Tag: Russian election interference

A Growing Lack of Faith in Elections

Vladimir Putin may be winning as more Americans have come to distrust the election process.

AS LAWMAKERS, STATE elections officials and social media executives work to limit intervention in the 2020 elections by Russia and other foreign operatives, an unsettling truth is emerging.

Vladimir Putin may already be succeeding.

The troubling disclosures of Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign – “sweeping and systematic,” special counsel Robert Mueller concluded in his report on the matter – have policymakers on guard for what intelligence officials say is a continuing campaign by Russia to influence American elections. But even if voting machines in all jurisdictions are secured against hacking and social media sites are scrubbed of fake stories posted by Russian bots, the damage may already have been done, experts warn, as Americans’ faith in the credibility of the nation’s elections falters.

View the complete May 10 article by Susan Milligan on The U.S. News and World Report website here.

Sen. Klobuchar on Russian interference: Trump ‘makes it worse by calling it a hoax’

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) on Sunday sharply criticized President Trump’s response to Russian interference in U.S. elections, saying that the president “makes it worse by calling it a hoax.”

Trump had a lengthy phone call with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on Friday. After being repeatedly asked by reporters whether he raised the issue of election interference or warned Putin not to do it again, Trump eventually acknowledged the issue, saying, “We didn’t discuss that.”

Klobuchar, who is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, said Sunday that there is “ample evidence” that Trump is not concerned about the possibility that Russia may try to interfere in the next election. She accused Trump of dismissing the seriousness of the issue.

View the complete May 5 article by Felicia Sonmez on The Washington Post website here.

Russia May Decide Our Next Election, Thanks To Trump

Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, a foreign adversary conducted a devastating attack on the United States. It was stealthy, strategic and effective. Russian agents, likely acting under orders from President Vladimir Putin, managed to boost the campaign of Donald J. Trump; to further polarize, anger and embitter American voters; and to weaken democratic institutions.

But that’s not the worst news from what will go down in history as a seminal strike on the United States. The worst news is this: Russia is poised to strike again as the 2020 presidential election nears, and the U.S. government is not doing nearly enough to stop it.

That’s because President Donald J. Trump insists on minimizing — or dismissing outright — the threat. And it’s now clear why: With the release of the report of special counsel Robert Mueller, it’s evident that Trump and his top campaign officials were aware, by the spring of 2016, of efforts by some Russian actors to assist his campaign, and that Trump benefitted from that help. If the Russians are to be stopped, then, Congress, state legislatures and top Trump officials brave enough to contradict the president will have to step up their efforts to thwart them.

View the complete May 3 article on the Cynthia Tucker on the National Memo website here.

‘I can land the plane’: How Rosenstein tried to mollify Trump, protect Mueller and save his job

Rod J. Rosenstein, again, was in danger of losing his job. The New York Times had just reported that — in the heated days after James B. Comey was fired as FBI director — the deputy attorney general had suggested wearing a wire to surreptitiously record President Trump. Now Trump, traveling in New York, was on the phone, eager for an explanation.

Rosenstein — who, by one account, had gotten teary-eyed just before the call in a meeting with Trump’s chief of staff — sought to defuse the volatile situation and assure the president he was on his team, according to people familiar with matter. He criticized the Times report, published in late September, and blamed it on former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose recollections formed its basis. Then he talked about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and told the president he would make sure Trump was treated fairly, people familiar with the conversation said.

“I give the investigation credibility,” Rosenstein said, according to an administration official with knowledge of what was said during the call. “I can land the plane.”

View the complete April 26 article by Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett on The Washington Post website here.

Mueller report: Russia hacked state databases and voting machine companies

Russian intelligence officers injected malicious SQL code and then ran commands to extract information

The Russian military intelligence unit known by its initials GRU targeted U.S. state election offices as well as U.S. makers of voting machines, according to Mueller’s report.

Victims of the Russian hacking operation “included U.S. state and local entities, such as state boards of elections (SBOEs), secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals who worked for those entities,” the report said. “The GRU also targeted private technology firms responsible for manufacturing and administering election-related software and hardware, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations.”

The Russian intelligence officers at GRU exploited known vulnerabilities on websites of state and local election offices by injecting malicious SQL code on such websites that then ran commands on underlying databases to extract information.

View the complete April 22 article by Gopal Ratnam on The Roll Call website here.

‘Nothing wrong’ with campaign accepting information from Russians, Giuliani says

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, said Sunday there is “nothing wrong” with a campaign accepting information from Russians, defending the Trump team’s efforts to obtain damaging material about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 race.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, said Sunday there is “nothing wrong” with a campaign accepting information from Russians, defending the Trump team’s efforts to obtain damaging material about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 race.

“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Giuliani said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It depends on where it came from.”

View the complete April 21 article by Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Felicia Sonmez on The Washington Post website here.

Inside the Russian effort to target Sanders supporters — and help elect Trump

After Bernie Sanders lost his presidential primary race against Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News reached out to his supporters to help sway the general election. “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” the account tweeted.

The tweet was not actually from Louisiana, according to an analysis by Clemson University researchers. Instead, it was one of thousands of accounts identified as based in Russia, part of a cloaked effort to persuade supporters of the senator from Vermont to elect Trump. “Bernie Sanders says his message resonates with Republicans,” said another Russian tweet.

While much attention has focused on the question of whether the Trump campaign encouraged or conspired with Russia, the effort to target Sanders supporters has been a lesser-noted part of the story. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, in a case filed last year against 13 Russians accused of interfering in the U.S. presidential campaign, said workers at a St. Petersburg facility called the Internet Research Agency were instructed to write social media posts in opposition to Clinton but “to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”

View the complete April 12 article by Michael Kranish on The Washington Post website here.

New hints of the Mueller report: Did Trump simply get rolled by the Russians?

Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump’s new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.

Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need you, Leon” — assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.

I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush’s administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn’t going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn’t a case of someone who’d spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr’s been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.

View the complete April 5 article by Heather Digby Parton with Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Here are all the Russian interference efforts that didn’t make it into Barr’s letter

Secessionists, fundamentalists, the NRA, and the far-left all played their role, but they didn’t make it into Barr’s summary report.

Special counsel Robert Mueller may not have found the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, but plenty of Americans — wittingly or otherwise — have helped Moscow’s election meddling efforts in recent years. Secessionists, Jill Stein and her campaign, and members of groups organized around gun rights and far-right Christian movements have spent the past few years cultivating ties with those close to the Kremlin and using their platforms to promote Russia-friendly ideas.

None of these groups were mentioned by Attorney General William Barr, who issued a letter on Sunday confirming that Russia conducted coordinated campaigns to interfere in America’s elections.

According to Barr, Mueller’s report found that Russian operatives reached out to Trump’s campaign, but that no member of the campaign actively colluded with the Russian government. However, Barr wrote that Mueller also “determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.” Both of these efforts — social media interference, and stealing and disseminating internal Democratic documents and emails — were widely known before the report’s conclusion.

View the complete March 27 article by Casey Michel on the ThinkProgress website here.

Tech Firm in Steele Dossier May Have Been Used by Russian Spies

WASHINGTON — Aleksej Gubarev is a Russian technology entrepreneur who runs companies in Europe and the United States that provide cut-rate internet service. But he is best known for his appearance in 2016 in a dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the Trump campaign’s complicity.

Mr. Gubarev’s companies, the dossier claimed, used “botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.”

On Thursday, new evidence emerged that indicated that internet service providers owned by Mr. Gubarev appear to have been used to do just that: A report by a former F.B.I. cyberexpert unsealed in a federal court in Miami found evidence that suggests Russian agents used networks operated by Mr. Gubarev to start their hacking operation during the 2016 presidential campaign.

[Read the report here.]

View the complete March 14 article by Matthew Rosenberg on The New York Times website here.