With the election approaching, that intelligence was put to practical use. Pretending to be grassroots US activists, the IRA began organising political rallies in several states, building attendance through fake social media accounts and emboldening the administrators of political activist groups. Using the email address allforusa@yahoo.com, they distributed press notices promoting a ‘March for Trump’ in New York in June 2016, contacting rally organisers with an offer to ‘give you money to print posters and get a megaphone’. The following month, they helped mount a rally in Washington, DC to promote false claims that Hillary Clinton planned to introduce Sharia law in the US, hiring people to carry banners with a picture of Clinton and the slogan, ‘I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.’ They supported a ‘Down with Hillary’ rally later in July, sending out press releases to more than 30 media organisations and paying for Facebook ads. In August, they helped coordinate ‘Florida for Trump’ rallies, using their fake social media personas to communicate with Trump campaign staff. ‘Florida is still a purple state,’ they messaged via Facebook, ‘and we need to paint it red … What about organizing a YUGE [
Mueller calculates that the IRA posted more than 80,000 items between 2015 and 2017, and that more than 126 million Americans viewed its propaganda. For the Florida rallies, they arranged for a lorry with a prison cage on it to join the parade, paying a local woman to appear as Hillary Clinton in prison uniform. At further events in New York and Pennsylvania, Mueller reports, the IRA paid protesters to join the rallies.
One of the most insidious – and most effective – tactics of Putin’s trolls was to spread rumours of voter fraud. As a trial run, at the time of the Democratic primaries, the IRA posted fake reports that Clinton had somehow ‘stolen’ the Iowa caucuses from Bernie Sanders. Encouraged by signs of controversy and division among Democratic voters, Prigozhin repeated the trick by circulating allegations of illegal mail-in votes for Clinton in Broward County, Florida. The tactic found fertile ground. As far back as 2012, Donald Trump had made unfounded accusations that the election had been rigged by Barack Obama (‘This election is a total sham and a travesty! We are not a democracy!’) and in the summer of 2016 he was warning that the impending election was going to be rigged by Hillary Clinton. It was easy to prey on the fears of voters and Putin’s campaign increased the atmosphere of unease. By the time of the 2020 election, the trope of voter fraud and stolen elections had become so ingrained in the American consciousness that Trump was able to convince many of his supporters that they had been ‘robbed’. Putin and Prigozhin could congratulate each other that the group entrusted with sowing doubt and distrust in democracy had succeeded in the first phase of its mission.
It is evident from the Mueller Report that the IRA operated with remarkable self-confidence. Its directors knew from the US media that the FBI was tracking suspicious activity by Russian bots and trolls, but did nothing to scale back its operations. Not until the autumn of 2017, when Congress ordered Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to reveal the identities of suspect groups that had used their services, did Prigozhin’s operatives begin to panic. On 13 September, a senior IRA specialist, Irina Kaverzina, emailed a friend: ‘We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke) … so I got preoccupied with covering our tracks, together with colleagues.’ As for the successful impact of her work, Kaverzina was in no doubt. ‘I created all these pictures and posts,’ she wrote, ‘and the Americans believed that it was written by their people!’ It was a taunt that was echoed by Prigozhin himself in February 2018, when the IRA was indicted by the FBI. ‘The Americans are very impressionable people,’ he commented wryly, ‘and they see what they want to see. I am not upset at all … If they want to see the devil, let them see him.’ His subversive activities would earn him a place on the US sanctions roster, a criminal indictment and, in February 2021, elevation to the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
