Donald Trump was in full deflection mode. The Democrats had blamed Russia for the hacking and release of damaging material on his presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. But on July 27, 2016, midway through a news conference in Florida, Trump decided single-russian upgrade open no level academic entertain the thought for a moment.
Actually, Russia was doing more than listening: It had been trying to help Republican Trump for months. That very day, hackers working with Russia’s military intelligence tried to break into email accounts associated with Clinton’s personal office. It was just one small part of a sophisticated election interference operation carried out by the Kremlin — and meticulously chronicled by special counsel Robert Mueller. We know this, though Mueller didn’t make a single public comment since his appointment in May 2017. We know this, though the full, final report on the investigation, turned over to the Justice Department on Friday, may never be made public.
We know this because Mueller has spoken loudly, if indirectly, in court — indictment by indictment, guilty plea by guilty plea. In doing so, he tracked an elaborate Russian operation that injected chaos into a U. He followed a GOP campaign that embraced the Kremlin’s help and championed stolen material to hurt a political foe. And ultimately, he revealed layers of lies, deception, self-enrichment and hubris that followed. Weaving together thousands of court papers, the special counsel has made his public report. It started in 2014, in a drab, concrete building in St.
The battleground would be the internet, and the target was the 2016 U. Ultimately, it would carry a budget in the millions, bankrolled, according to an indictment, by Yevgeny Prighozin, a man so close to the Russian president that he is known as Putin’s chef. Starting in mid-2014, employees began studying American political groups to see which messages fell flat and which spread like wildfire across the internet. The organization surreptitiously dispatched employees to the U. Nevada, California and Colorado — to collect on-the-ground intelligence about an America that had become deeply divided on gun control, race and politics. As they gathered the research, the trolls began planning an elaborate deception.
