Dana Tyrone Rohrabacher is an American former politician who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2019. A Republican, he represented California's 48th congressional district for the last three terms of his House tenure. Rohrabacher was defeated by Democrat Harley Rouda in 2018. Rohrabacher has expressed strong pro-Russia and pro-Putin opinions which have raised questions about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. Politico dubbed him as "Putin's favorite congressman".
John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has mainly been based in Britain since 1962. He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.
William Kristol is an American neoconservative writer. A frequent commentator on several networks including CNN, he was the founder and editor-at-large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol is now editor-at-large of the center-right publication The Bulwark.
The relationship between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United States of America has been mostly complex, and at times, strenuous since the establishment of the PRC and the retreat of the government of the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949. They have close economic ties and are significantly intertwined, yet they also have a global hegemonic great power rivalry. While both countries have broad areas of mutual interest in areas regarding the environment, as well as political and economic security, since the normalization of relations in the 1970s the US–China relationship has been marked by numerous perennial disputes, most of them with provenance in Asia, such as the political status of Taiwan, the One China policy, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and more recently the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. As of 2023, China and the United States are the world's second- and first-largest economies by nominal GDP, as well as the first and second-largest economies by GDP (PPP) respectively. Collectively, they account for 44.2% of the global nominal GDP, and 34.7% of global PPP-adjusted GDP.
The Special Relationship is a term that is often used to describe the political, social, diplomatic, cultural, economic, legal, environmental, religious, military and historic relations between the United Kingdom and the United States or its political leaders. The term first came into popular usage after it was used in a 1946 speech by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Both nations have been close allies during many conflicts in the 20th and the 21st centuries, including World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Gulf War and the war on terror.
Roger Jason Stone is an American conservative political consultant, lobbyist, and convicted felon. Stone is most remembered for the Robert Mueller special council investigation, and his involvement with and connections to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a political consultant for the campaign of 45th U.S. president Donald Trump.
Raymond McGovern is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned political activist. McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and in the 1980s chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement, returning it in 2006 to protest the CIA's involvement in torture. McGovern's post-retirement work includes commenting for Russian Government-funded RT and Sputnik News, among other outlets, on intelligence and foreign policy issues. In 2003 he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
WikiLeaks is an online publisher and media organisation founded in 2006. It operates as a non-profit and is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist, who is currently challenging extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication was in 2021, and its most recent publication of original documents was in 2019. Beginning in November 2022, many of the documents on the organisation's website could not be accessed.
Hong Kong–United States relations are bilateral relations between Hong Kong and the United States.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to wide international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning: footage of a US airstrike in Baghdad, US military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and US diplomatic cables.
The Afghan War documents leak, also called the Afghan War Diary, is the disclosure of a collection of internal U.S. military logs of the War in Afghanistan, which were published by WikiLeaks on 25 July 2010. The logs consist of over 91,000 Afghan War documents, covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. Most of the documents are classified secret. As of 28 July 2010, only 75,000 of the documents have been released to the public, a move which WikiLeaks says is "part of a harm minimization process demanded by [the] source". Prior to releasing the initial 75,000 documents, WikiLeaks made the logs available to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in its German and English online edition, which published reports in line with an agreement made earlier the same day, 25 July 2010.
WikiLeaks began publishing the United States diplomatic cables leak on 28 November 2010. The documents included classified cables that had been sent to the U.S. State Department by its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world. The cables were dated between December 1966 and February 2010, and contained assessments of host countries and their officials. The publication of the cables produced varying responses around the world.
WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing website founded by Julian Assange, has received praise as well as criticism from the public, hacktivists, journalist organisations and government officials. The organisation has revealed human rights abuses and was the target of an alleged "cyber war". Allegations have been made that Wikileaks worked with or was exploited by the Russian government and acted in a partisan manner during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak is a collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails stolen by one or more hackers operating under the pseudonym "Guccifer 2.0" who are alleged to be Russian intelligence agency hackers, according to indictments carried out by the Mueller investigation. These emails were subsequently leaked by DCLeaks in June and July 2016 and by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just before the 2016 Democratic National Convention. This collection included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC, the governing body of the United States' Democratic Party. The leak includes emails from seven key DNC staff members, and date from January 2015 to May 2016. On November 6, 2016, WikiLeaks released a second batch of DNC emails, adding 8,263 emails to its collection. The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party's national committee favored Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries. These releases caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign, and have been cited as a potential contributing factor to her loss in the general election against Donald Trump.
The Russian government used espionage to interfere in the 2016 United States elections with the goals of sabotaging the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to the U.S. intelligence community, the operation—code named Project Lakhta —was ordered directly by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The 448-page Mueller report, made public in April 2019, examined over 200 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
U.S. foreign policy during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021) was noted for its unpredictability and reneging on prior international commitments, upending diplomatic conventions, embracing political and economic brinkmanship with most adversaries, and stronger relations with traditional allies. Trump's "America First" policy pursued nationalist foreign policy objectives and prioritized bilateral relations over multinational agreements. As president, Trump described himself as a nationalist while espousing views that have been characterized as isolationist, non-interventionist, and protectionist, although the "isolationist" label has been disputed. He personally praised some populist, neo-nationalist, illiberal, and authoritarian governments, while antagonizing others, even as administration diplomats nominally continued to pursue pro-democracy ideals abroad.
The 2017 Macron e-mail leaks were leaks of more than 20,000 e-mails related to the campaign of Emmanuel Macron during the 2017 French presidential elections, two days before the final vote. The leaks garnered an abundance of media attention due to how quickly news of the leak spread throughout the Internet, aided in large part by bots and spammers and drew accusations that the government of Russia under Vladimir Putin was responsible. The e-mails were shared by WikiLeaks and several American alt-right activists through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and 4chan.
The 45th G7 summit was held on 24–26 August 2019, in Biarritz, France. In March 2014, the G7 declared that a meaningful discussion was currently not possible with Russia in the context of the G8. Since then, meetings have continued within the G7 process. However, according to a senior Trump administration official, US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron had agreed that Russia should be invited to the next G7 Summit to be held in 2020.
In 2012, while on bail Julian Assange was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden, and what his supporters said was the possibility of subsequent extradition to the US. On 11 April 2019, Ecuador revoked his asylum, he was arrested for failing to appear in court, and carried out of the Embassy by members of the London Metropolitan Police. Following his arrest, the US revealed a previously sealed 2018 US indictment in which Assange was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
