Russian influence on the 2016 election campaign in the United States

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ODNI Statement on Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections

The 2016 presidential election campaign in the USA was disrupted by hacking communications infrastructure, attacks on the US digital electoral system and false reports. According to a study commissioned by the US Senate , millions of entries on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram were influenced in favor of Donald Trump. The current US President Donald Trump has been under pressure since February 2017 because of possible illegal contacts by his campaign team to Moscow. The results of the investigation indicate that the Russian GRU was behind the attacks and that the country tried to influence the US presidential election in 2016 in favor of the eventual winner Trump.

The United States government , in office until 2017, accused the Russian government of disrupting the elections. In October and December 2016, the United States Intelligence Community announced that Russia had conducted an operation that US agencies codenamed Grizzly Steppe . The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which represents all 17 US intelligence services and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and forwarded documents to WikiLeaks . Russia denied being in any way involved in the complex. As the elected president and repeatedly during his presidency , Donald Trump said that Russia had no influence on the election campaign in the US, which he revised temporarily and members of his administration see it differently.

background

Internet Research Agency

See also: Troll Army

In July 2016, Adrian Chen first wrote in The New Yorker magazine that a Russian group called "Internet Research Agency" may be using fake accounts on social media to support Donald Trump's campaigns. Chen pointed out that the connection between Trump and Russia is not direct. In 2018, the US Senate commissioned a study by Oxford University. Millions of entries in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are evaluated and it is proven that many of them were launched by the Russian troll factory. At the height of the campaign, up to 6,000 entries in word, image and video were received from Saint Petersburg every month.

"Clinton Leak"

NSA Report on Russia Spearphishing

At the height of the US presidential election campaign in October 2016, WikiLeaks published several thousand emails between John Podesta and Hillary Clinton . This was preceded by the publication of e-mails from the DNC in July 2016, which suggested that the DNC opposed primary candidate Bernie Sanders. Julian Assange had hinted at this publication weeks in advance and indicated that he wanted to harm Clinton.

Podesta was the campaign leader for Hillary Clinton. The emails contained the text of confidential speeches Hillary Clinton made to Wall Street bankers . It also suggested which journalists could use to launch the Clinton campaign as positive stories about the candidate as possible. The publication damaged Clinton's reputation and led to the emergence of the conspiracy theory " Pizzagate ".

In July 2017, a group of former intelligence officials and diplomats that went by the name of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) reached out to the public and directly to President Trump with a memorandum. They claimed that the amount of data in the emails was so great that it took too long to be transmitted by a hack on the Internet, and that the data must have been copied to a storage device by someone with direct access to the DNC computers. The group did not agree on the analysis, however, and some members created an alternative memo that found the Internet transmission speed to be sufficient.

Known actions

In some US states , the operating programs of the electoral systems have been spied on. The attacks have been traced back to servers operated by a Russian company. According to information, the CIA cannot, however, assign these activities with certainty to the Russian government. The electoral system in the US is decentralized and states and municipalities operate a range of protective measures.

Investigations

The US foreign intelligence service, the CIA, was investigating the case. Then-President Barack Obama ordered an investigation. According to a CIA report, Russia used cyberattacks to intervene in the election to help Donald Trump win. NBC reported that intelligence officials knew that Russian President Vladimir Putin himself had given instructions on how to deal with the hacked mail. This should have been in connection with Clinton's work as US Secretary of State. Clinton had publicly questioned the legality of the 2011 Russian elections . The Washington Post reported, citing internal CIA documents, that insiders with connections to Russia had provided WikiLeaks with the hacked emails. The US accuses WikiLeaks of cooperating with the Russian secret service.

Lisa Monaco , Obama's counterterrorism advisor, told the Christian Science Monitor that the FBI investigation also strongly gave the impression that Russia was influencing the US election campaign.

In March 2018, The Daily Beast reported that the identity of the DNC hacker "Guccifer 2.0" had been proven to be a Russian intelligence agent and that the investigation had been included by Robert Mueller in his special investigation. The secret service agent typically used an anonymizing VPN service called "Elite VPN" to log into social media and to their email provider. Once he apparently made a mistake and logged in without a VPN connection. The stored IP address could be traced back to a Moscow office of the Russian military intelligence service GRU . The address can be assigned so clearly that even the name of the GRU officer is known. The responsible employee was changed in January 2017, which was also evident from the significantly better English language skills of Guccifer 2.0. In 2016, Sam Biddle from The Intercept and Jeffrey Carr from Medium.com had argued that the assignment of Guccifer 2.0 to the Russian secret services had not been proven. However, as early as 2016, the American intelligence community assumed that Guccifer 2.0 would be operated "with a high degree of probability" by Russian intelligence services.

On July 13, 2018, Deputy Justice Minister Rod Rosenstein announced at a press conference that twelve Russian citizens, all members of the Russian military intelligence service GRU , were officially charged. Charges were several computer intrusions into the networks and computers of the Democratic Congress Campaign Committee (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee abbreviated DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee ( Democratic National Committee abbreviated DNC) and various attacks on the Clinton campaign itself (staff and volunteers).

After Donald Trump took office

At the end of February 2017, US media reported on a meeting between then FBI Director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe with the White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus , at which the latter was informed of the ongoing investigation into the case. The disclosure of information violated numerous rules of the Department of Justice, which regulate the disclosure of investigation results to politicians and the independence of the FBI. The FBI had already started an investigation into the matter before the 2016 presidential election, which FBI Director Comey had not made public because of the possible involvement of Trump's election campaign. Comey disclosed this investigation to the US House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017. After Trump released Comey with immediate effect on May 9, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special investigator. This examined, among other things, the Russian influence on the US election campaign in 2016 and presented its final report on March 22, 2019.

The US Department of Justice , which is largely loyal to US President Trump , filed a lawsuit in May 2017 against an alleged whistleblower who allegedly passed on confidential information from the NSA. The documents were classified as " top secret ". In the previous months, the Trump cabinet had instructed the Justice Department to step up action against the disclosure of confidential information. Filings filed with the court show that Reality Winner , an intelligence officer at NSA service provider Pluribus International Corporation , passed the information on to online news magazine The Intercept . The FBI arrested the woman on June 3, 2017. On June 5, The Intercept published an article based on intelligence from the NSA about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

According to the Intercept article, the NSA documents clearly show that the Russian Military Intelligence Service (GRU) attempted to intervene in the US election even further than was previously known. There was therefore evidence of attacks on voter registration systems, for which Russian hackers attacked at least one supplier of the US election software in the days before the election. For this attack, phishing e-mails were sent , among other things , in order to place malware . There have been attempts to steal login data. According to the NSA report, nothing is known about any successes of these attacks.

In September 2018, Professor of Communication Science Kathleen Hall Jamieson published her analysis of the state of knowledge in the book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know. In their conclusion, Russian electoral influence was in all likelihood responsible for Trump's election victory.

In December 2018, two independently prepared studies on the activities of the International Research Agency (IRA), the Russian 'troll factory' located in Saint Petersburg , were presented; In the opinion of the authors, they prove massive manipulation during the 2016 election campaign. According to the authors, millions of messages in the social networks that can be assigned to the IRA were evaluated for the analyzes. A renowned editor for the New York Times wrote that the campaign was particularly targeted at African Americans ; they should be dissuaded from voting for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton .

Reactions

United States

Barack Obama

President Barack Obama clearly announced retaliation for the attacks in December 2016. If a foreign government tried to manipulate the US election campaign, the country would have to act, he told National Public Radio. "And we will - at a time and place of our choice. Some of it could be done openly and made public, some not." so Obama.

Shortly before the end of the year, Obama ordered 35 Russian diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours. In addition, the US government blocked access to two properties rented by Russian diplomats because the US had been spied on from there. President Trump later returned the property unconditionally.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump initially repeatedly denied that Russia had any influence on the US election campaign. After the DNC's emails were published by WikiLeaks in July 2016, he said, according to the New York Times , "Russia. ... If you're listening, I hope you are able to receive the 30,000 emails find that are still missing. " The emails would certainly arouse great interest in the US press, Trump said at the time.

After looking into the relevant documents, Trump stated in an interview on January 11, 2017, " It was Russia " and claimed for the first time that Russia was responsible for the hacker attacks, but went on to say that in his opinion this had no influence on the outcome of the election and despite everything, he endeavors to build a good relationship with Russia after his inauguration. He also categorically rejected reports that Russia had allegedly incriminating material about him. Corresponding reports were previously published in various media after the BuzzFeed website published a dossier by former British secret service employee Christopher Steele , which, according to the investigating journalists, contained errors and could not verify the allegations. Since mid-May 2017, special investigator Robert Mueller has been investigating a possible collaboration between Trump's campaign team and Russian authorities (see allegations of collusion with Russian authorities ). To this end, he appointed a grand jury and, according to newspaper reports from August 2017, should want to interview high-ranking politicians, including the former chief of staff Reince Priebus .

When Summit in Helsinki (2018) between US - President Donald Trump and the Russian President Vladimir Putin said Trump, he saw no reason why Russia should have interfered in the US presidential election 2016th President Putin's denial in this regard was "extremely strong and powerful". The US Democrats described the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki as "shameful", and the Trump-affiliated television station Fox News Channel also criticized the summit as "shameful, shameful and treasonous". Trump later said he had made a mistake. It should have read: "He sees no reason why Russia should NOT have interfered in the US presidential election in 2016".

On July 17, 2018, Trump admitted Russia's interference in the election in a press statement in the White House, but this would not have had any impact on the outcome. He would have US intelligence information in this regard, which he trusts.

Russia

Russia has denied any reports that it had in any way influenced the US election campaign. After the allegations in July 2016, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would be very careful "to avoid anything that could be interpreted as interfering with the election process in the US."

International

WikiLeaks

In June 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said he saw no evidence that the leaks in the DNC documents had any connection to Russia. In November 2016, Assange reiterated that Russia was not the source of the hacked emails published by WikiLeaks.

literature

  • Kathleen Hall Jamieson: Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York 2018, ISBN 9780190915810 .

Web links

Individual evidence

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  3. Trump calls CIA report on Russian electoral aid "ridiculous". December 11, 2016, accessed June 6, 2017 .
  4. a b tagesschau.de: US Senate report: Russian influence greater than expected? Retrieved December 17, 2018 .
  5. The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks. In: The New Yorker. July 27, 2016, accessed January 6, 2017 .
  6. DNC email database , published by WikiLeaks
  7. DNC emails show hostility to Sanders; one calls campaign chief 'damn liar' , Eliza Collins, USA TODAY, July 23, 2016
  8. Assange, avowed Foe of Clinton, Timed release email for Democratic Convention NYTimes, July 26, 2016
  9. Hillary Clinton: Clinton is said to have been informed about questions in the TV debate . In: The time . November 1, 2016, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed December 17, 2016]).
  10. Man wants to pursue conspiracy theory - and storms pizzeria with gun. May 12, 2016. Retrieved June 11, 2017 .
  11. Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence , Consortium News , July 24, 2017
  12. ^ A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year's DNC Hack , Patrick Lawrence, The Nation , Aug. 9, 2017
  13. A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo , The Nation, September 1, 2017
  14. http://www.n-tv.de/politik/Moskau-soll-US-Wahlen-manipernen-article18813576.html
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  16. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38264992
  17. Spencer Ackerman and Kevin Poulsen: Lone DNC Hacker 'Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer. In: The Daily Beast , March 22, 2018.
  18. The DNC Breach and the Hijacking of Common Sense , Jeffrey Carr, medium.com, June 19, 2016
  19. Here's the Public Evidence Russia Hacked the DNC - It's Not Enough , Sam Biddle, The Intercept , December 14, 2016
  20. DOJ: Official indictment of the Department of Justice against 12 members of the Russian military secret service ( English ) In: www.justice.gov . July 13, 2018. Retrieved July 14, 2018.
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