Assigning Blame for Russia’s Election Meddling

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Donald Trump accused the Obama Administration of doing nothing about Russian interference in the 2016 election, but former officials say that Trump is the one who has ignored the threat.REUTERS

In 2014, after Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, President Barack Obama’s national-security and foreign-policy advisers began a secret debate over whether to launch C.I.A.-led covert-influence operations against the Kremlin. Everyone involved in the discussions wanted the United States to push back against what they saw as Russian aggression, but they were divided about how to do so. Some were wary of putting the C.I.A. back on a Cold War footing with Moscow. Senior officials were also skeptical that covert-influence operations would be effective at punishing and deterring Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. “We suck at this,” one official told me. Obama’s advisers opted to use economic sanctions instead. By the end of 2015, the idea of the President issuing a secret Presidential finding to authorize the C.I.A. to act against Moscow had been set aside as a serious option.

Last Friday’s indictment of thirteen Russian nationals by Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the investigation into Russian tampering with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, showed that, while Obama’s advisers were wrestling with the pros and cons of launching a covert campaign against Moscow, the Russians had already embarked on an ambitious influence operation of their own in the United States. (Whether there was as much hand-wringing inside Putin’s Kremlin as there was inside Obama’s White House, we don’t know, but most American officials doubt it.)

The indictment handed down last week has renewed a debate about whether Obama did enough to counter the Kremlin when he was in office. President Trump weighed in over the weekend with a series of tweets, including one that charged, “Obama was President, knew of the threat, and did nothing.” Obama did take some steps to punish the Russians for their interference, expelling Russian diplomats and closing two of their diplomatic facilities in the U.S. But a former senior Obama Administration official I spoke to accused Trump of doing less to counter the Russians than Obama did, saying, “What Obama did is on the record. What Trump has not done is on the record. He is the one who has done nothing.” But at least some of Obama's advisers say they believe that the former President should have done more. Last year, when I wrote about the Russian operation for the Washington Post, one of them told me and my colleagues, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, “I feel like we sort of choked.” More senior officials in the Obama Administration counter that the intelligence picture was incomplete at first. Later, when faced with tough choices about how to respond, Obama opted to retaliate after the election, rather than before, to avoid making matters worse, the senior officials said. Contrary to Trump’s suggestion that Obama “knew” what was happening, a former intelligence official told me, “There was no singular moment where everything was known.”

Though we are still a long way from having a complete understanding of Russia’s interference, and of what U.S. spy agencies knew and when they knew it, Friday’s indictment helped fill in the time line of how events unfolded. By mid-2014, the now infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency had begun its campaign with the stated goal of spreading “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general,” according to the indictment. The National Security Agency sweeps up vast amounts of Russian communications, but policymakers say they weren’t briefed on the 2014 developments. It is unclear whether the new details disclosed in the indictment were obtained by federal investigators using their subpoena powers or if the N.S.A. and other spy agencies delivered relevant intercepts from 2014 after searching through their archives. (Mueller's team probably relied on both internal communications obtained via court order and N.S.A. intercepts that weren’t translated in real time but were pulled together after the fact.) Spy agencies collect so many phone calls, e-mails, and faxes from around the world that they often don’t know what they have until they are asked to hunt for it by investigators.

Now we know that the Russians involved in the election interference stepped up their efforts in 2015 by purchasing advertisements on social-media sites, but it remains unclear whether the F.B.I. or other intelligence agencies were aware of these purchases in real time. (Spy agencies monitor foreign communications, but privacy protections limit their ability to monitor traffic on social-media platforms frequented by Americans.) By early 2016, a team of F.B.I. agents was tracking dozens of fictitious, Kremlin-backed online personas peddling pro-Russian propaganda to U.S. and Canadian news and opinion sites. But, in keeping with longstanding practice in secretive counter-intelligence investigations, the F.B.I. kept this information within the confines of the U.S. intelligence community, wary of compromising an ongoing probe that might otherwise have dragged on indefinitely. F.B.I. counterintelligence officials often spend years watching and learning how adversaries operate in the United States without ever taking action against them or those who may be, wittingly or unwittingly, working on their behalf. (One former official compared counterintelligence work to stamp collecting or butterfly watching. When agents find something new, they gather around and say, “isn’t that interesting.”)

By the spring of 2016, one U.S. spy agency had issued a report describing a spike in Russian focus on the U.S. Presidential race. In retrospect, the intelligence looked prescient, but analysts stopped short of predicting that Moscow planned to intervene in the election itself, and it is not clear that the report was provided to senior American policymakers at the time, officials briefed on the findings said.

“Other agencies saw signs of Russian disinformation efforts before the F.B.I.,” a former intelligence official told me. “Initially, it was believed that it was business as usual. The Russians always do this kind of thing. However, as the effort intensified and the number of people involved on the Russian side grew, it became clear that it was not business as usual. It was a bigger and more varied operation.” But the official said that it took time for the agencies to understand what they were picking up and disseminate it to policymakers.

In summer of 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies had collected what the former intelligence official described as a “critical mass” of information about Russian efforts to intervene in the election, prompting John Brennan, then the director of the C.I.A., to brief Obama and other top advisers in August about the threat. Updates were provided as information came in. But readers of the President’s Daily Brief, or P.D.B., a top-secret digest of the U.S. government’s most closely held intelligence reports, didn’t learn the scope of the Russian effort, including that the F.B.I. had been tracking the use of fake personas online, or that the Russians were exploiting Facebook and other social-media sites, until well after Election Day, officials said. “We knew some things, but didn’t have all the pieces,” a senior official said, referring to Obama's final weeks in office.

It has been a year since Trump became President. He is now pointing to Obama’s failure to act, and it is legitimate to question the former Administration’s decisions. But current and former Trump advisers say that his Administration, which, like Obama’s, has its own internal divisions on Russia and how to respond to the latest intelligence, has done little itself to counter the threat. In fact, these advisers say, Trump has himself, at times, undermined efforts to address the issue. Last year, some officials said they were reluctant to raise the Russia threat in meetings, worried that they’d upset the boss. That made it harder to have substantive, high-level discussions within the White House about possible responses. We still don't know all the details about Russia’s operation, and about who knew what and when. We learned a lot last week, from Mueller’s team. Will we ever know the full story? I’m not sure.