Meanwhile, Unit 26165 was poring over the bounty from a separate attack it had just carried out: 50,000 emails stolen from the Clinton campaign’s chairman. Trump announced his foreign policy team, a group of fringe figures whose advocacy of warmer relations with Russia ran counter to Republican orthodoxy. Petersburg, shift workers posted on Facebook and Twitter at a feverish pace, posing as Americans and following instructions to attack Mrs. Trump won five primaries, closing in on his party’s nomination, and crowed that he had become “the biggest political story anywhere in the world.” That same day in Moscow, a veteran hacker named Ivan Yermakov, a Russian military intelligence officer working for a secret outfit called Unit 26165, began probing the computer network of the Democratic National Committee.

Trump emerged in spring 2016 as the improbable favorite for the Republican nomination, the Russian operation accelerated on three fronts - the hacking and leaking of Democratic documents massive fraud on Facebook and Twitter and outreach to Trump campaign associates.Ĭonsider 10 days in March. Trump flatly rejects.Ī banner of President Barack Obama that appeared the next month in Washington.Īs Mr. In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.Īnd there is a plausible case that Mr. To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.īut to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.įor many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington.

The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. On an October afternoon before the 2016 election, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V.

2016 nytimes election