The first night of the Democrats’ national nominating convention in Philadelphia started rather ugly, pretty much serving as a live demonstration of that famous Will Rogers (the cowboy humourist hugely popular in the 1930s in the US) quip. When Rogers was asked which organised political party he belonged to, he responded that he didn’t belong to an organised party; instead, he was a proud Democrat. Moreover, there is also the hoary political adage that Republicans start out tightly united, but then they set to fighting each other, while Democrats begin by biting and scratching – and then, grudgingly, gradually come together for an election. Potentially July’s political narrative is now following this maxim.

At least for the first half of Monday and among the various demonstrators outside the convention arena in Philadelphia, it was not entirely clear the Democrats would come together. But, as the day and the evening of that first day wore on, it seemed increasingly clear that it might actually be believable that the Democrats would – eventually – more or less pull themselves together behind the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, despite the ugliness of some things earlier in the day.

In that Monday evening, there were some combative, take-it-to-the-enemy speeches by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker. And they, in turn, led into an extraordinary moment of oratory by First Lady Michelle Obama. Without ever mentioning his name, she gave a precision smack-down of Donald Trump – “when they aim low, we aim high” – and offered a kind of secular benediction of Hillary Clinton as her husband’s best successor and the personification of giving real life to the ideal that all of the nation’s children can aspire to its highest offices. And, presumably, she didn’t crib a single word from Melania Trump.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the candidate bested by Clinton, then rose to round out the evening, giving a full-throated endorsement of Clinton’s candidacy, saying it was inconceivable to even contemplate allowing the Trumpster to triumph on 8 November. In helping settle some of the “Bernie or Bust” jostling, comedian Sarah Silverman, an early and vocal supporter of Sanders, and Senator Al Franken (a former top grade comedian as well) had earlier told Sanders supporters it was now time to get on board, lest they hand the final round to the Donald.

Now, by the time readers get to read this column along with their morning coffee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, barring a sudden, global, apocalyptic event, will be officially nominated as the first female candidate for the presidency from a major political party, after her name is placed in nomination jointly by Senator Barbara Mikulski and Congressman John Lewis, and the roll call of the states is called. On the same night, along with other speakers from among the Democratic stable, the “Big Dawg” himself, Bill Clinton, will also speak in support of his spouse – and there is considerable interest in whether or not he will be able to deliver a better rhetorical feast than Michelle Obama succeeded in doing. Maybe he will, but, then again, maybe he won’t be able to reach that remarkable moment. This may be the supreme public challenge of his public career.

But even as the officially scheduled business of the convention has been rumbling on, another topic has captured a significant share of attention, and has helped keep discontent about Hillary Clinton’s nomination on a slow boil. Late last week, Wikileaks released about 20,000 e-mails purloined (or liberated, depending on your stance on the issue) from the servers of the Democratic National Committee. The messages helped underscore the fact that some of the DNC staffers were distinctly unmoved by the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and that they even discussed ways they might conceivably help skew voter support away from him during some of the campaign’s primary elections.

While none of the e-mails available so far points to any specific act actually carried out by these staffers that actually cost Sanders primary wins, it clearly put paid to the idea that the committee was a completely neutral referee in the slugging contest between Clinton and Sanders. In the growing furore coming from this release of documents, the first casualty – besides the tenuous party unity in the minds of many – turned out to be Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz from Florida, who had been DNC chair until she was forced out. She had initially resisted resigning until President Obama’s views on the matter were finally wheeled in to make it crystal clear to her that she simply had to go for the sake of their party.

South African readers should understand, however, that party national committee chairs in the US do not have the kind of clout or power that adheres to someone like Gwede Mantashe in what he does for the ANC. In the US, the national committee chair is largely a highly-paid technician’s job, keeping the party’s trains running the right way and on time; helping raise funds for the many congressional and gubernatorial campaigns that take place; and, in a presidential election year, co-ordinating with the presidential campaign organisation and its fund-raising arms and managing the convention process and guiding primaries (although those are individual state party functions), rather than any actual agenda-setting or designing the party’s national political goals. Nevertheless, the chair has a major public presence on behalf of the party, especially as he or she is supposed to be an impartial force among – or between – rival candidates’ camps, and appears frequently on television. As this e-mail data dump seems to demonstrate rather clearly, Wasserman Schultz’s operation was not, after all, such a crisply impartial umpire, something that has infuriated numerous Sanders bittereinders, even if the former candidate effectively greeted these new revelations with weary, I-told-you-so, resigned shrugs. The nomination battle was over and he had accepted the result.

But, here’s the thing, and this is where it begins to become really interesting – or the plot of a great page-turner, potboiler novel. There are indications that Wikileaks may have laid its little electronic hands on those e-mails courtesy of Russian intelligence efforts. Whoa, what’s that, you say? The Russians? Isn’t the Cold War rather old news nowadays? Well, it seems that earlier this year, it was more than hinted at that Russian cyber-security forces had penetrated the DNC’s servers to liberate the opposition research that had been gathered on Donald Trump, given their understanding that he was going to be the Republicans’ inevitable nominee.

After all, in public statement after public statement, Hillary Clinton has been saying things about Russia and its ruler, Vladimir Putin, that are less than totally an uninhibited love fest. And in her time as Secretary of State, and thereafter, Clinton has made no secret of her interest in demonstrating a strong, vigorously defended Nato alliance, including its newest Baltic state members – nations that formerly were parts of the Soviet imperium. By contrast, consider Donald Trump’s buddy-buddy, reciprocal back-scratching, strong-man-mutual-admiration-society comments directed at Putin (and vice versa); his campaign chair Paul Manafort’s track record of working with some rather less than salubrious characters who just happened, effectively, to be Russian pawns in Ukraine, and Trump’s own recent comments that once he became president, American support for Baltic state Nato members would not be guaranteed, a priori. (Oh, and by the way, there is another theory being suggested that this data extraction and its release also reflects some vigorous competition between Russia’s FSB (the successor to the NKVD) and the GRU, Russian military intelligence. Just by the way, competition between Intel agencies of one nation’s government is not totally unknown in the world.)

Examining this still-evolving question, Governance Studies Fellow at the Brookings Institution Susan Hennessey wrote earlier this week, “There is significant evidence that individuals acting at the direction of or on the behalf of Russia – the degree of co-ordination is unclear – are attempting to use organisational doxing to influence the United States presidential election. As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith noted, this raises a number of scary questions regarding preserving the integrity of US election results. It is not entirely clear what is motivating the DNC document dumps or the apparent targeting of Hillary Clinton; some speculate the aim is to benefit Donald Trump, though a plausible goal might simply be to insert a degree of chaos into US politics. Understanding the ultimate goal of the hack and leaks, however, is not all that important to deciding how exactly we should respond. What is critical to mitigating the harm is sufficiently strong public attribution.

“Defence One [an online publication directed at defence and security analysts and policy-makers] lays out the powerful, though not definitive, public evidence of Russian involvement. The New York Times offers a somewhat more tempered assessment. It is important to recognise that the strongest evidence regarding attribution was made public long before the most recent batch of e-mails was released:

“Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reported in May that the intelligence community had evidence that foreign governments were targeting campaigns.

“In June, Crowdstrike [a cyber security company] published its account, specifically naming Russian state actors as behind the DNC hack.

“While the Russians have long been known to use information and disinformation campaigns to influence foreign elections, there was initial scepticism regarding the degree of Crowdstrike’s certainty. However, the discovery of incriminating metadata – first noticed by Matt Tait who tweets under @pwnallthethings – and other evidence quickly corroborated the Crowdstrike assessment.

“There are well-documented connections between Wikileaks – the chosen vehicle for the leak release – its founder Julian Assange, and the Russian state apparatus.

“Paired with the technical indicators, the sum total of evidence is about as close to a smoking gun as can be expected where a sophisticated nation state is involved.”

Aha. Cue that ominous music, right here. Let’s think about this one. Back in 1962, and then again in 2004, two film versions of Richard Condon’s best-selling 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate, have been made. In the first, Korean War hero Raymond Shaw is secretly implanted with commands to put him under the control of Chinese handlers at a certain moment, as he rises in US politics. In the new version, Shaw’s controllers are Iraqis and others using some mysterious implants and post-hypnotic commands emanating from the ominously named Manchurian Global Corporation, just as Shaw is on the cusp of becoming a vice president – and then president in a complex assassination plot.

Watch: Manchurian Candidate (1962) trailer

Now, no rational person is going to argue seriously that Donald Trump is a hypnotically controlled tool of the Kremlin, a so-called “Siberian Candidate”, a la those fictional Manchurian ones. However, what is being suggested is that a Trump victory could be advantageous to Putin’s geopolitical goals and ambitions, and that an important element in such a scheme could be sowing some really serious disarray among the Democratic ranks and growing distrust in their eventual nominee – Hillary Clinton – during the ensuing campaign.

Or, as Hennessey went on to argue, “Over the weekend, Dave Aitel [a computer security specialist in a note on the Ars Technica website] argued that the ‘DNC hack and dump is what cyberwar looks like’. There is a decent case that information systems surrounding our elections should qualify as ‘critical infrastructure’ and that malicious nation states should recognise that interfering with these systems risks serious consequences. The absolute minimum response should be to make credible public attribution.

“The US government is uniquely positioned to make the case for Russian attribution. The FBI and DHS have been working directly with the campaigns on cybersecurity, and the government has a combination of insight from both technical assessments of compromised networks and those intelligence information sources which the private sector lacks. And because the government has been historically very careful in stating conclusions regarding nation state involvement, it has a high degree of domestic and international credibility.

“The best way to mitigate damage is to provide a clear US intelligence assessment as to whether there is Russian involvement and the degree of confidence. In May, [US Director, National Intelligence James] Clapper was rather vague in noting that the IC [the official intelligence community] was ‘aware that campaigns and related organisations and individuals are targeted by actors with a variety of motivations.’ With the implication to free and fair elections in the US, it is time for the FBI to get far more specific.

“The Russian weapon is information. Our national values require that we not suppress information in the press, whatever its provenance. The solution is to fight fire with fire: our defence is more information. Protecting all sources and methods, the intelligence community and FBI should tell us who they think hacked and leaked the information. The rest of us can sort out why and whether that will matter on Election Day.” Aha.

Many scholars, analysts and senior technological and information systems managers have been arguing for some years that cyber security in the face of cyber attacks is the newest and most valuable coin of the national defence realm. Presumed Chinese cyber attacks on classified American defence technology reservoirs have been widely reported. Similarly, so have those Stuxnet cyber attacks (purportedly by the Israelis, the US, or perhaps both) a few years ago on Iranian nuclear facilities. But while protection of technologically sensitive information is critical in the face of cyber attacks, is it too much of a stretch to consider how strategic release of information can be used to manipulate public perceptions and the actions of public actors?

Moreover, for many years, America’s foreign antagonists have complained about alleged US interference with their respective domestic political processes and leadership selections. With these presumed actions by Russian intelligence agencies, the American political process might well now be tasting some of that same, unpleasant medicine. For many decades, direct contributions by foreigners and foreign organisations in American elections have been illegal. In fact, an early example of foreign interference in the US political system, the “XYZ Affair” in the late 18^th century, nearly led to war with revolutionary France.

In our own time, the potential cost of this effort to America’s voters and their exercise of political free choice may well be precedent-setting, significant and unpalatable – especially if foreign engagement in the selection of a US president via such a data dump turns out to have the ring of truth to it. DM

Photo: US Republican nominee for President Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Quicken Loans Arena on the final day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, US, 21 July 2016. Trump formally accepted the nomination of the Republican Party as their presidential candidate in the 2016 election. EPA/SHAWN THEW