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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.

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 well: “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.