Trump, Russians and leaked emails
As the Democratic Party began its convention Monday in Philadelphia, many questions revolved around leaked emails that revealed over the weekend that the Bernie Sanders campaign was less favoured by the leadership. Philip Bump of the Washington Post answe
Q Are Vladimir Putin and the Russians acting to support Donald Trump’s candidacy?
A Last month, The Washington Post reported that the breach of the DNC was linked to Russian state actors. A firm hired by the DNC to track intrusions, CrowdStrike, “identified two separate hacker groups, both working for the Russian government, that had infiltrated the network.” The company had analyzed other infiltrations from the groups over the past several years. (Ties to Russian hackers have since been corroborated.) Once inside the DNC, one group looked at email and chat over a long period of time; another targeted opposition files on Trump. On Friday, some 20,000 of those emails ended up on WikiLeaks.
Q Who provided the documents?
A It’s not clear how WikiLeaks got the documents, but a hacker identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit on Twitter. The name is a reference to Guccifer, the Romanian hacker who got into Bill Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal’s email system several years ago and who claims to have hacked Clinton’s. He was arrested and pleaded guilty to criminal charges in May.
Q But he’s Romanian, isn’t he?
A When Vice talked to Guccifer 2.0 in June, he also claimed to be Romanian. He took great pains to argue that he had acted alone. But “when we asked him to explain to us how he hacked into the DNC in Romanian, he seemed to stall us, and said he didn’t want to ‘waste’ his time doing that,” Vice reported. “The few short sentences he sent in Romanian were filled with mistakes, according to several Romanian native speakers. The hacker said he left Russian metadata in the leaked documents as his personal ‘watermark.’ ”
Q Is hacking something Russia does often?
A Russia’s facility with online disruption is established: It reportedly has a vast, sometimes informal operation of people who are employed to wreak havoc online. Last year, the New York Times’s Adrian Chen explored the workings of “The Internet Research Agency,” as it’s known. Hundreds of employees are paid to mix falsehoods with truth on social media in order to mislead and misinform. “Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history,” Chen wrote, “and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.”
Q Does that mean Russia is plumping for Trump?
A It’s not clear that The Agency is directly involved in pushing for Trump online, though there is evidence that some of Trump’s social media support originates from bots. The timing of the WikiLeaks release, immediately before Clinton’s announcement of her vice-presidential pick and the Democratic convention, is one reason that campaign manager Robby Mook and others suggest that the ultimate goal is political disruption.
Q Is Trump unusually sympathetic to Putin and Russian interests?
A For all of the attention that the Republican convention got, one incident flew largely under the radar. During the party’s discussion over its 2016 platform, the Trump campaign got directly involved in shaping the official Republican position on Ukraine. “Diana Denman, a platform committee member from Texas who was a Ted Cruz supporter, proposed a platform amendment that would call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, increasing aid for Ukraine and ‘providing lethal defensive weapons’ to the Ukrainian military,” the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reported. “Trump staffers in the room, who are not delegates but are there to oversee the process, intervened. By working with pro-Trump delegates, they were able to get the issue tabled while they devised a method to roll back the language.”
Q What ties are there between Trump’s campaign and Russia?
A Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was employed for years as a lobbyist by the pro-Russian president of Ukraine who was ousted in the uprising of 2014. Manafort denied any connection. In June, we detailed the extent of the financial ties between Trump and Russia — and Trump and Putin allies. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate crosssection of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump, Jr. said in a 2008 interview. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Trump has repeatedly praised or excused Putin’s strong-arm tactics and role in international affairs. In the wake of Putin’s invasion of Crimea, Trump faulted President Barack Obama for being weak, and praised Putin’s spike in popularity that resulted from the invasion.
He’s repeatedly also shown willingness to make decisions that bolster Russia’s international position. Last fall, Trump suggested the fight in Syria be ceded to Russia. Recently, Trump suggested that America re-think its involvement in NATO and, in an interview with the Times, said that he wouldn’t necessarily honour America’s commitment to protect Baltic states that are members of the organization and which have grown tense at recent Russian threats.