How Russia Openly Escalated Its Election Interference Efforts

In the final days before Tuesday’s vote, Russia abandoned any pretense that it was not trying to interfere in the American presidential election.

The Kremlin’s information warriors not only produced a late wave of fabricated videos that targeted the electoral process and the Democratic presidential ticket but also no longer bothered to hide their role in producing them.

A fabricated interview claiming election fraud in Arizona was conducted by the director of a Kremlin think tank, Mira Terada, who returned to Russia in 2021 after serving a prison sentence in the United States for money laundering. Another video on Rumble, the video-sharing platform, targeted the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and featured John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff from Florida who had previously denied working for the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus.

What impact Russia’s information campaign had on the outcome of this year’s race, if any, remains uncertain. There is no doubt, though, that it reflected an increasingly brazen effort by the Kremlin, one that has left the American government with little to do to except to rebut the falsehoods as they gain popularity. More than one official compared it to the arcade game Whac-a-Mole.

“That’s the thing — it feels so impotent,” said David Salvo, a former State Department official who is now managing the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “I mean, all we can do at the moment really is call it out.”

This year’s election underlined how much foreign interference — and disinformation generally — has become baked into American politics. Increasingly unfettered social media platforms like X and Telegram, along with the country’s constitutional protections of free speech, have opened the door for foreign influence, even if American law prohibits it.

“The flood of disinformation from Russian troll farms is just seemingly part of the overarching information environment,” said Chris Krebs, who served as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during President-elect Donald J. Trump’s first term, only to be fired when he called the last election fairly run.

For Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, the campaign was a risk, but clearly one he was willing to take. He has long brushed aside accusations of interference or interest in the outcome of American presidential politics — even joking at one point that he favored Vice President Kamala Harris. While much of Russia’s efforts presumably remain in the shadows, the ones made public as the campaign reached a climax left no plausible or even implausible deniability of Russia’s role.

Mr. Dougan, who over the last year created dozens of websites posing as American news outlets and filled them with articles generated by artificial intelligence, crowed as the results began to tilt toward Mr. Trump.

“Things are looking good,” he wrote in grievance-filled text message to a New York Times reporter on Wednesday morning, Moscow time, echoing themes that many Russians and Republicans shared about American foreign and social policies. “Goodbye warmongers.”

The brazenness, compared with 2016 or 2020, reflects the stakes Mr. Putin faces, two and a half years after ordering a full invasion of Ukraine. American and NATO support for Ukraine has helped thwart Russia’s war aims, at great cost in lives and materiel, and Mr. Trump’s return offers the best hope for undercutting it.

“In 2016, there wasn’t a grand strategic purpose to Russia’s disinformation campaign,” said Alex Stamos, who led Facebook’s efforts against it during that election and now works for SentinelOne, a cybersecurity company. “Now there is.”

It’s not just Russia. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the F.B.I. repeatedly warned that Iran, China and even, to a lesser extent, Cuba were also trying to sway Americans or at least to sow chaos.

Those countries took different positions — Iran, for example, opposed Mr. Trump — but all the activity contributed to the political cacophony online.

Iran hacked and leaked the emails of political advisers to Mr. Trump in an echo of the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, according to intelligence and law enforcement officials, and created fake news sites catering to specific demographic blocs, including Arab Americans in Michigan. China unleashed bots online to discredit Republican candidates for the House and Senate in Alabama, Tennessee and Texas. (All three won anyway.)

Russia’s influence efforts, though, were the most intense and persistent. They involved at least two separate information campaigns, as well as a covert effort organized by the state television network RT and the domestic successor of the K.G.B. That push funneled money — at least $10 million — to prominent American political influencers, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, according to an affidavit filed by the Justice Department. The influencers said they did not know the source of the money was Russia.

“I see this stuff as brazen, but it still works,” Mr. Stamos, the former Facebook official, said. “If they throw enough stuff at the world, it will be picked up and amplified.”

Some of the fake videos found little traction, but one fabrication posted on X purporting to show Haitian immigrants voting in Georgia gained hundreds of thousands of views.

As the election approached, the Russian efforts targeted not only Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, but also the electoral process itself. Those included a fabricated video purporting to show ballots being destroyed in Bucks County, Pa., and another showing a “whistle-blower” being interviewed by Ms. Terada, the Russian who leads the think tank in Moscow, the Foundation to Battle Injustice.

Ms. Terada and Mr. Dougan have worked closely together as part of an information effort that Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center and other researchers have called Storm 1516, as detailed in a new report published by the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University. Mr. Dougan has created dozens of websites that act as American news outlets and feature A.I.-generated articles and many of the videos linked to the effort.

Although Mr. Dougan has repeatedly denied any link to those sites, he appeared in a podcast on Rumble, the video streaming platform, and staged an interview with someone claiming to be a former student who was accusing Mr. Walz of sexual assault. It was one of at least three similar false accusations, which particularly disturbed officials in Washington as they began to gain traction online.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and law enforcement matters, said they had to make difficult judgment calls about which videos to highlight and how to attribute them to Russian actors. Even as the officials called the videos out, new ones appeared. They reached a crescendo on Election Day.

The Central Intelligence Agency refuted a video that claimed the agency had “identified deceased Americans allegedly voting.” Officials subsequently attributed the video to Russia, and industry experts said it was the work of the same group that undertook a second information campaign that had spread disinformation about the Olympic Games in Paris this summer.

The F.B.I., too, issued a statement about two more fabricated videos. One falsely claimed the bureau had issued a terrorist threat alert encouraging people to vote “remotely.” A second showed a fake bureau statement alleging that prison officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona were colluding with the Democrats to rig voting by inmates.

While much of Russia’s actions in the final days of the campaign appeared aimed at making a case that a close election could be stolen by the Democrats, their larger campaign appeared aimed at motivating people who could be supporters of Mr. Trump to become more engaged in politics.

The torrent of foreign disinformation is unlikely to stop — even with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. Russia will almost certainly continue to try to undermine support in the United States for the war in Ukraine, as it has sought to undermine governments across Europe. Though social media platforms have made some effort to take down disinformation — X removed Ms. Terada’s post, for example — many of them have pulled back their investments in content moderation in recent years.

The F.B.I. and intelligence agencies are, at least for now, continuing to investigate the efforts, including whether Russia was behind a series of bomb threats at polling stations. The Department of Justice has already announced charges against a prominent commentator and former adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, Dimitri K. Simes, for violating economic sanctions imposed because of Russia’s propaganda efforts surrounding the war.

Officials also wrestled with what to do with Mr. Dougan, who is already wanted on felony charges of extortion and wiretapping in Florida. The officials said they had concluded that the government could not take action against his efforts because he was an American citizen.

Mr. Dougan did experience a setback last week. Many of the websites he had registered with NameCheap, the American domain provider, went down, according to government officials, who did not discuss the reasons and said it was a decision made by a private company. NameCheap’s chief executive, Richard Kirkendall, did not respond to questions, though he did share a post on X on Wednesday morning criticizing the media.

On the eve of the election, Mr. Dougan once again denied any connection to the sites when asked by text message about their sudden disappearance. “Not my sites,” he wrote. “But that’s okay. The damage is done. Whoever had those sites accomplished what they wanted to do.”