After four years, 34 indictments, and more than 400 pages from the Mueller Report, you may think you know everything that happened during Russia’s attack on the American election in 2016. David Shimer’s new book, Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference, shows that you don’t. Former intelligence officials interviewed for the book reveal that Moscow didn’t dump all the dirt it had stolen from Democrats—the trolling during the campaign was only the first stage of an influence operation supposed to continue well after Election Day.
It’s one of a number of scoops contained in the new history. The Daily Beast spoke with Shimer about his reporting on the 2016 election, the history of American election-meddling, and what the U.S. could expect from Russia in 2020.
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Rigged is a history of covert election interference that “runs through three phases of history, the first being Soviet interference during the interwar period, the second being Russian, Soviet and American interference during the Cold War, and then the last phase is Russian interference around the world,” Shimer told The Daily Beast in an interview.
Among the revelations in the book is the fact that the emails hacked from the DNC and campaign chairman John Podesta may not be the only potentially embarrassing material the Russians had harvested from Democrats. Former intelligence officials think that Russia held some of its dirt back. “They fully expected Hillary Clinton to become president, and they wanted to have bullets they could use during her presidential term,” former CIA director John Brennan told Shimer.
According to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, one of the goals of a follow-on disinformation campaign would be to weaken Clinton after her expected victory. “They were already anticipating [Clinton] winning the election, and were bent then on what they could do to undermine the legitimacy of her presidency,” Clapper said.
That never happened. But Shimer reveals that Russia’s 2016 interference did delegitimize Trump’s victory, at least in the eyes of one senior Democratic official.
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the author there’s “no question” in his mind that Russian hackers covertly altered the vote count. “I think one reason the elections weren’t what they should have been was because the Russians manipulated the votes. It’s that simple,” Reid said.
How meddling became passé: Shimer’s book illustrates that while the U.S. was an enthusiastic practitioner of election meddling during the Cold War, the intelligence community has gotten out of the business since the fall of the Soviet Union.
As the book shows, President Bill Clinton did authorize a covert operation to support the opposition to then-president Slobodan Milosevic during the 2000 elections in Yugoslavia. In addition, former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte told Shimer that the Bush administration “really thought about it hard” when considering whether or not to intervene in Iraq’s 2005 election to support the U.S.-favored candidate, Iyad Allawi. His comments are backed up by former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who told the author the Iraq operation was at least serious enough for the Bush administration to brief Congress about it.
In any case, the Bush administration never went ahead with the Iraq effort and the Yugoslav intervention in 2000 is the exception that highlights what appears to be a post-Cold War norm against Western countries intervening in foreign elections. The U.S. turned its back on election-meddling for a few reasons, according to the author.
“If you’re exposed as doing this, it seems as though you’re violating your values. America pivoted from containing communism during the Cold War to saying ‘we’re going to promote democracy and promote free and fair elections today,’” said Shimer. “And if you’re saying that it's very difficult to then justify interfering covertly in an election in order to favor your preferred party.”
“The second reason that you see a pivot away from this is the advent of the internet, which has done two things from the perspective of American policymakers. It’s made it so that there’s a higher likelihood that you’ll get caught interfering in elections overseas. And if you’re caught doing this, it undermines your soft power,” according to Shimer. It’s also riskier because of the possibility that it could provoke more countries to intervene in American elections. “From the perspective of American policymakers today, it’s a dangerous game to say we’re going to promote this practice because that then invites other countries to do it to us,” he says.
New era of vulnerability: The practice of trying to rig an election hasn’t changed much since the old days of the Cold War, according to Shimer. It still involves trying to both change swing votes and influence voters. But it has made election rigging easier thanks to the Internet.
“During the Cold War, the Soviet Union tried many different times to interfere in U.S. elections, but with very limited effectiveness because they didn't have that reach. They didn't have that penetration that the internet has granted,” Shimer says.
As the book shows, one of those efforts included a campaign to insinuate that Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson was gay in order to discredit him as a messenger for strident anticommunism. KGB agents assembled a dossier of supposed dirt about Jackson and shared it with journalists. In the days before the internet, the gay-baiting campaign failed because reporters decided not to run with it.
At that time, that kind of unified brushoff from the press effectively killed the story because the Soviets had no other way to launch it into the mainstream covertly. Now, would-be election trolls can drop damning documents—real or false—onto the internet where there’s fewer editorial filters. In one recent example, Russian trolls dumped what they claimed were documents about Britain’s trade talks with the U.S. on social media, driving coverage during the election by catching the eye of Labour candidate Jeremy Corbyn.
What to expect from 2020: If the Russians do reprise their role in the 2020 elections, Shimer says we shouldn’t necessarily expect them to use the exact same tactics. “Last time it was social media and hacked emails. Maybe it'll be that again, but something history shows us is that these tactics are always evolving.”
The coronavirus pandemic adds “a new level of instability and doubt” around the election and makes for fertile ground for Russian influence operations, according to Shimer. “People are already wondering, will I be able to vote securely? Will I be able to do it safely? Will I be able to vote without jeopardizing my health? And the Russians thrive on taking advantage of preexisting doubts and divisions.”
