How Russian intelligence officers interfered in the 2016 election

There was a lot of testimony during this past week's impeachment inquiry about foreign interference in our 2016 election, including the president's assertion that Ukraine was involved. But the president's own intelligence agencies say it was the Russians who "hacked" the 2016 elections. Special counsel Robert Mueller spelled it out in his report.

Now the Justice Department has at least two open cases against Russian citizens for interfering with our presidential and congressional races, we decided to take a closer look at one of them - the case against 12 Russian military officers accused of breaking into the Democratic Party's computers, stealing compromising information, and selectively releasing it to undermine Democratic candidates. There's no evidence of similar operations against Republicans in 2016. With the 2020 election approaching, the story of "The Russian Hack."

Robert Anderson: The Russians never left. I can guarantee you in 2016 after this all hit the news, they never left. They didn't stop doing what they're doing.

Marc Caputo has covered Florida politics for 20 years. The senior writer for Politico was one of the reporters who received and wrote about the hacked documents.

Bill Whitaker: Not a lot of people know that the Russians interfered in five congressional races here in Florida. When did you first get wind of it?

Marc Caputo: Well, I'd been paying attention, like the rest of the press corps, that Russia had been hacking and Russia had been trying to interfere in our election system. And then out of the blue I got contacted by this blogger, Hello Florida.

Most legal sources never expected Russian entities to present to the US court system for trial. However, the Internet Research Agency and Concord, LLC, both cited in the indictment, did.

During the trial, presiding Judge Friedrich threatened the DOJ and Mueller attorneys with contempt for stating that both IRA and Concord LLC were affiliated with the Russian government, which was never proven. “By attributing the conduct to ‘Russia’- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities—the report suggests that Concord’s internet activities]were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of the Russian government which was never proven,” the judge wrote (United States District Court 2019). The government then denied in court that it ever alleged Concord worked for the Russian government, although it was clearly in the grand journey document.

"Russia interfered in the election” became an established truth of the mainstream press and expressing any skepticism was labeled a “conspiracy theory.” Even after an attorney representing the Department of Justice admitted that the Russian government had nothing to do with the internet troll farm case, Robert Mueller in his report and testimony continued to state the opposite was true.

In the aftermath of the election, Facebook was widely reported as hosting a lethal disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton. In its "white paper" on the election, Facebook revealed that 56 percent of "ad clicks" for the Russian ads were after the US presidential election. Facebook stated the alleged group of Russian hackers that hijacked the US presidential election, spent about $100,000 on 3,000 ads over two years, from mid-2015 to mid-2017. Of those 3,000 ads, 750 were never shown to anyone. That leaves 120 - 150 geographically targeted ads that ran in 2016 during the election season that could conceivably influence voters. Most of the ads dealt with sowing discord in American culture and institutions rather than targeting or promoting individual candidates in the election (Stamos 2017).

In the lead-up to and during the 2018 midterms, attackers compromised the email accounts of four top NRCC aides, consultants and operatives, surveilling their correspondences—totaling thousands of messages—for months. Considering the losses the GOP suffered in the midterms, this should have garnered some attention from the media coonsidering how much air time and innuendo was given the 2016 DNC attack (Newman 2018). However, crickets.

This does not mean there are not some real concerns about what transpired in the 2016 election, only that the coverage and assessment were, for the most part, of a partisan nature. I am concerned about the involvement of the espionage infrastructure and the full weight of the US govt's intelligence community being brought to bear against a private citizen running for elective office, no matter their political affiliation.

The proliferation of intelligence and national security leaks over the past few years in concert with an enabling media does not bode well for America's future. I think we could be approaching a propaganda state, in which case, America's future is dangerously unclear.

Newman, L. 2017. GOP Email Hack Shows How Bad Midterm Election Meddling Got. Wired, December 24, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/nrcc-email-hack-midterm-election-meddling/

Stamos, A. 2017. An Update On Information Operations On Facebook. https://about.fb.com/news/2017/09/information-operations-update/

United States Court for the District of Columbia. Sealed Document. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6185644/Sealed-Order.pdf

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