Russian interference in the 2020 United States elections was a matter of concern at the highest level of national security within the United States government, in addition to the computer and social media industries. In 2020, the RAND Corporation was one of the first to release research describing Russia's playbook for interfering in U.S. elections, developed machine-learning tools to detect the interference, and tested strategies to counter Russian interference. In February and August 2020, United States Intelligence Community (USIC) experts warned members of Congress that Russia was interfering in the 2020 presidential election in then-President Donald Trump's favor. USIC analysis released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Joe Biden "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration." The New York Times reported in May 2021 that federal investigators in Brooklyn began a criminal investigation late in the Trump administration into possible efforts by several current and former Ukrainian officials to spread unsubstantiated allegations about corruption by Joe Biden, including whether they had used Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani as a channel.
Reports of attempted interference
Overview In response to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, special counsel Robert Mueller conducted a two-year-long investigation. The resulting report concluded that Russia interfered in "sweeping and systematic fashion".Mueller Report , vol. I, p. 1: "The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" In his July 2019 congressional testimony, Mueller stated that the Russians continue to interfere in U.S. elections "as we sit here", and that "many more countries" have developed disinformation campaigns targeting U.S. elections, based partly on the Russian model.
Also in July 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the first volume of a bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, a report that included recommendations for securing the 2020 elections. The second volume of that report noted, based on social-media data from October 2018, that "Russian disinformation efforts may be focused on gathering information and data points in support of an active measures campaign targeted at the 2020 U.S. presidential election."
In a highly classified report, the Central Intelligence Agency stated: "We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia's influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. Vice President, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November." The existence of this report, published at the end of August 2020, was made public knowledge on September 22 in reports from The Washington Post and The New York Times.
U.S. officials have accused Russia, China and Iran of trying to influence the 2020 elections. Between January and late July 2017, Twitter identified and shut down over 7,000 phony accounts created by Iranian influence operations. According to Christopher A. Wray, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Russia is attempting to interfere with the 2020 United States elections. Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in July 2019, Wray stated, "We are very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020." Dan Coats, the former Director of National Intelligence, believes that Russia and China will both attempt to influence the elections. As of September 2020, intelligence officials point to Russia as the more "acute threat" to the election, saying that China has been expressing its preferences by public rhetoric rather than engaging in covert operations to denigrate a candidate or otherwise interfere in the election itself. Wray testified to the House Committee on Homeland Security on September 17, 2020, that Russian efforts to damage the Biden campaign were "very active".
According to United States intelligence officials interviewed by The New York Times, Russian "operations would be intended to help President Trump, potentially by exacerbating disputes around the results, especially if the race is too close to call." The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have stated that Russian cyberattacks have targeted "U.S. state, local, territorial, and tribal government networks, as well as aviation networks".
Social-media disinformation and voting infrastructure Various disinformation campaigns on social media have targeted the Democratic Party candidates running in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. This has prompted considerable concern regarding the ability of social media companies to cope with disinformation and manipulation. By August 2019, Facebook and Twitter had banned advertisements that use misinformation to attempt the suppression of voter turnout.
Microsoft developed an open source software called ElectionGuard to help safeguard the 2020 elections. In mid-July 2019, Microsoft announced that it had, over the prior year, "notified nearly 10,000 customers they've been targeted or compromised by nation-state attacks". Based on attacks that had targeted political organizations, and on experience from 2016 and 2018, Microsoft anticipated "attacks targeting U.S. election systems, political campaigns or NGOs that work closely with campaigns". Of the "nation-state attacks" that had originated from Russia, Microsoft claimed that they followed the "same pattern of engagement" as Russian operations in 2016 and 2018. On September 20, 2019, Microsoft announced that it would provide free security updates for Windows 7, which reached its end-of-life on January 14, 2020, on federally-certified voting machines through the 2020 United States elections. On October 4, 2019, Microsoft announced that "Phosphorus", a group of hackers linked to the Iranian government, had attempted to compromise e-mail accounts belonging to journalists, prominent Iranian expatriates, U.S. government officials and the campaign of a U.S. presidential candidate. While Microsoft did not disclose which campaign had been the target of the cyber attack, unnamed sources informed Reuters that it had been that of Donald Trump.
On October 21, 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company has detected a "highly sophisticated" set of campaigns to interfere with the 2020 elections. These campaigns originated from Russia and from Iran. Fake accounts based in Russia posed as Americans of varied political backgrounds and worked to undermine the campaign of Joe Biden, aiming to sow discontent with Biden from both the left and the right.
A September 2019 report from The Washington Post demonstrated that due to bad default passwords and weak encryption, hackers with physical access can easily get into voting machines designed for use in the 2020 United States elections, and remote hacking was possible if the machines were accidentally misconfigured.
On February 21, 2020, The Washington Post reported that, according to unnamed US officials, Russia was interfering in the Democratic primary in an effort to support the nomination of Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders issued a statement after the news report, saying in part, "I don't care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president. My message to Putin is clear: stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do." Sanders acknowledged that his campaign was briefed about Russia's alleged efforts about a month prior. Sanders suggested that Russians were impersonating people claiming to be his supporters online in order to create an atmosphere of toxicity and give "Bernie Bros" a bad reputation, a suggestion that Twitter rejected. According to Laura Rosenberger, "Russian attempts to sow discord in the Democratic primary would be consistent with its strategy of undermining Americans' faith in democratic institutions and processes."
In March 2020, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Brennan Center for Justice published a report indicating that Russia-linked social media accounts have been spreading Instagram posts calculated to sow division among American voters. According to the report, Russian operatives were increasingly impersonating real political candidates and groups rather than creating fictional groups. According to Twitter's head of site integrity, Russian agents also attempted in 2018 to create the impression of more election interference than is actually happening to undermine confidence in the process. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times reported that according to American intelligence officials Russian operatives have been stoking via private Facebook groups anger among African Americans, emphasizing allegations of police brutality in the United States, highlighting racism in the United States against African Americans, and promoting and pressuring hate groups, including white and black extremist groups, in order to create strife within American society, though American intelligence officials provided few details about the alleged operations. A CNN investigation found that Russian efforts had partly been outsourced to troll farms in Ghana and Nigeria. In May 2020, Twitter suspended 44 accounts that exhibited behavior plausibly, but not definitively, indicative of Russian election interference tactics, including association with a Ghana troll farm.
Government officials and American corporate security officers braced for a repeat of 2016's election infrastructure hacking and similar 21st-century attacks and conducted what were characterized as pre-emptive counter-strikes on botnet infrastructure which might be used in a large-scale coordination of hacking. Some incidents earlier in the year appeared to foreshadow such possibilities. Following his dismissal, in a December 2020 interview, Chris Krebs, the Trump administration's director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), described monitoring Election Day from CISA's joint command center along with representatives from the military's United States Cyber Command, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Secret Service (USSS), the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), representatives of vendors of voting machine equipment, and representatives of state and local governments, as well as his agency's analysis preceding and subsequent to that day, saying,Responding to spurious claims of foreign outsourcing of vote counting as a rationale behind litigation attempting to stop official vote counting in some areas, Krebs also affirmed that, "All votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America."
However, acts of foreign interference did include Russian state-directed application of computational propaganda approaches, more conventional state-sponsored Internet propaganda, smaller-scale disinformation efforts, "information laundering" and "trading up the chain" propaganda tactics employing some government officials, Trump affiliates, and U.S. media outlets, as described below.
Briefings to Congress