Marco Werman: David, the Kremlin had any number of tricks up its sleeve to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election. Remind us where it found the most success.

David Corn: What was most evident and obvious at the time was a hack-and-leak operation. Russian military intelligence broke into the computers of prominent Democrats in the Democratic Party, and then, through WikiLeaks, leaked that information in a way to embarrass, impede, and harm the Hillary Clinton campaign. And in a very close election as that one was, it was one of several factors that I think determined the final outcome. At the same time, they were mounting a massive disinformation operation, planting pro-Trump messages throughout social media platforms in the United States and exacerbating the political discord that already was present within the US political debate. Again, it’s hard to tell what impact that had, but their disinformation and social messaging reached millions of Americans. And the point of my book, “How Russia Won,” is that what happened in 2016 didn’t stay in 2016. It happened again and again and again in the 2018 midterms, but particularly in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections in the United States. Russia has been running a 10-year-long covert warfare operation against the United States. It’s not kinetic warfare; it’s information warfare. And now, as we head towards the midterms, we’ve just begun to see some of these Russian disinformation networks, which I wrote about in the book, starting to interfere again in an American election.

So what were the key lessons that the Kremlin took from its success in 2016?

That they could get away with it. With Trump as president in 2020 and with Trump dominating much of the political discourse in 2024 and discrediting people who were talking about this Russian attack, it gave Putin a wide-open field to continue these operations. There never was a united American counter-response to this information warfare coming from Moscow. And since Trump has reentered the White House, he has taken all these agencies in the US government that were tracking Russian disinformation and trying to counter it, and he’s shut them down. The Foreign Influence Task Force at the FBI, the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the outfit at the State Department that tracks Russian disinformation — they’re all gone. They don’t exist. It’s certainly a unilateral surrender in this twilight warfare coming from the Kremlin, which is not just attacking us. It’s happening throughout the West, in many NATO countries. It happened in the recent election in Hungary. They’ve targeted elections in France, Moldova, and England. So he has basically, though, put up the white flag, which looks to me like an invitation for Putin to keep doing this.

David, take us back to one encounter with a Russian actor in 2016 that raised a lot of eyebrows. I’m talking about the Trump Tower meeting that brought together 3 senior members of the Trump campaign — Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort — with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. What about that meeting remains ambiguous today?

Well, that was a meeting that happened in June of 2016, a few months before the election. And it happened because the son of a Russian billionaire, a Russian oligarch who was close to Putin, contacted Donald Trump Jr. and said the Kremlin wanted to help the Trump campaign, and they were sending a Russian emissary with dirt on Hillary Clinton to meet with the Trump campaign and share this information. What did Donald Trump Jr. say? It’s in an email. He said, “If this is what you say it is, I love it. And he met with Vosenitskaya, who had connections to Russian intelligence, and she was supposed to give them dirt on Hillary. They claim this is Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, the campaign chair at the time, and Jared Kushner, and that they got nothing useful from her. But what this meeting did was send a signal to the Kremlin that the Trump campaign was okay with Russian intervention in the election. And we can fast-forward — what is it, 10 years down the road now? And what did we just learn this week?

You’re talking about the ProPublica story?

Yeah. Donald Trump Jr. had a lavish wedding in the Bahamas, and it was paid for by a Russian oligarch close to Putin who runs an international boxing association that’s been accused of corruption and was kicked out of the Olympics. So here we have right now, today, this week, information that people close to Putin are essentially giving the Trump family hundreds of thousands of dollars.

How did platforms like X, the former Twitter, and Facebook respond to allegations that they played a role in Russian interference?

Well, sometimes when the Justice Department has gone to them directly and talked about certain accounts that are being run by Russian bots and troll farms and things like that, they’ve taken them down. But [overall], they haven’t been able or willing to stop individual acts of disinformation that jump from Russian sources into authentic American sources. That’s what the Russians have mastered in a way. They generate these disinformation videos and reports and memes and messages on X and YouTube, and they get them into the American bloodstream, and Americans start amplifying and boosting them. So it’s a very hard thing to fight, but it’s really hard to fight when you’re not even trying.

Fast forward to the present: How have Russia’s options for intervening in elections changed? I’m looking specifically at the midterms, and to what degree is AI a game-changer?

Over the last couple of days, we’ve started seeing Russian involvement and intervention in the midterms. One of the networks that I write about in the book is putting out deepfake videos that purport to show Hollywood celebrities disparaging the Democrats and urging people to vote Republican. It’s not getting much traction, and it won’t, but I think it’s a prelude to more sophisticated operations down the road.

And how fast can those operations be ramped up? Because as I said, it’s seven weeks away, the midterms.

It doesn’t take a lot. They may focus on just a couple of key races. And at the same time, through AI, they’ve been able to generate their own fake websites that generate their own fake stories and put up 30,000 social media posts a month in the hope that one, two, three, or maybe a couple dozen will gain some traction. They’re good at doing things at the last minute. Good negative ads often happen towards the end of a campaign when there’s less time to respond. So we’ve seen the beginning of this, but because Donald Trump has decimated or ended all these offices and agencies that were supposed to track this and respond to it, there may be other stuff happening now that we don’t see and that we may never know about.

Do you wonder if Russia is coordinating with other actors like China and Iran, or maybe just borrowing from their playbooks?

Iran has tried to put in some disinformation that was anti-Trump, and China has just tried to sow discord. It’s clear that Russia is the best at it, and they’re not just doing it towards us. They’ve done it towards other Western nations for the last 10 years or so. So they’re the most accomplished in this. And they have different outfits doing it. They have Russian military intelligence. They have a variety of different disinformation networks: Storm 1516, Storm 1679 and Matryoshka, which are the nesting dolls. They all have different names and specialties in how they try to insert disinformation into American discourse. So they’ll be out there doing something, and we just may be blind to it.

So, as you know, the Supreme Court yesterday rejected Trump’s plans to get the Post Office to withhold potentially millions of mail-in ballots, but Russia obviously is not affected by that court decision. What does this mean in terms of what you are now watching for from Russia, seven weeks before the midterms and two years before the next presidential vote?

One thing that Russia has done in almost every election is either prepare to do this or actually put out messaging that the elections can’t be trusted. That there’s chaos, there’s confusion, and they put out disinformation about how to vote and where to vote. And Trump has made that easier for them by creating this confusion about mail-in ballots. And if Trump takes that approach, if he doesn’t get the results he wants in November, I would expect Russian troll farms and disinformation networks to do everything they can to boost and amplify that messaging and exacerbate the political conflict that we already have in the United States. I mean, Vladimir Putin wants to show the world, but particularly his own people, that democracy doesn’t work, that you can’t trust elections, and you need a person like him, a strongman, to run a country and to secure it. So anything they can do to amplify the messiness of our own democracy or to look at the chaos that Trump might try to cause and say, look at that, and pour fuel on that preexisting fire, they will be eager to do so.