William Saletan takes a look at the latest IC report on foreign interference in US elections — and who helped them and benefitted them.
Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That’s been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the 2020 election. The report, drafted by the CIA, the FBI, and several other agencies, was released in unclassified form on Tuesday, but it was presented in classified form on Jan. 7. In other words, it was compiled, written, and edited during Trump’s administration. It destroys his lies about the election, and it exposes him as a Russian asset.
The report debunks conspiracy theories, promoted by Trump and his lawyers, that hackers in other countries robbed him of victory. “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process,” including “ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” says the document.
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As to Russia, the report leaves no doubt: In 2020, as in 2016, “President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations” to help Trump and hurt his Democratic opponent. For example, “Shortly after the 2018 midterm elections, Russian intelligence cyber actors attempted to hack organizations primarily affiliated with the Democratic Party.” Then, in late 2019, Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, “conducted a phishing campaign against subsidiaries of Burisma holdings, likely in an attempt to gather information related to President Biden’s family.” Throughout the 2020 election, agents “connected to the Russian Federal Security Service,” FSB, planted negative stories about Biden. Internet operatives working for the Kremlin, including the troll farm that had boosted Trump in 2016, continued to promote “Trump and his commentary, including repeating his political messaging.”
Attacks on Biden and his son, Hunter, were part of this operation. Through “US officials and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration,” the report says Russia’s intelligence services “repeatedly spread unsubstantiated or misleading claims about President Biden and his family’s alleged wrongdoing related to Ukraine.” In this way, Trump’s circle “laundered” the Russian-planted stories, which were then recirculated—and promoted by Russia’s online proxies—as American news.
One section of the report zeroes in on two Russian agents, Andriy Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik, along with their associates. It says they met with and passed materials to people linked to the Trump administration to advocate for government investigations. Derkach peddled audio recordings that were edited to make Biden look corrupt, and he “worked to initiate legal proceedings in Ukraine and the US related to these allegations.” The report doesn’t name the Americans who collaborated with the Russian agents, but it’s easy to identify them from news reports. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, met with Derkach twice. Donald Trump Jr. promoted Derkach’s tapes. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, gave Kilimnik inside information on the campaign. Trump, in a 2019 phone call, pressed Ukraine’s president to open an investigation of Biden, as Derkach proposed. And congressional Republicans, led by Reps. Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes, parroted a Russian-planted narrative “to falsely blame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.”
Trump also helped Putin discredit American democracy. That was a major goal of Russia’s 2016 and 2020 operations, the report explains: “Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.” Trump peddled the same fears. After the election, as “Russian online influence actors continued to promote narratives questioning the election results,” Trump duplicated that message. Russia’s agents also hyped “allegations of social media censorship,” as Trump did.
The IC assessment doesn’t address what Trump knew about the Russian influence campaign. But according to former officials who spoke last fall to the Washington Post and the New York Times, he was directly warned. In a December 2019 conversation, then–national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump that Giuliani had been “worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.” Trump shrugged and went on promoting the allegations Giuliani was feeding him. That makes Trump more than a Russian asset. It makes him, in technical terms, an agent of a foreign power.
And Trump wasn’t the only one:
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) this week released a declassified intelligence community assessment on foreign threats to our 2020 elections, and the top-line takeaway was important: Russia once again targeted our political system for the express purposes of giving Donald Trump power.
Indeed, as we discussed yesterday, Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin relied on the same cast of characters as their 2016 effort: the U.S. intelligence community specifically focused attention on Russian influence agent Konstantin Kilimnik who was responsible for trying to “denigrate” then-candidate Joe Biden in order to “benefit” Donald Trump’s re-election prospects.
But as important as these revelations are, they’re not the only lessons to be learned from the intelligence community’s findings. This week’s ODNI report also made clear that many leading Trump administration officials deliberately misled the public about foreign threats, especially related to alleged Chinese election interference.
I was also struck by multiple references in the intelligence community’s findings to a pro-Russian official by the name of Andriy Derkach. The Washington Post reported:
The intelligence community, for instance, assessed that Putin “had purview over” the activities of Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who played a prominent role in advancing the misleading narrative alleging corruption between Biden and Ukraine. [Rudy Giuliani] met with Derkach, whom the United States has sanctioned as an “active” Russian agent, in Ukraine and in the United States in 2019 and 2020 as Giuliani sought to release material that he thought would damage Biden. Last year, Derkach disclosed edited audio snippets of conversations Biden had as vice president with Ukrainian officials in an attempt to cast aspersions on him.
It’s obviously not great that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer partnered with a Russian agent, directed by Putin, on an anti-Biden scheme while the Kremlin was working on helping keep the then-Republican president in power.
But Rudy Giuliani wasn’t necessarily Andriy Derkach’s only point of contact. In fact, his name may be familiar to regular readers.
It was last year, for example, when we learned that Derkach claimed he fed information to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who was searching for anti-Biden dirt ahead of last fall’s elections.
Asked last summer whether he’d possibly relied on information from pro-Kremlin Ukrainians, the Wisconsin Republican appeared reluctant to answer, saying only that he and the Senate committee he led “are getting information from a variety of sources.”
A month earlier, at a House Intelligence Committee meeting, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) pressed Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — the panel’s top GOP member — on whether the Republican had received anti-Biden information from Derkach.
According to a transcript from the closed-door discussion, Nunes didn’t want to answer.
It was against this backdrop that Maloney spoke yesterday to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and said, “[T]he fact is that [Russian operatives] were so comfortable using people like Devin Nunes that Andriy Derkach — a known Russian asset — sent information to Devin Nunes at the Intelligence Committee. We literally had the package receipt.”
Someone should ask them about this. It seems there’s a little loyalty problem throughout the Republican party.