Mueller Indictment Of Russian Operatives Details Playbook Of Information Warfare

Outside a Trump campaign rally in West Palm Beach, Fla., there was a cage holding a person dressed up like Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform. In the outrageous state of the 2016 campaign, it wasn't altogether shocking to see someone at a Trump event staging the visual stunt, after the "lock her up!" chants that punctuated Trump rallies.

But it's now known that this moment was set up by Russians.

That incident was among the vivid details alleged in an indictment released by special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday, which lays out a sophisticated playbook for "information warfare" against the American political system.

Russians working for an organization called the Internet Research Agency created fake online personas and operated social media accounts in order to create "political intensity" throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, according to the indictment.

There were Facebook groups and events inciting both the left and the right; fake identities to pay real people involved with rallies; and stolen American identities used to facilitate payments for social media advertisements.

"They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump," the indictment reads.

The effort was sophisticated and well-funded: with an overall monthly budget that by September 2016 reached over $1.25 million, and hundreds of employees, the IRA had a graphics department, a data analysis department, a search-engine optimization department, an IT department and a finance department — in some ways mirroring how a real news organization might organize itself.

The IRA's initiative targeting the United States, nicknamed the "translator project," began in 2014 as its staff studied American online culture, with an emphasis on understanding social and political issues.

The IRA may have operated in many ways like a faux news organization but its products were anything but real: the social media interference arm included, by July 2016, more than 80 employees, including those dubbed internally as "specialists" tasked with creating and operating fake online personas and posting content to online social platforms.

The indictment alleges the Russians had help: Americans, unaware they were talking to Russian operatives, gave advice that had an effect on the Russian effort.

While speaking online with an American affiliated with a Texas-based grassroots organization, IRA operatives were told that they should focus on "purple states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida." After the exchange, the Russian defendants frequently referred to targeting "purple states" in their interference efforts, the indictment alleges.

By February 2016, the "translator project" was told to focus primarily on affecting American politics. According to the indictment, the "specialists" were told through an internal memo that they should focus on political content: "use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them)."

The IRA created hundreds of social media accounts in an attempt to develop fictitious public opinion leaders in the United States, and used technical tools to pretend their Internet traffic originated inside the United States. The specialists even were divided into day and night shifts to mimic American time zones, and given a list of American holidays so that they could post appropriate content on those days, the indictment alleges.

The fabricated online communities created by the IRA spanned the political spectrum. Groups included names such as "Secured Borders," "Blacktivist," "United Muslims of America" and "Army of Jesus" — an effort that culminated in the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of followers. One of the IRA's Twitter accounts, where the Russian operatives pretended to be the Tennessee GOP, gained more than 100,000 followers, the indictment says.