IRAC.ME

A comprehensive look at references to the press in justices’ opinions revealed “a marked and previously undocumented uptick in negative depictions.”

Editor’s Note: The violence that broke out in Northern Ireland earlier this month raised fears that sectarian conflict would return after decades of uneasy peace. American University’s Carolyn Gallaher and Kimberly Cowell-Meyers explain how the latest unrest draws on many of the players during the so-called “Troubles” but that today’s politics, particularly disputes over Brexit, are driving much of the violence.

Daniel Byman

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On April 7, young people in the Protestant community in the Shankill Road area of Belfast commandeered a bus and set it on fire. Later that night, Protestant and Catholic youth hurled incendiary devices at one another across so-called peace lines—formal and informal barriers that separate places where the two communities border one another. This capped a week of unrest across Northern Ireland. Since the violence started, 88 police officers have been injured.

Violence at interfaces between Protestant and Catholic communities was common during Northern Ireland’s 30-year conflict (1968-1998), known locally as “the Troubles.” The conflict was sectarian and ethno-nationalist. Unionists, who are typically Protestant, believe Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom. Nationalists, who tend to be Catholic and see themselves as Irish, believe Northern Ireland should be part of the Republic of Ireland. Each side had paramilitaries willing to use violence to pursue their ends. Unionists leaned on loyalist paramilitaries—the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA)—while nationalists relied on republican ones—most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Low-level street violence has continued in the post-agreement period. These clashes are so common in the summer months that journalists have nicknamed them “recreational rioting.” In May, June, and July, when the sun sets at 11 p.m., teenagers on both sides of the religious divide often gather at hotspots to throw rocks, launch homemade incendiary devices, and yell insults at one another. July is especially intense due to unionist commemorations of Protestant victories in the 17th century.

The recent violence looks similar, but two things set it apart. First, violence has been concentrated in loyalist communities, and second, it is broadly connected to loyalist paramilitaries’ recent rejection of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which formally ended the Troubles 23 years ago. The GFA created a power-sharing government between unionists and nationalists, among other structural reforms. This spring’s conflagration is the result of fallout from Brexit overlapping with the continuing influence of paramilitaries despite the Good Friday Agreement.

The Northern Ireland Protocol

Commentators warned that Brexit would destabilize the peace process, and it did. It is difficult to know if unionists, who overwhelmingly supported leaving the European Union, were engaged in magical thinking when they insisted Brexit wouldn’t undermine the GFA, or if they were calculating that Brexit would strengthen their hand against nationalists. In the end, the Northern Ireland Protocol, which lays out the post-Brexit ground rules governing trade between the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland, did not favor unionist interests.

During negotiations, a key sticking point was where to place the border for customs checks. The EU vigorously opposed reestablishing a land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. During the Troubles, the border had been heavily militarized, and guard posts were often subjected to attacks from the IRA. After the GFA, border infrastructure was dismantled and the border virtually disappeared. Because both countries were part of the EU, people and goods could cross the border without passport or customs checks. This contributed to peace-building by encouraging economic development throughout the island and neutralizing the border issue as a source of conflict between the competing identities of nationalists and unionists.

Post-Brexit, there were two ways to avoid reinstating a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. One option was for the U.K. to leave the EU but remain in its customs union (similar to Norway’s status). Unionist parties in Northern Ireland and the Conservatives in the U.K. repeatedly rejected this option, arguing that staying in the customs union was not a real exit from the EU. The second option was to put a border in the Irish Sea so that goods coming into Northern Ireland from Great Britain could move into the Republic of Ireland without stopping at the land border between them. Unionists in Northern Ireland voiced strenuous opposition to this plan.

Although he promised not to put the border in the Irish Sea, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ultimately did just that. Implementation began in December 2020. The EU had long resisted Johnson’s entreaties for flexibility, arguing that it would not be party to undermining the GFA. Its message was reinforced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the New IRA, a dissident republican group, which told a broadcaster in October 2019 that it would consider border infrastructure “a legitimate target for attack.”

The result is that goods coming from cities like Liverpool to Belfast now have to go through customs checks in the port of Belfast, even though both cities are part of the same country.

To unionists, the creation of a trade barrier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. looks like de facto unification with the Republic of Ireland. To loyalists, it also looks like British capitulation in the face of potential republican violence if the land border were restored. In Northern Ireland’s zero-sum politics, loyalists now believe they have license to use the threat of violence, just as they perceive republicans did during protocol negotiations. In early March, the Loyalist Communities Council, which represents loyalist paramilitary factions, issued a statement announcing it was withdrawing its support for the GFA.

Persistent Paramilitarism

Many commentators believe paramilitaries are behind the recent wave of violence. On Twitter, locals pointed to video footage of young kids appearing to take directions from adults on the scene. Others note that paramilitaries have often stage-managed street protests.

Leaders of the Loyalist Communities Council have denied involvement, and the police have backed them up, announcing they had no evidence paramilitaries “sanctioned and organized” the violence.

Debating whether paramilitaries stage-managed the rioting misses two larger points, however. First, even if the paramilitaries did not direct the recent violence, they were willing to use it to hammer home a political point. In the same statement in which the Loyalist Communities Council disavowed involvement in the riot, for example, it also declared the protocol was a “spectacular collective failure” that was bound to lead to violence. In paramilitary strongholds, paramilitaries have the power to shape the perception of events, even those they don’t initiate or control.

Second, why are paramilitaries still powerful 23 years after the GFA. Republican and loyalist paramilitaries eventually decommissioned their weapons and stood down active units (the IRA in 2005, the UVF and the UDA in 2007), but they didn’t go away. On the republican side, dissident republican paramilitaries replaced the IRA. On the loyalist side, the UVF and the UDA simply stayed put and continued to recruit. The Police Service of Northern Ireland estimates that loyalist paramilitaries currently have as many as 12,500 members.

But loyalist groups aren’t as cohesive or disciplined as they were during the Troubles (and even then, they weren’t as disciplined or cohesive as the IRA). Over time, centralized command structures have weakened. Many units operate semiautonomously. When commanders want to exert power over wayward factions, they have to consider the risks. During the early 2000s, loyalist attempts to police their own led to a series of deadly feuds, as the saga of Johnny Adair demonstrated. In 2000 Adair, who commanded an Ulster Defence Association faction, sparked a bloody, months-long feud with the Ulster Volunteer Force leadership when he teamed up with a UVF splinter group to sell drugs in UVF territory. Several people were killed, and hundreds of families seen as aligned with the UVF were displaced from their homes in Adair’s turf.

As a result, many of the old guard, who negotiated the 1994 cease-fires and the 1998 peace accord, have been sidelined. Indeed, a division of labor has emerged within loyalist paramilitaries. The old guard often engages in street-level peace-making, deconflicting between local factions, helping young people find job training and negotiating alternatives for people facing paramilitary rough justice. Newer leaders—many born in the 1990s—have taken the reins of burgeoning criminal enterprises, selling drugs and extorting local businesses.

“Pop-up gangs” are also in the mix. These are often small groups of young men who occasionally coordinate with paramilitary leaders for protests or riots, but they aren’t beholden to or controlled by them. Coronavirus-related restrictions and the announcement on March 30 by the Public Prosecution Service that no one would be prosecuted for attending IRA leader Bobby Storey’s funeral last June when public gatherings were banned have created a reservoir of frustration seeking catharsis.

Although many paramilitary men aren’t interested in politics, the UVF and UDA names come with a built-in political history. Often, this history affords political legitimacy for their criminal activity. But the disruptions caused by the protocol, and the sense it creates among unionists that they lost an important battle, means paramilitary men can’t ignore it. Indeed, in poor and working-class neighborhoods where trust in politicians is low, many people expect paramilitaries to speak for them, even if they don’t like them very much.

The question is which part of loyalism will set strategy and tactics moving forward. The Loyalist Communities Council, which is staffed largely by old-guard loyalists, claims it doesn’t condone or want the violence. Criminal elements, by contrast, may welcome the diversion it creates from their illicit activities. And it’s not clear what the youth will choose.

It may be difficult to stem the violence if its perpetrators see it as useful and there is no leadership to control it. There is little room for the British government to concede to unionist/loyalist demands on the protocol. And, unfortunately, policing alone won’t solve this problem. The political and social dimensions underlying the recent violence will ultimately have to be addressed by the unionist and loyalist communities.

On April 15, the Treasury Department answered one of the biggest questions left unresolved by the Mueller investigation—and left unanswered as well by the 2020 Senate Select Intelligence Committee report about 2016 election interference.

The resolution of the mystery arrived unexpectedly, tucked inside the department’s announcement of a package of sanctions against Russia issued in response to the SolarWinds hack and the Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election. As important as the nugget is, the Treasury Department didn’t particularly highlight it. Any reader would have to look closely and be obsessively familiar with past developments in the Mueller investigation to know what to keep an eye out for. But there it was: Under a heading labeled “Treasury Targets Known Russian Agent Konstantin Kilimnik,” the department announced that Kilimnik—whom the press release described as a “Russian and Ukrainian political consultant and known Russian Intelligence Services agent”—had, in 2016, “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.” 

Both the Mueller report and the Senate investigation established that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had passed that sensitive information to Kilimnik—but only now, years later, has the Treasury Department unveiled what Kilimnik did with it. With President Trump no longer in office, the development has attracted less excitement than it might have during the era of constant outrages about Trump’s friendliness with the Russian government and the former president’s attempts to hamstring investigations into his willingness to accept foreign help. But the Kilimnik news is worth paying attention to. As the New York Times put it, the Treasury Department’s press release provides “the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign” in 2016. 

That should be concerning as a historical matter. But it should be even more worrying for what it says about the future of American elections.

Kilimnik was something of an eminence grise of the 2016 Russia scandal. He entered the picture through his connections with Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort, for whom he had worked during Manafort’s time consulting for the pro-Russian former president of Ukraine. Kilimnik, the Times reported in 2018, was linked to Russian intelligence—and another member of Trump’s 2016 campaign had told an associate that Kilimnik “was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the G.R.U.,” Russia’s military intelligence agency. But Kilimnik’s true star turn came in the Mueller report itself.

“[T]he FBI,” Mueller wrote, “assesses [Kilimnik] to have ties to Russian intelligence.” The report described how Kilimnik had shared with Manafort a “peace plan” for addressing the conflict in eastern Ukraine sparked by Russia’s invasion of Crimea—on terms very favorable to Russia—that Kilimnik hoped the Trump campaign would adopt. (It’s not clear whether Manafort shared the plan with anyone else on the campaign.) And most notably, Mueller wrote that Manafort had shared polling data generated by the Trump campaign with Kilimnik—meaning, essentially, that Trump’s campaign manager had shared internal information with someone who had been, and maybe still was, a Russian spy.

But what did Kilimnik do with the data? On this point, the Mueller report is frustratingly vague, and its explanation is marred by a redaction for grand jury material that couldn’t be made public:

The Office could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period. Manafort [REDACTED] did not see a downside to sharing campaign information …. Because of questions about Manafort’s credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik, the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election[.]

The closest the report gets to answering this question is a hint that Manafort may have aimed to use the data to smooth over a bumpy relationship with a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, with whom both he and Kilimnik had worked and whom the Mueller report describes as “closely aligned with Vladimir Putin.” 

The next piece of information about Kilimnik’s role arrived in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s mammoth bipartisan summer 2020 report on Russian election interference. The Senate report is far blunter than Mueller on the subject of Kilimnik’s connections to Russian intelligence, writing directly that “Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer.” And it suggests that Manafort knew, too: “Manafort … at some point harbored suspicions that Kilimnik had ties to intelligence services. Manafort was undeniably aware—often from first-hand experience—of suspicious aspects of Kilimnik’s behavior and network. Nevertheless, Manafort later asserted to [Mueller’s team] that Kilimnik was not a spy.”

The Senate report provides a little more information about what the mysterious polling data might have contained. According to two Trump campaign associates, Manafort seems to have shared data with Kilimnik on “polls that identified voter bases in blue-collar, democratic-leaning states”—including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—“which Trump could swing,” along with data on negative public sentiment toward Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. 

So far, so suspicious. But once again, the report admits that the Senate committee was unable to figure out why Manafort shared the data or what Kilimnik did with it. “The Committee was unable to determine Kilimnik’s actions after sharing the data,” the report states. “The Committee did, however, obtain a single piece of information that could plausibly be a reflection of Kilimnik’s actions” after receiving the material from Manafort. Unfortunately, however, the reader does not get even that single piece of information. The next paragraph in the report looks like this:

A later section in the report, describing the committee’s suspicions about Kilimnik’s possible involvement with the Russian military hacking operation to obtain Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee emails in the spring of 2016, is likewise redacted.

This brings the story to this week’s Treasury Department announcement, and the revelation that Kilimnik did, in fact, share the Trump campaign data with Russian intelligence.

In one sense, the news might seem relatively minor. It’s one more development in a story that has been slowly dripping out into the public for more than three years. But that development answers a crucial question—and strengthens the evidence of coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. 

Previously, government documents had shown that Kilimnik—a person linked to some degree or another to Russian intelligence—had received inside information about the Trump campaign’s strategy from Trump’s campaign manager. Perhaps, those documents suggested, Kilimnik had passed that information to Deripaska, an oligarch known to have close connections with Putin. The Treasury Department announcement updates this story in two ways: First, the U.S. government has now said exactly what it thinks Kilimnik did with that data, rather than hedging or admitting defeat. And second, the government believes that Kilimnik gave that data not just to a person who might have passed the data to the Russian government, but directly to the Russian intelligence services. 

On the Russian side, that significantly increases the possibility that the polling data reached the desk of someone who might have used it to further Russian election interference—perhaps to target ads or other efforts—rather than getting lost somewhere between Deripaska’s office and the Kremlin. On the American side, it means that Trump’s campaign manager passed internal campaign information to the Kremlin about how Trump planned to win the election, whether or not Manafort knew it was headed there directly or through a more circuitous route. That certainly sounds a lot like the “collusion,” at least on the part of Manafort and the institutional campaign, that Trump has so vociferously denied. 

So why wasn’t this included in the Mueller report? For one thing, it’s worth keeping in mind that Mueller understood his investigation as prosecutorial work—not counterintelligence. Perhaps Mueller had access to this information but chose not to include it in the report because it would somehow have been inadmissible in court—because the details would reveal sources and methods, for example.

Another, more likely possibility is that U.S. intelligence agencies obtained the information about Kilimnik after the release of Mueller’s report. But how long after? According to the New York Times, “It is unclear how long American spy agencies have held the conclusion about Kilimnik. Senior Trump administration officials, fearing Mr. Trump’s wrath, repeatedly tried to keep from the public any information that seemed to show Mr. Trump’s affinity for Russia or its president, Vladimir V. Putin.” It’s conceivable that intelligence agencies could have obtained the information before the release of the 2020 Senate report and didn’t pass it to Congress. Recall, too, that Trump pardoned Manafort in December 2020. Did his administration know just what Manafort had done when that pardon was granted? 

It’s important to keep in mind what’s still unknown, and what can never be known. It’s not clear what, if anything, anyone else in the campaign knew about Manafort’s choice to pass this material to Kilimnik. It’s not clear what, if anything, Russian intelligence did with the data. It’s not clear what, if anything, the data could have allowed Russian intelligence to do. Some commentators have suggested that Russia could have used the information to better target its efforts to persuade Americans to vote for Trump or stay home on Election Day—but for all the dramatic claims about the power of microtargeting Facebook advertisements, there’s little definitive research as to whether Facebook ads like those generated by the Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm actually have the power to change anyone’s mind at the requisite scale to swing an election. 

Notably, even though the Treasury Department’s announcement also discusses misdeeds in 2016, the sanctions against Kilimnik are in response to his “having engaged in foreign interference in the U.S. 2020 presidential election”—not 2016. According to a March 2021 assessment released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Kilimnik—described in the assessment as a “Russian influence agent” linked to Russia’s intelligence and national security service, the FSB—“took steps throughout the election cycle to damage U.S. ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump’s prospects for reelection.” Here, the report seems to be referencing the efforts to slime Biden’s campaign by spinning false stories about the candidate’s involvement with an alleged Ukrainian scandal—a story that Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani eagerly seized upon as a potential boost to Trump’s reelection chances, and that quickly gained traction in right-wing media. 

The reference to Kilimnik’s potential 2020 role is a useful reminder of why all this matters. As a matter of history and accountability, of course, it’s useful to have additional context about what Russia may have been up to in 2016—and what the Trump campaign was all too happy to collaborate on. Yet it can be hard to get too worked up over new revelations in a scandal that’s now more than four years old, especially when the Capitol riot has shifted the political focus toward the misinformation and election interference conducted in America, by Americans.

The Kilimnik revelations aren’t an argument for refocusing American anxiety over election interference back to the threat posed by foreign actors. But they are another reminder that after 2016 and 2020, and in a political environment in which 78 percent of Republicans still believe Biden did not legitimately win the election, the guardrails that previously constrained what political candidates would do in order to win—lie, cheat, overturn the vote outright—have been shattered. There is a danger that another Kilimnik will, in 2024, reach out to another politician’s campaign to offer foreign support. The greater danger by far, though, is that the new campaign will be all too eager to listen.