The NPR Politics Podcast - U.S. Government Charges Russian With Interference In The 2018 Midterm Elections

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Elena Khusyaynova, a Russian citizen, has been charged by the U.S. government with one count of conspiring to defraud the United States. Prosecutors say she handled budgets and payments associated with the disinformation schemes on behalf of Russia leading up to the midterm elections. This episode: political reporter Asma Khalid, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, justice reporter Ryan Lucas, and national security editor Phil Ewing. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Ariadne from Hylia, Florida, originally, but currently living in Madrid, Spain. I'm on my way to the U.S. Embassy in Madrid to drop off my ballot for the midterm election. This podcast was recorded at 4.10 p.m. on Friday, October 19th. Keep up with the latest political news on the NPR One app or on your local public radio. OK, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. The Justice Department has charged a Russian woman with interfering in the 2018 midterm elections. It's the first such charge we've seen this campaign cycle. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Ryan Lucas, I cover the Justice Department. I'm Carrie Johnson, I also cover the Justice Department.

And I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor., Kerry, why don't we start by having you just explain who this woman was, 44-year-old Elena Kusanova, what exactly she was accused of doing. She's from St. Petersburg, Russia. She's still inside Russia, and she's basically been accused of acting as the accountant for a company that's been conducting information warfare in U.S. elections and in elections in other countries as well. In these new criminal charges filed on Friday, the authorities say that she was part of an operation to target U.S. elections up to and including these November 2018

midterms by disparaging certain political candidates, pumping up others, buying ads on Facebook and other social media sites, and basically trying to sow divisions within the U.S. on all those hot-button issues, things like gun rights, LGBT rights, race relations, and any number of other things. So to be real clear, just on one thing that you mentioned, Carrie, is that she is in Russia. So it's not as if the United States Department of Justice can force her to come to the U.S. and say, well, have a trial, right? I mean, what does this mean that they've charged her? This is part of an ongoing naming and shaming operation the Justice Department and the FBI are doing. Basically, they're trying to let these

Russians know, we're onto you. We see what you're doing. We saw what you're doing in 2016. We see what you're doing up to this day. We want to make it hard for you to go on vacation to places where the U.S. might have extradition treaties. And one day, maybe we'll get lucky. We'll nab you and bring you back here to the U are doing. And it informs the public so that they have a better idea of what to look out for. And this is not something that the public had this sort of knowledge in the run up to the 2016 election. So this way, the public can be more informed and keep an eye out for possibly fake news and fake social media accounts so that they can be wary of such things. Just one more point on these court papers that were unsealed on Friday. This case is being pursued by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia and the Justice Department proper.

This is not being pursued by the special counsel team. And one significant thing about that is that those folks are going to continue to be employed, those folks in the U.S. Attorney's Office and at Maine Justice headquarters in D.C., long after this special counsel team disbands. So it seems as if the DOJ is treating this threat as something that's going to be around for a while, much longer than Bob Mueller is. It's also a reminder, as Carrie pointed out earlier, that the U.S. can't arrest these people. So all the Russian suspects that have been charged by the Justice Department in this investigation so far, the so-called Internet Research Agency, the military officers with the GRU, the Russian Army Spy Agency, they're still out there. They're still doing all the things that they've been doing all along. And one message that comes through

these court documents on Friday so clearly is the Russians have been doing this, according to this, since 2014. They continued through the 2016 election, and they are continuing to do it even as we speak today. There was also a report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that kind of gives us a state of play of where election security is at this point. There were some, I would say, fairly dire warnings in some of the headlines that I saw, but can you kind of give us a synopsis of what we learned from that? Right. Well, it was a joint statement from the Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security,

which is a signal in a sense of how important they take this issue right now and how much of a concern it is and how they kind of want to put public concerns at ease, let people know that they are addressing this threat, they have it on the radar, and they're trying to deal with it. One of the things that they talk about is foreign influence campaigns. We've talked a lot about the ones that the Russians are conducting. They also say that China and other foreign actors are doing these sorts of influence operations as well. Certainly what we've talked about most is Russia because they have been the most effective as far as we know publicly. A lot of what these sorts of campaigns entail is what we've talked about. Social media, fake news, Facebook accounts that are trying to sow discord. It's that sort of stuff that they're keeping an eye out for. What they don't talk about is any hacking at this point that we know of

directed at the 2018 midterms, like we saw in 2016 with the hacking of the Clinton campaign, and then the weaponization of those emails. The message the government tried to send on Friday was that voting machines they believe are safe. So if you punch a card on a ballot, or if you use a voting machine, the vote will be recorded faithfully. They haven't recorded any cyber attacks against those types of systems. But the campaigns that Ryan just talked about, the ones that involve the public information space online and in the way we relate to other Americans on social media, that's the biggest concern that the spy agencies talked about. So this sort of information warfare, right, that you're describing, it sounds like that is the sort of intervention that we're seeing at this point ahead of the 2018 elections. But how does this compare, I guess, to what we saw leading up to 2016?

Well, earlier this summer and actually just a couple of weeks ago, we heard from some of the leaders of the national security establishment, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Christopher Wray, even the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have talked about the level of activity that we've seen from foreign actors trying to influence the vote. And what they said in the case of Russia in particular is that, yes, the Russians are active. It's not the same level as we saw in the run-up to 2016. But that doesn't mean that they can't flip the switch. And suddenly we're going to see a whole different level. And this could just fly off the charts.

One of the more interesting things to me is that once again in these criminal charges we saw against this Russian woman on Friday, there's no allegation that any Americans were conspiring or were witting collaborators in this information warfare campaign. But the Russians, once again, are successfully exploiting divisions within American society and doing it very, very effectively in a way that troubles not just the intelligence community, but all sorts of political leaders around the country. It's worth adding on that very important point that they are not creating divisions. They are exacerbating divisions that already exist. Yes. I mean, you mentioned some of this is like around gun control, immigration. These are cultural fissures that I will say as a political reporter, we go out in the country, we hear consistently from voters about these things. But it sounds like you're saying they are just taking this and intensifying it in the social media spaces.

Absolutely. And some of the documents referenced in these court charges from Friday talk about witch hunts and making fun of Barack Obama, making fun of the late Arizona Senator John McCain, targeting politicians on both sides of the aisle for some of these kinds of rhetoric we've been hearing in political ads here in the U.S. over time. And even things like the NFL space, what see U.S. officials are doing? And is this something that we've been, you think, as a country successfully able to combat thus far when we're talking about the administration's response? The government says that it wants to make the public aware about this as much as possible. The FBI has launched a special website that's focused on public information campaigns. The director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, other people at his level talk about this publicly much more than they used to. But the facts that are made clear in these court documents shows how much this continues

to take place on social media, on Facebook and Twitter especially. And frankly, what a bad job those two platforms have done in scrapping these sorts of things. These court papers are filled with examples of Russian influence mongers creating fake accounts, pretending to be Americans and posting memes about President Barack Obama, the former president, his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood ostensibly, or the coverage of the Austin bombings that took place last year and how much the media was ignoring them because the victims weren't white, because they were black and Latino at the time. And these, as Ryan indicated, are American controversies taking place naturally in our own context.

But the Russians are very skilled on social media at getting in there and trying to turn up the volume as much as they can. So skilled that there's actually some instructions quoted in these court papers in this part of this Russian campaign. They're telling Russians, listen, if you want to target American liberals, don't mention the site Breitbart. And if you want to target American conservatives, steer clear of mentioning BuzzFeed. These people know what they're doing. So talk to me a little bit about what the social media platforms themselves are doing, what these tech giants are doing. I know our colleague Tim Mack did spend some time with Facebook just this past week. And Facebook is sort of touting

this election security war room that they've developed. But I'm curious if any of you have a sense of how successful this has been, because to some degree also, you know, the Russians and whoever it is, is trying to interfere could ostensibly just invent new tricks. What the platforms have focused on is transparency. So they're responding in the way that the American political system has historically to campaign influence issues, where if you buy an ad that says Obama is a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, Facebook wants you to have to disclose who you are and thereby disclose the origins of that type of messaging. So that will be in place for political campaigns going forward. But in real time, when you're scrolling through

your Facebook feed, who's actually going to look at that and do the research and say, aha, this appears to be a foreign influence campaign. If it's going to have an effect, it's not going to stop the problem. And it's not going to keep our information environment in the United States pristine in any way. On a slightly depressing note, one of the questions that I always like to ask cybersecurity people when I meet with them and talk to them is, are these sorts of operations, is this just the sort of world that we live in now? And really, there's no way to end it. There's no way to combat this to the point where it's not going to be an issue. And the depressing answer that I generally get is, this is pretty much the world we live in now.

So it's like you're constantly playing defense. You can never really entirely fix the problem, right? You're just sort of trying to blockade. Is that fair to say? Kind of a whack-a-mole is how people often describe it. Yeah, that's a good example. It's a dilemma that counterterrorism professionals have talked about for many years

because we have an open society. We have freedom of movement. We have freedom of speech. You can go wherever you want within reason. And in the old days, we worried about terrorists exploiting that. These days, we're worried about foreign governments exploiting that because they can move much more quickly than Facebook and Twitter can to clamp down on them. And the U.S. government really has no way to stop that from taking place. I got to tell you that as somebody who sometimes goes out in the

world to speak at places other than Washington, D.C., I know that we have listeners who teach high school and college history or American studies or social studies. And at the high school and the college level, they are trying to educate people, young people, about how to recognize some of these phony memes and information warfare attacks to try to get at the problem that way before people start logging into Facebook and believing everything that they read. There's actually a real kind of effort at civics education out there aimed at young folks to try to get them to recognize these things that are targeting them everywhere they go. And that's wonderful, but it's also, that's like a generational struggle. It's going to take years and years to get an educated voting populace that's conscious of such things. Just to kind of wrap up the conversation here, it sounds like the interference

that we are seeing is really just essentially on the information level, the information in public space. But it's not really a matter of voting. Like if I am a voter going to vote, there's not a real threat to election security in that way. Is that right? as you intended. These interference campaigns focus on the public information space in the United States, on social media especially, and they're attempting to change Americans' behavior by the information they take in and the way they think, as opposed to the actual way that votes are collected and counted. Well, that is it for today. You can keep up with our coverage over the weekend on your local public radio station, on NPR.org, and on NPR One. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Carrie Johnson. I also cover the Justice Department. And I'm Phil Ewing,

national security editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.