Russia’s election influence efforts show sophistication, officials say

The Russian government’s covert efforts to sway the 2024 presidential election are more advanced than in recent years, and the most active foreign threat this political season, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday.

Russia’s activities “are more sophisticated than in prior election cycles,” said a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in a briefing with reporters, noting the use of “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” Russian government propaganda and spread socially divisive narratives through major social media, as well as on sham websites that pose as legitimate American media organizations.

Moscow is targeting U.S. swing states in particular, the official said, and using artificial intelligence to more quickly and convincingly create fake content to shape the outcome in favor of former president Donald Trump.

That is “consistent with Moscow’s broader foreign policy goals of weakening the United States and undermining Washington’s support for Ukraine,” the ODNI official said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the agency.

China, for its part, is not attempting to influence the presidential race, but it is seeking to do so in state-level and regional races, officials said, referencing similarities to Beijing’s efforts in the 2022 midterm elections.

Officials noted that they have seen no foreign efforts to directly interfere in the 2024 election by, for instance, hacking into voting machines.

However, the ODNI officials acknowledged for the first time that the Iranian government was behind not only the hack of the Trump campaign revealed last month, but also the leak of internal campaign documents. A person who used an AOL email account and the name “Robert” sent the documents to media outlets, including The Washington Post.

This week, the U.S. government announced a sweeping set of actions to counter Russian influence campaigns, including an indictment of two Russian employees of the state-run news site RT for allegedly paying an American media company to spread English-language videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.

Prosecutors also seized 32 Russian-controlled internet domains that were used in a state-led influence effort called “Doppelganger” to undermine international support for Ukraine. In addition, the Treasury and State departments announced sanctions on Russian individuals and entities that are accused of disseminating propaganda.

RT has cultivated networks to disseminate narratives friendly to Moscow, while trying to mask the content as authentic Americans’ free speech, ODNI said in an election security update Friday.

Two things place “Russia at the top of the list” of foreign governments seeking to influence the election, the ODNI official said. “They’re fairly robust and quite practiced at doing this type of activity. Also the scope and the scale of their activities are quite significant.”

“Russia is working up- and down-ballot races,” the official said. They are using artificial intelligence “to more quickly and convincingly create synthetic content” and influence-for-hire firms that leverage marketing, public relations and other expertise to complicate attribution.

“Americans are more likely to believe other Americans’ views compared to content with clear signs of foreign propaganda,” the official said. “So what we see them doing is relying on witting and unwitting Americans to seed, promote and add credibility to narratives that serve these foreign actors’ interests.”

These new tactics and technologies are an advance on what Russia was doing in 2016, when its efforts to interfere in the election stunned the public and caught U.S. intelligence flat-footed, said Brandon Van Grack, a former federal prosecutor who investigated Moscow’s efforts to sway the 2016 campaign.

“The main thing that struck me is they were able to launder their influence through U.S. media personalities in a way that, had they been overt as in identifying themselves as the Russian government or RT, those viewpoints would never have been disseminated,” he said.

None of the influencers alluded to in the indictment unsealed Wednesday were identified. But conservative YouTuber Matt Christiansen said on a live stream that day that he was among the six influencers or “commentators” mentioned in the document.

He insisted, however, that he had never been influenced by the Russians in his coverage and merely promoted values dating back to America’s founding.

“I guess if that aligns with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, then I’ve been had,” Christiansen said.

In 2016, RT was operating openly in the United States. It was forced to register a year later as a foreign agent, but was effectively silenced in the West in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“You did not have influencers like this, who were spreading this information directed and funded by the Russian government in 2016, at least not nearly in the same manner,” said Van Grack, now a partner at Morrison Foerster.

The ODNI also noted, however, that as Moscow’s sophistication has increased, the U.S. intelligence community’s “understanding of these efforts has also increased - in our effort to understand and counter it.”

Gavin Wilde, a former U.S. intelligence analyst focused on Russia, noted that the FBI named Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff Sergei Kiriyenko as directing the Doppelganger effort.

“That’s a level of detail and formal orchestration by higher levels in the Kremlin” than was ever publicly alleged by the U.S. government, including during the 2016 election, when a Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) spread disinformation on American social media, he said. The IRA campaign, detailed in a January 2017 ODNI assessment on Russian interference, was run by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who as founder of the Wagner mercenary group would later run afoul of Russian President Vladimir Putin and die in a mysterious midair plane explosion.

The same 2017 intelligence assessment identified RT as the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet, which under editor in chief Margarita Simonyan, contributed to the influence campaign.

“In 2016, the best we understood at the time was the propaganda efforts by RT or the Russian troll farms were tacitly approved by the Kremlin,” said Wilde, a White House aide in the Trump administration who coordinated policy to counter foreign malign influence. “So Kiriyenko having steered the propaganda aspects of this seems like a level of orchestration we haven’t seen before.”

The Washington Post, citing internal Kremlin documents, revealed in April 2023 that Kiriyenko directed a network of political strategists to conduct propaganda campaigns promoting Russian interests and undermine support for Ukraine across Europe. In April this year, The Post revealed that under Kiriyenko’s direction, the political strategists turned in earnest to undermining support for Ukraine in the United States as a supplemental aid bill was pending in Congress. They also sought to stir fear over U.S. border security and to stoke economic and racial tensions.

Catherine Belton in London and Will Sommer in Washington contributed to this report.