by Craig Unger
Within an hour of the story’s release, WikiLeaks was fighting to win back control of the narrative by releasing hacked emails from the account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.46 In addition, at least 2,752 Twitter accounts from Russia’s Internet Research Agency went into action on Trump’s behalf whenever they were necessary. On September 17, Trump reversed his lies asserting that Obama had been born in Kenya and declared instead that Obama “was born in the United States, period.” Russian tweets came to the rescue, with various Russian accounts now asserting that it was Hillary who started the birther controversy.47
And so it went, Russian hackers and bots leading a supine press corps by its nose. After all, it is far easier to write stories about hacked emails that are delivered on a silver platter than to probe a multifarious political conspiracy to sabotage a presidential election.
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Thanks to Cambridge Analytica, Clinton’s campaign may have faced an even bigger problem with Facebook than with Twitter bots. That’s because the British data-mining company had made a deal with a Russian-American academic named Aleksandr Kogan, who harvested no fewer than fifty million people’s raw profiles from Facebook without their permission, roughly thirty million of which contained enough information to build psychographic profiles. The profiles had been assembled with the premise that big data enabled clients to drill into the psychology of individual voters, thereby allowing them to identify the different types of American voters and shape their behavior.48
It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of Cambridge Analytica’s approach of microtargeting narrowly tailored messages to the electorate. But, according to the Intercept, Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, has claimed to “have a massive database of four to five thousand data points on every adult in America.” Nix also claimed that Trump campaign online ads were seen at least 1.5 billion times.49
In the end, more than 126 million Facebook users were shown Russian-generated election propaganda.50 “They were using 40–50,000 different variants of ads every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response,” Martin Moore of King’s College London told the Guardian.51 “It’s all done completely opaquely and they can spend as much money as they like on particular locations because you can focus on a five-mile radius or even a single demographic. Fake news is important but it’s only one part of it. These companies have found a way of transgressing 150 years of legislation that we’ve developed to make elections fair and open.”
Absurd as some fake news seemed, much of it went viral when it triggered Facebook algorithms that pushed the buttons of impassioned Trump supporters. A case in point: a story that became known as “Pizzagate” suggested that certain phrases in John Podesta’s hacked emails were actually code words linked to a Democratic Party pedophilia ring based in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza parlor. Ludicrous as the story was, it went viral on sites such as Infowars.com, parts of Reddit, and various alt-right sites.52
The story, like others, had first started on Facebook. Which shined a new light on a 2012 meeting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow. They talked about Facebook’s role in politics, and according to the Times, they joked about its importance in the American presidential campaign.53 Suddenly, the joke was on America, and though most Americans didn’t yet realize it, it had deadly serious consequences.
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As he campaigned across the country, Trump occasionally addressed the issue of his ties to Russia. “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia,” he said told CBS Miami on July 27, 2016. “I don’t have any jobs in Russia. I’m all over the world but we’re not involved in Russia. . . . I have nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do, I never met Putin, I have nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.”54
None of which placated Clinton. On September 26, when she and Trump went head to head in the first presidential debate, Hillary attacked: “I was so shocked when Donald publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans. That is just unacceptable.”55
Nonetheless, Trump’s off-kilter response was enough for his supporters. “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the D.N.C.,” Trump said. “She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t—maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, O.K.?”
Finally, in the third debate, on October 19, about three weeks before the election, it came to a head, with Clinton asserting that Putin liked Trump “because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”
Trump: No puppet. No puppet.
Clinton: And it’s pretty clear . . .
Trump: You’re the puppet!
Clinton: It’s pretty clear you won’t admit . . .
Trump: No, you’re the puppet.
Clinton: . . . that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race. So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17—17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.56
But the Russia issue got no traction, and was buried by sensational but relatively insignificant reports of Trump’s horrifying transgressions against women, Muslims, and immigrants—not to mention the never-ending reports about Clinton’s emails.
For the most part, political pundits thought Clinton was so far ahead that it didn’t matter, anyway. But on October 28, eleven days before the election, then–FBI director James Comey announced in a letter to Congress that as a result of an unrelated case, the FBI had obtained additional emails that might relate to its investigation of Hillary’s use of a private email server. It was soon revealed that the emails were obtained as the result of an investigation into former congressman Anthony Weiner.
Suddenly, the Hillary Clinton email case—and conversation—had been reopened. In the end, after reviewing the new emails, Comey said the FBI had not changed its conclusions. But so far as the general public knew, Hillary was the only candidate being investigated.57
On October 27, polls were showing her with a reasonably comfortable margin of six to nine points over Trump. But Clinton later said, “Our analysis is that Comey’s letter—raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be—stopped our momentum.”58
To complicate matters further, on October 31, just nine days before the election, a New York Times headline—“Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia”—seemed to exculpate Trump entirely, when, in fact, the investigations were just beginning.59
But the electorate didn’t know that. Voters only knew that Hillary was being hammered in the press, and Donald Trump always seemed to skate free. The polls tightened. By November 3, that 7 percent margin had closed to less than 3 percent.60
In the closing week before the election, Trump used Russia-backed WikiLeaks as a battering ram against Hillary day after day. On October 31, in Warren, Michigan, Trump told a rally, “Did you see where, on WikiLeaks, it was announced that they were paying protestors to be violent, $1,500? . . . Did you see another one, another one came in today? This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove.”61
Then, on November 2, in Orlando: “Out today, WikiLeaks just came out with a new one. Just a little while ago. It’s just been shown that a rigged system with more collusion, possibly illegal, between the Department of Justice, the Clinton campaign and the State Department.”62
&nb
sp; And on November 4, in Wilmington, Ohio: “Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks.”63
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On November 5, three days before the presidential election, Ivanka and Jared Kushner made a pilgrimage to the grave of the Chabad rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in the old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York. Known as the Ohel, the rebbe’s grave is considered holy by followers of Chabad and is visited by tens of thousands of people annually. Jared and Ivanka reportedly made a special prayer for Ivanka’s father there, at the grave of a man whose adherents believed he had not really died, that he was the messiah; a man who had been the leader of a movement that somehow led directly to Vladimir Putin.64
On November 8, Election Day, Russian hackers targeted election systems in at least twenty-one states, mostly in the form of “assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus—voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment.”65 Initially, the impact of these attacks was unclear. Typical of the complaints, according to an election-monitoring group called Election Protection, in a Democratic-leaning county in a swing state, dozens of voters in Durham, North Carolina, were being told they were ineligible to vote, even when they displayed valid registration cards. Others were sent from one polling station to another, only to be rejected again, or were told, incorrectly, they had already voted.66
Months earlier, VR Systems, which provided information about voting via ebooks for Durham, had been hacked by Russians. Without VR’s information, which is used to verify voters’ eligibility, voters would be unable to cast ballots at all.67
Still, all over America, the consensus was that Hillary would win. According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight election site, nine of the top ten pollsters had Hillary winning. Silver gave Trump a 28.6 percent chance68 of winning, but that was far more generous than most of his colleagues. Others gave Trump less than a 1 percent shot.69
Trump impressed friends as being relaxed and at ease with what he characterized as a no-lose situation. “He was like, ‘Look, what do I have to lose?’” Pastor Darrell Scott, CEO of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, told GQ.70 “‘I’m gambling with house money. You know what I mean? If I win, great, I want to win; if I lose, what’s my default position? The CEO of Trump International.’”
Even WikiLeaks was making plans for President Hillary Clinton. At 6:35 p.m., WikiLeaks wrote to Don Jr., “Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do.”71 If Trump contested the election, WikiLeaks reportedly argued, that would help Trump discredit the mainstream press and create a new media network to serve his agenda.72
Uncharacteristically, the Trump campaign had booked its “victory party,” if that’s what the evening held, not in a Trump property but at the midtown Hilton just three blocks from Trump Tower because its massive ballroom could hold three thousand people. According to GQ, the setup, which was dominated by risers for camera crews and a large press pen, looked as if it had been set up for a press conference more than a celebration.73
By five p.m., the insiders at Fox News had begun working on the corresponding narrative: Hillary Clinton was the forty-fifth president of the United States. Within the network, all this was a closely guarded secret that was shared largely with people who had to prepare graphics and other materials. “Fox News declares Hillary Clinton elected president,” read one graphic.
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At 5:03, Fox News exit polls had Hillary winning Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two critical states that Trump needed. Fox political anchor Bret Baier recalled, “They were saying, ‘You know, this is not definitive, but it really looks like Clinton will pull it out by about 11 p.m. Eastern time.’”74
At 8:22, things still looked good for Clinton. As the votes rolled in, the New York Times tweeted that Hillary had an 82 percent chance of winning.75
But suddenly, the narrative changed. The exit polls, after all, were not final tallies. At 9:30, it was clear that key states like North Carolina and Florida were too close to call. By 9:40, the Times had lowered Hillary’s chances of victory to 55 percent. Then, by 10:50, Trump had captured two of the most important swing states, Ohio and Florida. Then Utah and North Carolina went for Trump.
By 11:36, his supporters had begun chanting, “President Trump, President Trump.”76
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In some ways, it seemed that everything had come together better than Putin could possibly have dreamed: three decades earlier, Mogilevich and the Russian Mafia’s compromising of Trump had begun by possibly using Trump real estate to launder their money. They had bailed out Trump when he was bankrupt. They had ensnared him with some form of kompromat, most likely, though in exactly what form is unclear. They had ensured that he was beholden to Russia’s money, and its power.
Meanwhile, the Gerasimov Doctrine had been implemented, and with it a new kind of asymmetric warfare using hackers and cyberattacks, disinformation and media manipulation. All done at Putin’s behest, often by thinly disguised state actors, working hand in hand with the FSB. All largely unseen. All done with deniability. Accompanied by an almost Surkovian attempt to destroy the entire notion of truth via cries of “Fake news!,” pathological lies, and right-wing propaganda, fueled with the gasoline of social media, real and robotic.
As to the impact of all the “active measures” undertaken by Russia leading up to the 2016 election, it is difficult to quantify exactly how much they changed the outcome of the presidential race. However, according to the study by the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, automated tweeting alone by thousands of bots added 3.23 percentage points to Trump’s vote in the US presidential race.77
Given Trump’s narrow victory in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—states that were predicted to vote Democratic but were won by Trump with a margin of less than 1 percent,78 and which put him over the top in the electoral college—it is more than likely that the Russian interference made the difference.
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As midnight neared on election night, things were going so well for Trump’s forces that an unlikely personage emerged at the Hilton. Even during the campaign, Felix Sater had continued to work with Michael Cohen in an effort to get Trump Tower Moscow going well into the presidential campaign, all the while cultivating contacts ranging from intelligence officials to Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, the two billionaire brothers who had been Putin’s judo sparring partners. But on July 26, Trump tweeted that he had “ZERO investments in Russia” and the Trump Tower Moscow project was dead.
Trump, of course, had claimed in a deposition that he barely knew Sater. Now, though, on the most significant night of Trump’s political life, Sater was back in his good graces and was a guest at the invitation-only victory party for the next president of the United States.
At 1:50 a.m., Trump took Pennsylvania, meaning his election was all but certain. Finally, at 2:29 a.m., came Wisconsin, a state that had not gone Republican since 1984. Then, in a statement that had been unexpected only hours before, the Associated Press officially called Donald Trump the next president of the United States.
Three minutes later, at 9:32 local time in Moscow, Deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov of the pro-Putin United Russia Party, the grandson of the namesake of the Molotov cocktail, was greeted by enthusiastic applause when he announced Trump’s victory in the Duma.79 Vladimir Putin’s implementation of one of the most audacious intelligence operations in history had been successful beyond his wildest dreams.
Later that day, Vladimir Vinokur, Putin’s favorite comedian and a longtime associate of Mogilevich and the Solntsevo gang, posted a collage of two photos on Instagram. One of the photos showed Vinokur chatting amiably with Putin. The other showed the Russian comic with Trump. “We won!” it said. �
�Congratulations!”
A new era had begun.
TRUMP’S FIFTY-NINE RUSSIA CONNECTIONS
Donald Trump has repeatedly said he has nothing to do with Russia. Below are fifty-nine Trump connections to Russia.
Roman Abramovich
Putin confidant/billionaire who, along with fellow oligarch Lev Leviev, created the Putin-approved Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, aka “Putin’s rabbi.” Ivanka Trump is close to Abramovich’s ex-wife, Dasha Zhukova, and has taken several trips with the Abramoviches, including a trip to Russia in 2014 as their guest.1
Aras Agalarov
A billionaire Russian real estate developer who is close to Putin, Agalarov partnered with Trump in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow and was a serious potential partner behind the never-built Trump Tower Moscow. Agalarov remained in contact with Trump after Miss Universe and during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Emin Agalarov
Son of Aras Agalarov, pop singer Emin performed at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, got Donald Trump to appear in one of his music videos, and was a key figure in arranging the infamous June 2016 meetings in Trump Tower between Russian operatives and top Trump associates.
Evsei Agron
The first alleged boss of the Russian Mafia in Brighton Beach, Agron came to New York in 1975 and ran his crime gang out of Brooklyn’s El Caribe Country Club, which was owned by Dr. Morton Levine and his family, including nephew Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer.
Rinat Akhmetshin
