In four weeks, the public will vote to select our next president, among many other elected officials. Russia’s various intelligence services are working overtime to influence our election, hardly for the first time. Over the past decade, it has become dogma among Democrats that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to boost Republicans while returning former President Donald Trump to the Oval Office.
But is this true, or is the opposite the case? What does the evidence tell us about what the Kremlin wants from our election?
Although the former president constantly derides the “Russia hoax,” there is no serious debate about the fact that the Kremlin influenced Trump’s election in 2016. The best unclassified analysis of what Russian intelligence did in 2016 to shape American politics comes from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent three years investigating the matter.
Its massive bipartisan report establishes that the Kremlin was up to no good: “The Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” in which WikiLeaks played a prominent role. Moreover, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the current SSCI chairman, explained, while that investigation uncovered no evidence that Trump colluded with Moscow in 2016, “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”
How much that meddling affected the outcome is another question. Although many liberals passionately believe that Trump was somehow placed in the White House by Russian intelligence (per the online “Resistance” mantra: “He was installed to destroy us”), the evidence for that assessment is dubious. Even that Senate deep-dive investigation failed to uncover anything tangible about how Kremlin espionage games boosted Trump at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s expense. Most veteran counterspies assess that Putin’s intention in 2016 was harming Clinton — whom he detests for her backing of 2011 anti-regime protests in Moscow, which the Kremlin strongman viewed as an attempted U.S. “color revolution” in Russia — more than helping Trump. Indeed, Moscow seems to have been shocked that Trump won the election, as was Trump himself, who apparently had no victory speech ready.
The truth about 2016 isn’t palatable to MAGA fans, who have been told by Trump for years that the “Russia hoax” was a fanciful liberal plot against him. However, any full account of Russian election interference is no more pleasant for Democrats. For instance, the Steele dossier, which salaciously smeared Trump and became a top Democratic talking point for years, was itself a Russian disinformation operation, as bona fide experts explained even in 2017. Measured against absurd Democratic claims, the Trump collusion narrative was a hoax. Then add the painful reality that the only office in the whole U.S. government tasked with debunking Russian disinformation was shuttered in late 2015, one year before the election, on the orders of Barack Obama’s White House, for reasons that have never been explained.
Too many on the Left also seem to think that labeling Republicans and Trump as base Russian stooges is somehow accurate and also helpful toward building unity against Russia’s threat. Instead, this derisive arrogance only plays to Russia’s interest in dividing Americans. By asserting that the U.S. election process has been deeply corrupted by Russian interference, Democrats have done grave damage to our democracy. They have made themselves useful idiot servants of Putin’s campaign to weaken America.
We should note that much has changed since 2016.
Espionage-driven political influence is a more complex game now, with China and Iran seeking to shape our election as well as Russia. President Joe Biden’s intelligence community recently stated that “China probably does not plan to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,” without explaining how our spies came to that important conclusion. Nevertheless, the report explained, “The IC is also aware that PRC influence actors are using social media to sow divisions in the United States and portray democracies as chaotic.” The People’s Republic of China is also targeting downballot races across the country.
Given the extent of Chinese intelligence targeting of the Democrats, particularly of party figures from California, plus the strange and unexplained relationship between Beijing and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), our intelligence leadership seems to be following the Democratic political line over impartial analysis. The Biden-Harris intelligence community has done this many times before.
Then there’s Iran, which the intelligence community report explains “is continuing efforts to fuel distrust in U.S. political institutions and increase social discord. … The IC has observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive would increase tensions with the United States.” That’s an oblique way of saying that Iran’s mullahs want Harris to win. This should be no surprise given how many friends of Tehran have burrowed their way into the upper echelons of the Biden-Harris administration. To say nothing of the fact that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s terrorist arm, has plotted to assassinate Trump, as well as several of his senior officials. The recent Justice Department indictment of three Guard operatives who hacked Trump campaign emails, which then mysteriously were shopped to several press outlets, reveals Tehran’s hand in this election.
The intelligence community continues to portray Russia as the predominant foreign threat to our election: “Moscow continues to use a broad stable of influence actors, and … these actors are seeking to back a presidential candidate in addition to influencing congressional electoral outcomes, undermine public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbate sociopolitical divisions.” There can be little doubt that the Kremlin prefers a Trump presidency in 2025 over a Harris one.
Biden-Harris support for Ukraine, which appears to be indefinite, is sufficient reason for Russia to want Republicans in power, as Moscow faces an attritional struggle against its neighbor with no end in sight. Trump’s promise to find a negotiated settlement of that war — even before his inauguration, he claims — isn’t taken seriously in Moscow. Putin and his retinue repeatedly watched the Trump White House make grandiose promises to repair relations with Russia, only to see a diffident diplomatic follow-up. In many ways, Trump proved harsher toward Moscow on policy than Obama was — and Putin knows this.
But Russia would probably welcome another Trump presidency because it would at least offer hope for peace talks, while Harris remains publicly committed to unwavering support of Ukraine and Kyiv’s war aims. Her recent comment that discussions of surrendering Ukrainian land to Russia, which is the precondition to any successful peace talks, “are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender,” strongly implies that Harris White House policies toward Russia-Ukraine would be identical to Biden’s.
Nevertheless, Putin is hedging his bets, as the cagey old Chekist always does. If Putin is desperate to ensure a Trump victory, why did he deliver Biden-Harris an easy political win at the beginning of August with a historic spy swap between Washington and Moscow? For anyone versed in real-world counterintelligence and its interaction with diplomacy, that spy swap looks like a payback from Moscow, a gift to the Democrats in an election year, in exchange for Biden’s Justice Department dropping charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Russia’s favorite Western propaganda mouthpiece, in late June. Putin understands that Biden-Harris are willing to get past 2016, no matter what Democrats tell their voters for partisan effect.
Moscow will try to shape our election during its last month in the same fashion it has done for years. That means lies, some of them absurd, authored by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, then fenced through myriad propaganda outlets from the unconcealed (such as RT, formerly Russia Today) to the somewhat masked (such as fake-news English-language websites), all designed to portray American politics in the worst possible light. To boost such malignant efforts, Russia’s Federal Security Service will fence disinformation through Americans who are willing to assist Moscow, usually for cash. All the while, Kremlin hackers, often from Russian military intelligence, will attempt to steal sensitive political secrets to tamper with American public opinion, as they did in 2016 and after, and as GRU hackers are continuing to do to most NATO countries.
What the SVR, FSB, and GRU are trying to do, illicitly influencing American politics to Moscow’s liking, is simply the “new normal,” something Western countries must accept is part of international political life now. Moscow isn’t going to stop doing any of this, at least not so long as Putin rules the Kremlin. Such espionage-influence operations are cheap, particularly when compared with the cost of a new nuclear submarine or a week’s worth of the munitions that Russia expends every week of its costly Ukraine war.
Such spy games may not be especially effective at changing Western politics, yet they please Putin and his retinue, who hate the West and blame it for most of Russia’s present ills. That deep-seated resentment, however strange and nonsensical it may appear to Westerners, is shared by many average Russians.
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There’s no reason, therefore, for the Kremlin to cease and desist. Our ability to deter Moscow in this SpyWar is frankly limited. Americans need to stop panicking about Kremlin interference in our elections, particularly for partisan effect, and start counteracting its effects.
More than anything, the Putin regime seeks to poison our politics by making Americans hate each other. That weakens our country and its resolve to stand up to global menaces like Putin. This is especially easy to accomplish in our era of virulent negative partisanship when many Democrats and Republicans seem to hate the other party more than they love the United States. If we keep doing that, Putin will keep winning.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.