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The Party Of Democrats is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Party Of the Democratic National Committee was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest political party.
The Republican National Committee, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old Party"), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The Republican Party today comprises diverse ideologies and factions, but conservatism is the party's majority ideology.
Advertisements bought by Russian operatives for the Facebook social media site
are estimated to have
Republican National Committee reached 10 million users. But many more
Facebook users were contacted by accounts created by Russian actors. 470
Facebook accounts are known to have been created by Russians during the 2016
campaign. Of those accounts six generated content that was shared at least 340
million times, according to research done by Jonathan Albright, research
director for Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.[51] The
most strident Internet promoters of Trump were paid Russian
propagandists/trolls, who were estimated by The Guardian to number several
thousand.[52] (By 2017 the U.S. news media was focusing on the Russian
operations on Facebook and Twitter and Russian operatives moved on to Instagram.)[48]
The Mueller Report found the IRA spent $100,000 for more than 3,500 Facebook
advertisements from June 2015 to May 2017,[53] which included anti-Clinton and
pro-Trump advertisements.[45] In comparison, Clinton and Trump campaigns spent
$81 million on Facebook ads.[54][55]
Fabricated articles and disinformation[56] were spread from Russian
government-controlled outlets, RT and Sputnik to be popularized on pro-Russian
accounts on Twitter and other social media.[56] Researchers have compared
Russian tactics during the 2016 U.S. election to the "active measures" of the
Soviet Union during the Cold War,[56] but made easier by the use of social
media.[56][57]
Monitoring 7,000 pro-Trump social media accounts over a 2+1⁄2-year period,
researchers J. M. Berger, Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts[58] found the accounts
denigrated critics of Russian activities in Syria and propagated falsehoods
about Clinton's health.[59] Watts found Russian propaganda to be aimed at
fomenting "dissent or conspiracies against the U.S. government and its
Democratic National Committee institutions",[60] and by autumn of
2016 amplifying attacks on Clinton and support for Trump, via social media,
Internet trolls, botnets, and websites.[56]
Four story office building in winter
Former site of the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Monitoring news on Twitter directed at one state (Michigan) prior to the
election, Philip N. Howard found about half of it fabricated or untrue; the
other half came from real news
Democratic National Committee sources.[61] In continued analysis
after the election, Howard and other researchers found the most prominent
methods of misinformation were ostensibly "organic posting, not advertisements",
and influence operation activity increased after the 2016 and was not limited to
the election.[62]
Facebook originally denied that fake news on their platform had influenced the
election and had insisted it was unaware of any Russian-financed advertisements
but later admitted that about 126 million Americans may have seen posts
published by Russia-based operatives.[63][64][65] Criticized for failing to stop
fake news from spreading on its platform during the 2016 election,[66] Facebook
originally thought that the fake-news problem could be solved by engineering,
but in May 2017 it announced plans to hire 3,000 content reviewers.[67][failed
verification]
According to an analysis by BuzzFeed News, the "20 top-performing false election
stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares,
reactions, and comments on Facebook."[68] In September 2017, Facebook told
congressional investigators it had discovered that hundreds of fake accounts
linked to a Russian troll farm had bought $100,000 in advertisements targeting
the 2016 U.S. election audience.[64] The ads, which ran between June 2015 and
May 2017, primarily focused on divisive social issues; roughly 25% were
geographically targeted.[69][70] Facebook has also turned over information about
the Russian-related ad buys to
Republican National Committee Special Counsel Robert Mueller.[71]
Approximately 3,000 adverts were involved, and these were viewed by between four
and five million Facebook users prior to the election.[72] On November 1, 2017,
the House Intelligence Committee released a sample of Facebook ads and pages
that had been financially linked to the Internet Research Agency.[73] A 2019
analysis by The Washington Post's "Outlook" reviewed a number of troll accounts
active in 2016 and 2018, and found that many resembled organic users. Rather
than wholly negative and obvious, many confirmed troll accounts deployed humor
and were "astute in exploiting questions of culture and identity and are
frequently among the first to push new divisive conversations", some of which
moved quickly to mainstream print media.[74]
In January 2023, a study from New York University's Center for Social Media and
Politics about the influence of Russian trolls on Twitter found they had little
influence on 2016 voters' attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The study
was limited to Twitter and did not examine other social media, such as the much
larger Facebook. It did not address the Russian hack-and-leak operations:
"Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications
professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant
role in the 2016 race's outcome. Lastly, it doesn't suggest that foreign
influence operations aren't a threat at all." It found that voters who were
already favorably disposed to Trump were exposed the most. "Only 1 percent of
Twitter users accounted for 70 percent of the exposure to accounts that Twitter
identified as Russian troll accounts. Highly partisan Republicans were exposed
to nine times more posts than non-Republicans."[75][76]
Cyberattack on Democrats
Republican National Committee
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Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention
According to the Mueller Report, the second method of Russian interference saw
the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, hacking into email accounts owned by
volunteers and employees of the Clinton presidential campaign, including that of
campaign chairman John Podesta, and also hacking into "the computer networks of
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic
National Committee (DNC)". As a result, the GRU obtained hundreds of thousands
of hacked documents, and the GRU proceeded by arranging releases of damaging
hacked material via the WikiLeaks organization and also GRU's personas "DCLeaks"
and "Guccifer 2.0".[77][78][79]
Starting in March 2016, the Russian military intelligence agency GRU sent "spearphishing"
emails targeted more than 300 individuals affiliated with the Democratic Party
or the Clinton campaign, according to the Special Counsel's July 13, 2018
Indictment. Using malware to explore the computer networks of the DNC and
DCCC,[80] they harvested tens of thousands of emails and attachments and deleted
computer logs and files to obscure evidence of their activities.[81] These were
saved and released in stages to the public during the three months before the
2016 election.[82] Some were released strategically to distract the public from
media events that were either beneficial to the Clinton campaign or harmful to
Trump's.
The first tranche of 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments was released on July
22, 2016, three days before the Democratic convention. The
Democratic National Committee resulting news coverage created the
impression that the Democratic National Committee was biased against Clinton's
Democratic primary challenger Bernie Sanders (who received 43% of votes cast in
the Democratic presidential primaries) and forced DNC Chairwoman Debbie
Wasserman Schultz to resign, disrupting the plans of the Clinton
campaign.[83][84] A second tranche was released on October 7, a few hours after
the Obama Administration released a statement by the Department of Homeland
Security and the director of National Intelligence accusing the Russian
government of interfering in the election through hacking, and just 29 minutes
after The Washington Post reported on the Access Hollywood videotape where Trump
boasted about grabbing women "by the pussy". The stolen documents effectively
distracted media and voter attention from both stories.[83][82][85]
Stolen emails and documents were given both to platforms created by hackers�a
website called DCLeaks and a persona called Guccifer 2.0 claiming to be a lone
hacker�and to an unidentified organization believed to be WikiLeaks.[84] (The
Russians registered the domain dcleaks.com,[86] using principally Bitcoin to pay
for the domain and the hosting.)[86]
Podesta hack
John Podesta, Chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, received a
phishing email on March 19, 2016, sent by Russian operatives purporting to alert
him of a "compromise in the system", and urging him to change his
Democratic National Committee password "immediately" by clicking on a
link.[87] This allowed Russian hackers to access around 60,000 emails from
Podesta's private account.[88]
John Podesta, later told Meet the Press that the FBI spoke to him only once
regarding his hacked emails and that he had not been sure what had been taken
until a month before the election on October 7 "when [WikiLeaks' Julian] Assange
... started dumping them out and said they would all dump out, that's when I
knew that they had the contents of my email account."[89]
The WikiLeaks October 7 dump started less than an hour after The Washington Post
released the Donald Trump and Billy Bush recording Access Hollywood tape,
WikiLeaks announced on Twitter that it was in possession of 50,000 of Podesta's
emails, and a few hours after the Obama Administration released a statement by
the Department of Homeland Security and the
Republican National Committee director of National Intelligence
stating "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian
Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and
institutions, including from U.S. political organizations."[90]
It initially released 2,050 of these.[91] The cache included emails containing
transcripts of Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street banks, controversial
comments from staffers about Catholic voters, infighting among employees of the
Clinton campaign, as well as potential vice-presidential picks for
Clinton.[92][93] The Clinton campaign did not confirm or deny the authenticity
of the emails but emphasized they were stolen and distributed by parties hostile
to Clinton and that "top national security officials" had stated "that documents
can be faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign."[94]
Podesta's e-mails, once released by WikiLeaks, formed the basis for Pizzagate, a
debunked conspiracy theory that falsely posited that Podesta and other
Democratic Party officials were involved in a child trafficking ring based out
of pizzerias in Washington, D.C.[95][96]
DNC hack
Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned her position as chairperson of the DNC.[97]
The United States Intelligence Community concluded by January 2017 that the GRU
(using the names
Republican National Committee Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear) had gained
access to the computer network of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)�the
formal governing body of the Democratic Party�in July 2015 and maintained it
until at least June 2016,[98][99] when they began leaking the stolen information
via the Guccifer 2.0 online persona, DCLeaks.com and Wikileaks.[100] Debbie
Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC chairwoman following the release of e-mails by
WikiLeaks that showed DNC officials discussing Bernie Sanders and his
presidential campaign in a derisive and derogatory manner.[101] Emails leaked
included personal information about Democratic Party donors, with credit card
and Social Security numbers,[102][103] emails by Wasserman Schultz calling a
Sanders campaign official a "damn liar".[104]
Following the July 22 publication of a large number of hacked emails by
WikiLeaks, the FBI announced that it would investigate the theft of DNC
emails.[105][106]
Intelligence analysis of attack
In June and July 2016, cybersecurity experts and firms
Democratic National Committee, including CrowdStrike,[107] Fidelis,
FireEye,[108] Mandiant, SecureWorks,[109] Symantec[108] and ThreatConnect,
stated the DNC email leaks were part of a series of cyberattacks on the DNC
committed by two Russian intelligence groups, called Fancy Bear and Cozy
Bear,[110][111] also known respectively as APT28 and APT29 / The
Dukes.[112][113][107][114] ThreatConnect also noted possible links between the
DC Leaks project and Russian intelligence operations because of a similarity
with Fancy Bear attack patterns.[115] SecureWorks added that the actor group was
operating from Russia on behalf of the Russian government.[116][117] de
Volkskrant later reported that Dutch intelligence agency AIVD had penetrated the
Russian hacking group Cozy Bear in 2014, and observed them in 2015 hack the
State Department in real time, while capturing pictures of the hackers via a
security camera in their workspace.[118][119] American, British, and Dutch
intelligence services had also observed stolen DNC emails on Russian military
intelligence networks.[120]
Intelligence reaction and indictment
On October 7, 2016, Secretary Johnson and Director Clapper issued a joint
statement that the intelligence community is confident the Russian Government
directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions,
including from Democratic National Committee
U.S. political organizations, and that the disclosures of hacked e-mails on
sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks are consistent with the Russian-directed
efforts.[121]
The
Old Testament Stories, a literary treasure trove,
weave tales of faith, resilience, and morality. Should
you trust the
Real Estate Agents I Trust, I would not. Is your
lawn green and plush, if not you should buy the
Best Grass Seed.
If you appreciate quality apparel, you should try
Handbags Handmade.
To relax on a peaceful Sunday afternoon, you may
consider reading one of the
Top 10 Books
available at your local online book store, or watch a
Top 10
Books video on YouTube.
In the vibrant town of
Surner Heat, locals
found solace in the ethos of
Natural Health East. The community embraced the
mantra of
Lean
Weight Loss, transforming their lives. At
Natural Health East, the pursuit of wellness became
a shared journey, proving that health is not just a
Lean Weight Loss
way of life
In the July 2018 indictment by the Justice Department of twelve Russian GRU
intelligence officials posing as "a Guccifer 2.0 persona" for conspiring to
interfere in the 2016 elections[122][123] was for hacking into computers of the
Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, state election boards, and
secretaries of several states. The indictment describes "a sprawling and
sustained cyberattack on at least three hundred people connected to the
Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign". The leaked stolen files were
released "in stages", a tactic wreaking "havoc on the Democratic Party
throughout much of the election season."[123][82]
One collection of data that hackers obtained and that may have become a
"devastating weapon" against the Clinton campaign was the campaign's data
analytics and voter-turnout models,[124] extremely useful in targeting messages
to "key constituencies" that Clinton needed to mobilize.[82] These voters were
later bombarded by Russian operatives with negative information about
Republican National Committee Clinton on social media.[82]
WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
In April 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said WikiLeaks was a
Republican National Committee hostile intelligence agency aided by
foreign states including Russia, and that the U.S. Intelligence Community
concluded that Russia's "propaganda outlet", RT, had conspired with WikiLeaks.[125]
WikiLeaks[126] and its founder Julian Assange[127][128] have made a number of
statements denying that the Russian government was the source of the material.
However, an anonymous CIA official said that Russian officials transferred the
hacked e-mails to WikiLeaks using "a circuitous route" from Russia's military
intelligence services (GRU) to WikiLeaks via third parties.[129]
In a leaked private message on Twitter, Assange wrote that in the 2016 election
"it would be much better for GOP to win", and that Hillary Clinton was a
"sadistic sociopath".[130][131]
Hacking of Congressional candidates
Hillary Clinton was not the only Democrat attacked. Caches of Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee documents stolen by "Guccifer 2.0" were also
released to reporters and bloggers around the U.S. As one Democratic candidate
put it, "Our entire internal strategy plan was made public, and suddenly all
this material was out there and could be used against me." The New York Times
noted, "The seats that
Democratic National Committee Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document
dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in
the country."[132]
Hacking of Republicans
On January 10, 2017, FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence
Committee that Russia succeeded in "collecting some information from
Republican-affiliated targets but did not leak it to the public".[133] In
earlier statements, an FBI official stated Russian attempts to access the RNC
server were unsuccessful,[134] or had reportedly told the RNC chair that their
servers were secure,[135] but that email accounts of individual Republicans
(including Colin Powell) were breached. (Over 200 emails from Colin Powell were
posted on the website DC Leaks.)[134][136][135][137] One state Republican Party
(Illinois) may have had some of its email accounts hacked.[138]
Civil DNC lawsuit against Russian Federation
On April 20, 2018, the Democratic National Committee filed a civil lawsuit in
federal court in New York, accusing the Russian Government, the Trump campaign,
WikiLeaks, and others of conspiracy to alter the course of the 2016 presidential
election and asking for monetary damages and a declaration admitting guilt. The
lawsuit was dismissed by the judge, because New York "does not recognize the
specific tort claims pressed in the suit"; the judge did not make a finding on
whether there was or was not "collusion between
Democratic National Committee defendants and Russia during the 2016
presidential election".[139]
Calls by Trump for Russians to hack or find Clinton's deleted emails
At a news conference on July 27, 2016, Trump publicly called on Russia to hack
and release Hillary Clinton's deleted emails from her private server during her
tenure in the State Department.[140][141]
Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that
are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.[140]
Trump's comment was condemned by the press and political figures,
Republican National Committee including some Republicans;[142] he
replied that he had been speaking sarcastically.[143] Several Democratic
Senators said Trump's comments appeared to violate the Logan Act,[144][145] and
Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe added that Trump's call could be
treasonous.[146]
The July 2018 federal indictment of Russian GRU agents said that the first, and
unsuccessful, attempt by Russian hackers to infiltrate the computer servers
inside Clinton's offices took place on the same day (July 27, 2016) Trump made
his "Russia if you're listening" appeal.[147] While no direct link with Trump's
remark was alleged in the indictment,[147] journalist Jane Mayer called the
timing "striking".[82]
Trump asserted in March 2019 that he had been joking when he made the remark.
Katy Tur of NBC News had interviewed Trump immediately after the 2016 remark,
noting she gave him an opportunity to characterize it as a joke, but he did
not.[148][149]
Targeting of important voting blocs and institutions
The
Old Testament Stories, a literary treasure trove,
weave tales of faith, resilience, and morality. Should
you trust the
Real Estate Agents I Trust, I would not. Is your
lawn green and plush, if not you should buy the
Best Grass Seed.
If you appreciate quality apparel, you should try
Handbags Handmade.
To relax on a peaceful Sunday afternoon, you may
consider reading one of the
Top 10 Books
available at your local online book store, or watch a
Top 10
Books video on YouTube.
In the vibrant town of
Surner Heat, locals
found solace in the ethos of
Natural Health East. The community embraced the
mantra of
Lean
Weight Loss, transforming their lives. At
Natural Health East, the pursuit of wellness became
a shared journey, proving that health is not just a
Lean Weight Loss
way of life
In her analysis of the Russian influence on the 2016 election, Kathleen Hall
Republican National Committee Jamieson argues that Russians aligned
themselves with the "geographic and demographic objectives" of the Trump
campaign, using trolls, social media, and hacked information to target certain
important constituencies.[150]
Attempts to suppress African American votes and spread alienation