Russia targeted people close to Trump in bid to influence 2020 election, U.S. intelligence says
Bri Andrassy, of Jupiter, was fishing 30 miles off the Pacific coast of Mexico recently when she caught and released a 200-pound striped marlin from a kayak.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials in Moscow sought to influence the 2020 election by spreading misleading information about Joe Biden through prominent individuals, some of whom were close to former President Donald Trump, the U.S. intelligence community said in a report Tuesday.
The new report does not identify those individuals by name but appears to reference Trump’s onetime personal lawyer Rudy
Giuliani, whose repeated meetings with a suspected Russian agent came under scrutiny by U.S. officials.
Both Russia and Iran sought to influence the election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its report. But a third major adversary, China, did not even try, it says, contradicting the Trump administration’s assertions about Beijing’s activity last year.
The declassified document, the first U.S. government report on the matter since November’s election, said no foreign government attempted to change votes or alter results — supporting U.S. officials’ earlier assessments.
It confirmed what was widely reported last year — that there were no efforts by any foreign government to mount the sort of broad campaign to influence American voters that the Russians attempted in 2016 by hacking and releasing Democratic Party emails, circulating divisive ads on social media and by persistent efforts to hack election-related websites.
While foreign disinformation and interference was a major concern heading into the 2020 campaign, domestic efforts to disrupt the race — including by Trump and his allies — turned out to be of far greater significance.
“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” said Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”
Indeed, Russia undertook activities to influence the outcome and to a far greater degree than any other country. And it was Putin and the Russian state, the document said, that authorized operations aimed at undercutting Biden’s campaign for president.
A key element of the strategy was to use Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence to “launder” unsubstantiated allegations against Biden through U.S. media, lawmakers and prominent individuals, an apparent
reference to Giuliani.
The intelligence community, for instance, assessed that Putin “had purview over” the activities of Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who played a prominent role in advancing the misleading narrative alleging corruption between Biden and Ukraine. Giuliani met with Derkach, whom the United States has sanctioned as an “active” Russian agent, in Ukraine and in the United States in 2019 and 2020 as Giuliani sought to release material that he thought would damage Biden. Last year, Derkach disclosed edited audio snippets of conversations that Biden had as vice president with Ukrainian officials in a clumsy attempt to cast aspersions on him.
Putin has said Russia does not interfere in U.S. domestic affairs and did not seek to help Trump get elected in 2016. Derkach has denied serving as a foreign agent for any country.
Giuliani’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
The report’s details about the Kremlin’s use of individuals close to Trump were known to the intelligence community at the time, but officials may have been reluctant to disclose them in public statements about election security last year for fear
of advancing the narrative promoted by Trump of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine him, and over concerns about harming counterintelligence probes and revealing sources and methods, former officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains politically sensitive.
Iran, by contrast, carried out a covert influence campaign to hurt Trump’s reelection chances, the report said.
While Moscow and Tehran preferred different candidates, they both sought to undermine public confidence in the American electoral process and to stir societal divisions.
Last fall, Iran made a striking foray into U.S. election influence. In a highly targeted operation, Iranian hackers sent Democratic voters threatening, spoofed emails purporting to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, demanding that they change their party affiliation and vote to reelect Trump. The hackers also produced a video intending to show alleged voter fraud.
The effort mostly fell flat, but it demonstrated that nations other than Russia were willing to get into the fray. Such covert cyber operations are “low cost, deniable” and do not depend on physical access to the United States, the report noted.
A surge of migrants on the Southwest border has the Biden administration on the defensive, with the head of Homeland Security acknowledging the depth of the problem Tuesday but insisting it’s under control and saying he won’t revive a Trump-era practice of immediately expelling teens and children.
The number of migrants being stopped at the U.S.Mexico border has been rising steadily since last April, and the administration is still rapidly expelling most single adults and families under a public-health order issued by President Donald Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is allowing teens and children to stay, at least temporarily, and they have been coming in ever larger numbers.
More than 4,000 migrant children were being held by the Border Patrol custody as of Sunday, including at least 3,000 in custody longer than the 72-hour limit set by a court order, according to a U.S. official. The agency took in an additional 561 on Monday, twice the recent average, according to a second official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss figures not yet publicly released.
It has put President Joe Biden in a difficult spot, blasted by Republicans for what they view as encouragement to illegal border crossers and by some Democrats over the prolonged detention of minors. It’s also a challenge to his effort to overhaul the broader Trump policies that sought to curtail both legal and illegal immigration.
“The situation at the Southwest border is difficult,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded Tuesday in his most extensive remarks to date on the subject. “We are working around the clock to manage it and we, will continue to do so. That is our job.”
The number of migrants attempting to cross the border is at the highest level since March 2019, with Mayorkas warning that it is on pace to hit a 20-year peak for the year.
The number of children crossing by themselves, mostly from Central America, appears to be surging in particular in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. The Border Patrol took in 280 there alone on Monday.
The total of 561 unaccompanied minors from Monday offers a snapshot of how quickly conditions have changed along the border. That was up 60% from the daily average in February, one of the officials said. In May 2019, during the last surge, the one-day peak was 370 teens and children.
Children and teens crossing by themselves rose 60% from this January to more than 9,400 in February, according to the most recent statistics released publicly by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The Health and Human Services Department plans to open shelter facilities at Moffett Federal Airfield near San Francisco and in Pecos, Texas, to handle the flow. It is also looking to expand a facility in Donna,
Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, to hold 2,000.
Also, the Dallas Convention Center is scheduled to begin holding children as early as Wednesday with plans to accommodate up to 3,000. Another makeshift holding center in Midland, Texas, can hold 700 children and had 485 on Monday.
A detention center in Homestead could also be reopened.
Some of the increase in adults is due to people who are repeatedly caught after being expelled under the public-health order issued last year to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Other factors include economic upheaval caused by the pandemic and recent hurricanes that worsened living conditions in Central America. Officials say it’s also likely that smugglers have encouraged people to try to cross under the new administration.
Mayorkas said the a surge in the number of children is a challenge for the Border Patrol and other agencies amid the coronavirus pandemic. But he rejected a Trump-era policy of sending them immediately back to Mexico or other countries.
“They are vulnerable children and we have ended the prior administration’s practice of expelling them,” Mayorkas said.
Though there have been previous migrant surges, including under Trump, Republicans in Congress say that Biden’s support for new immigration legislation and his decision to allow people to make legal asylum claims have become a magnet for migrants.
Am I the last person in America with a landline? I don’t know what I pay for it. I don’t know who I pay either, since the charges are deducted automatically. I almost never dial out on it, but it rings 10, maybe 12 times a day — and the calls are never, ever from anyone I know.
Either it’s “This is the Social Security Administration” or “Ignoring this will be an illegal second offense” or “Hi, I’m Suzie. This will be your final courtesy call.” Some are scams, some are telemarketers; on occasion it’s an actual person selling something or soliciting for something, but usually it’s a robocall.
Donald Trump used to call regularly, but I don’t hear from him anymore.
YouMail, a private company that specializes in blocking unwanted calls, has calculated that, in 2020, there were 45,866,949,500 robocalls made to U.S. households. I swear most of them came to me.
So why haven’t I dumped the landline already? Partly because I’m lazy. And I’ve always had one. Plus, my wife thinks maybe a hard-wired phone line will be our last link to safety when the Big One finally jolts us out of bed one night.
Landline use has been plummeting faster than, I don’t know, reservations at Mar-a-Lago. A decade ago, the overwhelming majority of American households had landlines. By the end of 2018, 57.1 percent had a cellphone but no landline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among younger adults, aged 25 to 34, the share of households with only a cellphone was even higher: 76.5 percent. (Yes, I also wondered why the CDC was counting landlines. Surely the agency has more pressing things to attend to.)
So, if everyone else is ripping out their landlines, why shouldn’t I?
One somewhat abstract argument for not doing so is that the demise of the landline is another blow to our communal culture. From the time they were unveiled by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, telephones were part of the shared space of families and communities. There were switchboard operators and party lines. Jealous husbands could listen in on their wives’ conversations, and kids were forced to make small talk with adults who called. The nostalgic case for the communal landline was made by a writer in The Atlantic, who noted that the phrases “I’ll get it” and “It’s for you” are now headed the way of 10-cent calls in glass-enclosed phone booths.
In that sense, I guess, the end of landlines is a victory for the lonely, antisocial world of people who go through life with their headphones on.
But you know what? I don’t really care. That’s a small price to pay. Besides, my cellphone doesn’t cut out if it goes farther than 20 feet from the base.
To be clear, my motivation for cutting the cord is not technological. It is not even that I’m sick of paying for both cell service and a landline. It’s the endless barrage of scams, robocalls and telemarketers. Those calls also come to my mobile phone, but for whatever reason — and I’m sure it won’t last — I get many more on the landline. Besides, why should I get spam calls on two different phone lines?
Unwanted phone calls are a scourge. They’re the top consumer complaint at the Federal Communications Commission. Over at the Federal Trade Commission, the “Do Not
Call” complaint database logged almost 4 million complaints in fiscal year 2020. Frankly, I’m at the point where I get angry every time my landline rings even before I look to see who’s calling.
Of the billions of robocalls made last year to
U.S. households, YouMail estimates that 40 percent are scams and 21 percent are telemarketers.
Telephone scams may seem so obviously fraudulent that it’s hard to imagine people falling for them. But they do. Consumers
reported losing $667 million to scammers in 2019, according to FTC figures, mostly to people who pretended to be calling from the government or a well-known business, or who were posing as a family member with an emergency. Many scammers used gimmicks like “spoofing,” in which they manipulate their caller IDs to make it appear that a call is coming from a familiar, trustworthy local phone exchange.
The FTC says new technology is “making illegal robocall campaigns more deceptive, more disruptive and harder to stop.” Hundreds of billions of internet calls can now be made rapidly, at a tiny cost. Many of the scam calls originate overseas.
There are lots of suggestions for addressing the issue: stricter enforcement of Do Not Call registry violations, more effective caller ID, expanded call blocking, more tracing of fraudulent calls, stronger warnings to consumers to never give out personal information to strangers.
But my short-term solution is this: I’m going to convince my wife to cancel our landline. If Donald Trump or the IRS or Suzie with the cheery voice need to reach me, they can try me on my cell. I won’t pick up.
Bri Andrassy has always dreamed big when it comes to fishing, but she wasn’t prepared for the excitement and satisfaction of the biggest catch of her life.
Andrassy, of Jupiter, was fishing 30 miles off the Pacific coast of Mexico recently when she caught and released a 200-pound striped marlin after a 4½-hour fight. From a kayak.
“It was the wildest ride of my life,” said Andrassy, who went to Mexico specifically to catch a marlin.
The marlin towed her 14-foot Hobie kayak for the first hour of the fight, then it sounded and stayed down.
“There was no budging it,” she said. “The harder I fought, the harder the fish would fight. So I reeled very discreetly to try to get it up.”
Using her kayak to create drag and tire the marlin, she eventually got the fish to the surface, but as soon as it jumped, it would go right back down. The marlin nearly spooled Andrassy’s fishing reel three different times.
Four hours into the fight the marlin was close enough to the kayak for Andrassy to grab the leader for an official catch. Before pulling in the leader to bring the fish closer, Andrassy wisely loosened the drag of her reel and put down the rod. As soon as the marlin felt the pressure on the leader, it took off, and it would have taken the rod and reel with it if not
for Andrassy’s foresight.
She finally got the fish back up after fighting it for 30 more minutes. This time she grabbed the marlin’s bill and pedaled her foot-powered Hobie while she held the fish alongside the kayak to revive it, and the marlin swam away strongly as an exhausted Andrassy looked on.
“Prettiest fish I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said.
That covers a lot of fish for Andrassy, who grew up near Philadelphia and caught her first fish when she was 3 years old.
Andrassy is a doctor of nursing practice who teaches undergraduate nursing at a local university. Since moving to South Florida nine years ago, she has fished locally from all types of vessels.
They include her Hobie Outback kayak, which she fishes from in Jupiter as well as offshore out of Palm Beach and Boynton Beach. She also fishes from her Sea Doo personal watercraft off Jupiter, and she even fishes and dives from her stand-up paddleboard. Many of her adventures, including this latest one, are documented on her YouTube channel “BA Fishing” and her Facebook page of the same name.
Her first big dream was to catch a sailfish from a kayak.
“That goes way back to when I was a kid,” Andrassy said. “My mom actually taught my dad how to fish and on their honeymoon they went to Cancun, Mexico. My mom caught a 10- or 11-foot Pacific sailfish and my dad caught a 7-footer, but you never hear about his, you only hear about hers. They got hers mounted, so my whole life I grew up looking at a sailfish on the wall. I thought it was the prettiest fish.”
Soon after arriving in Jupiter, Andrassy started fishing inshore from a paddleboard. Then she was invited to fish offshore from a kayak.
“I’m like, ‘You’re kidding me. You catch tuna from a kayak?’ ” she said. “It was very common for these kayak fishermen to catch sailfish and that blew my mind. I’ve wanted to catch a sailfish my whole life. My mom caught one on a charter, somebody baited her hook for her. So my thing was, ‘All right, my first sailfish, I want to catch off the kayak and that’s the story I’m going to tell my kids,’ because I always had my mom’s.
“It finally happened a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago off Palm Beach, and it was wild, watching the fish breech and just how beautiful it was.”
After that achievement, Andrassy went to a kayak fishing resort in Panama to catch roosterfish, among other species. While she was fishing, another angler unintentionally hooked a huge black marlin that headed for Andrassy’s kayak and jumped before breaking the line.
“I never forgot that image of this marlin breeching out of the water and being so close to it,” Andrassy said. “The rest of the trip, every single minute I was fishing for a marlin. I just trolled for a marlin and didn’t get a hit, nothing, but I did get a really nice mahi.”
After a second trip to Panama with no marlin despite trolling for eight or nine hours every day in her kayak, Andrassy decided to fish in Magdalena Bay in December, where boats called pangas could take kayakers 30 miles off San Carlos, Mexico.
When she told the panga captains that she wanted to catch a marlin, they said, “Wait, what do you want to do?” But they were up for the challenge.
They knew what they were doing. On her first day of fishing, moments after Andrassy had pushed her kayak away from the panga, a striped marlin ate the live mackerel on the end of her 80-pound monofilament line on a Shimano Talica conventional reel.
“I didn’t believe it. I was shocked,” she said. “The captain thought it was hilarious.”
Four and a half hours later, no one had a bigger smile than Bri Andrassy.