THE 2016 U.S. ELECTION, RUSSIA, AND THREE-DIMENSIONAL CHESS

The United States 45th Presidential election took place in 2016 and was like none before it. Donald Trump, with zero political experience, overcame insurmountable odds and beat Hillary Clinton through a campaign that shocked most United States citizens, supporters, and detractors alike, as well as many around the world. How did a reality show character and real estate developer come to head the highest office on the land? Did his election grow our nation's trust in the processes of our democracy, or did it erode it? Lastly, if the US system functions because of trust in its democratic institutions, who benefits if said trust is corroded? To answer these questions, it is best to start a few years earlier.

Vladimir V. Putin was President of the Russian Federation from 1999 to 2008, serving two consecutive terms. The Russian constitution, at the time, had not limited the maximum number of terms a president can serve but provided that a former president may seek re-election after waiting out one complete term. (Federation, 2002) Putin did just that, installing Dmitry Medvedev for a single four-year term before putting himself back on the ticket for re-election, followed by a landslide victory in 2012. (BBC, 2008) The election was later shown to be entirely rigged. (Kathy Lally, 2012) So blatantly in fact, that the citizens of Russia mobilized into protests across the country in numbers never seen in the history of the country. Hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens shouted with one voice, "we do not want Putin! We want a free and fair election!" (Black, 2012)  The response from Putin was a declaration that it couldn't be that his citizens didn't want him. That every one of the protesters must be foreign agents or they had been manipulated to behave in this manner by the US and its Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.  

It is important to note, for context, that Hillary Clinton made abundantly clear her contentious view of Vladimir Putin, referring to him as an archenemy, and taking an acutely hard line when it came to Russian relations, more than any other president in many decades. (Sanger D. E., 2016) In 2011, Hillary Clinton had spoken publicly that she had big doubts that the coming Russian elections could be conducted fairly. Putin cited her preemptive accusation repeatedly and blamed Hillary Clinton for having nearly singlehandedly directed the protests. He stated in a press conference "she (Hillary Clinton) set the tone for some of the actors inside the country (Russia). She sent the signal. They heard the signal, and with U.S. State Department support set to work." (Elder, 2011) Putin was set to unleash a crusade against Hillary Clinton.  

In the meantime, in 2013, in St. Petersburg, an agency was set up quietly by one of Putin's closest advisors, called the Internet Research Agency, (IRA). It had a strategic goal: engineering politics via social media through online imposter personas.

There were two main departments inside the agency. The analytics department did the research, strategy and devised the agenda. They then created technical assignments that were passed onto the second department, who were the trolls. They were the ones doing the posting by using specific words and key phrases created by the analytics department above them. The agency established three types of personas through which it pushed out constructed information: fake people accounts who later became influencers, fake interest groups or activist organizations, and finally fake local media like newspapers and magazines. All three personas worked together in concert to push an assigned agenda.  (Mueller, 2018)

The first target of the IRA was the Russian people themselves. To quell the Russian's mistrust in their government, which Putin's election agitated, the IRA's first assignment was to fix Putin's image to his countrymen. Using such key phrases as: "Putin is the best"; "Putin is the best president"; "Putin is the right guy to run things"; "Putin is good", the IRA whitewashed the internet praising Putin. (Soshnekov, 2013) Paired with state-controlled TV pushing the same messages, they turned a good portion of Russian people's perception favorably towards Putin. On the face of it, a state-sponsored PR campaign is not illegal. Very few found these events notable, except in hindsight.

That same year, Russia was getting embroiled in a tug of war with the EU over Ukraine, its immediate neighbor to the west, which separated Russia from NATO allies. Putin was not about to allow Ukraine to sign a trade agreement with the EU, which they had been negotiating openly at the time. This would open the door for Ukraine to a possible future EU integration and thus NATO at Russia’s borders. (Larrabee, 2015) Through a backdoor agreement, Putin gave the then Ukrainian president and strong Russian ally Viktor Yanukovych an offer he could not refuse, a bailout package worth many times of what the EU could offer, upwards of $20 billion. Ukraine had been in financial ruin and so Yanukovych promptly pulled out of the EU talks, announcing on state television that Ukraine would be embracing the Russian alliance instead. (Piper, 2013) Ukrainian people overwhelmingly wanted European integration to happen, so a reversal of this drastic was met with angry demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from across the country poured into Kyiv in what became known as the Euromaidan Revolution. For three months, the protesters stood their ground, and many died in the demonstrations at the hands of the state. With no end to the protests insight, and with the world watching the killings, Yanukovych fled his own country in the middle of the night and emigrated to Russia. For a moment, it seemed that the Ukrainian citizens won, as a new and fair election for president was promised by their parliament within two months. Putin had to act quickly. The very next day after the Yanukovych government fell, Putin's troops invaded Crimea and within a week seized it entirely. An invasion like this had not been attempted since WWII. (Agnieszka Wilscewska, 2015) Ukraine was paralyzed to react, as its government had just collapsed.

The world watched in shock and confusion. The US and NATO weighed options on how to react. At this point, the IRA got to experiment with its capabilities towards a different goal - convince the world of a new reality. In the coming weeks, the IRA released the three-persona information wave, targeting simultaneously Russian, European, and American audiences. Dividing the public into two philosophical spheres, right and left, conservative or liberal. On the left, they mounted videos that the Neo-Nazis are taking over Ukraine. So much was the threat, Jewish citizens of Ukraine and neighboring countries would be in fear for their lives, many beginning to flee the region. At the same time, on the right, the message was the opposite. They declared that Ukraine was a Jewish conspiracy and that the state was propped up by Jewish oligarchs. "Welcome to Orwell's world!" they pronounced. Of course, those two stories do not go together, but it makes no difference as the two audience demographics do not visit the same information spheres. (Mueller, 2018)

Two months later in May 2014, as Ukraine was getting ready to elect its new president, the Russian Secret Service Unit (SBU) hacked into the main server of the Ukrainian voting system and manipulated the result of the election to portray as the winner a neo-Nazi nationalist Dmytro Yarosh, who at the time was a very minor candidate. (Agnieszka Wilscewska, 2015) The following day, the Russians broadcast the false result on their evening news to solidify the deceit. Fortunately, the Ukrainian state understood quickly what was happening and manually recounted all the votes which gave them an entirely different picture of who won. (Joselow, 2016) Even though this chaos lasted a short while, it played right into what Russia had already been telling the West for several months. Ukraine is a bunch of fascists, Putin declared. Russia must step in to defend civilization against the next brewing Hitler. Unbeknownst to most at the time the extent of the full picture, Russia then themselves picked out a fascist to temporarily win the election in Ukraine, proving their own point, and with no time to lose, blasted out this false narrative across its own country, Europe, and America. Irrespective of how quickly that was caught, the signal was unmistakable. Russia could do what it pleased in its backyard, without consequence. (Flintoff, 2014) To underscore that sentiment, the following year in December 2015, in a display of Russian cyber power, the SBU hacked into the control systems of the western Ukraine power grid. Two days before Christmas, the power went off across parts of the country. All transport and industry came to a halt, leaving more than 200,000 without electricity. (Agnieszka Wilscewska, 2015)

Ukraine was the laboratory that taught Russia how one could motivate or demotivate groups of people by telling one side or the other contradictory falsehoods. You can do it with precision by targeting different audiences with different messages simultaneously. In creating chaos and confusion, you lead the disoriented public toward the result you are targeting while breaking everything that came before it in the process.

This brings us to the election of Donald Trump. Russia decided early that Trump would be favorable to their interests as soon as he announced his candidacy.  Immediately after his announcement, Russian State TV crafted support for his run by separating him from the other candidates with news reports such as "One of America's candidates' favorite pastimes is telling horror stories about Russia. Trump has broken that mold. He is one of the few who've so far resisted the temptation to use Putin to frighten Americans." (Russian TV, 2015) This followed with the IRA's army of tweets such as, "Every other candidate is a puppet. #Trump #TrumpTrain #draintheswamp". (Twitter, 2016)

Trump himself was very deliberate when he was asked about his position on Russia, making statements like "I was over in Moscow a few years ago and I know that you can build with the Russians. I would be willing to bet I would have a great relationship with Putin." (Trump, 2015)

Putin was not going to rely on social media alone. Due to the highly sophisticated malware coding fingerprint, the hacking of the Democratic National Convention database was quickly confirmed by the FBI to have come from Russia. The FBI then prepared that the Republican National Convention would be next. But conspicuously, the RNC was left untouched. (Mueller, 2018)

One month later, when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee, according to an American source embedded within Moscow's top foreign-policy brain trust, Putin warned privately that if Hillary won the presidency, the world would remember that day as the day that began the Second Cold War. (Ehrlich, 2016) In Putin's own words to his press on state TV, "it's better not to debate with women. Better not to engage at all in arguments. When people cross certain boundaries, boundaries of decency, it does not show their strength, but their weakness. But weakness is not the worst quality in a woman." Putin finished off this last misogynist comment with a smile to the female interviewer.  (Kedmey, 2014) The following day that Hillary Clinton secured the Democratic Nomination, DCLeaks.com, an IRA persona news outlet, did a giant data dump of some of the documents Russia collected from the DNC the month prior. Hillary Clinton was exposed using her personal email account at the State Department, which was a violation of federal law and the IRA spared no time in stoking the outrage of that grievance. (Mueller, 2018)

From the lessons Russia learned in Ukraine, they understood that to have influence in issues that would divide Americans, you needed to have your hand in both sides of the most sensitive discussions. Argue both perspectives simultaneously, and control the argument by leading what is being argued and how. To this end, the IRA's three-personas focused on the most polarizing controversies in the U.S. and inflamed those grievances by whisking hatred. They then took those conflicts offline by conducting protests. Often calling on followers to rally in the same place on the same days - stoking that outrage in the real world. ANTIFA vs White Supremacists Protests in Georgia (Press, 2015) and Anti-Muslim vs Freedom of Religion protest in Texas which was organized by the Facebook group Heart of Texas. With banners "Stop Islamization of Texas" and a following of 300,000, Heart of Texas repeatedly called for violence and was confirmed in 2018 to be an IRA persona. (Mueller, 2018) The rules of the game that Russia was designing were not in feeding complete lies to the American public, but in taking the worst parts of our society and magnifying them to the point that the entire landscape begins to look like what they are painting - like a funhouse mirror of sorts.

On the anniversary of Eric Garner's murder in 2016, the confirmed IRA troll persona BlackMatters.us, who had a Facebook Fan page, a Twitter following, and an online magazine of 500,000 subscribers, began a campaign to boycott the 2016 election. (Mueller, 2018)  All those who want to "honor his (Eric Garner) memory because our justice system is broken. Sit out the vote". More IRA personas such as Blacktivist joined the same echo, "I won't vote. Will you?"

A few months leading up to the general election, WikiLeaks began to systematically dump, on a weekly basis, the rest of the stolen documents accumulated by Russia. The constant drip of controversy was stunning. On the day that Access Hollywood release the secret recordings of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, WikiLeaks released DNC private emails that showed that the Democratic National Convention had internally pushed for Hillary Clinton to win the nomination and actively squeezed Bernie Sanders out of the race. Putting their fingers on the scale infuriated many democratic voters who supported Bernie. Hugely embarrassed, the chairwoman of the DNC announced her resignation. It looked like the Democrats were imploding. (Mueller, 2018)

During this hurricane, Paul Manafort, at the time Donald Trump's campaign manager, quietly met with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska's employee Constantine Kilimnik. Paul Manafort's right-hand man and business partner Rick Gates were also at this meeting. Gates later became a cooperating witness with the Mueller investigation, sending Manafort to prison for collusion with a foreign power. (Trump pardoned Manafort before leaving office in 2021). Gates revealed that at the meeting, Manafort ordered Gates to share internal polling data with Kilimnik which focused on what was described as battleground states. At the time, several of these states were not thought of being battleground states, as they were long-term democratic supporters. So much so, that Hillary Clinton did not even bother going to campaign in some of them. However, coincidentally, the IRA were specifically active in those regions. (Mueller, 2018)

What followed during the November election? In Wisconsin, a known blue state for decades, Hillary lost by 23,000 votes. In Detroit, Michigan, a city dominated by black, democratic voters, 75,000 registered voters who had turned out for Obama, decided to stay away from the voting booth. Clinton lost Michigan, a key swing state, by only 10,000 votes. Was that due to the "Don't Vote!" campaign? In a report obtained by the state department, troll persona accounts created by the IRA additionally influenced voter opinions in Florida and Pennsylvania, giving Trump 59 electoral votes. According to Rick Gates, all these states were supplied to Kilimnik as points of focus during the Manafort secret meeting. (Mueller, 2018)

Traditional war is thought of as one sovereign nation making another sovereign nation do what it wants. In the 21st century, war does not have to be carried out by traditional military forces. A nation can break the will of another nation by figuring out what makes it tick. Figure out their strengths and above all your weaknesses. Then appeal to those weaknesses by getting them to do things that are not really in their interest. What Russian did in 2016 was figure out a new technological environment much faster than anyone else and then they weaponized this environment to their own ends. In years since, Israel, Iran, Germany, the U.S., North Korea, and many others followed suit. (Sanger & Perlroth, 2019) (Staff, 2020) (Reuters, 2021) We are now all playing this new version of a chess game. But in the case of Russia, their mastery is not only how many moves ahead they see, but how many realities they are able to forge simultaneously.  

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