The Democrats might have made big campaign gains, but it remains a tight race and “crowded field” for interference from America’s foreign adversaries. Foreign Editor David Pratt reports

It’s not often these days that you see a smiling, relaxed, Vladimir Putin. But the Russian president looked decidedly laid back when he answered questions last Thursday about the US presidential election at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. 

If Putin is to be believed, he would like to see US Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in the White House after this coming November’s ballot.

“She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that she is doing well,” the Russian leader teased mockingly, before criticising former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump for placing “so many restrictions and sanctions against Russia like no other president has ever introduced before him.”

Few, take Putin’s endorsement of Harris or criticism of Trump seriously, least of all at the US Justice Department, State Department and the Treasury. 

Last week almost precisely at the same moment Putin was stirring the pot of speculation about Moscow’s ‘favoured’ nominee, the three departments of the US government were bringing together one of the largest coordinated efforts against foreign influence on the election based on research by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

According to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department, it accused the state-financed RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and other Russian state-backed media of spearheading a covert campaign of disinformation promoting pro-Kremlin views laundered through their online and television networks.

It also accused RT of spending millions of dollars to “recruit unwitting American influencers” in order to churn out content meant to undermine confidence in the US elections system and US foreign policy goals, including support for Ukraine.

Responding to the findings of the indictment, the State Department and the White House both asserted that Putin himself has been guiding some of the influence operations.

“We believe Mr Putin is weighing in on these actions,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby commented.

It’s a view that evidence suggests is shared by both Democrats and Republicans alike. For despite bitter differences over the coming election, former US officials and politicians from both parties recognise that election campaign time means it’s open season for malign influence and manipulation from America’s foreign adversaries.

(Image: Getty)

Hacking claim

In the Republicans’ case the Trump campaign team in mid- August said it had been hacked, while the FBI has warned that the Democrats and Harris’s teams was the target of a “foreign actor influence operation.”

This is something Harris is all too familiar with. Barely three days after she was sworn into the Senate in early January 2017, the US intelligence community released a damning declassified report saying that Putin had ordered an influence campaign meant to sway the previous year’s presidential election in favour of Trump and undermine confidence in US democracy.

As Amy Mackinnon, national security and intelligence reporter at the US based Foreign Policy (FP) magazine highlighted recently, Harris during her time on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was part of a three year investigation of Moscow’s interference efforts. 

Throughout that period, according to a Republican source cited by FP who requested anonymity to share their insights, Harris and other members were exposed to “borderline raw intelligence.” 

 “I think it was sobering for everyone,” the Republican source told FP last month as eight years on the FBI is warning that foreign entities are once again seeking to disrupt voting.

So just who, according to the US authorities, are the main culprits, how do they go about such interference and what do they hope to achieve both in the US and internationally?

According to Avril Haines who as Director of National Intelligence is the US’s top intelligence official, this year “Russia remains the most active foreign threat” to the presidential election. 

Speaking at a hearing about risks to the 2024 elections, she said that using a “vast multimedia influence apparatus" encompassing state media, intelligence services and online trolls, Russia's goals "include eroding trust in US democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and degrading Western support to Ukraine.”

Despite Putin’s claims last week to favour Harris over Trump, American spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin would like to see the former President come out election winner, with Moscow viewing him as more sceptical of US support for Ukraine.

Trump’s allies however have pushed back on the claim that Russia would prefer him. “Donald Trump was maybe the best president at deterring Russia in a generation,” Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s Republican running mate said at this year’s Munich Security Conference, citing Putin’s comments at the time that Moscow would rather have Biden than Trump.

But some worry more about Russian attempts to exacerbate existing US social divisions, which the US intelligence community found was one of Moscow’s goals in 2016.

“Russia is the best at it, they’re the most motivated,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. 

“Any risk aversion that they’ve had in the past is gone,” Schafer concluded, speaking to the independent US based news website Semafor.

Putin sarcastically suggested he favoured Kamala Harris, above, over Donald Trump

Crackdowns

While disinformation experts have long struggled to measure the effectiveness of Russian influence campaigns, last week’s US Justice Department crackdown gave some idea of the extent of the methods used.

Federal authorities seized 32 internet domains for violating money laundering and criminal trademark laws and charged two Russian nationals employed at the Russian state-media organisation RT. 

Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva are accused of conspiring to illegally and secretly send nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based online media company to inject hidden Russian government messaging across social media to target American audiences and influence the vote.

Justice Department officials confirmed that among this social media content were videos,  that gained 16 million views on YouTube.

“As alleged in our court filings, President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle…directed Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of a programme to influence the 2024 US presidential election,” said US attorney-general Merrick Garland. 

The court filings identified Sergei Kiriyenko, a longtime senior aide to Putin, as overseeing the internet websites, which were designed to appear to readers as leading US news sites such as Fox News and The Washington Post, but were, in fact, filled with Russian messaging. The domain washingtonpost.pm was allegedly registered to imitate washingtonpost.com, for instance.  

One article on the fake Washington Post website read: “It is time for our leaders to recognise that continued support for Ukraine is a mistake. It was a waste of lives and money, and to claim otherwise only means further destruction. For the sake of everyone involved in the conflict, the Biden administration should just make a peace agreement and move on.”

According to some analysts and observers, in acting now the US authorities were looking to a bold move designed to throw the Kremlin off balance. And in doing so included the leak of a message from senior Kremlin official Kiriyenko outlining the goal of influencing the election. 

The US administration’s move will make it harder for Moscow to have an impact this November, but that, say analysts, will not stop the Kremlin from still trying. 

“I believe the threat from Russia this year will be higher than it has ever been,” said Kat Duffy, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The impact that threat will have remains unclear,” Duffy added, speaking to Semafor. 

But other experts speaking on the subject to the news website were not convinced that Russian influence would have much impact on the election.

Rescuers carry a body of a resident killed in Russia’s guided air bomb strike in Kharkiv, Ukraine, last month

Foreign actors

Cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch told Semafor that by and large such interference has not been effective in the past. He also said the 2024 election in particular will be difficult for any foreign actor to influence.

“The attitudes towards both of these candidates is pretty hardened,” Alperovitch told Semafor. “There’s not a lot of people whose minds are going to be changed one way or another.”

But if Russia is regarded as the main threat, it’s not the only one in what US intelligence chief Avril Haines described recently as a “crowded field,” with Iran, China, and other foreign actors also trying to sway American voters or sow division.

For each of these players the outcome of the US election, so neck and neck according to the latest polls, also carries the highest stakes. This is especially so for those at war or close to war, like Russia, and Iran and countries they see as allies like China. 

As the US polls swing between the candidate such outside players favour or fear, those seeking to shift the balance will pull out the stops respectively.  Sometimes these choices do not automatically align, with US intelligence officials suggesting that while Russia would favour a Trump win because of Ukraine, Iran might favour Harris given the possibility of pressure building on Israel or even the chance of some kind of rapprochement over sanctions with Iran’s new supposedly more ‘moderate’ president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

According to a report in August released by US security officials, “Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome.”

To do so it has targeted people directly associated with the presidential campaigns of either the Democrats or the Republicans and used social engineering and other methodologies.

According to the New York Times (NYT), who spoke with one Iranian official and another Iranian who works in the state’s media and information sector, both of whom are familiar with the country’s disinformation campaigns, Iran’s vast network of influence operatives and hackers includes front companies controlled by the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

Both Iranian officials asked that their names not be published because they were not authorised to speak publicly but told the NYT that the government and the Guards also operate a network of individuals who use social media platforms to push Iran’s views, some under assumed names.

One website called Savannah Time describes itself as “your trusted source for conservative news and perspectives in the vibrant city of Savannah.” Another site, NioThinker, wants to be “your go-to destination for insightful, progressive news.” Meanwhile the online outlet Westland Sun appears to cater to Muslims in suburban Detroit. 

But all of these says the NYT, are not what they appear and are instead part of an intensifying Iranian campaign to sway the election. Iran’s latest propaganda and disinformation efforts have grown more brazen, more varied and more ambitious, according to the US government, company officials and Iran experts, with such efforts sometimes carried out by the well-known Iranian cyberattack group, APT42, or Charming Kitten that hacked the Trump campaign. 

In one case Iran set up fake news sites targeting Americans across the political spectrum, one of which referred to Trump as an “opioid-pilled elephant in the MAGA China shop,” according to data provide by Microsoft to US officials.

All these hackers have been credited to the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-IO) which is recognised as the spy arm of Iran’s military. While both Iran and Russia dismiss accusations of interference, evidence suggests that both have little fear of the consequences of confrontation.

China, meanwhile, has perhaps been a little more careful or as Senator Jim Himes one of the top Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee put it: “We’re not doing $700 billion in trade with Russia.” 

Jeopardising such trade with Beijing could be a restraining factor, just as the high risk of getting caught in election interference likely prevents US allies like Ukraine from attempting covert intervention with so much at stake for Kyiv.

That said, as the NYT also reported, covert Chinese accounts are already masquerading online as American supporters of Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking the Democrats ahead of the election.

And so the ‘big three’ Russia, Iran and China remain under scrutiny by the US intelligence community but that’s not to rule out other bit players that could be “influential at the margins” as one analyst put it. Countries like North Korea or oil rich Venezuela, both capable of cyberattacks. 

“I think the Chinese are trying to get better at it, I think the Iranians have dabbled in it, and it’s not something that costs a lot of money, so you can imagine more and more nations are going to be engaged in that,” Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Semafor.

For now, America remains on high alert for interference from its foreign adversaries who currently have more incentives that ever to intervene in an effort to shape their own national interests. All of which only adds another level of danger and intrigue to a presidential contest that could still go down to the wire.