The Russians are coming (again)
Are you sure you still want to call it fake news, Mr. President? For the past year, Donald Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of a profound national security threat: Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 election on his behalf. He dismissed the Russian subversion effort as a hoax by his opponents and the media despite voluminous evidence to the contrary — including the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community — that it did in fact happen, and is sure to happen again.
Now come the indictments. On Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election, filed criminal charges of fraud and identity theft against 13 Russian citizens and three Russian organizations, all alleged to have operated a sophisticated influence campaign intended to “sow discord in the U.S. political system.”
One organization, the Internet Research Agency — which the indictment says is funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the “go-to oligarch” of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin — began its efforts as early as 2014, according to the indictment. Its staffers, known as “specialists,” posed as Americans and created false identities to set up social media pages and groups aimed at attracting U.S. audiences. The broad outlines of this interference have been known publicly for a while, but the scope of the deception detailed in Friday’s indictments is breathtaking.
By the spring of 2016, the operation had zeroed in on supporting Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton. The Internet Research Agency had a staff of 80 and a monthly budget of $1.25 million. On the advice of an unnamed grass-roots activist from Texas, it had focused its efforts on swing states.
Staffers bought ads with messages like “Hillary is a Satan,” “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison” and “Vote Republican, Vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment!”
They created hundreds of social media accounts on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other sites to confuse and anger people about sensitive issues like immigration, religion and the Black Lives Matter movement — in some cases gaining hundreds of thousands of followers.
They staged rallies while pretending to be U.S. grass-roots organizations. A poster at one “pro-clinton” rally in July 2016 read “Support Hillary. Save American Muslims,” along with a fabricated quote attributed to Clinton: “I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.”
As the election drew nearer, they tried to suppress minority turnout and promoted false allegations of Democratic voter fraud. The specialist running one of the organization’s Facebook accounts, called “Secured Borders,” was criticized for not publishing enough posts and was told that “it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton.”
After the election, they continued to spread confusion and chaos, staging rallies for and against Trump, in one case on the same day and in the same city.
All along, they took steps to cover their tracks by stealing the identities of real Americans, opening accounts on U.s.-based servers and lying about what their money was being used for. Last September, after Facebook turned over information about Russian ad purchases to the special counsel, a specialist named Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina emailed a family member: “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.” Kaverzina continued, “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.” Fake news, indeed.
Trump’s defenders, desperate to exculpate him, seized on a single word — “unwitting” — that the indictment used to describe certain “members, volunteers and supporters of the Trump campaign involved in local community outreach” who had interacted with the Russians.
In other words, as the White House subtly put it in a statement Friday, “NO COLLUSION.” The president repeated the claim in a tweet, grudgingly acknowledging Russia’s “anti-us campaign” but emphasizing that it had started “long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!”
It’s true that, as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in an announcement, these particular indictments do not allege that any American knew about the influence campaign, nor that the campaign had changed the outcome of the election. But that’s quite different from saying that there was no collusion or impact on the election. As Rosenstein also said, the special counsel’s investigation is continuing, and there are many strands the public still knows little or nothing about.
Remember, Mueller has already secured two guilty pleas — one from Trump’s former national security adviser and another from a former campaign adviser — for lying to federal authorities about their connections to Russian government officials. He also has charged Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his top aide, Rick Gates, with crimes including money laundering. Gates appears to be nearing a plea deal himself.
Then there were Russian cyberattacks on the elections systems of at least 39 states. And the hacking of emails sent among members of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign — which Trump openly encouraged.
This is all going to happen again. Intelligence and law enforcement authorities have made that clear. The question is whether Trump will at last accept the fact of Russian interference and take aggressive measures to protect U.S. democracy. For starters, he could impose the sanctions on Russia that Congress overwhelmingly passed, and that he signed into law, last summer. Of course, this would require him to overcome his mysterious resistance to acting against Russia and to focus on protecting his own country.
The broad outlines of this interference have been known publicly for a while, but the scope of the deception detailed in Friday’s indictments is breathtaking.