Nancy Scola
The indictment released Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller makes plain how prosecutors believe Russia pursued its multiyear scheme to undermine the 2016 presidential election — by wielding the social media-driven internet that the United States itself did so much to create.
They had help, digital experts say, from decades of accepted U.S. policy about how to help the internet thrive: The U.S. government has taken a largely hands-off approach, while the anonymity that protects people’s privacy and liberty online also allowed Russian trolls to deceive overly trusting Americans. And the same freedom to innovate that has made Silicon Valley wealthy and powerful meant that there were few eyes on the ball as Russian actors began figuring out how to manipulate the internet’s few dominant platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and the Google-owned YouTube.
“So many of us thought for so long that the internet was an unbridled force for good, but man, over the last year, the shine has really come off,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a D.C.-based tech advocacy group.
“I’m sort of at a loss right now,” Hall added. “I value anonymity, but it’s really hard to see how this doesn’t lead to some sort of driver’s license for the internet, which makes me feel horrible. There’s needs to be some sort accountability, though I really don’t know what that is. We have a lot of work to do.”
Jonathan Albright, an expert on bots and online propaganda, also found the conclusions of Mueller’s investigators stunning and sobering.
“The indictment is unbelievable,” said Albright, who’s also a research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He pointed in particular to a section detailing how the major social media companies did not share evidence of Russian spending on political or social ads until September 2017, some 10 months after the presidential election.
He blames, in part, Silicon Valley’s insularity. “If there was more transparency and accountability into these systems, researchers might have been able to pre-empt some of what happened. But these companies don’t answer to anyone except shareholders,” Albright said.
But there’s plenty more responsibility to go around, argues Albright. Government officials, for example, have failed to pass the sort of campaign finance disclosure or data privacy laws or rules that could make it more difficult to target Americans online.
It was not supposed to happen this way. For years, American tech evangelists and U.S. government leaders alike saw the free-flowing internet as a threat to global strongmen, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who favor tight controls. U.S. policymakers have often espoused the idea that dictators would be so tempted by digital commerce’s economic bounty that they would eventually relent and allow the internet to operate without censorship. It was an article of faith in the Obama administration that, as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2011, “governments who have erected barriers to Internet freedom … will eventually find themselves boxed in.”
But Russian authorities, Mueller’s indictment suggests, had other ideas — even as they adopted many of Silicon Valley’s best practices and turned them against U.S. democracy.
The notorious Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, the document details, has been organized like a well-tuned digital marketing shop. It had a division dedicated to search-engine optimization, the art and science of persuading the algorithms that power Google and other websites to prominently feature certain content. The indictment says the Russian outfit also used data analytics to track which of their posts were proving most successful, sent private social media messages to stir up genuinely American grass-roots activists and registered accounts — with names like "staceyredneck@gmail.com” — on PayPal to pay for ads.
The organization even double-checked the content generated by its posting “specialists” to make sure it had the kind of authenticity to make it believable to Americans.
The tech companies have been reluctant to embrace the idea that their actions, or inactions, might have made life easier for the Russian actors. Just last month, Facebook’s product manager for civic engagement, Samidh Chakrabarti, made news by saying of Russian social media meddling, “This was a new kind of threat that was hard to predict, but we should have.”
Renée DiResta, one of the co-founders of the newly launched Center for Humane Technology — a group of tech industry veterans critical of what social media has done to society — tweeted, “While you read the Mueller #Indictment remember the tech CEO mantra: ‘We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth.’ These platforms were used exactly as they were designed to be used. Here we are a year later, and still no accountability or governance.”
Behind the scenes, though, some in tech grumble that they haven’t gotten the kind of government help that the industry might have needed to combat the foreign interference.
After the Mueller indictment came out Friday, Joel Kaplan, the vice president of global policy at Facebook, said in a statement that the company was “grateful” that government authorities were taking “aggressive action against those who abused our service and exploited the openness of our democratic process.”
Kaplan, too, emphasized that Facebook now believes it needs to do more to combat whatever attacks might come. “We’re committed to staying ahead of this kind of deceptive and malevolent activity going forward,” he said.
Twitter said in a statement Friday night that it will continue to cooperate with Congress’ and Mueller’s investigations into the election meddling.
“Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election, in part by abusing social media platforms, go against everything we at Twitter believe,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “Any activity of this kind is intolerable, and we all must do more to prevent it.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
But in light of the details laid out in the Mueller materials, the American people are not finding themselves off the hook either. If anonymity has merits on the internet, experts say, users still have the job of making smart decisions about whom to listen to or not.
The indictment describes how the Russian outfit used a made-up persona of “Matt Skiber” to correspond with a Texas grass-roots political group about the organization’s offline rallies. It also cites one Internet Research Agency staffer who in an email to a relative described how she “created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed it was written by their people.”
As Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tsk-tsked during his Friday news conference, “this indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the internet.”
Even perhaps Silicon Valley’s harshest critic of late in Washington, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), responded to the Mueller indictment in part by pointing the finger at the American population.
“While platforms like Facebook and Twitter are allowing Americans to communicate and share ideas in ways unimaginable just a decade ago,“ said the Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman, "we’re also learning that we each bear some responsibility for exercising good judgment and a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to the things we read and share on social media.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller had spent nine months on the job with little evidence that he was focusing on his original mandate: to investigate Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election.
On Friday, a stunning new court document from Mueller changed that.
Mueller’s detailed indictment against 13 Russian nationals and a trio of Russian entities for illegal election activities, largely favoring then-candidate Donald Trump, sent a powerful signal that his team of prosecutors and FBI agents never took their eye off their initial directive of uncovering Russia’s fingerprints on the election — even as outsiders had shifted their focus to the second-order question of whether President Trump might have tried to obstruct justice.
The May 17 order from deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointing Mueller as special counsel to lead the FBI’s Russia probe called the move part of the Justice Department’s effort “to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”
And that was the core question Mueller returned to Friday, with an indictment that detailed a Russian “information warfare” operation that sowed dissent and confusion among American voters to the benefit of Trump and the detriment of hisDemocratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“What’s described in this indictment is the heart of the matter,” said William Jeffress, a Washington-based white-collar attorney who represented Richard Nixon after he left the White House.
Trump and his attorneys signaled in the hours after the indictment’s release that they were vindicated by where it stopped. “Very happy,” the president’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, told POLITICO. Trump himself celebrated on Twitter, saying that Mueller’s showed that his campaign “did nothing wrong - no collusion!”
But veterans of criminal investigations said the president’s celebration may be premature.
While the indictment says three Trump campaign officials may have played “unwitting” roles in the specific Russian election interference it describes, the document draws no broader conclusions about any potential Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin — which has been alleged to take many different forms beyond the focus of Friday’s charges.
And they noted that Mueller’s latest move appears to establish the critical basis to charge American co-conspirators in the Russian election effort. Before Friday, it was unclear what crimes any U.S. persons might have been aiding or abetting. Now, a legal framework exists for criminal charges against Americans — including ones who do not show up in Friday’s court document.
The indictment mentions conspirators both known and “unknown” to the grand jury, legal experts noted.
“This language is purposeful,” said Elizabeth de la Vega, a former assistant U.S. attorney from the Northern District of California. “It unmistakably indicates there is much more to the story.”
“Think of a conspiracy indicting parties ‘known and unknown’ as a Matroyshka doll,” she added. “There are many more layers to be successively revealed over time.”
Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney from Northern Alabama, said Mueller’s indictment now sends the signal that he believes it’s a federal crime for a foreign national to try and interfere in a U.S. election.
“That means any American who met with Russians in an effort to receive election assistance, also committed a crime,” she said. “And any efforts to cover that conduct up would be a very serious obstruction of justice.”
Mueller’s indictment also puts an exclamation point on findings from the U.S. intelligence community that Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election, both to disrupt the U.S. political system and out of President Vladimir Putin’s longstanding animus for Clinton.
While Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on those findings — Trump said during one October 2016 presidential debate that the hackers stealing Democratic emails “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds” — the indictment presented evidence specific enough to form the basis of federal criminal charges.
“Frankly, Trump is the only one who says there’s no meddling. This lays it out chapter and verse,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who served as a deputy to the mid-2000s federal investigation into the leak of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
Several Democrats said Friday that Mueller’s latest indictment should put to rest claims that the notion of Russian election interference is some kind of hoax, and freshly underscores the need for Mueller to complete his investigation with full political independence.
Trump himself is under investigation for his attempts to tamp down the original probe, including the May 2017 firing of FBI Director James Comey — a move which prompted Rosensetein to appoint Mueller. More than 20 current and former White House aides have already met with Mueller as part of his wider inquiry – former Trump strategist Steven Bannon had multiple interviews earlier this week with the special counsel — and Mueller is seeking to ask Trump himself about the subject.
Meanwhile, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates are facing multiple charges — including money laundering and failing to register as foreign agents for lobbying work unrelated to the 2016 election. The federal judge overseeing the case has suggested a trial could start in the fall, though it’s unclear if that will happen. CNN reported on Thursday that Gates is talking with Mueller’s office about a plea deal in exchange for his cooperation. POLITICO has not been able to independently confirm that report.
Friday’s shift to the Russians’ social media campaign to influence voter behavior is unlikely to play out in the same way as the Manafort-Gates case given the defendants are all foreign nationals.
“How are you actually going to do anything against these guys if they all stay hidden in Russia?” said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and expert on Russian disinformation.
Mueller’s rollout Friday also came with an added wrinkle: a rare press conference to announce the charges from Rosenstein, the No. 2 official at DOJ who has supervising authority over Mueller and the whole Russia case. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation after charges that he provided inaccurate accounts of his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. while serving as a key surrogate and adviser for the 2016 Trump campaign.
Trump has fumed over Rosenstein’s handing of the Russia investigation. But the optics of Friday’s press conference showed the deputy attorney general squarely in charge of the investigation. They also aligned with Rosenstein’s previous claims that he was aware of and closely monitoring the special counsel investigation, which some Republican critics have portrayed as unmanaged and out of control.
“The window for Trump to fire Mueller or Rosenstein is now closed,” de la Vega said. “It is painted shut.”
But Randall Samborn, a former assistant U.S. attorney and spokesman on the Plame investigation, said he is not convinced that the deputy attorney general’s job is safe.
“It could cut either way,” Samborn said. “It gives them protection from naysayers on Capitol Hill but it may even put him in more jeopardy in the eyes of the president and his allies, who now see him in concert with Mueller. You can see this as both helping and hurting the longevity at the same time.”
As they digested Friday’s findings, Democrats and legal experts said it had piqued their interest in what other Americans might turn up in what are presumed to be more indictments on the way from the special counsel.
“The next step obviously is for the grand jury to decide whether there were any U.S. persons who are part of the conspiracy,” said Jeffress, who represented I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a senior George W. Bush White House aide ultimately charged in the Plame case.
“I suspect their names will be known to us soon,” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.
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