The Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election was issued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in March 2019.  The investigation was led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and its result is commonly called the Mueller Report.  Its first page states this summary: 

[T]he Special Counsel’s investigations established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations.   

First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 

Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton campaign and thus released stolen documents. 

My post here does not discuss “computer-intrusion operations” except to remark that the stolen documents perhaps were released not by Russian intelligence, but rather by an American individual, named Seth Rich, in order to hinder Hillary Clinton from beating Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary-election race.

My post here discusses only the first alleged “operation.”  The “Russian entity” is a private business called the Internet Research Agency (IRA).  The Mueller Report (paragraphs 42–43) states the IRA’s motivation as follows: 

By approximately May 2014, Defendants [the IRA] ... began to monitor U.S. social media accounts and other sources of information about the 2016 presidential election. ...

They [the IRA] engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump. ...

[IRA] specialists were instructed to post content that focused on “politics in the USA” and to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).” 

In its own words, therefore, the IRA did support Sanders and Trump against Clinton.  However, those words should be interpreted correctly.  The IRA’s business is to research the internet in order to win profitable contracts.  Perhaps the IRA did strive to prove that it might be able to help Sanders or Trump to beat Clinton.  Aside from its prospect of winning such a contract with Russian intelligence, the IRA did not care much who won that election.

According to the Mueller Report, Russian intelligence did establish a contract with the IRA, which did market and perform various services that eventually were detected by U.S. intelligence.  However, such services are common everywhere.  Surely, the IRA was only one of many U.S. election-consulting businesses that helped Sanders and Trump to defeat Clinton.  That should have been the context of the IRA stating, “We support them.” 

The Mueller Report (pages 562–563) indicts the IRA as follows: 

Using fictitious U.S. personas, IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences.  These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists.  Over time, these social media accounts became a means to reach large U.S. audiences.  IRA employees traveled to the United States in mid-2014 on an intelligence-gathering mission to obtain information and photographs to use in their social media posts. 

IRA employees posted derogatory information about a number of candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  By early to mid-2016, IRA operations included supporting the Trump Campaign and disparaging candidate Hillary Clinton.  The IRA made various expenditures to carry out these activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities.  Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing Russian association, communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political to seek to coordinate political activities, including the staging of political rallies.

For sure, the IRA violated some U.S. laws in this “operation,” but those violations are minor in relation to the outrage that has been generated.  Ultimately, the DOJ dropped key indictments in March 2020. 

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