A year later, Director of National Intelligence – and, as such, the leader of America’s 17 intelligence agencies – Dan Coats confirmed to the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the United States is under attack” and that Russia is attempting to “degrade our democratic values and weaken our alliances.”   

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Coats also warned that the U.S. intelligence agencies “expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States.” Months later, Coats continued to warn that “the warning lights are blinking red again. Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack.”

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According to the Mueller report, “Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified by the investigation, a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States… Russia’s two principal interference operations in the 2016 U.S. presidential election – the social media campaign and the hacking-and-dumping operations – violated U.S. criminal law.”

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A 37-page federal indictment of thirteen Russian nationals issued by Mueller revealed they had stolen Americans’ identities; created fake drivers’ licenses, bank accounts, and PayPal accounts in the names of fictitious Americans; faked social media accounts; created and distributed inflammatory digital ads and images; organized political rallies on U.S. soil; and even had at least two operatives on the ground in America. One pair traveled to at least nine states posing as tourists to gather information for their bosses back in Russia. The indictment mentions Facebook and Instagram 41 times. Facebook finally admitted that divisive content generated by Russia reached 146 million Americans on their platform alone.

 

In July 2019, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released its first of five reports regarding 2016 Russian election interference. The first report revealed that all fifty states were targeted by Russia in 2016. In August 2020, the Committee released its final report, which totaled almost 1,000 pages and included information from over a million documents and 200 interviews. The report confirmed that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election… Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president.”

 

The report also confirmed that Konstantin Kilimnik – a close business associate of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s original 2016 campaign chairman – was a Russian intelligence officer, and that Donald Trump’s campaign accepted help from Russians who were trying to get him elected.  To that end, the campaign provided Russians with polling data and coordinated the leak of stolen internal emails from the Democratic National Committee.

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Weeks after the Mueller investigation was completed – an effort that generated over two dozen criminal cases, including six against Trump associates – Bill Barr, the Attorney General during the second half of the first Trump administration, appointed a special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of links between Russia and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, to include any misconduct by U.S. government officials that might have taken place.

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To Donald Trump’s dismay, after a four-year investigation, Special Counsel John Durham found very little ammunition. Although he offered a contemptuous critique of the Justice Department and FBI – saying the agencies “failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” – the investigation culminated in just one guilty plea and two acquittals (Durham lost both cases that went to trial). Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, the subject of the third case, pled guilty to altering an email that was used to support a surveillance application. He was given probation.

By failing to challenge Putin, President Trump enabled him to do even more damage. As former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said after the 2016 election, “Russia perceives its past efforts as successful” and views future elections “as a potential target for Russian influence operations.”

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…which was made clear in the 2020 and 2024 elections when Russia meddled yet again. And they just got better at it over time. Before the 2024 election, U.S. intelligence officials warned that Russia’s interference efforts were “more sophisticated than in prior election cycles.” They warned that Russia was now using “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” propaganda and misinformation.

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Russia is “at the top of the list” of foreign governments trying to influence the election, because 1) “they’re fairly robust and quite practiced at doing this type of activity” 2) the “scope and the scale of their activities are quite significant” 3) they “work up- and down-ballot races” 4) they use artificial intelligence “to more quickly and convincingly create synthetic content” and 5) they use “influence-for-hire firms that leverage marketing, public relations and other expertise to complicate attribution.” Here’s just a sampling of their work:

John Mark Dougan, a former U.S. Marine who relocated to Russia and turned into one of the Kremlin’s most talented propagandists, was paid by Russia’s military intelligence service to create deepfakes and spread misinformation about Kamala Harris and her campaign.

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One of Dougan’s videos – a four-minute video that featured a “former student” making fabricated allegations against vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz – was viewed more than 5.4 million times on X in less than a day. The video gained little attention until it was shared by an X account associated with QAnon. Another of Dougan’s deepfake videos showed a fake Barack Obama suggesting Democrats orchestrated the July 2024 assassination attempt against Donald Trump. According to NewsGuard – a company that tracks disinformation online – posts, articles and videos created by Dougan and his team have been viewed 64 million times since September 2023.

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In a post on X five days before the 2024 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was forced to issue a statement denouncing a fake 20-second video that showed Haitians saying “We’re voting Kamala Harris. Yesterday, we voted in Gwinnett County, and today we’re voting in Fulton County…We have all our documents, driver’s license. We invite all Haitians to come to America and bring families.”

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Commenting on a post that shared the video – along with the caption: “Illegal Haitians flown into the U.S. claim they received all necessary documents and driver’s licenses within just six months of arriving in the U.S. and are able to vote!! They show several Georgia driver’s licenses featuring the same photo and claim to have voted for Kamala Harris in two different counties so far: Gwinnett and Fulton” – Raffensperger wrote, “We have discussed this with State and Federal Authorities. This is obviously fake, and likely it is a production of Russian troll farms.”

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Unfortunately, an emboldened Putin is just one of the severe consequences of Trump not calling him out for his 2016 shenanigans. After all, what kind of message did that spectacle send to China, Iran, North Korea, and other potential cyber attackers?

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Let us save you some time… they all got the message loud and clear… which the 2024 Annual Threat Assessment from the U.S. Director of National Intelligence proved when it warned, “the People’s Republic of China (PRC) remains the most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks. Beijing’s cyber espionage pursuits and its industry’s export of surveillance, information, and communications technologies increase the threats of aggressive cyber operations against the United States and the suppression of the free flow of information in cyberspace.”

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Indeed, the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history – by far,” according to U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), transpired between 2020 and 2024 when Chinese government-affiliated actors launched an espionage campaign that compromised over a dozen tele-communications companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Lumen Technologies. Targeting U.S. wiretap systems, the hack gave the Chinese unparalleled access to our foreign-intelligence surveillance systems.

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Salt Typhoon, as the group is referred to by investigators, hacked mainly the phones of people involved in government or political activity – including Donald Trump, JD Vance and Kamala Harris – as well as highly sensitive electronic communications that internet service providers collect based on U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders. 

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​In September 2025, a joint statement from the United States, Britian, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain, among other countries, said the “unrestrained” and “indiscriminate” Salt Typhoon attack targeted over 80 countries and may have stolen information from almost every American.

 

Other Chinese “typhoon” threats include Volt Typhoon, which targets U.S. infrastructure, and Flax Typhoon, which targets routers, cameras and other internet-connected consumer devices (“typhoon” is the name used by Microsoft to differentiate between various Chinese-backed cyber campaigns/threats).

 

And now Iran has also decided to join the election-interference fun. In the runup to the 2024 election, Iran attempted to hack Trump associates and advisers to the Biden and Harris campaigns.

 

Hoax?  Я так не думаю

(that’s I don’t think so, in Russian)