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The Internet Research Agency’s effort to organize rallies on U.S. soil, which was first reported by The Daily Beast, was more than just a sideline for the group. In his final report, special counsel Robert Mueller found “dozens of U.S. rallies organized by the IRA,” indicating that the troll farm spearheading Russian meddling had more unwitting proxies in the U.S. than prosecutors originally let on.
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IRA IRL: The earliest IRA-organized event in the U.S. was a “confederate rally” in November 2015 promoted on an Instagram account called “Stand For Freedom.” “Good evening buds! Well I am planning to organize a confederate rally… in Houston on the 14 of November and I want more people to attend.” The theme of the rally—the racially charged display of symbols of white nationalist heritage—was an early sign of the divisive rhetoric Russian trolls would later deploy on the American electorate. A year later, IRA front group SecuredBorders hosted an Islamophobic rally in Twin Falls, Idaho, demanding an end to immigration by Muslims.
Remote control MAGA: Russian trolls developed an effective strategy for handling the logistics of putting on rallies from the remove of St. Petersburg: They would announce the rally and send direct messages to Americans urging them to attend. People who responded were then recruited to handle the rally on the ground. When the marches were over, trolls would post pictures of the events to their social media accounts and pester both legitimate news outlets and senior Trump campaign officials like Dan Scavino and Corey Lewandowski on social media seeking attention.
They didn’t find much. “Some rallies appear to have drawn few (if any) participants, while others drew hundreds,” the Mueller report notes. “The reach and success of these rallies was closely monitored.”
Trump campaign outreach: In some cases, Russian trolls actually made contact with lower level Trump campaign staff and sought help with their U.S. rallies. ”IRA employees represented themselves as U.S. persons to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign in an effort to seek assistance and coordination on IRA-organized political rallies inside the United States,” the report says. The assistance took the form of low-level favors like delivering Trump-Pence campaign signs. That help, where delivered, was unwitting. “The investigation has not identified evidence that any Trump Campaign official understood the requests were coming from foreign nationals,” Mueller concluded.
Signal boost: The report notes that some of the trolls’ Twitter posts were retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Michael T. Flynn. In September 2017, the president personally responded to a Russian troll tweet that read simply, “We love you, Mr. President!” Mueller found that the IRA “monitored the reaction of the Trump Campaign and, later, Trump Administration officials to their tweets.”
Words: You don’t just have to rely on just the Mueller report to get a look inside the Russian troll factory’s astro-turf infrastructure. In March 2018, The Daily Beast first reported that the IRA had been a victim of a breach of its own and the data offered its own window on how trolls managed to rope unsuspecting Americans into their rallies. The documents detailed IRA employees’ use of stolen accounts and identities to try to identify and deputize protest leaders at anti-racism protests in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and Buffalo, New York.
