Russian active measures in the 2016 US presidential election: 'useful idiots' and intelligence agencies

The 2016 US presidential election saw a two-pronged Russian interference operation. Russia’s intelligence agencies sought to compromise both campaigns – Trump’s through highly publicized direct engagement, Clinton’s through leaking compromising information. In parallel, a non-state outfit, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), sought to exacerbate conflict and strife through a destabilizing social media campaign. The authors’ earlier findings indicate the IRA’s actual effect on the election outcomes was minimal. In fact, they argue, the campaign aimed to drive disaffection and diminish trust in the US electoral system overall, rather than help Trump win. Nonetheless, the perceived effectiveness of Russia’s interference allowed the Kremlin – through deft media engagement – to exploit the shock result to exaggerate the apparent effect of its intervention and delegitimize Trump’s victory. Moscow succeeded in degrading Washington’s strategic coherence by driving a wedge between the White House and US intelligence community. Russia’s emerging division of labor between government and private agencies is instructive. The complex and sensitive task of hacking high-value targets was executed by government agencies. The technically simple yet labor-intensive online campaign was outsourced to the IRA. This gave the Kremlin a measure of deniability and allowed it to quickly recruit and deploy extra resources for the campaign.