Leave it to the NY Times to find a particular news story to bring up just when the timing is… interesting shall we say?
Previously unseen documents from a Soviet archive show how hard Mr. Sanders worked to find a sister city in Russia when he was a mayor in the 1980s. Moscow saw a chance for propaganda.
If you don’t read past the headlines, the takeaway is: Bernie Sanders — Russian Dupe.
The article gets into the history of Sanders’ attempt to set up a relationship with a Russian “sister city” as a means of defusing tensions with Russia — which were running high in the Reagan years. If you’ve heard that he honeymooned in Russia, that’s the back story. He’d gotten married somewhere in the middle of the process with Russia, and the trip just happened to align with negotiations.
If you’ve heard favorable quotes from Sanders about Russia from that time, keep in mind that Sanders was involved in trying to persuade the Soviet government to okay the deal; he was hardly going to come back to America and start bad-mouthing them. The Soviets had their own agenda, of course.
...“One of the most useful channels, in practice, for actively carrying out information-propaganda efforts has proved to be sister-city contact,” a Soviet Foreign Ministry document provided to Yaroslavl officials said….
...Nothing in the documents suggests that Mr. Sanders was the only local American official targeted for propaganda, or even that he was particularly receptive to it, though they do describe him as a socialist. But the documents do show the Soviets’ intensive preparation to use Mr. Sanders’s interest in their country to their advantage.
The Sanders campaign had this to say:
In a statement, the Sanders campaign said the candidate was “proud” of his grass-roots diplomatic efforts and noted that the idea of bringing together Soviet and American cities had the highest-level support at the time.
“Mayor Sanders was proud to join dozens of American cities in seeking to end the Cold War through a Sister Cities program that was encouraged by President Reagan himself,” a Sanders campaign spokesman, Mike Casca, said in a statement. “The exchange between Burlington and Yaroslavl, which continues to this day, confirmed Sanders’s long held view: by meeting face to face, we can break down the barriers and stereotypes that exist between people and their governments.”
Now maybe this is simply journalism — the Times went to the effort of doing some original reporting by uncovering some source documents related to the background of one the two remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination. Still, the article never says how the Times learned of these previously obscure documents, or why they decided to report on them now.
The Times requested the files on the Thursday of last week — ahead of Super Tuesday. This story appearing after those primaries is bound to have some effect on Mr. Sanders’ candidacy. While his actions at the time were motivated by his convictions, the implication that they also served to advance Russian interests at the expense of America could be taken as a net negative for Sanders. Will this impact the next set of primaries? It can’t be expected to help.
It’s difficult to avoid getting into CT territory here. Take your pick of possible string pullers aiming the Times at Sanders on this. Did someone in the Trump campaign or elsewhere in the GOP suggest now would be a good time to follow up on Sanders’ Russian connections? The Biden campaign would certainly want something to contrast Biden’s foreign policy experience against that of Sanders. How did the Times learn about the documents?
The shortest connection is out of Russia — who else would be aware of these documents and what they might mean? There have been reports Russia continues to interfere in our political process, including the Sanders campaign, despite denials from their asset Donald Trump. What would they hope to gain? It’s possible that if they can weaken Sanders enough to prevent him from getting the nomination, he and his supporters will not turn out for the Democratic nominee in November — and Trump gets re-elected. It might also cripple the Democratic Party.
Or it could be an effort by the usual suspects to remove the remaining progressive candidate from contention. Elizabeth Warren was “disappeared” by the media after her third place finish in Iowa, even though that should have been a marker to take her seriously — or perhaps because it was. Her position on M4A drew a lot of hostile fire from the media — which the other candidates avoided by either refusing to support M4A or by not putting out anything that could be parsed to death. She may have been their chief concern, but Sanders is also in their sights.
And then there is this. The NY Times in 2016 did more than a little to amplify the GOP talking points against Hillary Clinton, readily picking up talking points from the right and mainstreaming them. (Cokie’s law.) There are times when it now appears the paper is more frightened of a Progressive Democrat in the White House than it is about another 4 years of Trump and GOP rule. (Or to be charitable, they don’t believe Sanders can beat Trump in November.)
So where does that leave us? If you are not paranoid at all, it’s not for lack of a target-rich environment. I would like to know the editorial reasoning that decided this story was worth running at this time, and I would like to also know who pointed them at these documents that had been quietly sitting in the archives for years.
I would also like to know why the NY Times is going to the trouble of digging into Sanders’ Russian connections, but seems to have so little to say about Trump’s at the moment.
One of the things coming out of the impeachment trial and before was the narrative that it was really the Democrats working with Ukraine (and the FBI and the Deep State, etc. etc.) to sabotage Trump’s campaign, not Russia. There are Russians all through the story — the people Giuliani was talking to, the theories that kept coming up, the financial ties. It’s as though all of that disappeared once the Republicans in the Senate gave Trump a get out of jail free card.
There are signs the GOP is attempting to go ahead with plans to smear Biden with the bogus Ukraine corruption charges — and it’s likely Russia will have its hand in there if it doesn’t already. They no longer need Ukrainian ‘help’ to do it — they spent much of the impeachment process talking it up as loudly and as often as they could. (The Benghazi technique.)
The Times will dutifully pick up the allegations (because it’s “out there and people are talking about it”), but will bury the lede that there is no substance to them and is purely partisan somewhere down below the headlines. To do otherwise would be “liberal bias”, and we can’t have that.
They learned nothing from 2016.
UPDATE: Charlie Pierce took a look at this story and has a take on it in his own particular style. Here’s the opener and the closer; read the whole thing if you can get past the paywall:
Now that the Democratic primary race is down to two people, I guess it’s time for the silly season to blossom fully in our elite political press. One of the fundamental dynamics in this business holds that, if you work really hard to pry documents loose from the government, what you pry loose must have an inherent newsworthiness, and must be presented in the most dramatic fashion possible, even if what you’ve pried loose is something as innocuous as the menu for a state dinner honoring the Moldovan prime minister…
...This story exists for two reasons: one, the Times looked at obscure documents that nobody else ever bothered to read, and two, they wanted to put the name “Bernie Sanders” in a story with the words, “Soviet Union.” If we’re going to go down the road of context-free, ooga-booga, what-else-are-you-hiding? political reporting again, the Times should let us know so we can all go to sleep until December.