CONFIRMED: Putin’s Election Hacking Was About Hurting Clinton, Not Helping Trump
MICHAEL BASTASCH
FREEDOMOUTPOST.COM
MAY 22, 2017
U.S. intelligence overhead a Russian operative brag about targeting Hillary Clinton in the upcoming 2016 presidential election as payback for an “influence campaign” the former secretary of state ran against Vladimir Putin five years earlier.
Senior intelligence officials told Time that a Russian military intelligence officer with GRU said his group “was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election” to “pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him” during Russian elections.
In December 2011, protests broke out in 70 Russian cities “organized on social media by a popular blogger named Alexei Navalny, who used his blog as well as Twitter and Facebook to get crowds in the streets,” Time reported.
Protesters took to the streets amid allegations Putin’s party United Russia rigged the election results. The protests were the largest demonstrations since the 1990s and bled into Putin’s 2012 presidential campaign.
Putin won his re-election and “dispatched his newly installed head of military intelligence, Igor Sergun, to begin repurposing cyberweapons previously used for psychological operations in war zones for use in electioneering.”
U.S. officials who overheard Russian officials discussing their cyber campaign against Clinton wrote up their findings in a report, but intelligence experts didn’t see what was coming.
“We didn’t really understand the context of it until much later,” a senior intelligence official told Time.
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