The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence.
Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions.
Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy. Trump himself repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax—and at the same time, blamed Obama for not doing anything about it. As recently as July 2017, he continued to denigrate the Intelligence Community and claimed that countries other than Russia might be responsible for the DNC hack. Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates tweeted in response that Trump’s “inexplicable refusal to confirm Russian election interference insults career intel pros & hinders our ability to prevent in future.”
But there is one area where Trump’s team seems to have been intently interested: rolling back U.S. sanctions against Russia. That’s what Flynn was discussing with the Russian Ambassador. The Reuters news service reported that Senate investigators want to know whether Kushner discussed it in his meetings as well, including whether Russian banks would offer financial support to Trump associates and organizations in return. And as soon as the Trump team took control of the State Department, it started working on a plan to lift sanctions and return to Russia two compounds in Maryland and New York that the Obama administration had confiscated because they were bases for espionage. Career diplomats at State were so concerned that they alerted Congress. As of this writing, the Trump administration is exploring returning the compounds without any preconditions. All of this is significant because it makes it a lot easier to see how a quid pro quo with Russia might have worked.
We’ll surely continue to learn more. But based on what’s already in the public domain, we know that Trump and his team publicly cheered on the Russian operation and took maximum advantage of it. In so doing, they not only encouraged but actually helped along this attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power.
What the Russians Did
That brings us to what we’ve learned since the election about what the Russians did. We know already about the hacking and release of stolen messages via WikiLeaks, but that’s just one part of a much larger effort. It turns out they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and fed damaging information to local bloggers and reporters in various congressional districts across the country, which required sophistication. And that’s just the beginning.
The official Intelligence Community report explained that the Russian propaganda strategy “blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users, or ‘trolls.’ ” Let’s try to break down what it all means.
The simplest part is traditional state-run media; in this case, Russian networks such as RT and Sputnik. They use their global reach to push Kremlin talking points over the airwaves and social media, including malicious headlines like “Clinton and ISIS Funded by Same Money.” Sputnik frequently used the same Twitter hashtag as Trump: #CrookedHillary. It’s hard to know exactly how wide of a reach RT has. A Daily Beast article reported on claims that it had exaggerated its stats. It’s probably more than you’d think (maybe hundreds of thousands) but not enough that it would have a big impact on an election by itself. But when RT propaganda gets picked up and repeated by American media outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart, and Alex Jones’s Infowars, and posted on Facebook, its reach expands dramatically. That happened frequently during the campaign. Trump and his team also helped amplify Russian stories, giving them an even bigger megaphone.
The Russians also generated propaganda in less traditional ways, including thousands of fake news sites and individual internet “trolls” who posted attacks on Facebook and Twitter. As the Intelligence Community reported, “Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton… some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President Elect Trump as early as December 2015.” Some of the stories created by trolls were blatantly false, like the one about the pope endorsing Trump, but others were simply misleading attacks on me or puff pieces about Trump. Much of this content was then fed into the same amplification process, pushed along by RT and then picked up by American outlets such as Fox.
The Russians wanted to be sure that impressionable voters in key swing states actually saw their propaganda. So they set out to game the internet.
Much of what we see online is governed by a series of algorithms that determine what content appears in our Facebook and Twitter feeds, Google search results, and so on. One factor for these algorithms is popularity. If lots of users share the same post or click on the same link—and if key “influencers” with large personal networks do as well—then it’s more likely to pop up on your screen. To manipulate this process, the Russians “flooded the zone” with a vast network of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, some carefully designed to appear like American swing voters. Some of these accounts were run by trolls (real live people), and others were automated, but the goal was the same: to artificially boost the volume and popularity of Russian and right-wing propaganda. The automated accounts are called “bots,” short for robots. The Russians were not the only ones using them, but they took it to a whole other level. Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that nearly 20 percent of all political tweets sent between September 16 and October 21, 2016, were generated by bots. Many of them probably were Russian. These tactics, according to Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, could “overwhelm” search engines so that the voters’ newsfeeds started showing headlines like “Hillary Clinton’s Sick” or “Hillary Clinton’s Stealing Money from the State Department.”
According to Facebook, another key tactic is the creation of fake affinity groups or community pages that could drive conversations online and draw in unwitting users. Imagine, for example, a fake Black Lives Matter group created to push malicious attacks linking Democrats to the KKK and slavery, with the goal of driving down African American turnout. The Russians did things like that. The similarity of their attacks to organic right-wing memes helped. For example, a prominent Trump supporter and evangelical bishop, Aubrey Shines, produced an online video attacking me because Democrats “gave this country slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws.” This charge was hugely amplified by the conservative media company Sinclair Broadcast Group, which distributed it to all of its 173 local television stations across the country, along with other right-wing propaganda. Sinclair is now poised to grow to 223 stations. It would reach an estimated 72 percent of American households.