On Wednesday evening, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe blamed Iran for emails that have been directed at thousands of Democrats in Florida. Those emails threaten voters with violence if they don’t change their registration to Republican and vote for Trump. Naturally, Ratcliffe said that Iran was trying to “damage” Trump.
In the same brief press appearance, Ratcliffe briefly mentioned Russia without giving any details of their operations in the 2020 elections. Now more information has become available, and it appears to be a much larger threat than spoofing emails from the Proud Boys. As The New York Times reports, intelligence officials say that Russia has already hacked into state and local systems connected to the election. Russia did this in 2016, but it’s not believed they were able to alter any votes or voting rolls. This time, that’s not so clear, as officials say they don’t know what Russia plans to do. However:
… they said its operations would be intended to help President Trump, potentially by exacerbating disputes around the results, especially if the race is too close to call.
What could Russia do? In 2016, Russian agents showed a keen understanding of how to exploit divisions between Americans. They created fake news stories that made white Americans afraid of violence by Blacks. They planted false news stories around religious issues ranging from Trump being endorsed by the Pope (he wasn’t) to Hillary Clinton being a secret Muslim extremist (she’s not). Anywhere there was a crack, Russia inserted a crowbar … and pushed.
For 2020, there are particular concerns that Russia may follow up on all the groundwork that Trump has laid to build suspicion around voting by mail. If Election Day ends without a clear and absolute winner, Russian agents may not need to actually alter votes. Instead, they could deface local websites, alter totals that were displayed on news pages, use social media to push rumors of massive fraud, issue releases of supposedly updated totals … in short do everything that would “sow chaos and doubts about the integrity of the results.”
Officials left no doubt about who Russia wants to benefit from all this: They’re doing it all for Trump. Chaos benefits the loser. If Trump was winning, there would be no reason to try and make people distrust the results.
And of course, this is only half of Russia’s interference in the United States election. The other half of their plan, as intelligence officials have made clear for months, is to smear Joe Biden by making false claims about his son and activities in Ukraine. Expect to hear more about that during the debate Thursday evening, when Trump will once again depend on the false stories spread by Russian agents to boost his campaign.