Russian To Judgment, Con't

With all the impeachment news, the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee's final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election came out this week was missed by most folks, and it's brutal.

A bipartisan panel of U.S. senators Tuesday called for sweeping action by Congress, the White House and Silicon Valley to ensure social media sites aren’t used to interfere in the coming presidential election, delivering a sobering assessment about the weaknesses that Russian operatives exploited in the 2016 campaign.  

The Senate Intelligence Committee, a Republican-led panel that has been investigating foreign electoral interference for more than 2½ years, said in blunt language that Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton while bolstering Republican Donald Trump — and made clear that fresh rounds of interference are likely ahead of the 2020 vote.  

“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee’s chairman. “Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in the machinery of government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans.”

Though the 85-page report itself had extensive redactions, in the visible sections, lawmakers urged their peers in Congress to act, including through the potential adoption of new regulations that would the disclosure of ad buyers more transparent. The report also called on the White House and the executive branch to adopt a more forceful, public role, warning Americans about the ways in which dangerous misinformation can spread while creating new teams within the U.S. government to monitor for threats and share intelligence with industry.

The recommendations call for Silicon Valley to more extensively share intelligence among companies, in recognition of the shortage of such sharing in 2016 and also the ways that disinformation from Russia and other countries spreads across numerous platforms — with posts linking back and forth in a tangle of connections.

“The Committee found that Russia’s targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated and ongoing information warfare campaign,” the report says. The Russian effort was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood... an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States."

The report found that the bulk of social media efforts by Russians to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump were targeted at conservative voters to get them angry, but again the efforts were also targeted at African-American voters, to either get us to vote third-party or to not vote at all.

It's information we've been told before, and again the Trump regime is ignoring it, choosing instead to blame the Obama administration for "doing nothing to stop the Russians" when of course Mitch McConnell made it clear that preventing the Russians from helping Trump would be viewed as war. He won't allow a vote on any of these recommendations, either.

Again, we're already seeing efforts by Russia, Iran, and other foreign countries to disrupt our elections, and the Trump regime knows allowing them to continue is the best shot they have of winning in 2020.