1) The social media front.
Mueller and his team exhaustively detailed the “information warfare” against the United States in Volume I, Section II of the report, specifically how the IRA infiltrated Facebook and Twitter with the intent to change the minds of voters, its propaganda targeted at Americans to either vote for Trump or against Hillary Clinton. In conjunction with the leaking of stolen emails by the Russian GRU through Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, Guccifer 2.0 and DCleaks, the IRA operated Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members. Mueller notes that Facebook told investigators the reach of the propaganda was anywhere from 29 million to 126 million people (page 26). Shockingly, many of the IRA’s tweets and statuses were retweeted and shared by Trump and his campaign, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, thus adding to the legitimacy of the agitprop. The fake Twitter accounts boasted tens of thousands of followers.
Sadly, there are millions of Americans who share, like and retweet without investigating whether they’re sharing foreign propaganda or fake news. Many of us recall seeing these materials in our feed — we watched it happen in real time — and anyone who’s been on social media for more than two minutes knows how influential it can be.
2) Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Perhaps one of the most outrageous sections of the Mueller Report describes contacts between Trump’s campaign chairman and convicted felon Paul Manafort and his “man in Kiev” Konstantin Kilimnik, a GRU operative and Manafort’s longtime fixer in Ukraine. Turns out, Manafort owed Russian aluminum king and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska millions of dollars, and as part of his repayment, Manafort offered Deripaska through go-between Kilminik access to Trump campaign materials. On page 140 of the Mueller Report, investigators described the following scene from August 2, 2016:
…Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the state of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s plan to win the election. That briefing encompassed the Campaign’s messaging and its internal polling data. According to [deputy campaign chairman Rick] Gates, it also included discussion of “battleground” states, which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.
As we all know, those three states, minus Minnesota which Trump barely lost, were the clinchers for Trump. Neither Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush nor Bob Dole won any of those states in previous elections, yet we’re expected to believe Trump, of all people, accomplished what no other Republican has been able to do since 1988? Additionally, Trump won the entire trifecta by less than one percent of the popular vote — a 10,000-vote margin in Michigan, 22,000 votes in Wisconsin and about 44,000 in Pennsylvania. Around 51,000 previous Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Trump in Wisconsin, around 47,000 Sanders voters went for Trump in Michigan, and a whopping 116,000 more in Pennsylvania. In every case, we’re talking about election-altering margins, especially when we add the tens of thousands of votes for Green Party nominee Jill Stein in those states.
Now, it turns out Manafort and the Russian GRU targeted these states as clinchers. Mueller doesn’t connect the final few dots on this front, but in context of the widespread nature of the attack, it’s fair to say that Russia knew where to focus its efforts, and the bizarre election results speak for themselves.
