Intel hearings: Our elections are safe from Putin, our public culture isn’t

Unless you consider it a surprise that yes, the FBI is in fact investigating Russian ties to the Trump campaign (at least now we know for sure) then there aren’t any big surprises so far. That investigation has been going on since July. FBI Director James Comey also made clear that Trump Tower was not subject to any sort of wiretap order that he’s aware of.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans (Chairman Devin Nunes, Rep. Tom Rooney, and Rep. Trey Gowdy went first) seem to be spending most of their time discussing the leak of intelligence gathered to the media — a felony punishable by ten years imprisonment. Democrats are focusing more on the merits of the issue of Trump campaign connections to Russia, but there’s disappointingly little that Comey and Rogers are willing to say in terms of specifics in an open hearing.

It’s important to keep Russian interference in the 2016 campaign in perspective. The Russians illegally hacked (incidentally, not only of Democrats, but also of Republicans and “think tanks”) and ran extensive public propaganda efforts with the apparent goal of boosting Trump’s candidacy. But there is no evidence that the vote itself was compromised (it should be noted that key swing states like Michigan and Iowa use paper ballots and would not be easy to compromise) nor has anyone else found information to that effect.

The question that could lead to more — or not — is whether there was some kind of participation in this propaganda effort behind the scenes by people within the Trump campaign. Some Trump campaigners, such as Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Carter Page, did have extensive Russian connections, and those have already come up in today’s hearings. But given the nature of the propaganda campaign, it may not have required any of their direct involvement. We may never find anything concrete.

So how do you prevent foreign propaganda from influencing public thinking? The idea that a foreign power should have a toe-hold in America’s public culture — a culture where the press is free and foreign voices (including cleverly disguised ones) can have as much influence as others — is nothing new. That debate goes all the way back to the founding.

In 1798, President John Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts in order to counter French influence. France’s revolutionary government had launched an undeclared naval war against the United States at that time. The American government refused to pay back debts it had owed to the King of France for his help during the American Revolution — the king whom the revolutionaries had deposed and murdered a few years earlier. During that war, more than 2,000 American merchant ships were captured.

There was great fear at the time of French sympathizers destroying the young American republic from within, and so new curbs were placed on naturalization of foreign immigrants. There was also an accurate perception that one of the two American political parties (the Democratic Republicans) was sympathetic to France.

But the Alien and Sedition Acts basically became an excuse to arrest anyone — including newspaper editors — who had been critical of Adams, the U.S. refusal to recognize debts to France, and the acts themselves. The laws were bad enough, and contrary enough to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, that James Madison, the father of the Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, took part in state-level efforts in Virginia and Kentucky to threaten secession in response. Congress ultimately allowed the acts to expire, and returned the fines that people had paid for violating them.

How does a country with a free press and freedom of speech deal with foreign propaganda? It’s a question that comes up again and again with different foreign threats in different eras (the most infamous being Soviet Russia in the 1950s). There’s never been an easy answer.