Reading the Mueller Indictment: A Russian-American Fraud

In his first indictments for Russian interference in the 2016 election, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has revealed the inner workings of a shadow campaign—conceived in Moscow and deployed in the United States—that was far more disciplined than Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. Focussed, creative, and persuasive, the Russian operation was a campaign to envy. Mueller has also given the American public a cautionary tale of contemporary American democracy—a story of deception, influence, and technology.

John Sipher, an expert on Russia’s intelligence services, who retired in 2014 after twenty-eight years in the C.I.A., told me that the details in the indictment lay bare how audacious the Russian effort to get Trump elected President was in its brazen, repeated contact with American citizens. “You see a willingness to take risk that you hadn’t had before, because Putin was so hateful toward Hillary Clinton. They had a unity of effort, because they had one enemy: the United States. We’re focussed on China, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan. I don’t think it was brilliantly thought out, but they put an army out there to do what they can.”

Ordinarily, U.S. prosecutors are wary of releasing highly specific accounts involving foreign-intelligence targets, in order to protect the “sources and methods” that allow the government to pierce electronic communications and hidden dealings. But, Sipher said, this thirty-seven-page indictment suggests that Mueller’s team made a strategic decision to include a level of detail that will help it elicit relevant documents from businesses and banks. The indictments open the way for “discovery that otherwise may not be allowed or would be hard to do without a charging document,” he said.

In its particulars, the indictment, which charged thirteen Russian nationals and three organizations with multiple conspiracies and frauds, fills in the details of an “active measures” campaign that had been described in general terms by analysts and journalists over the past year. It offers a playbook for manipulating American democracy using a mix of classic espionage, private-sector social-media tools, and partisan ideology. The operation, centered on the now infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, extended to scores of undercover staff and associates in multiple countries, including the United States, and deployed a range of political gambits.

Among the details in the document, I was struck, in particular, by three themes—political weapons, in effect—that pose questions for technology companies, the intelligence community, and voters:

The power of anonymity. In a section titled “Use of U.S. Computer Infrastructure,” prosecutors noted that some of the defendants and co-conspirators “purchased space on computer servers located inside the United States in order to set up virtual private networks.” Once they had those, they could create social-media accounts and communicate with American campaign activists “while masking the Russian origin and control of the activity.” What obligation do campaigns have to vet the people and information they encounter? Under current law, campaigns must document the sources of their funding (to insure, among other things, that they receive no foreign donations, which are against the law).

The power of voter suppression. To promote Trump, the Internet Research Agency did not just amplify his supporters’ enthusiasm; it actively sought to deter others from participating in the democratic process. Months before Election Day, Russian trolls “began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 US. presidential election or to vote for a third-party US. presidential candidate.” In one case, a Russian-controlled account on Instagram, with the name “Woke Blacks,” posted, “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”

Source: Newyorker News