The president is obsessively following media coverage of his political predicament and monitoring Republican reaction in near real time.
By DANIEL LIPPMAN 11/03/2019 05:00 PM EST
President Trump doesn’t think House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry should get any media coverage.
Meanwhile, he’s ravenously consuming news about the subject — primarily through a friendly lens. From the Oval Office to the White House residence to Air Force One, he’s closely tracking how Republican members of Congress are digesting the latest revelations on his handling of Ukraine, and monitoring their statements for any sign of hesitation or perceived disloyalty.
“We’re getting fucking killed,” Trump often gripes — a complaint about media coverage that is escalating in volume and frequency amid the impeachment probe, according to a Republican close to the White House. “He does make that comment literally every day.”
Trump is especially frustrated that the depositions by current and former officials — which have taken place behind closed doors, but nonetheless have leaked in some detail to reporters — “have to be covered at all,” according to a senior White House official.
“We should have no speculative coverage of what’s going on inside these private briefings, according to the very people who keep it private,” said another White House official. “Either let everybody see what’s happening as it happens or keep your mouth shut.”
Trump tells White House aides in private that he sees no need for leaks from the depositions because everyone can read the transcript of his call with the president of Ukraine, which he has repeatedly called “perfect.” He also is critical of witnesses he accuses of “pretending they know what he meant” on the call.
To get news on impeachment, Trump often relies on his favorite Fox shows: Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, “Fox and Friends,” Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro, because he thinks they provide an alternative to the narrative many journalists in the more down-the-middle press are giving. He has grown especially enamored lately with Carlson’s show, according to a Republican close to the White House, though he has complained publicly about some of the more critical news coverage on Fox.
“He likes all these guys on Hannity who are beating the shit out of the left." - A former White House official
He is also a fan of John Solomon, the conservative journalist who first disseminated the unsubstantiated reporting about Joe Biden and Ukraine, as well as Solomon’s fellow Fox News contributor Sara Carter, according to a former White House official.
“He likes all these guys on Hannity who are beating the shit out of the left,” this person said.
Trump will also sometimes consume news from conservative outlets Newsmax and One America News Network, which tend to take a more uniformly pro-Trump line than Fox News. In private, he has erupted at Fox for bringing on former DNC chair Donna Brazile as a contributor, and has railed against its weekend hosts on Twitter.
Trump usually watches TV in the morning and at night in the residence, where he has a DVR-like device to record shows he can’t watch live. When he’s in the Oval Office, according to a former White House official, he’ll often watch impeachment news in the nearby private dining room.
When leaving the Oval Office, he will usually stop to look at a nearby television showing Fox News, Fox Business, CNN and MSNBC to check the news of the day and headlines on the stock market, according to an administration official.
His tweets often track closely with the programs he’s watching, and he’ll often quote snippets of dialogue or political arguments that favor his narrative.
On Oct. 23, a particularly prolific day for Trump, he tweeted or retweeted 9 tweets that had Fox content, including a retweet of RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel of a clip of a Trump interview with Sean Hannity, a Stephen Moore article on FoxBusiness.com, tweets related to Reps. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) and John Ratcliffe (R-Texas)’s appearances on Fox, a Sean Hannity tweet on Ukraine and corruption, two tweets related to a Matt Whitaker appearance on Fox and two tweets with Fox News clips of Trump’s Syria announcement. To stay current on impeachment, Trump also gets regular in-person briefings from different parts of the White House, including the counsel’s office, the legislative affairs shop and the press office, all dealing with their specific aspects of impeachment. In those briefings, Trump asks questions like “Who’s up this week?” — meaning who is giving depositions — and “What does that mean?”
White House aides who share the president’s frustration with the entire impeachment process say he often vents his irritation with the House probe because, as one put it, he believes it is all just “so distracting.”
“He didn’t do anything wrong, so he’s rightfully frustrated,” this person added.
But Trump is also closely monitoring Republicans on Capitol Hill in near real time, looking to stamp out any signs of an incipient revolt and intervening when he deems it necessary.
“He keeps track of everything that’s going on up there from who’s going up there [to] who’s at these various basement events [to] what people are saying in hallway conversations, in media interviews, in floor statements, all that sort of stuff,” said a White House official.
Trump also will sometimes direct staffers to send printouts of news stories, such as articles he particularly enjoyed, and other material on all sorts of issues, including impeachment, to members up on the Hill via email, hand delivery and in person through meetings and visits to the Hill.
Trump’s impeachment media diet isn’t all television shows and clips. Besides the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, which are still delivered to the White House residence every day before dawn, Trump also gets various printouts and Twitter reactions related to impeachment and other topics in the news in a daily briefing book put together from the staff secretary’s office that goes back to the private residence every night.
“They don’t discriminate with good, bad or otherwise,” said a former official, describing the process of putting together the briefing book. Aides make sure to include news on what “hot-button topics” are getting traction in major media outlets.
When he reads newspapers, Trump will sometimes circle stories that he believes are wrong and tell staffers to “call this reporter” or “get this reporter on the line,” said a former White House official.
On a more personal level, Trump relies on his closest GOP allies, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) for news and insights into how impeachment is unfolding on Capitol Hill -- and they don’t just give him positive spin, according to an administration official.
Trump is in frequent touch with House members who are in the deposition room with witnesses, noted one Republican familiar with his conversations, who stressed that members of Congress are barred from sharing details of the testimony.
Last Sunday, Trump brought Graham, Meadows and a number of other members with him, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), to game five of the World Series, where Trump and the members touched on impeachment but also discussed baseball, according to a Republican familiar with the conversations.
TRUMP&PUTIN:The Russian Trolls Have a Simpler Job Today. Quote Trump.
"In Trump’s Twitter Feed: Conspiracy-Mongers, Racists and Spies "Dear Mr. President, I’m a Casualty of Your Drive-By Tweeting War. We All Are." "
As part of their attempt to interfere with the 2020 election, Russians are grabbing screenshots of President Trump’s tweets, or quoting his own misleading statements, analysts and officials say.
President Trump’s attacks on states sending mail-in ballots to all voters are being amplified by Russian actors. Oliver Contreras for The New York Times
By David E. Sanger and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Sept. 22, 2020, 7:53 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Four years ago, when Russian intelligence agencies engaged in a systematic attempt to influence the American presidential election, the disinformation they fed American voters required some real imagination at the troll farms producing the ads.
There was the exaggerated Texas secession movement, a famous ad in which Satan arm-wrestles Jesus .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-election-facebook.html .. while declaring, “If I win, Clinton wins,” and an effort to recruit protesters and counterprotesters to the same, invented rally over the rapid spread of Islamic influence in the United States.
This year, their task is much easier. They are largely amplifying misleading statements from President Trump, mostly about the dangers of mail-in ballots.
In interviews, a range of officials and private analysts said that Mr. Trump was feeding many of the disinformation campaigns they were struggling to halt. And rather than travel the back roads of America searching for divisive issues — as three Russians from the Internet Research Agency did in 2016 — they are staying home, grabbing screenshots of Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts, or quoting his misleading statements and then amplifying those messages.
That campaign is at the heart of the disinformation efforts that the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, warned Congress last week .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/fbi-russia.html .. was meant “to both sow divisiveness and discord” and “to denigrate” former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee. Mr. Trump chastised him for his comments on Twitter.
“But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia,” he said. He went on to repeat the kind of statements the Russians have been exploiting, writing that the two countries would take advantage of “our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam.”
Twitter flagged the president’s tweet, urging readers to click on a link to “learn how voting by mail is safe and secure.”
The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday again warned of the risk of interference in the election, this time by foreigners aiming to exploit the time it will take to sort through mail-in ballots. During that time, the agencies said, hackers could amplify “disinformation that includes reports of voter suppression, cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure, voter or ballot fraud and other problems intended to convince the public of the elections’ illegitimacy.”
The warning made no mention that the president had recently listed several of those techniques as likely to plague the vote.
Multiple U.S. officials with access to the intelligence have said Mr. Trump has been doing the job of the Russian propagandists for them. Mr. Biden’s national security adviser when he was vice president, Antony J. Blinken, charged at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce forum on Tuesday that as a “leading consumer and purveyor of conspiracy theories,” Mr. Trump “seems to have suited up for the other side.”
Clint Watts, a former F.B.I. special agent and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said his review of the disinformation traffic showed that “the Russians in 2016 had to make false news stories or manipulated truths to power their narratives.”
“This time they’re not writing anything that’s not already said in U.S. space,” often by Mr. Trump himself, Mr. Watts added. “They must be flabbergasted and saying, ‘We really don’t need to work hard this time.’”
Much of the Russian traffic echoes Mr. Trump’s effort to establish an argument for rejecting the election results if he loses in states that are mailing ballots to all voters for the first time. But of the states doing so for the first time this election, only Nevada is seriously in contention.
No sooner did Mr. Trump begin to contend that the system was ridden with fraud than Russian trolls, bots and news sites joined in. In late May, the state-backed Russian website RT was quick to publish an article claiming that such ballots “are the easiest route to a RIGGED ELECTION.”
By early August, the Strategic Culture Foundation — an online journal that the State Department declared recently “is directed by Russian Foreign Intelligence Service” — had picked up on the same theme .. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/06/voting-fraud-is-real-the-electoral-system-is-vulnerable/ , according to analysts at Recorded Future, a group based in Somerville, Mass., that analyzes cyberactivity by foreign governments.
An article appearing on the Strategic Culture website concludes: “President Trump has several times claimed that the expected surge in mail-in voting could result in ‘the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history .. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-mail-in-voting-will-lead-to-most-corrupt-election-in-us-history .’ Trump is often wrong when he speaks or tweets spontaneously, but this time he just might be right.”
And this month, the Russian government news site, Sputnik, published an article headlined, “Trump Again Claims Biden May Be Using Drugs to Enhance His Debate Performances,” repeating comments the president made on Fox News. That piece was republished by the right-wing website Infowars, disseminating it more widely in the United States, and readers shared it on social media. That allowed the article to spread without running the risk that it would be removed because it was an “inauthentic” post by a Russian troll in St. Petersburg pretending to be American.
The Russia proxy website Newsfront went further, reporting “confirmation of rumors about Biden’s incapacity.” It is the exact type of disinformation a homeland security intelligence bulletin warned Russian actors have amplified “because they judge this narrative will resonate with some American voters and reduce their confidence in him as a candidate.”
Mr. Trump has claimed that the mail-in ballot system is ridden with fraud. Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock
“Sitting officials and candidates should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering calling the validity of an upcoming election into question,” the committee concluded, without dissent from its Republican majority. “Such a grave allegation can have significant national security and electoral consequences, including limiting the response options of the appropriate authorities, and exacerbating the already damaging messaging efforts of foreign intelligence services.”
Now, his own bureaucracy finds itself stuck between their intelligence findings and an angry president. The day before Mr. Trump scolded his F.B.I. director on Twitter, General Paul M. Nakasone, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, warned of the dangers of Russian disinformation — which his agency has pledged to counter.
General Nakasone has vowed to take steps to knock such disinformation offline, as he did in the 2018 midterm elections, when Cyber Command attacked the Internet Research Agency, the digital propaganda shop that operates from St. Petersburg, disabling its systems for a number of days. One veteran of Cyber Command noted that the general’s mission in the next six weeks may involve taking down Russian posts that are quoting his boss.
Intelligence officials, for their part, are battling an effort by Mr. Trump and his top advisers to cast China and Iran as equal threats to the election, which runs counter to their intelligence.
A homeland security official, Brian Murphy, said in a whistle-blower complaint .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/us/politics/homeland-security-russia-trump.html .. that the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, including the agency’s acting secretary Chad F. Wolf, blocked the release of a threat assessment that contained warnings of Russian interference because of how it “would reflect upon President Trump.”
The senior officials instead directed analysts to highlight threats posed by China and Iran, which have generally targeted Mr. Trump, according to Mr. Murphy. While both are threats, officials say, their operations are neither as extensive nor as sophisticated as the Russians. They are longer-term concerns, though Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, has sought to portray them on equal footing with Moscow.
Former officials say they are concerned that such contradictory assessments play into Russia’s hands. “If the adversary’s goal is to undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the process, then it’s incredibly important we have voices to counter that objective,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a former under secretary for cybersecurity and critical infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security. “And if the credibility of those voices has been undermined, then it makes the adversary’s jobs that much easier.”
Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, told lawmakers last week that Russia was engaging in “very active efforts” to influence the 2020 election. Pool photo by Chip Somodevilla
In a draft of the assessment from August, homeland security analysts wrote: “Russia probably will be the primary covert influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation within the homeland.”
They continued, “We assess that Moscow’s primary objective is to increase its global standing and influence by weakening America — domestically and abroad — through efforts to sow discord, distract, shape public sentiment and undermine trust in Western democratic institutions and processes.”
Mr. Murphy said he learned in September that Mr. Wolf had ordered new drafts to be redesigned by his policy office. Mr. Wolf’s department has now said it will be released on Oct. 1. The Department of Homeland Security has rejected Mr. Murphy’s allegations.
Mr. Wolf has seldom highlighted the Russian threat in public remarks without also mentioning China and Iran.
Harry Fones, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency had tracked a growing threat from Russia, China and Iran.
“As a department it is our duty to defend our nation and critical infrastructure like elections from all threats, not just the one the news is focusing on,” he said.
David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent. In a 36-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is the homeland security correspondent, based in Washington. He covers the Department of Homeland Security, immigration, border issues, transnational crime and the federal government's response to national emergencies and security threats. @KannoYoungs
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
