The Mueller Report

As the public and the mass media have scrutinized the redacted release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, there has emerged new information about the extent of Moscow’s involvement in trying to sway the vote.  The report detailed the actions of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a troll farm linked to the Kremlin.  The IRA reached up to 126 million Americans on Facebook by creating fraudulent accounts, advertisements, and partisan Facebook groups (Mueller, 2019).  The IRA even organized political rallies.  Mueller (2019) concluded, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” (p. 9).  The report illustrated Russian efforts to hack voting technology in the United States, to target election administrators in several states, and to infiltrate the computers of people linked to the Democratic campaign.  In doing so, the report says Russia “stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks” (Mueller, 2019, p. 13).  The report was not the first time Mueller’s team had pointed fingers at Russia.  In 2018, the special counsel indicted 12 Russian officers for election interference, and he provided evidence of the role that troll factories and paid agents played in shaping the political narrative online (Benkler, 2018).  

One individual who loomed large in that report is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.  In his report, Mueller (2019) noted Assange’s statements about the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich “implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails” (p. 48).  On April 11, 2019, British police arrested Assange in London after the government of Ecuador withdrew his asylum.  He awaits extradition to the United States on charges of attempting to hack into classified material on U.S. government computers in 2010 (Savage, Goldman, & Sullivan, 2019).  Assange may face additional charges; the indictment does not mention WikiLeaks’ more recent publishing of Democrats’ emails, which authorities have said Russia stole to help influence the 2016 presidential election (Savage et al., 2019).