Key takeaways from the Russia indictment

The Russian scheme to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election was a plot years in the making — an expensive effort that cost millions of dollars and employed as many as hundreds of people, the federal indictment unsealed Friday alleges.

The document lays out a breathtaking influence operation that sent Russian operatives to the U.S., sought American activists’ advice about targeting swing states, staged rallies on U.S. soil and wielded the United States’ homegrown social media platforms to worsen the country’s racial, religious and political divides.

And while the indictment doesn’t explicitly name Vladimir Putin as one of the conspirators, it meshes with U.S. intelligence agencies’ January 2017 conclusion that the Russian leader had “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” an effort that eventually “developed a clear preference” for the election of Donald Trump. The operators even made contact with “unwitting individuals in Trump’s campaign,” the indictment says.

These are several takeaways from the indictment secured by special counsel Robert Mueller:

1) The operation started as far back as 2014.

Prosecutors say the conspirators had been planning their efforts for years, started as early as 2014 to track and study social media pages focused on political and social issues.

In the spring of that year, the indictment says, an infamous Russian “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency launched a strategy seeking to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, intending to “spread distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”
The IRA also started an operation called the “translator project” that used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to influence the U.S. population. Its research later informed the alleged Russian trolls’ behavior during the campaign.

2) The plot had strong links to Putin.

The indictment says the IRA’s disinformation campaign got funding from two Russian organizations, Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering — entities that have “various Russian government contracts” and are controlled by Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin. Prigozhin, a billionaire, is reported to be a close Putin ally and is sometimes known in Russian media as his “chef,” according to The Associated Press.

According to the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a Russia-based nonprofit that investigates corruption among high-ranking Moscow officials, Prigozhin has became one of the largest state contractors in Russia because of Putin’s love for his cooking.

3) The trolls supported Trump and trashed Clinton.

The IRA trolls’ primary directive was to “communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton” and “to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump,” the indictment says.

One instruction from the IRA told the trolls to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them),” according to the indictment. One IRA-controlled Facebook page, called “Secured Borders,” even drew flak during an internal IRA review for having “a low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton.”

Frequently, the IRA trolls produced materials intended to promote pro-Trump and anti-Clinton hashtags on Twitter, including #TrumpTrain, #MAGA and #Hillary4Prison. Starting in the second half of 2016, the alleged trolls also encouraged minority groups either to not vote or to vote for a third-party candidate.

More broadly, the IRA told its trolls to create “political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation and oppositional social movements.” IRA-controlled pages on social media platforms had names like “Blacktivist,” “United Muslims of America,” “Army of Jesus” and “South United,” names that pointed up existing U.S. social on issues like the Black Lives Matter movement or anti-Muslim bias. These pages commanded hundreds of thousands of online followers.

Source: Politico News