Russians gather at the grave of Josef Stalin outside the Kremlin in Moscow on March 5, the anniversary of the dictator’s death. Mueller III turns off the lights in the special counsel’russia single voting day office for the final time, he will leave behind an exhaustive blueprint of how Moscow meddled in the last presidential election, one pieced together from electronic blueprints, sensitive communications intercepts and financial records. It was an arduous task, but the truly hard part will be ensuring the Russians aren’t able to pull that same blueprint off the shelf and use it in future campaigns. A review of court filings and independent studies, as well as interviews with experts, shows that no one should expect that the end of Mueller’s work means an end to Russian political meddling.
Alina Polyakova, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. We’re just at the very, very beginning of this reckoning. President Trump has downplayed or outright denied that Moscow meddled with the election, questioning U. Russian President Vladimir Putin at their summit in Helsinki, Finland, last year. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.
Trump’s assessment is not shared by Atty. William Barr, who sent a letter to Congress on Sunday summarizing Mueller’s findings. Barr backed up the president’s repeated assertions that no one from his team conspired with the Russian government, but he stood by Mueller’s determination, shared by U. Moscow had launched a covert effort to meddle in U.
Citing the special counsel’s investigation, Barr described a two-pronged effort by the Russian government to influence U. The first part, a disinformation campaign allegedly funded by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, an oligarch close to Putin, is a relatively cheap and difficult-to-trace way of interfering in another country’s politics. Such campaigns spread divisive content on social media, and Moscow has proved itself to be a persistent practitioner even after its actions during the last presidential election were revealed. A prime example came a little more than a year ago, when Mueller unveiled his indictment targeting the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg, Russia-based troll farm that led the disinformation efforts. The day Mueller announced the indictment, the trolls were back online to rile both sides, with some supporting Trump and others cheering the prosecutors.
We didn’t vote for Trump because of a couple of hashtags shilled by the Russians. The tweets, part of a database of now-defunct accounts tied to the Internet Research Agency, were a show of brazenness from Russia, which has always denied its role in the meddling. Jakub Kalenský, who is based in Prague as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Until there’s a very robust, very strong step 2, it will not stop Russia. Prigozhin and a dozen other Russians were indicted by Mueller. Last year the Justice Department’s national security division charged another Russian who allegedly acted as the Internet Research Agency’s accountant.
The other prong of Moscow’s operation, as described by Barr in his letter, was a hacking effort allegedly carried out by Russian military intelligence officers. Although Trump later said he was joking, Russian operatives tried for the first time to access Clinton’s system that night, according to one of Mueller’s indictments. Max Bergmann, who directs the Moscow Project at the Center for American Progress, said Trump and the Russians have often echoed each other with their messaging. They just need to amplify the president and many of his supporters on the right. Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate known as the GRU in Moscow in 2006. Washington has become more aggressive to combat the problem.
Cyber Command, a branch of the military, sent messages directly to Russian trolls to warn them that they were being watched, the New York Times recently reported. Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have also been deactivating accounts suspected of being part of foreign influence operations, a game of digital Whac-A-Mole. But national security officials expect the challenge to continue as the U. FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a recent conference in San Francisco. The problem has been the subject of two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee and released late last year. New Knowledge, Columbia University and Canfield Research. Ben Nimmo, a British-based senior fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said Russians have various methods of staying one step ahead of authorities.
They’ve taken greater steps to disguise their digital tracks, he said, such as registering social media accounts with internet-based phone numbers rather than Russian mobile phones. Nimmo said there’s also been an increasing focus on Instagram, where the more visual format minimizes linguistic clues that can reveal the account isn’t run by an American. The sheriff has now ridden into town. The bad guys are trying to figure out new ways to get away with what they’re doing. Disinformation campaigns are likely to gain traction as long as the targets — in this case, U. It’s a more ambiguous challenge than bringing indictments against Russian trolls, but she said it could end up being more critical in the long run.
Critics say the lack of leadership from the White House has hampered the country’s efforts to defend itself, especially since Trump has viewed questions about Moscow’s role as an attempt to erode the legitimacy of his victory. But we should be much further along than we are, and this should be a higher priority for the administration. An additional concern is other countries following Russia and launching similarly extensive operations to meddle in U. There are signs that Iran has already taken steps, and Twitter announced in October that it had deactivated 770 accounts linked to the Middle Eastern country. The accounts had spread pro-Tehran messages, sometimes while posing as independent news sources. Bret Schafer, a social media analyst with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. I don’t necessarily think we’re in a better spot today than we were three or four years ago.
