Russia, Iran acted to influence 2020 presidential election

Intelligence assessment says Putin tried to hurt Biden’s prospects and sow discord while Khamenei moved to undercut Trump.

Vladimir Putin authorised a range of intelligence operations intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Picture: AFP

The leaders of Russia and Iran last year ordered their governments to attempt to influence U.S. voters’ choices in the presidential election and undermine the public’s faith in American democracy, a US intelligence assessment released on Wednesday said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin authorised a range of intelligence operations intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and support President Donald Trump’s re-election, while Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved a digital scheme to undercut Mr Trump’s re-election bid, the declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.

China didn’t undertake an effort to influence voters, considering but ultimately forgoing one because neither candidate appeared sufficiently favourable to Beijing to risk its being caught by the US, the report said. The report also found that Cuba, Venezuela and the militant group Hezbollah took some steps to influence the election as well, though it described those as generally smaller in scale to Russia’s and Iran’s meddling.

The report released Tuesday said intelligence agencies had high confidence in their findings, though it specifically doesn’t include any assessment of how much the alleged foreign meddling affected the election. It marked the first time the US blamed Mr Putin and Ayatollah Khamanei for their nation’s efforts to meddle in the 2020 presidential contest, though Mr Putin had previously been accused of orchestrating a more-comprehensive interference operation in 2016. That operation included the hack and leak of Democratic emails and was intended to bolster Mr Trump, according to U.S. intelligence agencies and a bipartisan Senate review.

The report described Moscow’s election-interference attempts as the most organised and substantial of all the nations that took aim at the US vote. The efforts, which it said began as early as 2014, involved social-media trolls, laundered intelligence and a network of Russia-aligned operatives who met with people connected to the Trump administration and others and were centred largely around an effort to portray Mr Biden and his family as having corrupt ties to Ukraine.

“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions in a consistent manner,” it said.

Despite the various foreign campaigns, however, the report said US intelligence officials had found no indications any foreign actor had attempted to alter “any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections,” including voter registration systems, individual ballots, vote tabulation systems or the reporting of results. The finding is a tacit rebuke of unfounded claims repeatedly made by Mr Trump and some of his allies that the election was stolen.

A separate report released on Wednesday AEDT by the Homeland Security and Justice departments said the US government had no evidence “that a foreign government or other actors compromised election infrastructure to manipulate election results”.

US intelligence agencies identified some successful compromises of state and local government computer networks before election day that they attributed to Russia, as well as a larger volume of unsuccessful attempts, the report said. Those attempts didn’t appear intended to alter actual vote counts, the report noted, adding that Russia, Iran and others prefer to amplify false or inflated claims about hacked voting systems to diminish public confidence in the election.

The 15-page intelligence assessment is the first official US government finding about foreign interference in the 2020 presidential campaign to be made public since votes were cast in November. It characterises China’s actions as less significant than earlier public assessments delivered during the Trump administration, which prompted Democrats and some officials to say Beijing’s influence activity was being politicised.

The Biden administration has pledged forceful responses to what it has described as a series of malign activities by Moscow, which beyond the 2016 and 2020 election meddling include the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and a hack of federal government systems. The report largely affirms previous assessments dating back to last summer about Russia’s and Iran’s actions and intentions. It doesn’t discuss domestic disinformation, which many U.S. security officials said grew into a greater concern than foreign threats in the final months of the 2020 election cycle and during the presidential transition.

Russia’s government, the report said, viewed Mr Biden’s election as disadvantageous to the nation’s interests relative to Mr Trump’s re-election. It reported that Russian officials frequently attacked Mr. Biden in Russian media, especially over his role in leading Ukraine policy during the Obama administration and his support for anti-Putin figures.

“Putin probably also considers President Biden more apt to echo the idea of American ‘exceptionalism,’ which he and other Kremlin leaders have often publicly criticised as problematic and dangerous,” the report read.

Russia’s efforts to influence the vote relied on proxies linked to Russian intelligence services, which promoted “influence narratives — including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden — to US media organisations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.”

The report said Mr Putin had purview over operations including the activities of Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian politician sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in September, and Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the US Senate Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer.

Mr Derkach tried to surface information about then-candidate Mr Biden’s purported involvement in his son Hunter’s business in Ukraine, and the information was pursued by Mr Trump’s close ally, Rudy Giuliani. Mr Derkach has previously rejected similar allegations.

Mr Kilimnik and others “took steps throughout the election cycle to damage U.S. ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump’s prospects” for re-election, the report said. Mr Kilimnik has denied ties with Moscow’s security services.

Democrats said the new intelligence report reaffirmed that Russia remains the top foreign threat seeking to undermine US democracy.

Beijing, meanwhile, sees a bipartisan U.S. consensus against China that leaves “no prospect” for a pro-China administration, and saw little to be gained by trying to sway the vote one way or another, the report found.

“Beijing probably judged that Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election significantly damaged Moscow’s position and relationship with the United States and may have worried that Washington would uncover a Chinese attempt to deploy similar measures,” it said.

One senior US intelligence official involved in preparing the report dissented from its conclusions that China made no effort to influence the 2020 presidential election.

Ayatollah Khamenei, the report said, probably authorised a “whole of government effort” that included spear-phishing strikes on government and campaign officials and a campaign to send threatening emails to Democratic voters that appeared falsely to be from the far-right Proud Boys group. The Iranian cyber campaign relied on inexpensive, scalable methods that didn’t require physical access to the US, the report found.

The Wall Street Journal