The Internet Research Agency, operating out of St. Petersburg, was described in the indictment as a hub for a sophisticated operation designed to reach millions of Americans to disrupt the political process in the United States. Its annual budget was millions of dollars; its stated goal was to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.”
Individuals involved in the conspiracy traveled to and around the United States, visiting at least eight states, court papers show, and worked with an unidentified American. That person advised them to focus their efforts on what they viewed as “purple” election battleground states, including Colorado, Virginia and Florida, the indictment said. ... 13 Russians Indicted in First Charges on 2016 Election Interference By SHARON LaFRANIEREFEB. 16, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-election-interference.html
The Agency
From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
By ADRIAN CHENJUNE 2, 2015 ... Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.
Seven months after the Columbian Chemicals hoax, I was in a dim restaurant in St. Petersburg, peering out the window at an office building at 55 Savushkina Street, the last known home of the Internet Research Agency. It sits in St. Petersburg’s northwestern Primorsky District, a quiet neighborhood of ugly Soviet apartment buildings and equally ugly new office complexes. Among the latter is 55 Savushkina; from the front, its perfect gray symmetry, framed by the rectangular pillars that flank its entrance, suggests the grim impenetrability of a medieval fortress. Behind the glass doors, a pair of metal turnstiles stand guard at the top of a short flight of stairs in the lobby. At 9 o’clock on this Friday night in April, except for the stairwell and the lobby, the building was entirely dark.
This puzzled my dining companion, a former agency employee named Ludmila Savchuk. She shook her head as she lifted the heavy floral curtain to take another look. It was a traditional Russian restaurant, with a dining room done up like a parlor from the early 1900s, complete with bentwood chairs and a vintage globe that showed Alaska as part of Russia. Savchuk’s 5-year-old son sat next to her, slurping down a bowl of ukha, a traditional fish soup. For two and a half months, Savchuk told me, she had worked 12-hour shifts in the building, always beginning at 9 a.m. and finishing at 9 p.m., at which point she and her co-workers would eagerly stream out the door at once. “At 9 p.m. sharp, there should be a crowd of people walking outside the building,” she said. “Nine p.m. sharp.” One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month. During her time in the organization, there were many departments, creating content for every popular social network: LiveJournal, which remains popular in Russia; VKontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and the comment sections of Russian news outlets. One employee estimated the operation filled 40 rooms.
Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities. Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.
Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui — and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.
In fact, she was a troll. The word “troll” was popularized in the early 1990s to denounce the people who derailed conversation on Usenet discussion lists with interminable flame wars, or spammed chat rooms with streams of disgusting photos, choking users with a cloud of filth. As the Internet has grown, the problem posed by trolls has grown more salient even as their tactics have remained remarkably constant. Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester. Any major conflict is accompanied by a raging online battle between trolls on both sides.
As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian. ... more https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html
(CNN) A California man pleaded guilty to identity fraud in a second case unsealed Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation into Russian interference in the US presidential election.
The guilty plea results in the first criminal conviction related to Mueller's investigation into the Russian-backed ring of social media users aiming to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, prosecutors told a federal judge this month, according to unsealed court filing.
Pinedo's attorney said Friday his client was not aware of the identity or motivations of those buying the accounts.
Pinedo ran a scheme that helped his customers use dummy bank accounts to bypass the security of online companies like PayPal, which can be used to transfer money and pay for online services.
The Russians had opened accounts on PayPal using stolen identities of people in the US, prosecutors said. The related indictment of the Russians listed 14 bank accounts they used.
Pinedo's service, called Auction Essistance, helped users circumvent the online security feature that tests whether a person's identity is real, by depositing and withdrawing small amounts from a bank account then asking the person to identify the amounts in the deposits. The separate indictment of 13 Russians described how they illegally obtained bank account numbers to evade PayPal's security measures.
Pinedo's business, Auction Essistance, appears to have gone dark on the internet as of Friday, despite previously having Facebook and Twitter pages and a sizable amount of public customer reviews. But cached versions of the business' homepage and a promotional Medium post from 2015 show a business pitching itself as a trusted aid to webcrawlers who'd like privacy online.
The homepage touts "quick turnaround," "competitive rates" and "trusted and secured" services. For about $35, customers who've been banned from sites like PayPal, eBay and Amazon could buy verified accounts through Auction Essistance.
"We guarantee our accounts are legitimate and not hacked or stolen like most other sellers offer," the site's homepage said. The site advises its international customers to use a US-based IP address with a fake account.
In several reviews posted on the homepage, customers refer to Pinedo as "Ricky."
Pinedo sold bank accounts registered under his own name and registered under stolen identities to many people outside the US, the prosecutors said. Pinedo made more than $1,000 in a year from the scheme, and earned tens of thousands of dollars in total, the statement said.
Though he didn't register bank accounts using stolen identities, "he willfully and intentionally avoided learning about the use of stolen identities," the prosecutors said.
Pinedo agreed to cooperate with the special prosecutors' office in exchange for his guilty plea on February 12.
In a statement to the press on Friday, Pinedo's attorney admitted Pinedo's guilt in the fraudulent online banking scheme, but said he did not know he was helping Russians.
"Through an online website, Mr. Pinedo sold bank information which allowed individuals to fraudulently verify and establish accounts with online financial institutions. Doing so was a mistake, and Mr. Pinedo has accepted full responsibility for his actions," the statement said. "However, Mr. Pinedo had absolutely no knowledge of the identities and motivations of any of the purchasers of the information he provided. To the extent that Mr. Pinedo's actions assisted any individuals, including foreign nationals, from interfering in the American presidential election was done completely without his knowledge or understanding."
The attorney, Jeremy Lessem, declined to comment further, "given the ongoing nature of this investigation."
Responding to Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians and a secretive “troll farm” company for interfering in the 2016 election, President Donald Trump and his supporters have tried to frame the news as proof that neither Trump nor his former campaign staffers had deliberately worked with foreign actors.
In a public statement, the White House press office said that the president “has been fully briefed on this matter and is glad to see the Special Counsel’s investigation further indicates — that there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
Trump reiterated the claim in a tweet:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!
8:18 PM - Feb 16, 2018
Many of the president’s media fans made the point as well:
NO COLLUSION: Mueller Indictment Says TRUMP CAMPAIGN Unaware of Russian Meddling | Sean Hannity Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office indicted 13 Russian nationals and three foreign “entities” with election meddling Friday; saying...
hannity.com
Tom Fitton @TomFitton So big Mueller indictment of Russians confirms "unwitting" involvement of Trump campaign with disguised Russian operatives. No collusion. Shut it down.
7:21 PM - Feb 16, 2018
Ari Fleischer @AriFleischer Today's announcement is mostly good news/some bad news for POTUS.
Good news is no collusion was found. If there was collusion, it likely would have been revealed today.
Bad news is the President has never flat out said Russia interfered in our election. He should say so now.
7:12 PM - Feb 16, 2018
Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter YOU GET NO COLLUSION! AND YOU GET NO COLLUSION! AND OH YEAH YOU GET NO COLLUSION!
8:52 PM - Feb 16, 2018
It is true that the indictments and a statement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein indicate that prosecutors have no evidence that Americans knowingly worked with professional Russian trolls. But to claim that Mueller has somehow cleared Trump and his former campaign staffers of illegal conduct is simply untrue.
In the first place, collusion is not a crime. That’s almost certainly why the word has become the preferred term of Trump supporters eager to defend their president.
As the Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky noted last October in a story that quotes a number of legal experts, it is not illegal for an American to work in a limited capacity to promote shared policy views with foreign individuals. Nor is it illegal for an American to exchange information about campaigns.
“There could be something out there that stinks to high heaven but it doesn’t make it a violation of the law,” Jacob Frenkel, a former attorney in a past federal independent counsel investigation told Zapotosky.
In terms of Trump officials having colluded with overt or covert Russian government agents, we already know that it happened. Donald Trump Jr. has already publicly revealed that he, indicted former campaign chief Paul Manafort, and future top presidential counselor Jared Kushner had met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, an attorney known to have close connections to the Russian government, for the express purpose of obtaining secret, negative information about Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
We already know that Trump’s former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, has admitted to knowing about hacked emails stolen by Russians from Clinton’s campaign long before they became public information. And that Papadopoulos had been told about them by a Maltese foreign policy professor with ties to Russia. We also know that Papadopoulos’ former colleague, Carter Page, has admitted to having met with high-ranking Russian government officials during his time with the former Trump campaign and that he once described himself as “an informal adviser to the staff of the Kremlin,” the Russian government’s central seat of power.
We also know that Manafort worked for decades for various Eastern European politicians with strong ties to Russia, that he was millions of dollars in debt to several wealthy supporters of Putin, and that he had offered to provide “private briefings” to a Russian billionaire who is a close Putin ally.
There are plenty of other possible crimes that could have been committed by Trump or his former staffers during the course of their conversations with Russians or others working for them. One way would have been to encourage Russians to engage in criminal activity, such as by violating campaign finance laws by propagandizing Americans online as foreign nationals (the crime which Mueller on Friday accused the 13 Russians of doing).
Some of Trump’s critics have also charged that he may have committed a crime in July of 2016 when he urged Russian hackers to “find” some emails that FBI investigators said had been erased from an illegal private email server once used by Clinton during her time as secretary of state. Last June, the White House dismissed the remark as a joke.
Beyond the fact that collusion isn’t a crime in and of itself and that former Trump campaign workers have already admitted to dialoguing with Russians, the reality is that the latest indictments are only a small portion of the Mueller investigation. Bloomberg News confirmed this explicitly on Friday, citing an unnamed person “with knowledge of the probe” who said that the special prosecutor was continuing his work into former Trump staffers’ connections to Russians.
We still do not know the full extent of the special counsel’s case against Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. While he and his partner Rick Gates have been indicted on 12 separate counts of money laundering, conspiracy, and perjury, it’s almost a certitude that those charges are only the beginning of the ones that Mueller wishes to level against Manafort.
Instead of being a complete case, the indictments appear to be part of an attempt to coerce Gates into testifying against Manafort and whoever else Mueller may have in his cross-hairs. That Gates is rumored to be close to a plea deal signifies that this is almost certainly true.
Mueller might also have a surprise or two for Jared Kushner, who has his own web of connections to Russian interests that is almost as extensive as Manafort’s. We also know that he was the White House official who instructed former national security adviser Michael Flynn to engage in secret talks with the Russian government before Trump had become president.
There's still a lot more to the Mueller investigation. We still don't know just what the prosecutor and his team will try to prove in court or what they will say in their final report. The president and his supporters may be terribly surprised if they actually believe their spin that this thing is over.
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