Deep-context accounts of the 2016 election have already arrived via journalism (Harding, 2017) and academic investigation (Snyder, 2018) that pull together a wider narrative than I am attempting here. For the eager student of contemporary flak, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on the 2016 election is an original source of interest. The report was released in January 2017, two months after the 2016 election and weeks before Trump’s team assumed office. The report collates the judgments of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA). I do not take it as my “job” to valorize the work of the alphabet-soup agencies as I work in the (more transparent, if disorderly) environment of a university—but am mindful of the agencies’ research acumen, their formidable tools and workforce. In this case, their work clearly previewed the more elaborate findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s full report in 2019.
ICA’s report opens with blunt statements about the stakes around its investigation:
Russian efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. (original emphasis; Intelligence Community Assessment, 2017, p. ii)
These are bracing statements about the ambition of Russian activities and objectives. It bears further mention that Russia is not Canada; the MI6 intelligence service of the United States’ closest ally, the United Kingdom, recently “reclassified Russia as a ‘tier one’ threat, alongside Islamic terrorism” by 2017 (Edwards, 2017, para. 1).
The U.S. intelligence community’s account of Russian activity also squares with the characterization of flak discussed earlier. To wit, ICA appraises the ←12 | 13→Kremlin as undertaking a delegitimization effort in support of Russia’s strategic objectives—and its flak targets were not only personalized vis-à-vis Clinton, but ultimately directed at the bigger target of fundamental faith in the U.S. electoral system that makes the nation governable. ICA’s further maintains that Russia, a hostile foreign power, assessed that Trump’s ascendency was compatible with Russian interests. While Russian agents hacked material from “some Republican-affiliated targets,” ICA concludes that Russia exclusively weaponized stolen material against Democrats (2017, p. 3).2
Had Clinton prevailed in the November 2016 election, Russia was also prepared to pour high-octane fuel on any brushfires of discontent in the United States over the result. Russian intelligence had already prepared the #DemocracyRIP hashtag to look like the work of indignant Americans, for the purpose of mobilizing doubts about Clinton, in particular—and the probity of U.S. electoral results, in general (2017, p. 2). Toward these strategic ends, Russian intelligence endowed its activities with the façade of being organic, U.S. domestic opposition, and not the work of a hostile foreign government.
Alongside cyber operations to spearfish and penetrate the Clinton campaign’s computer networks, ICA reports that the Russian flak offensive featured more “above board” flak tactics. RT (formally called Russia Today) was the Kremlin-sponsored, English-language television network that answered the call (2017, pp. 6–12). RT went to the ramparts for Trump and against Clinton with repetition on flak memes about “her leaked emails […], poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism” (2017, p. 4). RT’s most popular video, viewed more than nine million times, circulated under the flak claim, How 100-Percent of the Clintons’ Charity Went to … Themselves (2017, p. 4).3 RT ventured far beyond straightforward criticism of Clinton as claims were not only made in apparent bad faith but were loaded to delegitimize and even criminalize the target. Moreover, Russia’s campaigns were not rolled up after the election in 2016. ICA assess that Russia’s program of spearfishing U.S. government officials, thinks tanks and nongovernmental organizations continued, in the effort to gain advantages over the its foe, the United States (Intelligence Community Assessment, 2017, p. 5).
Mueller’s GRU(e)some Indictment
A year-and-a-half later in 2018, The United States of America versus Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al. presents further interesting reading for the student of flak around the 2016 election. A product of the Robert S. Mueller III special ←13 | 14→counsel investigation, the indictment provides operational detail about the activities flagged in the ICA’s report in 2017. Mueller (2018) mainly focuses on the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, known in the west by the acronym GRU; a notoriously severe outfit even by the standards of military intelligence. However, in this episode, GRU was more concerned with killing campaigns and reputations via flak than people.
According to Mueller’s indictment, GRU operatives hacked email accounts “of volunteers and employees of the U.S. presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton,” including her campaign chair John Podesta (2018, p. 2). Once email accounts were compromised, Russian military intelligence stole documents, logged keystrokes, and made screen shots of Clinton campaign workers’ computers. All of this was undertaken by a “tier one” threat, eager to weaponize the information it was gathering to flak against its disfavored candidate. Toward this strategic end, “By in or around June 2016,” Russia’s GRU had “gained access to approximately 33 DNC [Democratic Party National Committee] computers” (Mueller, 2018, p. 10).
In line with a flak strategy, the stolen communications were subjected to “stage releases” for political impact at crucial intervals of the 2016 campaign. The objective was “to interfere” with the election—and to do so in ways that flaked Clinton to Trump’s advantage (Mueller, 2018, p. 2). Document dumps of the pilfered materials were made through “fictitious online persons”—Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks—in order to conceal Russia’s hand. Mueller’s indictment notes that GRU agents “created the online persona Guccifer 2.0” that was “falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker” (2018, p. 14). DCLeaks, launched in June 2018, was proclaimed with similar speciousness to have been “started by a group of ‘American hacktivists’ when it was in fact started by the [GRU] Conspirators” (2018, p. 13). In both cases, the GRU fronts were designed to exude the “white hat” prestige of being concerned (h)ac(k)tivists. DCLeaks’ hashtag was subsequently used to organize flash mobs against Clinton as well as to post images from #BlacksAgainstHillary in an attempt to demobilize a core Democratic Party constituency.
GRU also employed these fronts to recruit other players to spread the hacked booty and damage Clinton’s campaign: “the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DNCC [Democratic Party National Congressional Committee] to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news” (2018, p. 16). Through the Guccifer 2.0 persona, GRU shared its ill-begotten wares with ←14 | 15→two reporters and “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” (2018, p. 16). The stolen booty was also shared with an organization named in the indictment as “Organization 1,” understood to be WikiLeaks. In turn, Mueller’s indictment cites communications between GRU/Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks about how to make the pilfered material “have a much a higher