“If somebody called from a country, Norway,” Donald Trump famously told ABC News’ George Stephanopolous in 2019 when asked if he thought foreign interference in a U.S. election was kosher, “‘we have information on your opponent’—oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”
Turns out, his invitation was accepted, except not by fjord-dwelling Scandinavians. A newly declassified U.S. intelligence assessment has found that a quintet of U.S. enemies—Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Cuba and Venezuela—all tried to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election, with the first two doing the heavy-lifting.
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The Russians, who led the way in trying to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, got up to their old cyber tricks, albeit with far less impact this time around. The GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence agency, tried to hack “organizations primarily affiliated with the Democratic Party” shortly after the 2018 midterm elections, plus “U.S. political actors” in 2019 and 2020, the latter apparently unsuccessfully.
Yet the Kremlin also employed a more elaborate human intelligence apparatus. Instead of simply dispatching St. Petersburg-based trolls with MAGA-themed Twitter profiles, Russian spies duped major players in the U.S. political and media establishments to “launder” disinformation on their behalf. Even the trolls bankrolled by the U.S.-sanctioned catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin got in on the action: “Unwitting third-country nationals,” we’re told, located in fleeting bases of operation in Ghana, Mexico, and Nigeria were instrumentalized to push “U.S.-focused narratives.”
A Message to You, Rudy: Being laughed out of court and having Just For Men hair color dribble down his jowls on national TV may have been the highlight of Rudy Giuliani’s year. But his role as a useful idiot for the Kremlin should be right up there as well.
“A key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded, “was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives-including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden-to U.S. media organizations, US officials, and prominent U.S. individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.”
The report cites Andriy Derkach, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian legislator with “ties to Russian officials as well as Russia’s intelligence services,” as one of those proxies. Derkach, over whom Russian President Vladimir Putin “had purview,” according to the report, famously fed bullshit about the Biden family’s financial entanglements in Ukraine to Giuliani, then acting as Trump’s consigliere, most of it focused on Hunter Biden’s involvement in the corruption-plagued Ukrainian gas company Burisma. (The GRU also tried to hack subsidiaries of that company in “an attempt to gather information related to President Biden's family and Burisma.”)
As The Washington Post reported in October 2020, America’s Mayor was even warned by then-National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien that he was being used in an elaborate Russian influence operation. That of course didn’t stop Giuliani from relying on the “very helpful” Derkach to launder disinformation about the Bidens, including by hosting the operative on his podcast.
Derkach’s utility evidently expended itself after he was sanctioned by the outgoing Trump administration in mid-January for leading a network of Russian agents who “leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine.” Upon that development, Giuliani said, “I never tried to influence the election and my work with him was over months ago well before the election.”
Proxy warfare. Another Russian proxy the ODNI report says was in on the influence operation meant to “denigrate” Biden and boost Trump is Konstanin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of convicted and pardoned former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and onetime employee of the International Republican Institute (don’t ask). Kilimnik was earlier named in the fifth and final installment of the Senate subcommittee on intelligence’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 interference campaign as a “Russian intelligence officer” who received Trump campaign polling data via Manafort and Manafort’s other associate and fellow convict Rick Gates.
The ODNI describes Kilimnik a touch more modestly as a “Russian influence agent… connected to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).” Whatever his secret identity, he’s in trouble: Kilimnik is now on the FBI’s Wanted List—with a $250,000 reward offered for his capture— for “obstruction of justice and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.”
OANists. While the ODNI is forthcoming about Russian and Ukrainian actors, it doesn’t name names when it comes to the American useful idiots they duped. But it really doesn’t have to, owing to the specificity of its findings. It states, for instance, that Derkach and Kilimnik “made contact with established U.S. media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a U.S. television network in late January 2020.”
The documentary in question, which featured audio tapes of then Vice President Biden talking about Ukrainian corruption reform, aired on One America News Network (OAN), one of the stalwart pro-Trump media proponents of the debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen or compromised by, among others, foreign actors. Yet even here ODNI undermines those far-fetched conspiracy theories it’s already debunked, concluding that Russia’s cyber operations targeting U.S. election infrastructure were not as “persistent” as they were in 2016, altered no votes, and weren’t even election-focused but rather “part of a broader campaign targeting dozens of U.S. and global entities.”
The Persian Version. Perhaps taking a leaf from the older, less expensive Russian playbook of influence operations, the ODNI found that Iranians pretended to be Americans with email accounts and tried to scare people away from re-electing Trump, whose “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran and assassination of Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 pissed off Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, in turn, is said to have “probably” authorized this all-of-government but low-fi campaign. Put simply, the report states, the Iranians impersonated the Proud Boys to scare Democrats into votingRepublican?, drummed up false claims of election fraud, and pushed spoof social media accounts with dark tales to tell about COVID-19 and America’s parlous social and economic landscape.
