UK says Russia sought to interfere in 2019 election by spreading documents online
Russian actors “sought to interfere” in last winter’s general election by amplifying an illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign, the foreign secretary has said.
Dominic Raab’s statement is the first time ministers have admitted that the Kremlin has tried to distort the workings of British democracy – a practice the foreign secretary said was “completely unacceptable”.
“On the basis of extensive analysis, the government has concluded that it is almost certain that Russian actors sought to interfere in the 2019 general election through the online amplification of illicitly acquired and leaked government documents,” Raab said in a written statement.
British intelligence has been investigating for several months how a 451page dossier of official emails ended up in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn during the election campaign. The then Labour leader said the dossier showed the NHS “was on the table” in trade talks with the US.
Raab said he was issuing an update as to the progress of that investigation – just days before the expected publication of the long-awaited Russia report by the intelligence and security committee, which was blocked from release by Boris Johnson before the general election.
Ministers had until recently insisted there were “no successful examples” of Russian disinformation affecting a British election – although there have been persistent allegations that the Kremlin sought to influence the result of the 2016 EU referendum. The topic is expected to be discussed in the Russia report.
Labour said it condemned any attempt by Russia, or any foreign power, to interfere in the UK’s democratic processes.
A spokesperson added: “Labour stands ready to work cross-party to protect our nation’s security. That includes in our response to the publication of the long-awaited report by the intelligence and security committee on the Russian threat to the UK.”
Alyn Smith, the SNP foreign affairs spokesperson, said he thought the timing of the government’s Russia disclosures was suspicious.
“Despite Boris Johnson repeatedly playing down what may be in the
Russia report both before and after the election, there is no escaping the reality that it appears as though Dominic Raab only published the findings after the ISC was finally established and it voted to publish the Russia report next week,” the MP said.
The foreign secretary was careful not to say that the dossier had been obtained via Russian hacking, although it is believed to have been obtained via a government special adviser’s personal email account.
Instead he emphasised that it had been spread by “Russian actors”. It was posted on Reddit in October last year under the heading “Great Britain is practically standing on her knees” by an anonymous user called Gregoriator.
Shortly afterwards a Twitter account with the same name tried to bring it to the attention of various Labour and Lib Dem politicians, journalists and celebrities, including Stephen Fry and Bette Midler. But this blunt approach was initially unsuccessful.
“Sensitive government documents relating to the UK-US free trade agreement were illicitly acquired before the 2019 general election and disseminated online via the social media platform Reddit,” Raab said.
“When these gained no traction, further attempts were made to promote the illicitly acquired material online in the run-up to the general election.”
A month later, the dossier eventually came to the attention of the pressure group Global Justice Now, which told the BBC it had been emailed and alerted to the presence of the documents online – where it was passed on to Labour and highlighted in the closing phases of the election campaign.
Corbyn said that the documents obtained were genuine. “Today’s government claim is an attempt to divert attention from the threat to the NHS and the Tory party links to Russian oligarchs expected to be revealed in the long-buried parliamentary Russia report,” the former leader added.
Concerns about the dissemination of the documents have been circulating since December, when researchers at Graphika, a social media consultancy, said the method used and the spelling and grammatical mistakes made by Gregoriator pointed at a Russian origin.
They matched amplification techniques known as Secondary Infektion, the name given to a Russian information operation exposed by Facebook earlier this year, operating across six languages and dozens of platforms.
Ben Nimmo, the head of investigations at Graphika, said: “The big thing here is that the UK government has now accused Russian actors of trying to interfere in the general election. All the evidence pointed that way, but this adds so much weight to it.
“It’s also a reminder that election interference wasn’t a one-off in the US in 2016: it’s a much broader threat, and one we all need to watch out for.”
The foreign secretary also said a criminal investigation was ongoing, and that it would be inappropriate to go into further detail, and that the chair of the intelligence and security committee, Julian Lewis, had been briefed on the situation.