercut much of the narrative (or at least made those pushing it look unreasonable). Instead he acted in a way that opened the door to continued digging and inferences by *never* responding in a straight manner and being more interested in attacking the media (up to and including Fox News) than protecting the country.

    If your answer is "but that's not how Trump is", well, that's Trumps problem and he can't complain if his vulgar mindless combativeness wasn't met with meek submission and the benefit of the doubt.

    Also, as with almost every story about media coverage in the Trump years, its ridiculous to ignore the fact that the media of 2016 was not the media of Walter Cronkite and Woodward and Bernstein. The old economic model was dead, fact checkers were frequently the first people cut, the basic infrastructure and culture built around a single daily paper or news hour couldn't cope with 24/7 news cycle driven by twitter and and Fox news had made a crapload of money by competing without the old pretense of objectivity.

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      Pat Riot

      No that wouldn't be hard for him to have done... unless Putin was extorting him.

      As a matter of fact, you can say, "unless Putin was extorting him" for *hundreds* of things Trump did...

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        Rochejaquelein

        I am happily willing to put money up that I am the most Russophobic subscriber to the Dispatch. I have been know to argue that Dostoyevsky was Finnish and Chekhov Polish. I refuse to use Thousand Island because its an abomination so must by necessity use "Scythian Tatar" dressing on Reubens (this works out poorly at most delis). When I watched Star Trek II as a kid, I was tremendously pro Khan and pro brain eating worms, because they at last were dealing with the Muscovite threat Starfleet had let fester for far too long. I, to the fullest extent permissible by the tenents of the Roman Catholic Church, *hate* the Russian state as it has existed from the Slavic settlement of Muscovy and will do so until the day I die (and pray to see NATO, Turkish and Chinese flags flying over Moscow before that day).

        So when I tell you that the idea of some Kompramat held by Putin over Trump is rubbish, believe me.

        Trump didn't need to be blackmailed. He was a narcissitic amoral sociopath with no sense of the dignity of the office or the moral heritage of Westen Civilization. He also understood, far earlier than almost anyone else other than Steve Bannon, how rapid the moral and intellectual degeneration of the Republican base voters in Protestant rural America was and how far it had progressed.

        If there had been a piss tape, Trump would have brazened it out, Laura Ingraham would have defended it as a harmless practice and millions of Southern Baptists would have suddenly convinced themselves that urine was hygenic and biblical. You can't extort someone that shameless who knows his supporters are that slavish.

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          Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

          Let me address the Russian pee pee tape I have on my bookshelf some light reading on murderers, evil bad guys, etc. Many autocrats (think Stalin, etc.) regularly used hygiene taboos to shame and harm their opponents. If one is a historian, finding evidence of this is not difficult.

          So you have a Russian, off the record, repeating a decades old trope that no one takes serious anymore, other than gullible hacks working in the US MSM. Any good journalist would have thought to ask "is that an urban legend", and would have qualified reporting to include that disclaimer. But they didn't.

          Similarly, remember the Julie Swetnick (kavanaugh 3rd accuser) story, and how MSM ran with it without asking if it was an urban legend. I was in college decades ago when that story floated about every college campus. Even then, we knew it was an urban legend.

          As noted Internet commenter Abarham Lincoln, "you can fool all the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but your success rate goes up if they work for CNN"...

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            Rochejaquelein

            Er, mate, I'm not sure where you live but dismissing it as an urban legend is a bit much. The whole pee tape thing may have been unlikely based on other stuff we know about Trump's personal sexual depravity putting aside the "raw intelligence, and dubious raw intelligence at that", but its hardly in the category of urban legend. A promising Blairite labour MP had his career implode due to an even fouler documented "urban legend" of this sort earlier this century.

            I also think that while lots of anti-Trump people went pretty far down a rabbit hole on Russia (exactly what I was pushing back against) the revisionist narrative that many even Trump skeptical Republicans have seem to have settled on in just as bad or not worse.

            Mainstream Republicans seem to want to pretend that there was absolutely nothing uncovered by Muller and the first impeachment, and that it was all a "witch hunt". Once respectable figures like Andrew McCarthy went further and convinced many otherwise sane people that not only should Paul Manafort and Helskinki and turning the Ukrainian national struggle into a auxiliary to a dirty tricks op and the obvious willingness of Trump's campaign to act as a conduit for the anti-American scum at Wikileaks be ignored, but that the *real* scandal was in the FISA warrant process.

            The media made mistakes. Many of the mistakes were in completing the long journey from the old imperfect, hollow but probably valuable "objective" model to the brave new world of political entertainment journalism that Fox opened up without being honest about doing so. Some have to do with having infinitely more news space to fill with resources that were gutted by technological changes. Some was traceable to real bias, but even then in all seriousness what did you expect the media to do confronted with a media celebrity obsessed with them who deliberately embraced a 100% non-cooperation and demonizing attitude towards them from the start? Its pretty hard for a human being to maintain objectivity when a demagogue incites an unruly rabble to menance his colleagues at every rally. Spiro Agnew got unfair press. Spiro Agnew asked for unfair press.

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          2. Fudrock

            I think you overstate how enamored and how broadly the MSM took up these stories and ran with them. I think it’s a helpful exercise for conservatives inculcated, rightly in many cases, to the idea that Mainstream media is horribly biased to remember that there is a spectrum, and most are still concerned hewing to the facts and maintaining credibility, and bias tends to manifest itself in editorial discretion and framing, but there’s differences in degrees the further an organization gets from the center. The vast majority of media outlet wouldn’t touch the Steel Dossier with a ten foot pole until Buzzfeed released it. Buzzfeed. That’s a high caliber output. The mainstream media (which must include Fox by now) must grapple with the fact that it’s credibility has been tarnished with half the nation, though I am not sure how they can fix it really. I think this cake is baked.

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          Pat Riot

          So you have definitive proof that Trump is/was *not* being extorted by the Russian government? Where did you find that?

          Certainly there's a mountain of circumstantial evidence to that effect, going all the way back to Trump's purchases of TV equipment from the Russian supplier in New York back in the 90s, and everything he did was very consistent with Russian kompromat so... I'm very curious where you found evidence of his *not* being compromised in this way...

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            Rochejaquelein

            “So you have definitive proof that Clinton and Soros is/was *not* running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a DC pizza joint? Where did you find that?”

            See how silly that sounds Pat? As a man from Scranton says, “c’mon man”.

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      Kmregan7

      All of this. You covered it very well.

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      Aylene Wright

      I recall Sarah once tried her hand at "the speech Trump would make if he were sane" for the version of the Sweep covering the RNC, but yours comes very close. I have tons of problems with Biden these days (his ridiculous flip-flop-flip today in the refugee cap being one), but I do commend him for one thing, he is not acting like a whiny toddler about the fact that the majority of Republicans still don't see him as a legitimate President. Certainly not what Trump did in a similar circumstance.

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        Kmregan7

        I voted for Biden. I too am having problems with some of his decisions. I voted for Obama. I had problems with his decisions as well. This is normal. Apparently only die-hard Trump supporters can't separate criticism of the decisions/policies with criticism of the man (and let's face it, even as a man, Trump has a lot to criticize)

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        Aylene Wright

        Er. ON not IN the refugee cap.

        #EditButton

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      Logical

      Once again, Andy T, you are brilliant. I can't improve on this.

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