How Russia Manipulated The 2016 Election In Favor Of Trump
In 2013, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, published a new doctrine detailing the future of Russian warfare. He detailed his thoughts on the power of social media in the “internet-dominated world” and how there were new ways to “weaponize political divisions within another nation.” His article was a new and unconventional detailing of Russia's modern warfare strategy and plans to use an advanced form of non-military tactics. Soon, to defeat an opponent, Russia would turn from using direct or violent engagement and instead utilize propaganda, hackers, misinformation, leaks, and other forms of non-military tactics. This document was named “The Gerasimov Doctrine” and set the background for the chaos and political warfare uncovered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Russian government interfered in the election on behalf of Trump by hacking Democratic Party organizations, deploying fake accounts and ads on major social media sites, and stealing personal emails from Clinton campaign staffers.
Russia's use of this doctrine and other factors that led to Donald Trump's presidential victory is analyzed in the book “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. “Russian Roulette” is a political journalists’ breakdown of the controversy surrounding President Donald Trump and his relationship with the corrupt government of the Russian Federation. It details instances of Russian interference during the 2016 campaign, the U.S. government's missteps in dealing with the Russian malfeasance, and ways in which Trump almost lost the election despite having Russia on his side. Russian hackers breached both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and released its stolen documents to the public in a series of leaks. While Russian hackers had been in the DNC’s networks for weeks, the dump of their stolen files only occurred on July 22, the Friday before the 2016 Democratic National Convention where Hillary Clinton was to be officially nominated. The emails were given to WikiLeaks by the Russian government under the false persona of “Guccifer 2.0”, a self-proclaimed lone Romanian hacker who took credit for the DNC breach and denied any Russian collusion or influence. The email dump revealed the party leadership’s bias towards Clinton and against Sanders, its disdain for Sanders campaign staffers, and other generally pro Clinton rhetoric including strategies to undermine and defeat Bernie Sanders and silence his supporters. The content caused a rift and further alienated Sanders supports who felt that their own party’s collision and plot against them had finally been revealed.
The overall goal of Russian cyber interference in the 2016 election was to “sow confusion and exploit divisions within the adversary” and this was specifically the effect that the DNC email dump had had. During the convention and for months after, the stolen emails angered Hillary disputants (particularly Bernie Sanders supporters), alienated independents, and incited “insurrection at the Democratic convention.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) email dump also had dire consequences for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party overall. The DCCC dump included incredibly important internal memos about DNC candidates, damaging information, assessments, and strategy files, as well as documents with the numbers and addresses of all the Democratic members of the House of Representatives. The Russians hacked into the DCCC by using servers of businesses in American cities, such as Chicago, as pass-throughs to pilfer documents without the firms knowing. They essentially commandeered other organization’s networks to hack into the DCCC and steal documents. While the DNC hack and dump divided Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters; the specific effect the hacking and dumping of the DCCC documents had was disruption within the entirety of the Democratic Party itself. Democratic House members were the immediate targets. Some had their homes vandalized while others received profane emails, phone calls, and text messages. One prime example of this backlash was Representative Emanuel Cleaver from Missouri who received several calls “from people using profanity and the N-word,” as wells as “obscene and racist emails.”
The leak also included information and biased assessments of Democratic candidates vying for primaries, which led to the dump directly influencing elections as candidates began to use the leaked material to defeat their opponents. A second instance in which the Russian government specifically interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump was through the dissemination of fake news and other socially divisive content through doctored social media accounts. Putin created the Internet Research Agency (IRA) to launch a social media campaign by creating fake accounts and VPNs posing as Americans on major social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, in order to defame Clinton to anyone that would listen. The accounts “attacked Clinton on Twitter and Facebook and depicted her as corrupted” while at the same time “rushing to Trump's defense”. The fake accounts overall impact is difficult to assess, however, Facebook “would estimate that the fake Russian accounts produced about eighty thousand posts over two years that were seen by 126 million Americans.” Furthermore, after the election, Twitter alone found “more than thirty-six thousand accounts that had generated automated, election-related material and were possibly associated with Russia.”
It is important to note that even before the 2016 election Russia had used bots and fake social media accounts to decimate pro-Russian rhetoric. Even as early as 2014, there were hundreds of Western-looking “automated Twitter bots that had shown up in other social media campaigns pushing Kremlin propaganda”. During the 2016 election cycle, those Twitter bots and pro-Kremlin accounts became staunch Trump supporters who posted inflammatory posts aimed at organizing American voters. For example “a Russian-backed Facebook page called Being Patriotic organized pro-Trump rallies across Florida... and promoted a ‘Down With Hillary!’ protest outside her Brooklyn headquarters.” These accounts successfully manipulated and mobilized American voters under the guise of social media and posted in favor of Trump and against Clinton. Accounts posing as Hillary dissenters were not the only issue, Russia also used online advertisements. For example “on Facebook and Instagram, hundreds of IRA operatives bought thousands of ads...inflammatory and divisive...focused on hot-button issues, including LGBT rights, race, police brutality, immigration, and gun rights.” An IRA troll, himself, said on national Russian television that the group's goal was to “‘set up the Americans against their own government.’” These Russian bots and generated accounts had the specific effect of spreading pro-Trump propaganda. They attempted to manipulate and divide voters while overall influencing the American political process. Unfortunately, the direct impact of the ads and false information is inestimable. Twitter stated that the 36,000 Russian accounts had about “288 million impressions in the fall election period.” but understanding the finite and measurable impact the false accounts had on voters is infeasible.
A third way that Russia manipulated the 2016 election in favor of Trump was through the targeted hacking and breaching of Clinton staffers. The most prominent member - and arguably the most potentially damning - of the Clinton staff that was breached by Russian hackers was John Podesta, Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman and personal confidant. In March of 2016, Russian state-sponsored hackers sent Podesta an email, posing as the Google Team, requesting that his password be changed due to a perceived intrusion attempt from a server in Ukraine. The email included a bogus link to a site which Podesta used to create a new password. Immediately, the Russian hackers had access to his personal emails and “the most private messages of Clinton World going back years.”
The impact of the Podesta breach was not seen until October 7th when WikiLeaks released two thousands of Podesta's emails to the public. They included “emails that could bruise feelings” as well as highly sensitive and private material meant for Clinton's campaign members only. The most damning of the documents were “excerpts of Clinton's paid speeches to various groups.” Clinton’s past of making speeches - often delivered in private or closed door settings - for large corporations, such as Goldman and Sachs, in exchange for money was already a controversial detail in her campaign because it was used by her opponents to paint her as a money-hungry, Wall Street puppet. She had never released the transcripts of said speeches, despite being advised to do so by her staff, and was unprepared for the backlash that would occur when they were made public. The transcripts and excerpts of the speeches were inflammatory and immediately used against Clinton in the media. For example, in a 2013 speech, Clinton used an analogy to describe her experience of being a politician and claimed to hold “‘both a public and private position.’” This remark was “zeroed in on...as evidence of Clinton's political hypocrisy” and resulted in lowering Clinton’s appeal with general Americans who found her increasingly unreliable and crooked. Thus, Russia succeeded in painting Clinton as a hypocrite and a fraud with a “penchant for secrecy”. However, the timing of the Podesta email dump was just as significant as its effect because defaming Clinton was not Russia's only goal. The Podesta email release saved the Trump campaign after one of its most significant missteps; the shocking Access Hollywood tape that had been released earlier that day.
The Access Hollywood tape and particularly Trump's dismissal of it was incredibly destabilizing for his campaign. During a debate prep session Trump was informed of the tape that was to be included in a Washington Post story but when shown the transcript he almost immediately dismissed it with claims that “‘It doesn't sound like me’.” Even after the Post sent him the video Trump “did not dwell on the contents.” Thus in response to the video, instead of launching a full-fledged apology, Trump sent a short statement vaguely apologizing for the video, calling it “‘locker room banter’”. In spite of Trump's apparent flippancy and dismissal, the tape had very negative initial impacts. Trump began to lose support from many fellow Republicans such as Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Reince Priebus, Paul Ryan, John McCain, and Jason Chaffetz. This misstep and dismissal even resulted in calls for Trump to drop out of the presidential campaign. These arduous responses led to what the media called a “‘hostage video’” in which Trump awkwardly apologized by claiming that he was wrong and stating that Bill Clinton also had had previous inappropriate conduct with women. The Access Hollywood tape had obvious negative repercussions for Trump, especially in the form of withdrawn supports and denouncements, yet it was still not enough to bury his campaign. Rather, by mid-October, the tapes were old news and regarded by Steve Bannon, a member of Trump's inner circle advisors, as a failure to “knockout” Trump.
Over the course of the election, there were multiple instances in which the government- more specifically the Obama administration- responded poorly to Russian interference. For example, instead of issuing an official response denouncing Russian malfeasance, Obama decided to directly warn Putin in person at the 2016 G20 summit in Hangzhou in fear of appearing to favor Hillary. After directly warning Putin, Obama and his cabinet decided that the best way to respond to Russia's previous attacks was with a “no action now, but possible consequences later” strategy. Notably, Obama was too worried about seeming biased that he failed to act adequately in response to a hostile foreign threat. He and his top aides believed that “if the president himself issued a message, Trump and the Republicans would accuse him of exploiting intelligence - or making up intelligence - to help Clinton.” They also concluded that they must encourage all states - especially red, Republican-leaning ones - to accept federal help in checking and bolstering their voting systems. In order to achieve this, Obama and his advisors decided on issuing a “buy-in from congressional Republicans” by having the “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan try to deliver a bipartisan and public message that the...local officials should collaborate with the feds to protect the electoral infrastructure.”
The reason this measure failed was due to the high political tensions in Washington at the time and the failure of the American leaders involved to put political color and party aside. At a meeting with Paul Ryan, President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi Senate Majority Leader McConnell downright rejected Obama's proposal of a “joint public statement” because he didn't trust Obama due to his clear support of Clinton. He believed that accepting Obama’s request would undermine the Republican party and its nominee, Donald Trump, and refused to cooperate with Obama and sign off on the bipartisan message. This blatant disconnect between the leader of the executive branch and the leaders of the legislative branch demonstrated just how divisive the 2016 political air was. Both sectors of government failed to protect the American citizens and did not give the public adequate warning or disclosure about the Russian interference in the election. At the time, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “had seen ‘efforts at cyber intrusions of voter registration data maintained in state election systems’.” Thus, vote tampering and election rigging was a primary concern, yet the elected U.S. government officials failed to come together against their real foe, Russia, and instead became divided amongst themselves. In the end, the letter that McConnell issued was a poor response to the crisis at hand. The letter was brief, flippant, and did not mention Russia in the slightest. “It was not much more than an iteration of the obvious,” and “made no difference.” This insignificant letter and oversight by the Obama administration ultimately exacerbated the impact of Russian interference because it simply did not acknowledge the foreign state and ultimately had no impact, neither positive nor negative, in protecting Americans from Russian mischief.
Gerasimov wrote that “The very rules of war have changed” and nothing is a more clear reflection of Russia's new approach than their actions during the presidential election. The 2016 election cycle overall was astonishingly permeated with one outlandish incident after another which ultimately led to a Trump victory. One single event, occurrence, or leak cannot solely be credited, rather it was a myriad of developments and circumstances that led to Trump defeating Clinton. Anti-establishment rhetoric, fake news, social media reliance, controversy, partisanship, and other factors all amalgamated during 2016 and resulted in Trump's unforeseen triumph.
