When I learned about these fake groups spreading across Facebook and poisoning our country’s political dialogue, I couldn’t help but think about the millions of my supporters who felt so bullied and harassed on the internet that they made sure their online communities, such as Pantsuit Nation, were private. They deserved better, and so did our country.
Put all this together, and you’ve got multifaceted information warfare. Senator Mark Warner summed it up welclass="underline" “The Russians employed thousands of paid internet trolls and botnets to push out disinformation and fake news at a high volume, focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation,” he said. “This fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach and potentially influence millions of Americans.”
It gets worse. According to Time magazine, the Russians targeted propaganda to undecided voters and to “soft” Clinton supporters who might be persuaded to stay home or support a third-party candidate—including by purchasing ads on Facebook. It’s against the law to use foreign money to support a candidate, as well as for campaigns to coordinate with foreign entities, so a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission has called for a full investigation of this charge.
We know that swing voters were inundated. According to Senator Warner, “Women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan.” One study found that in Michigan alone, nearly half of all political news on Twitter in the final days before the election was false or misleading propaganda. Senator Warner has rightly asked: “How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”
Interestingly, the Russians made a particular effort to target voters who had supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries, including by planting fake news on pro-Sanders message boards and Facebook groups and amplifying attacks by so-called Bernie Bros. Russian trolls posted stories about how I was a murderer, money launderer, and secretly had Parkinson’s disease. I don’t know why anyone would believe such things, even if you read it on Facebook—although it’s often hard to tell on there what’s a legitimate news article and what’s not—but maybe if you’re angry enough, you’ll accept anything that reinforces your point of view. As the former head of the NSA, retired General Keith Alexander, explained to Congress, the Russian goal was clear: “What they were trying to do is drive a wedge within the Democratic Party between the Clinton group and the Sanders group and then within our nation between Republicans and Democrats.” Perhaps this is one reason why third-party candidates received more than five million more votes in 2016 than they had in 2012. That was an aim of both the Russians and the Republicans, and it worked.
According to CNN, Time, and McClatchy, the Justice Department and Congress are examining whether the Trump campaign data analytics operation—led by Kushner—coordinated with the Russians to pull all this off. Congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has said he wants to know whether they “coordinated in any way in terms of targeting or in terms of timing or in terms of any other measure.” If they did, that also would be illegal.
Think this is bad? There’s more. We knew during the campaign that Russian hackers had breached election systems in two states. Now we know that this effort was far more extensive than previously thought. In June 2017, officials from the Department of Homeland Security testified before Congress that election systems in as many as twenty-one states were targeted. Bloomberg News reported that the number could be as high as thirty-nine. According to a leaked NSA report, the accounts of more than a hundred local election officials across the country were also penetrated. In addition, hackers gained access to the software used by poll workers on Election Day. The goal of these intrusions seems to have been accessing voter registration information. Hackers attempted to delete or alter records of particular voters. They could also have used the data to better target their propaganda efforts. According to Time, investigators want to find out if any stolen voter information ended up with the Trump campaign.
I know that the slow unfolding of this news has inured many people to how shocking all this is. It feels a little like the frog in the pot that doesn’t realize it’s boiling because it happens so gradually. But step back and think about it: the Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.
And why stop there? According to the Washington Post, the Russians used old-fashioned forgery to influence the election as well. The Post says Moscow surreptitiously got a fake document to the FBI that described a fabricated discussion between the chair of the Democratic National Committee and an aide to financier and liberal donor George Soros about how Attorney General Lynch had promised to go easy on me in the email investigation. It was a bizarre fantasy straight out of the fever swamp. Jim Comey may well have known the document was a forgery, but the Post says he was concerned that if it became public, it would still cause an outcry. Its existence, however fraudulent, provided him with a new justification to disregard long-standing protocol and hold his infamous July press conference disparaging me. I don’t know what Comey was thinking, but the idea that the Russians could have manipulated him into such a damaging misstep is mind-boggling.
Finally, to add one more bit of cloak-and-dagger mystery to this whole story, a lot of Russian officials seem to have had unfortunate accidents since the election. On Election Day itself, an officer in the New York consulate was found dead. The first explanation was that he fell off a roof. Then the Russians said he had a heart attack. On December 26, a former KGB agent thought to have helped compile the salacious Trump dossier was found dead in his car in Moscow. On February 20, the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations died suddenly, also from a heart attack. Russian authorities have also arrested a cybersecurity expert and two intelligence officials who worked on cyber operations and accused them of spying for the United States. All I can say is that working for Putin must be a stressful job.
If all this sounds unbelievable, I know how you feel. It’s like something out of one of the spy novels my husband stays up all night reading. Even knowing what the Russians did in Ukraine, I was still shocked that they would wage large-scale covert warfare against the United States. But the evidence is overwhelming, and the Intelligence Community assessment is definitive.
What’s more, we know now that the Russians have mounted similar operations in other Western democracies. After the U.S. election, Facebook found and removed tens of thousands of fake accounts in France and the United Kingdom. In Germany, members of Parliament have been hacked. Denmark and Norway say the Russians breached key ministries. The Netherlands turned off election computers and decided to count every vote by hand. And most notably, in France, Emmanuel Macron’s campaign was hit by a massive cyberattack just before the presidential election that sparked immediately comparisons with the operation against me. But because the French had watched what happened in America, they were better prepared. Macron’s team responded to Russian phishing attacks with false passwords, and they seeded fake documents in with their other files, all in an attempt to confuse and slow down the hackers. When a trove of stolen Macron emails did appear online, the French media refused to provide the kind of sensationalized coverage we saw here, in part because of a law in France that guards against that happening close to an election. French voters also seem to have learned from our mistakes, and they soundly rejected Le Pen, the right-wing pro-Moscow candidate. I take some comfort knowing that our misfortune helped protect France and other democracies. That’s something, at least.