Class 22. Project Lakhta

A window into the creation of Russian talking points, which sound eerily like a lot of current GOP talking points. Which is the chicken and which is the egg?

In the last class we looked at the creation and inner mechanics of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm run by the late war criminal, Yvegeney Prigozhin. In this class I want to drill down into the specifics of the IRA’s operations, particularly through Project Lakhta, the IRA’s political and electoral interference operation in Ukraine, the E.U., and the United States. According to the 2018 indictment against the project’s manager, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, by the Eastern District of Virginia (this one was not brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller), “since at least May 2014, Project Lakhta's stated goal in the United States was to spread distrust towards candidates for political office and the political system in general.” The indictment estimates that between January 2016 and June 2018, Project Lakhta’s proposed operating budget for its information warfare efforts totaled approximately $35 million.

As the New York Times video above details, the most effective way to neutralize disinformation and propaganda is to expose them. The Khusyaynova indictment is one of my favorite documents from the DOJ’s investigation into 2016 Russian election interference because it details the specific narratives that Russia used to inflame divisions in the U.S. even after the 2016 election. The most potent of these, which involved exploiting racial divisions, is worth dedicating a separate lesson to given its scope and reach, which I will do in the coming weeks. Many of the others are just the same old greatest hits in America’s culture wars: LGBTQ issues, gun rights, immigration. But the political talking points are worthing homing in on, because they will probably sound very familiar. In fact, while the indictment makes clear that Project Lakhta was targeting both sides of the political spectrum as far back as 2017, they gained much more traction among the far right MAGA base. This merging of foreign and domestic narratives in the last six years creates a big problem for the government’s efforts to combat election disinformation — something we are already seeing in recent federal court rulings.

Laying the Groundwork for “Civil War”

It’s tempting to look at January 6 as an effort that Trump got rolling in the months leading up to the 2020 election. Indeed, the final report of January 6 Committee details how Trump began making claims of voter fraud and delegitimizing the election going back as far as April 2020. ProPublica has also detailed how calls for “civil war” became intensified in the nine weeks between Election Day and January 6, with posts like the following:

The thing is, I have been noticing the “civil war” rhetoric ever since I read the Khusyaynova complaint in 2018. At the time, it seemed pretty shocking: No mainstream conservatives were actually saying it out loud, yet. That would change over the next few years. In fact, the same themes underlying January 6 — allegations of voter fraud in the “blue states,” threats of civil war, and calls for a 1776-style “revolution” were specific narratives being pushed by the IRA going back to August 2017.

For example, the following instructions given by Project Lakhta instructed employees on how to message the topic of voter fraud :

Emphasize that previous falsifications during the U.S. elections used to be perceived as a myth; today they became a reality with a threatening force and are perceived accordingly. Emphasize that all illegal voters must be kept away from the ballot boxes at distances ‘beyond artillery firing range.’ There is an urgent need to introduce voter IDs for all the states, above all in the blue (liberal and undecided) states. Remind that the majority of the ‘blue states’ have no VOTER IDs, which suggests that large-scale falsifications are bound to be happening there. State in the end that the Democrats in the coming election will surely attempt to falsify the results. (Preliminary translation of Russian text.)

It’s notable that this narrative was being pushed after Trump was elected president, perhaps with a view towards impacting the midterms, but also in tandem with similar claims Trump was making at the same time.

The indictment states that rhetoric about violence in conjunction with elections were also being pushed in 2017, along with an amplification of an article by Michael Savage calling for “civil war” if Trump was impeached:

Forcefully support Michael Savage's point of view with competence and honesty. Savage made it clear that any attempt to remove Trump is a direct path to a civil war in the United States. Name those who oppose the president and those who impede his efforts to implement his pre-election promises….Summarize that in case Republicans will not stop acting as traitors, they will bring upon themselves forces of civil retribution during the 2018 elections. (Preliminary translation of Russian text.)

And just to round out the seeds of insurrection, here is Project Lakhta’s spin on how to message Congress not doing what Trump wants:

Fully support Donald Trump and express the hope that this time around Congress will be forced to act as the president says it should. Emphasize that if Congress continues to act like the Colonial British government did before the War of Independence, this will call for another revolution. Summarize that Trump once again proved that he stands for protecting the interests of the United States of America. (Preliminary translation of Russian text.)

Ummmm….remember this?

So how do we explain this merging of messaging between what the IRA was doing in 2017 and what eventually became the MAGA party line by 2020?

Destructive Minds Think Alike

Russia didn’t suddenly brainwash a swath of the American population into wanting to overthrow the government. Rather, its information warfare efforts tapped into an existing undercurrent of anti-government sentiment among the far-right segment of the political spectrum. Specifically, the “civil war” rhetoric is a key component of white nationalist ideology, which anticipates a race war that is instigated by an attack on the federal government. (I have written previously about how the Big Lie dovetails with white nationalist ideology, and the narrative structure of terrorist ideologies more generally.) As we saw in Class 1 with Operation Infektion, foreign influence operations are most successful when they can echo beliefs that are already held by their targets, and repetition helps the messages take hold in the minds of those exposed to them.

To that end, Project Lakhta probably just helped give these fringe ideological currents a boost and momentum over time as they were echoed by Trump (he mainstreamed it in 2019 when he used the phrase to describe what would happen if he was removed from office by impeachment, the same context as the Lakhta talking points). At this point, civil war rhetoric has become standard fare for MAGA Republicans since January 6, and even spiked after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

Former CIA officer John Sipher has explained this process in intelligence parlance as convergence, defined as “distinct groups doing the same things for different reasons, or as a unity of interests evolving from separate starting points.” As he writes in The Atlantic:

Both Putin and Trump seek to inject chaos into the U.S. political system. They support an assault on U.S. foreign-policy elites, encourage fringe and radical groups, and envision a United States untethered from traditional allies. They also share a willingness to utilize informal and semi-legal means to achieve their goals. The common interest shown by Russia and the alt-right in exploiting fears surrounding the routine Jade Helm military exercise in Texas in 2015? That’s convergence.

This blending of interests came full circle with Tucker Carlson, who as Russian Media Monitor Julia Davis explained in Class 14 became the Kremlin’s best mouthpiece. In many ways, he made Project Lakhta’s job pretty easy; over the last five years, the IRA didn’t really have to create talking points, it just had to amplify the ones Trump, Tucker, and others were generating all on their own.

Houston, We Have a Problem

The problem with convergence of Russian and right-wing narratives isn’t just a political problem, it’s a legal one. That’s because the legal tools we have to combat domestic disinformation are much different (read: practically nonexistent) than the ones we have to combat foreign disinformation. When the line gets blurred between the two — particularly when the convergence is happening with a major political party — you have all the ingredients of a politicized intelligence “scandal.”

Let’s go back to the Khusyaynova indictment. Like the indictment we covered in Class 20 against the IRA, Prigozhin, and others, the primary charge in this case was 18 U.S.C. 371, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States. The Justice Department alleged that in creating fake accounts that were acting at the direction of a foreign government with the intention of influencing voters, Khusyaynova was evading FARA and election laws regulating foreign political- and election-related activity. As a result, she was thwarting the intended functions of the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission, which is a form of fraud. (We covered FARA in more detail in Class 3, if you need a refresher.)

The problem is that if the disinformation is coming from inside the house (or from inside the House, as the case may be), these laws don’t apply. In fact, the exact same kind of activity — fake accounts, false messages intended to sway voters — get full First Amendment protection. So if the government or intelligence agencies try to work with social media companies to take down or slow down what they think is the former, but it might be or turns out to be the latter, they stand to be accused not only of censorship, but of potentially trying to swing the election in favor of one party over another.

Enter the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.* Last week, a panel of three Republican-appointed judges expanded an injunction it issued last month to prohibit the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from “coerc[ing] or significantly encourage[ing]” tech companies to remove disinformation related to elections. Alluding to the FBI’s flagging to social media platforms of the Hunter Biden laptop story as a possible foreign influence operation, the court stated that

[R]ight before the 2022 congressional election, the FBI warned the platforms of ‘hack and dump’ operations from ‘state-sponsored actors’ that would spread misinformation through their sites. In doing so, the FBI officials leaned into their inherent authority. So, the platforms reacted as expected—by taking down content, including posts and accounts that originated from the United States, in direct compliance with the request. Considering the above, we conclude that the FBI coerced the platforms into moderating content…For example, several platforms ‘adjusted’ their moderation policies to capture ‘hack-and-leak’ content after the FBI asked them to do so (and followed up on that request). Consequently, when the platforms subsequently moderated content that violated their newly modified terms of service (e.g., the results of hack-and-leaks), they did not do so via independent standards. See Blum, 457 U.S. at 1008. Instead, those decisions were made subject to commandeered moderation policies.

I discussed in Class 19 how the FBI’s vigilance in 2020 (and 2022) was shaped by the mistakes in understanding — too late — Russia’s M.O. in the 2016 election. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling suggests that any attempts by intelligence agencies to try to correct those mistakes — particularly if they go beyond merely flagging posts to social media companies — could be grounds to argue that they are trying to censor speech. Notably, the ruling doesn’t really make an attempt to distinguish foreign, state-sponsored disinformation from domestic disinformation. It’s not clear to me that under the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning, the FBI could “significantly encourage” social media platforms to remove content which it knew to be in violation of FARA or even part of a conspiracy to defraud the United States, as in the Khusyaynova complaint, without running afoul of the First Amendment.

We’re a year away from an election. What could go wrong?

---

*As we will discuss with Steve Vladek next week in our discussion of the Supreme Court and the “shadow docket,” the Fifth Circuit seems to be at the forefront of pushing provocative legal theories in front of the Supreme Court, so this one seems to be following in that vein.

Audio here:

Discussion Questions:

1. The violent rhetoric used by Project Lakhta was provocative for political discourse in 2017 but has become normalized by Trump since then. How can Russia capitalize on this evolution and push the envelope further to achieve its goals?

2. What are some other areas where Russia has achieved convergence with the far right? The far left?

3. Is there any meaningful way for the FBI or CISA to communicate with social media platforms about foreign influence operations or election disinformation without it being “coercive”? How could these platforms be otherwise incentivized to self-police?