A criminal complaint filed Friday charges a Russian national, employed by a firm linked to Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence, with helping direct interference in the 2018 midterm elections.<\/b>
\nThe Russian conspirators waging an ongoing disinformation and propaganda campaign targeting American voters directed their trolls on social media to call the late Arizona Senator John McCain an \u201cold geezer,\u201d and Special Counsel Robert Mueller \u201ca puppet of the establishment.\u201d President Trump, the trolls were told to say, \u201cdeserves a Nobel Peace Prize\u201d for meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Those are just a few of the messages that Russian trolls were tasked with spreading on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram between 2016 and 2018 to sow discord and influence U. S. elections, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday.
The complaint was filed by the Justice Department in the eastern district of Virginia against Elena Khusyaynova, a 44-year-old Russian national who allegedly managed the finances of an election interference campaign run out of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, code-named Project Lakhta. The complaint makes Khusyaynova the first Russia charged with interfering in the 2018 midterm elections.
The messaging strategy mimicked the overheated rhetoric that the St. Petersburg firm, financed by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and closely tied to Russian intelligence, employed to considerable effect during the 2016 presidential election. The partisan \u2014and, at times, hateful\u2014comments so artfully mimicked the daily back and forth on social media that they seemed to be those of real Americans. The rhetoric wasn\u2019t necessarily sophisticated, but it did reveal a basic understanding of U. S. culture wars. At times, the messaging copied President Trump\u2019s bombast, almost verbatim.
The complaint says the Russian conspirators directed their army of trolls to \u201c[s]tate that during past elections, namely, this mainstream media, which supported Hillary Clinton\u2019s candidacy, disseminated fake news,\u201d with a citation to one such article from CNN. (One of Trump\u2019s favorite refrains, chanted by his supporters at rallies, is that \u201cCNN is fake news.\u201d) Another troll was allegedly instructed: \u201cBrand Paul Ryan a complete and absolute nobody incapable of any decisiveness\u201d because of his opposition to Trump\u2019s immigration cuts. (Trump called Ryan a \u201cweak and ineffective leader\u201d in 2016.) Yet another Russian troll was allegedly told to produce an article about voter registration numbers in California that should refer to \u201clarge-scale falsifications\u201d that threaten to turn the Constitution \u201cinto a mockery and celebration of lawlessness…there is an urgent need to introduce voter IDs for all the states.\u201d (Trump has claimed, without evidence, that between three and five million ballots were cast illegally in the 2016 election.) The Russians went after Mueller, too, according to the complaint, urging troll factory employees to portray the man investigating Trump as \u201ca politician with proven connections to the Democratic party\u201d who is incapable of producing \u201chonest and open results.\u201d (Trump has attacked Mueller \u201cand his whole group of angry Democrat thugs,\u201d calling his investigation a rigged \u201cwitch hunt.\u201d)
The echo chamber between Trump\u2019s election rhetoric and that of the Russian trolls was striking.
Russia\u2019s use of phony social media accounts p to spread disinformation and propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election was heavily scrutinized following Facebook\u2019s disclosure last September that it had shut down 470 pages linked to the Internet Research Agency that shared divisive content and then promoted it using targeted political ads. Approximately 10 million people saw the ads, Facebook estimated, which targeted users in Michigan and Wisconsin\u2014two states Trump won by approximately 10,000 votes and 22,000 votes, respectively. Twitter told Congress in November that Russia-linked accounts \u201cgenerated approximately 1.4 million automated, election-related tweets, which collectively received approximately 288 million impressions\u201d last year from September 1 to November 15.
The disinformation campaign\u2014which was bolstered by the Russians\u2019 hack on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign chairman during the 2016 election\u2014was described by Mueller in detail in February, when he indicted 13 Russian nationals, including Khusyaynova\u2019s alleged employer, Putin confidant Yevgeny Prigozin.
The Russians used PayPal accounts and utilized a complex network of shell companies to finance the operation, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said earlier this year, following Mueller\u2019s indictment. The troll factory\u2019s budget for the project, which Khusyaynova allegedly controlled, exceeded 73 million Russian rubles\u2014or roughly $1.2 million\u2014per month. If anyone expected Project Lakhta to shut down after the 2016 election, however, they would have been wrong: the troll factory\u2019s budget actually grew almost monthly between January and June 2018 as the Russian trolls targeted the midterms, according to the complaint. By July, the proposed operating budget totaled more than $10 million.
That month, Mueller issued yet another indictment laying out in extraordinary detail how Russia\u2019s military intelligence agency hacked Democratic organizations and timed the release of the stolen material to have the maximum impact on the election. Three days later, Trump stood on stage with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and again refused to condemn him for Russia\u2019s interference campaign, even going so far as to deny the conclusion of U. S. intelligence agencies that Russia was responsible. \u201cI think we have both been foolish,\u201d Trump said, when asked by a reporter whether he would hold Russia accountable \u201cat all, for anything in particular.\u201d He added: \u201cI think we are all to blame.\u201d Asked later whether he would denounce Russian interference and ask Putin to never do it again, Trump said he didn\u2019t \u201csee any reason why it would be Russia\u201d that interfered.
Trump\u2019s critics, and even some members of his own party, were stunned by the president\u2019s refusal to hold Putin accountable for Russia\u2019s election meddling. \u201cI\u2019ve seen Russian intelligence manipulate many people in my career,\u201d GOP Congressman Will Hurd, a former CIA official, told CNN at the time. \u201cI never thought the U. S. president would be one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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