This is not "random idiots stuffposting on twitter."
Some background information: The 'main' entity in question being prosecuted here is the Internet Research Agency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
They're a russian company that does online influencing operations on the Russian Government's behalf. Even if it isn't coming straight from the Russian president himself, the government gives them their orders.
They, along with other Russian companies, engaged in a large interference operation titled "Project Lakhta." [Page 6]
Everything in this indictment is about the Internet Research Agency's (and other's) involvement in Project Lakhta.
Some more details:
(Yes, a MONTHLY budget EXCEEDING 1 million dollars)
Here are some excerpts from earlier now that we have this context:
Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities. Defendants also staged political rallies inside the United States, and while posing as U.S. grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates. Some Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Annoying Orange Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.
In order to carry out their activities to interfere in U.S. political and electoral processes without detection of their Russian affiliation, Defendants conspired to obstruct the lawful functions of the United States government through fraud and deceit, including by making expenditures in connection with the 2016 U.S. presidential election without proper regulatory disclosure; failing to register as foreign agents carrying out political activities within the United States; and obtaining visas through false and fraudulent statements.
To pay for the political advertisements, Defendants and their co-conspirators established various Russian bank accounts and credit cards, often registered in the names of fictitious U.S. personas created and used by the ORGANIZATION on social media. Defendants and their coconspirators also paid for other political advertisements using PayPal accounts.
Beginning in at least 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used, without lawful authority, the social security numbers, home addresses, and birth dates ofreal U.S. persons without their knowledge or consent. Using these means of stolen identification, Defendants and their coconspirators opened accounts at a federally insured U.S. financial institution ("Bank I")
Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased credit card and bank account numbers from online sellers for the unlawful purpose of evading security measures at PayPal, which used account numbers to verify a user's identity. Many of the bank account numbers purchased by Defendants and their co-conspirators were created using the stolen identities of real U.S. persons. After purchasing the accounts, Defendants and their co-conspirators submitted these bank account numbers to PayPal.
On or about August 24, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators updated an internal ORGANIZATION list of over 100 real U.S. persons contacted through ORGANIZATION controlled false U.S. persona accounts and tracked to monitor recruitment efforts and requests. The list included contact information for the U.S. persons, a summary of their political views, and activities they had been asked to perform by Defendants and their co-conspirators.
It's a fully coordinated, multi-million dollar attack by a hostile nation against the US's democracy AND its people, and it's proven so thoroughly that they're now being prosecuted for it. I don't understand why anyone is arguing about this. This is universally bad for everyone. They wanted to create extremely divisive politics in the US and they loving succeeded. Let's be thankful that they didn't succeed in other countries and let's start to try to undo this by not being divisive here.
We've been over this, it was a government-coordinated, multi-million dollar attack to sew divisiveness in US politics and they succeeded. Being divisive about it like this helps nothing. Of course this is going to have changed how people voted. Whether it actually directly led to Donald being elected is obviously up for debate but it's also not the point of the investigation. The goal of the investigation is to see if he had any part of the criminal activity that took place.
Again it's a win win no matter what the outcome is: Test comes up negative, you get to gloat and everybody's minds can be put at relative ease. Test comes up positive, we get to remove a criminal from office.
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