US indicts 13 Russians over poll meddling
WASHINGTON (AP) — In an extraordinary indictment, the United States special counsel on Friday accused 13 Russians of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, charging them with running a huge but hidden social media trolling campaign aimed in part at helping Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The federal indictment, brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, represented the most detailed allegations to date of illegal Russian meddling during the campaign that sent Trump to the White House. It also marked the first criminal charges against Russians believed to have secretly worked to influence the outcome.
The Russian organization, according to the indictment, was funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy St. Petersburg businessman with ties to the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin.
The 13 Russians are not in custody and not likely to ever face trial. The Justice Department has for years supported indicting foreign defendants in absentia as a way of publicly shaming them and effectively barring them from foreign travel.
Trump quickly claimed vindication last Friday, noting in a tweet that the alleged interference efforts began in 2014 — “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!” he tweeted.
The indictment, however, did not resolve the collusion question at the heart of the continuing Mueller probe, which before Friday had produced charges against four Trump associates. US intelligence agencies have previously said the Russian government interfered to benefit Trump, including by orchestrating the hacking of Democratic emails, and Mueller has been assessing whether the campaign coordinated with the Kremlin.
The latest indictment did not focus on the hacking but instead centered on a social media propaganda effort that began in 2014 and continued past the election, with the goal of producing distrust in the American political process. Trump himself has been reluctant to acknowledge the interference and any role that it might have played in propelling him to the White House.
The indictment also did not allege that any American knowingly participated in Russian meddling, or suggest that Trump campaign associates had more than “unwitting” contact with some of the defendants who posed as Americans during election season.
But it did lay out a vast and wide-ranging Russian effort to sway political opinion in the US through a strategy that involved creating Internet postings in the names of Americans whose identities had been stolen; staging political rallies while posing as American political activists and paying people in the US to promote or disparage candidates.
While foreign meddling in US campaigns is not new, the indictment for an effort of this scope and digital sophistication was unprecedented.
“This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the Internet,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Friday. “The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the US and undermine public confidence in democracy. We must not allow them to succeed.”