Author Archives: Warren Stewart

National: Putin likely directed 2020 U.S. election meddling, U.S. intelligence finds | Christopher Bing, Joseph Menn and Raphael Satter/Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely directed efforts to try to swing the 2020 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump, according to an American intelligence report released on Tuesday that sources said would likely trigger U.S. sanctions on Moscow. The 15-page report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, added heft to longstanding allegations that some of Trump’s top lieutenants were playing into Moscow’s hands by amplifying claims made against then-candidate Joe Biden by Russian-linked Ukrainian figures in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. It also added new findings that Putin either oversaw or at least approved of the election meddling to benefit Trump. Washington is expected to impose sanctions on Moscow as soon as next week because of the allegations, three sources said on condition of anonymity. The findings about Putin’s role are likely to receive particular attention given the report’s conclusions that Russia-backed figures such as Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach enlisted unnamed U.S. political figures in their campaign to smear Biden and his son Hunter. The report named Derkach, who met Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani in 2019, as someone whose movements were tracked, if not directed, by Putin. “Putin had purview over the activities of Andriy Derkach,” the report said. “Other senior officials also participated in Russia’s election influence efforts - including senior national security and intelligence officials who we assess would not act without receiving at least Putin’s tacit approval.”

Full Article: Putin likely directed 2020 U.S. election meddling, U.S. intelligence finds | Reuters

Full Article: Putin likely directed 2020 U.S. election meddling, U.S. intelligence finds | Reuters

National: Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says | Julian E. Barnes/The New York Times

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday. The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine. “Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said. The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded. A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.

Full Article: Putin Authorized Russian Interference in 2020 Election, Report Says - The New York Times

National: Foreign Meddling Flooded the 2020 Election—but Not by Hackers | Andy Greenberg/WIRED

After the pro-Trump hack-and-leak operations and disinformation campaigns that roiled the 2016 US election, the country braced for a second round of no-holds-barred foreign interference last year. But US intelligence agencies have now confirmed that didn't entirely come to pass. The 2020 election was hit with meddling, trolling, and disinformation operations like those of 2016—but not the outright efforts to hack election infrastructure or political campaigns themselves. On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report that outlines findings from US intelligence agencies including the CIA, NSA, FBI, and DHS on the overall picture of election interference by foreign actors in 2020. Those agencies agree that while more foreign powers than ever before attempted to influence the outcome of the election—using everything from disinformation to voter intimidation emails to social media campaigns—none actually seems to have used hackers to attempt to disrupt the election or access election infrastructure as they did in 2016. "In 2020, the IC tracked a broader array of foreign actors taking steps to influence US elections than in past election cycles," the report reads, naming Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and even Lebanon's Hizbollah Islamic extremist group as actors that sought to influence the election's outcome. Russia in particular sought to support Trump's reelection bid with everything from troll-farm social media postings to active smear operations that provided information directly to "Trump administration-linked persons." Iran, meanwhile, worked against Trump's reelection with social media campaigns and even fake, threatening emails designed to frame the Trump-supporting white nationalist group the Proud Boys—while not directly supporting Biden or any of Trump's other political opponents.

Source: Foreign Meddling Flooded the 2020 Election—but Not by Hackers | WIRED

National: After 2020 loss, GOP targets voting restrictions | Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann/NBC

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try — to change how the contest is conducted. That’s the backdrop for all of the legislation across the country that would restrict voting access in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential loss back in November. Republicans hold legislative majorities and governorships in 24 states — including battlegrounds like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, even Texas — and 22 of them are pursuing voting restrictions. Eleven of these states are attempting to replace restrictions on mail-in voting, according to research from the Brennan Center compiled by NBC’s Caitlin Hartman (Arizona, Georgia, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Idaho, Florida, South Carolina, Iowa, Alaska and South Dakota). Nine are trying to create barriers for casting mail ballots (Arizona, Oklahoma, Iowa, Alaska, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Indiana). Nine are seeking to expand voter-roll purges (Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, New Hampshire, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Florida). Eight are trying to limit voter-registration opportunities (Alaska, Arizona, Iowa, Mississippi, Texas, Montana, New Hampshire, Georgia). And eight are attempting to implement stricter voting ID laws (Arkansas, Arizona, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Wyoming, Georgia, Idaho).

Full Article: After 2020 loss, GOP targets voting restrictions

National: Spy Agencies Reject Trump Claim of China Election Meddling | Chris Strohm and Alyza Sebenius/Bloomberg

The U.S. intelligence community concluded with “high confidence” that China didn’t attempt to change the outcome of the 2020 election, an assessment that contradicts repeated assertions by former President Donald Trump and his allies. “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential Election,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in an unclassified report released on Tuesday. “China sought stability in its relationship with the United States” and “did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.” The agencies also found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered influence operations to hurt President Joe Biden’s candidacy, favoring Trump just as the intelligence community says he did in 2016 against then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.,” the report found. Russia has long denied meddling in U.S. elections.

Full Article: Spy Agencies Reject Trump Claim of China Election Meddling - Bloomberg

National: After Trump’s loss and false fraud claims, GOP eyes voter restrictions across nation | Nolan D. McCaskill/Politico

Former President Donald Trump’s debunked claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election galvanized his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January. Now, his rhetoric is turning into policies that are moving through GOP-dominated state legislatures: a rollback of voting access. In statehouses around the country — most notably, in Georgia — lawmakers are rolling out legislation that would make it a lot harder to vote. They’re considering dozens of restrictive bills to purge voters from rolls, limit early and absentee voting, add voter ID requirements and eliminate automatic and same-day voter registration. In short, bills are being introduced to prevent something that didn’t happen in 2020 — widespread voter fraud — from recurring in 2022, 2024 and beyond. “They’re all predicated on the ‘big lie,’ the idea that Trump won the election, that there was widespread voter fraud,” said Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project. “The ‘big lie’ is the engine or the fuel that powered in a lot of ways the Jan. 6 insurrection. It’s also the fuel that’s powering these anti-voting bills that we are seeing across the country.” If passed, critics warn, the policies would disproportionately affect Democratic constituencies such as young voters, poor voters and voters of color, erecting barriers to the ballot box after a historic turnout last fall. “There’s absolutely no coincidence in terms of the people who are gonna be impacted and the timing of this,” said Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, an arm of the SPLC, which prioritizes impact litigation on issues such as voting rights and criminal justice reform.

Full Article: After Trump’s loss and false fraud claims, GOP eyes voter restrictions across nation - POLITICO

National: The Misinformation Campaign Was Distinctly One-Sided | Renée DiResta/The Atlantic

On the morning of September 21, 2020, three trays of United States mail were discovered in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The local sheriff’s office reported that the mail dump included several absentee ballots. When a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson made a similar assertion two days later, a local Fox affiliate, WLUK, reported the statement on its website. And then a national network of conservative commentators and influencers did something that happened again and again last fall: They picked up a bare-bones news story and made it sound nefarious. Within hours, Jim Hoft, the combative founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, a conservative media outlet, came across the story. A consortium of researchers working together on an effort called the Election Integrity Partnership (which included my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory) had by this point begun to track false and misleading voting-related information, particularly claims about ballot and mail fraud, as it moved across the social-media ecosystem. Our partnership began 100 days before the election and continued for a few weeks following Election Day. In that time, The Gateway Pundit would become a primary driver in dozens of instances in which false information or misleading narratives went viral. “We report the truth,” a banner on the site noted, as its pages regaled readers with stories of malfunctioning voting machines in Michigan, ballot boxes stuffed into cars, and “miraculous” fake ballots marked for Joe Biden. In our data set tracking the spread of misleading claims, The Gateway Pundit’s stories racked up more than 800,000 retweets on Twitter and at least 4 million views on YouTube over a four-month period. The process of producing viral misinformation hits followed a familiar pattern throughout the 2020 campaign: Prominent pro–Donald Trump influencers or hyper-partisan conservative outlets would pick up a real-world event—in many cases an isolated incident that bubbled into the national conversation via social media—and shoehorn it into a far broader narrative. Many of the narratives involved hints of conspiracy. 

Full Article: Right-Wing Propagandists Were Doing Something Unique - The Atlantic

National: Senators introduce bill to fund election official cybersecurity training | Maggie Miller/The Hill

ArticlSenate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Wednesday reintroduced legislation to designate funding to provide cybersecurity training to election officials. The Invest in Our Democracy Act would establish a $1 million grant program to cover up to 75 percent of the costs of tuition for cybersecurity or election administration training for state and local election officials, along with their employees. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) would oversee the grant program, with EAC employees also eligible to receive funding for training. The bill was originally introduced in 2019 by Klobuchar and Collins but did not advance in the Senate. Klobuchar has been a key senator involved in spearheading election security legislation over the past several years, and before becoming chairwoman she served as the ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal elections and other related issues. “Our intelligence officials have made clear that our election systems continue to be a target for foreign adversaries,” Klobuchar said in a statement on Wednesday. “While federal and state officials have agreed that the 2020 election was ‘the most secure in American history,’ we must continue to do everything in our power to protect our democracy from the ongoing threat of foreign interference.”

e: Senators introduce bill to fund election official cybersecurity training | TheHill