The Russian scheme to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election was a plot years in the making — an expensive effort that cost millions of dollars and employed as many as hundreds of people, the federal indictment unsealed Friday alleges.
The document lays out a breathtaking influence operation that sent Russian operatives to the U.S., sought American activists’ advice about targeting swing states, staged rallies on U.S. soil and wielded the United States’ homegrown social media platforms to worsen the country’s racial, religious and political divides.
And while the indictment doesn’t explicitly name Vladimir Putin as one of the conspirators, it meshes with U.S. intelligence agencies’ January 2017 conclusion that the Russian leader had “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” an effort that eventually “developed a clear preference” for the election of Donald Trump. The operators even made contact with “unwitting individuals in Trump’s campaign,” the indictment says.
These are several takeaways from the indictment secured by special counsel Robert Mueller:
1) The operation started as far back as 2014.
Prosecutors say the conspirators had been planning their efforts for years, started as early as 2014 to track and study social media pages focused on political and social issues.
In the spring of that year, the indictment says, an infamous Russian “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency launched a strategy seeking to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, intending to “spread distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”
Source : politico
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