Related Research Articles
WikiLeaks is an NGO owned by Icelandic company Sunshine Press Productions ehf that runs a website that has published news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist, who is currently fighting extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents since beginning in 2006 in Iceland. 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 could not be accessed.
Russian web brigades are state-sponsored anonymous Internet political commentators and trolls linked to the Government of Russia. Participants report that they are organized into teams and groups of commentators that participate in Russian and international political blogs and Internet forums using sockpuppets, social bots and large-scale orchestrated trolling and disinformation campaigns to promote pro-Putin and pro-Russian propaganda. Articles on the Russian Wikipedia concerning the MH17 crash and the Russo-Ukrainian War were targeted by Russian internet propaganda outlets. In June 2019 a group of 12 editors introducing coordinated pro-government and anti-opposition bias was blocked on the Russian-language Wikipedia. During the war by Russia against Ukraine in 2022, Kremlin trolls were still active on many social platforms and were spreading disinformation related to the war events.
During her tenure as United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton drew controversy by using a private email server for official public communications rather than using official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers. After a years-long FBI investigation, it was determined that Clinton's server did not contain any information or emails that were clearly marked classified. Federal agencies did, however, retrospectively determine that 100 emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". An additional 2,093 emails were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department.
Guo Wengui, also known under the names Ho Wan Kwok (郭浩云), Miles Guo, and Miles Kwok, is an exiled Chinese billionaire businessman who became a political activist and controls Beijing Zenith Holdings, and other assets. At the peak of his career, he was the 73rd richest person in China. Guo was accused of corruption and other misdeeds by the Chinese authorities and fled to the United States in late 2014, after learning he was going to be arrested under allegations of bribery, kidnapping, money laundering, fraud and rape. Guo claims the charges are politically motivated and are a product of a campaign of political retribution carried out against him by the Chinese government. Guo is a colleague of Steve Bannon and a member of former U.S. President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The Internet Research Agency, also known as Glavset and known in Russian Internet slang as the Trolls from Olgino, is a Russian company engaged in online propaganda and influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests. It is linked to Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and based in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, often referred to as the 1MDB scandal or just 1MDB, describes a corruption, bribery and money laundering conspiracy in which the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) was systematically embezzled, with assets diverted globally by the perpetrators of the scheme. It had a global scope, implicated institutions and individuals in politics, banking, and entertainment, and sparked criminal investigations across a number of nations. The 1MDB scandal has been described as "one of the world's greatest financial scandals" and declared by the United States Department of Justice as the "largest kleptocracy case to date" in 2016.
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.
"Guccifer 2.0" is a persona which claimed to be the hacker(s) who gained unauthorized access to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network and then leaked its documents to the media, the website WikiLeaks, and a conference event. Some of the documents "Guccifer 2.0" released to the media appear to be forgeries cobbled together from public information and previous hacks, which had been mixed with disinformation. According to indictments in February 2018, the persona is operated by Russian military intelligence agency GRU. On July 13, 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU agents for allegedly perpetrating the cyberattacks.
The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy 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 Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous 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.
Donald Trump's handling of government records, especially those containing classified information, during his presidency has come under scrutiny. A number of incidents in which the president disclosed classified information to foreign powers and private individuals have become publicly known, sometimes with distinct national security and diplomatic consequences.
Jack Michael Posobiec III is an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent and presenter, conspiracy theorist, and former United States Navy intelligence officer. Posobiec is known for his pro-Donald Trump comments on Twitter, as well as using white supremacist and antisemitic symbols and talking points, including the white genocide conspiracy theory. He has repeatedly planted false and derogatory claims about political figures in an effort to damage his opponents. He has promoted fake news, including the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory claiming high-ranking Democratic Party officials were involved in a child sex ring. He was also a promoter of the Stop the Steal movement.
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.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, sorted by topics. It also includes events described in investigations into suspected inappropriate links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials. Those investigations continued in 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and 2019, largely as parts of the Crossfire Hurricane FBI investigation, the Special Counsel investigation, multiple ongoing criminal investigations by several State Attorneys General, and the investigation resulting in the Inspector General report on FBI and DOJ actions in the 2016 election.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
The Grayzone is an American far-left news website and blog founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal. The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project, was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018. A fringe website, it is known for misleading reporting and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes. The Grayzone has denied human rights abuses against Uyghurs, promulgated conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria and other regions, and promoted pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Grayzone has been described by Commentary as a propaganda shop devoted to pushing pro-Assad, pro-Maduro, pro-Putin, and pro-Hamas narratives.
In October 2020, a controversy emerged involving data from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden that was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop in 2019. Three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published a front page story that presented emails from the laptop, alleging they showed corruption by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The story was based on information provided to Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of incumbent president and candidate Donald Trump by the computer shop's owner, John Paul Mac Isaac. Forensic analysis later authenticated some of the data on the laptop, including one of two key emails used by the Post in their initial reporting.
In 2021, an internal document leak from the company then known as Facebook showed it was aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms. The leak, released by whistleblower Frances Haugen, resulted in reporting from The Wall Street Journal in September, as The Facebook Files series, as well as the Facebook Papers, by a consortium of news outlets the next month.
The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents that were made public, starting in December 2022, by CEO Elon Musk, who gave them to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after Musk acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.
In April 2023, two sets of classified documents of the United States began circulating on Twitter, Telegram, and 4chan. The documents are primarily related to the Russo-Ukrainian War, but also included foreign intelligence assessments concerning nations including North Korea, China, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Jack Teixeira, an airman first class of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, allegedly photographed printouts of the documents at his parents' home in Dighton, Massachusetts and posted them to the instant messaging platform Discord on a server named "Thug Shaker Central". A subset of documents were shared to Discord servers for a YouTuber and the sandbox video game Minecraft in late February and early March. In April, a 4chan user posted several documents on the website's political imageboard /pol/. The documents were then spread throughout pro-Russian Telegram channels; at least one image was altered to show more Ukrainian casualties than Russian casualties.
References
- 1 2 3 Trofimov, Yaroslav; Mackin, Bob (April 16, 2023). "Social-Media Account Overseen by Former Navy Noncommissioned Officer Helped Spread Secrets". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 21, 2023.
- ↑ https://www.euronews.com/2023/04/18/former-us-navy-officer-exposed-for-running-pro-kremlin-disinformation-account
- ↑ Lyngaas, Sean; Liebermann, Oren; Bertrand, Natasha (April 17, 2023). "FBI probes pro-Russia social media account's spread of classified information". CNN. Retrieved April 21, 2023.
