The Russian government’s program of support for Donald Trump started much earlier than the general election campaign. Months before Trump’s senior campaign staff sat down with Russian operatives to begin unfolding a plan of attack on Hillary Clinton, Russia was already heavily engaged in a program of social media disinformation to support Trump. The first targets of that attack were Trump’s Republican opponents in the primaries.
Through the end of 2015 and start of 2016, the Russian influence system … began pushing themes and messages seeking to influence the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election. Russia’s overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline
opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adversarial views toward the
Kremlin.
Those measures meant that Trump was benefiting from false stories planted about his opponents — and possibly information surfaced for his benefit — from the moment he rode that down escalator into the election.
The letter that Rob Goldstone sent to Donald Trump Jr when arranging that infamous meeting in Trump Tower includes this paragraph:
This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.
Notably, that doesn’t make this support sound like anything new. The information on Hillary is just the next phase of Russia’s ongoing effort to seat Trump in the Oval Office. And that’s exactly how Donald Trump Jr. treats the email. There’s no surprise at this shocking program, just concern over the logistics of scheduling. But even the primaries weren’t the real start of Russia’s campaign to elect Donald Trump. They started years ago.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee back in March, foreign policy and cyber security expert Clint Watts marks the start of Russia’s campaign for 2016 as being well before there was a Trump campaign. Using a small army of human agents and a much vaster array of automated ‘bots, Russia pervaded social media with
Through the summer and fall of 2014, we studied these pro-Russia accounts and
automated bots. Hackers proliferated the networks and could be spotted amongst recent data breaches and website defacements. Closely circling them were honeypot accounts, attractive looking women or passionate political partisans, which appeared to be befriending certain audience members through social engineering. Above all, we observed hecklers, synchronized trolling accounts that would attack political targets using similar talking points and follower patterns. These accounts, some of which overtly supported the Kremlin, promoted Russian foreign policy positions targeting key English speaking audiences throughout Europe and North America. From this pattern, we realized we were observing a deliberate, well organized, well resourced, well funded, wide ranging effort commanded by only one possible adversary – Russia.
The Russian program went beyond Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. It included false news sites, some of which mimicked existing sites except for the occasional extra or altered story. Russia built this system out, growing their followers on Twitter, making friends on Facebook, securing viewers on their news sites.
And they conducted experiments to test the function of the system. Experiments that were still going on as the 2016 election approached.
On the evening of 30 July 2016, my colleagues and I watched as RT and Sputnik News
simultaneously launched false stories of the U.S. airbase at Incirlik being overrun by
terrorists. Within minutes, pro-Russian social media aggregators and automated bots amplified this false news story and expanded conspiracies asserting American nuclear missiles at the base would be lost to extremists. More than 4,000 tweets in the first 78 minutes after launching of this false story linked back to the Active Measures accounts we’d tracked in the previous two years.
The Russians were deliberately inserting these false stories down multiple routes to test which techniques and accounts were most effective. What key words would make a story spread faster? What networks would spread it most effectively?
These previously identified accounts, almost simultaneously appearing from different geographic locations and communities, amplified this fake news story in unison. The hashtags incrementally pushed by these automated accounts were #Nuclear, #Media, #Trump and #Benghazi. The most common words found in English speaking Twitter user profiles were: God, Military, Trump, Family, Country, Conservative, Christian, America, and Constitution. These accounts and their messages clearly sought to convince Americans a U.S. military base was being overrun in a terrorist attack like the 2012 assault on a U.S. installation in Benghazi, Libya.
There was no actual attack, just a small protest outside the base. The whole story was simply a more elaborate version of the Emergency Broadcast Test, but look at what Russia is testing. Trump, family, and country. They’re creating a system in which Trump equals strength, support for the military, and God.
Why do America’s evangelicals believe that Donald Trump is in their corner, despite his notable lack of any spiritual connection and disdain for every facet of the traditional Christian ethic? Why do military families feel like Trump has their back in the face of his open contempt for veterans and their sacrifices? Why has the message of “fake media” been so easily accepted even though Trump’s lies are obvious an unending?
Because Russia spent years building those messages and planting them deep. Russia didn’t create the alt-right or the Tea Party. It didn’t create Facebook or Twitter. It just subverted all those things for it’s own purposes, turning them into components in a network of disinformation that by 2016 was so finely tuned, it could be used to make millions of Americans dance.
This pattern of Russian falsehoods and social media manipulation of the American electorate continued through Election Day and persists today. Many of the accounts we watched push the false Incirlik story in July now focus their efforts on shaping the upcoming European elections, promoting fears of immigration or false claims of refugee criminality.
The evidence of this unseen, but highly effective, network also provides some clarity for something that’s loomed at the edge of the news at several points over the last year.
It deserves emphasis that several revelations over the past weeks and months should add to confidence in former MI6 operative Christopher Steele’s now famous dossier on Russian connections to the Trump campaign. The focus here is on the primary season, and it is useful to recall that Steele said he was first hired to investigate Trump by a Republican source during the primary.
Russia’s connection to Trump didn’t begin with that meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya. Ryan Goodman’s lengthy and fascinating analysis at Just Security has more.
In sum, there is ample information suggesting Trump campaign connections to the Russian government during the GOP primary for investigators and others to raise the question and find the answers.