Stewards of the Visual Exposition
Are We Not Supposed to Take "Jealous Care" of Our Right to Vote and to Make Absolutely Sure That Each Citizen's Vote Counts Equally?
And with regard to the 2016 election, just last week some declassified FBI documents were released by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which indicate that the Clinton campaign was warned about efforts of a foreign government to influence her through campaign contributions that "may come in a form outside established parameters for such contributions." The threat of corrupt malign influence activities requires continued vigilance.
So malign foreign influence efforts in our elections has been a perennial problem. But though the general threat isn't novel, some of the challenges we're facing now are different. As President Trump put it in Executive Order 13848: "In recent years, the proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity..."
Historically, malign influence operations were often limited by their reliance on third parties, such as mainstream news outlets or popular magazines, to reach sizeable segments of the American public. For much of our history, the media were cautious about being used in this way. For example, many American journalists wrote exposés about Nazi propaganda in the United States and, at least by 1940, the press was largely "immune" to it. Decades later, the FBI told Congress in 1986 that "[t]he American media is sophisticated, and generally recognizes Soviet influence attempts." But today, the media environment is considerably different, and the internet and social media also allow foreign actors to reach unprecedented numbers of Americans covertly, inexpensively, and directly, without ever setting foot on U.S. soil. We are all now familiar with the findings that, in the 2016 election cycle, the Russian Internet Research Agency "spent a total of about $100,000 over two years on advertisements" on Facebook to promote social discord and division, and similarly placed disguised posts and tweets on several social media platforms.
While the tools of malign influence have proliferated, foreign governments such as Russia and China have also become more sophisticated and more bold. Back in 1986, the FBI told Congress that Soviet active measures had relatively little success in the United States because they were "often transparent and sometimes clumsily implemented." Forged government documents, for instance, could be exposed. But the arsenal of modern malign influence - like impersonating Americans on social media platforms, or manipulating digital content through "deep fakes" - can be more difficult to detect and counter.
As to boldness, as the FBI Director has recently pointed out, the PRC has been "engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign," using bribery, blackmail, and other malign tactics to influence our year-round policymaking, which certainly has implications for our elections. Beijing's corrupt methods are not always as blatant as its illegal campaign financing was in 1996; PRC tactics are more subtly pernicious and complex. Beijing, for example, works relentlessly to co-opt seemingly independent middlemen who can influence members of Congress on a host of policies.
What is being done about all these malign foreign influence efforts? Rest assured, as this old problem takes on new looks, the Department of Justice has been responding to these challenges with our own tools. I'll mention five of them.
First, the FBI has established a Foreign Influence Task Force that brings together cross-disciplinary and cross-regional expertise, encompassing counterintelligence, cyber, criminal, and even counterterrorism agents and analysts who investigate and counter malign influence by China, Russia, Iran, and other foreign actors.
Second, the Department of Justice has been assisting social media companies, campaigns, and election officials in hardening their platforms, networks, and infrastructure against these threats, and has been providing them with defensive counterintelligence briefings and steps they can undertake to reduce their vulnerabilities.
Third, the Department of Justice has strengthened compliance efforts for the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, in order to identify and expose malign foreign influence. FARA helps to ensure transparency by requiring persons who engage in certain foreign influence-related activities to register with the department and publicly disclose those activities. It doesn't prohibit any speech, but instead enhances the public's and the government's ability to evaluate foreign influence-related speech by ensuring that the source is clear.
Fourth, where malign foreign influence operations violate our federal laws, as with hacking of email systems to make their contents public, these department of Justice has brought criminal charges. The department remains prepared to bring criminal charges where they are warranted.
Fifth, the department has supported the Administration's broader efforts to counter malign foreign influence. For example, the Administration has imposed financial sanctions for Russian efforts to sow discord in connection with the 2016 election, and imposed further sanctions in the last twelve months for Russia's additional influence operations since then. In short, the Justice Department and our colleagues in government have been adapting to foreign actors' malign activities-and actively combatting and defending against them.
At this point, I want to touch briefly on the current threat landscape as we head toward Election Day. The department of Justice, DHS, and other federal agencies, have engaged in an unprecedented level of coordination with and support to all 50 states and numerous local officials to ensure that their election infrastructure is secure. We have yet to see any activity intended to prevent voting or to change votes, and we continue to think that it would be extraordinarily difficult for foreign adversaries to change vote tallies.
We do, however, continue to see malign foreign influence efforts relevant to the 2020 presidential election. Some foreign actors are covertly trying to undermine confidence in our elections because they are authoritarian governments opposed to representative democracy. As the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently made public on August 7, some foreign governments have preferences about our election - and have taken or planned malign activities in support of their preferences - including efforts by China and Iran to undermine President Trump and his Administration's policies and efforts by Russia to undermine former Vice President Biden. The Intelligence Community, including the FBI, have briefed Congress, as well as both presidential campaigns, about these threats. ODNI also has also taken unprecedented steps to educate the public about these threats to "better inform Americans so they can play a critical role in safeguarding our election."
We are working to counter all of these influence activities. But it is important to remember that there are times when drawing attention to the threats can be precisely what the bad actors want, to generate concern and distrust, division and discord. And as Americans, we need to avoid the temptation to seek political advantage from the revelation of influence activities that were meant to divide us.
Instead, the right response is for our electorate to be knowledgeable and careful about the sources of information they rely on, to look for accurate information, to inform themselves about the candidates, and to cast their ballots accordingly. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves." So let me offer some final thoughts about what the historical records tells us that Americans can do to protect ourselves from the malign influence efforts of foreign governments, in addition to the strong measures being taken by the Justice Department and other government agencies.
We are given some advice from our predecessors. First, we all need to be aware that malign foreign influence efforts have always existed and they still do. It's one of the warnings that President George Washington shared when he counseled Americans that "against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake."
Second, this means we should not take information from foreign governments or questionable sources at face value. Information from countries or regions that have a history of propaganda, should be taken with "a grain of salt," if not "two and then three grains," as President Franklin Roosevelt said. We've been warning the public that "some foreign governments" have a track record of spreading fabricated stories, disinformation, and propaganda to try to shape voter perceptions, and the Intelligence Community continues to share information about what those governments are doing in 2020. All Americans can control what information they rely on and can exercise care by evaluating that information with a critical eye.
Finally, while we must remain vigilant, Americans should not be deterred from participating in elections by concerns of malign foreign influence efforts. All Americans, in the end, can control who they vote for. Foreign propaganda and other influence activities have been concerns since the founding of our Republic, but they are challenges that we've been successfully navigating for more than two hundred years. The measures I've outlined today can help us to do so once again this year.
References:
Remarks of Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen: https//www.justice.gov/opa/speech/remarks-deputy-attorney-general-jeffrey-rosen-malign-foreign-influence-us-elections
The First Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson (March 1, 1801). Referenced at: http//founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0116-0004
PETITION: Demand Legal Action On Election Fraud (also titled: "Petition To Remedy Voter Disenfranchisement Caused By Electoral Corruption In 2020"), Tom DeWeese and The American Policy Center (www.americanpolicy.org) - https://americanpolicy.org/archive/ OR https://americanpolicy.org/2020/11/25/demand-legal-action-on-election-fraud/ [NOTE: I have referenced the research and conclusions made by Tom DeWeese and the American Policy Center in the section above on the various examples of fraud and voter/election irregularities and on the section citing the Supreme Court case Anderson v. Celebrezze and the case Anderson v. United States (with the brilliant passage from Justice Thurgood Marshall)].
Connie Hannah, "The Trump Card Report," The County Compass, week of Dec, 24-29, 2020 [Connie writes a regular column grading President Trump on his performance for the particular week. She has provided me with information as to evidence of election fraud].
Peter Svab, "Fraud Analyst Finds Average of 2 to 3 Percent Shift for Biden in Counties That Used Dominion," The Epoch Times, Dec. 25, 2020. Reference at: Fraud Analyst Finds Average of 2 to 3 Percent Shift for Biden in Counties That Used Dominion (theepochtimes.com)
Anderson v. Celebrezze, 40 U.S. 780 (1983)
Anderson v. United States, 417 U.S. 211 (1974)
18 U.S.C. §241 ("Conspiracy Against Rights") - [USC02] 18 USC 241: Conspiracy against rights (house.gov) OR https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title18-section241&num=0&edition=prelim
Go Back
So malign foreign influence efforts in our elections has been a perennial problem. But though the general threat isn't novel, some of the challenges we're facing now are different. As President Trump put it in Executive Order 13848: "In recent years, the proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity..."
Historically, malign influence operations were often limited by their reliance on third parties, such as mainstream news outlets or popular magazines, to reach sizeable segments of the American public. For much of our history, the media were cautious about being used in this way. For example, many American journalists wrote exposés about Nazi propaganda in the United States and, at least by 1940, the press was largely "immune" to it. Decades later, the FBI told Congress in 1986 that "[t]he American media is sophisticated, and generally recognizes Soviet influence attempts." But today, the media environment is considerably different, and the internet and social media also allow foreign actors to reach unprecedented numbers of Americans covertly, inexpensively, and directly, without ever setting foot on U.S. soil. We are all now familiar with the findings that, in the 2016 election cycle, the Russian Internet Research Agency "spent a total of about $100,000 over two years on advertisements" on Facebook to promote social discord and division, and similarly placed disguised posts and tweets on several social media platforms.
While the tools of malign influence have proliferated, foreign governments such as Russia and China have also become more sophisticated and more bold. Back in 1986, the FBI told Congress that Soviet active measures had relatively little success in the United States because they were "often transparent and sometimes clumsily implemented." Forged government documents, for instance, could be exposed. But the arsenal of modern malign influence - like impersonating Americans on social media platforms, or manipulating digital content through "deep fakes" - can be more difficult to detect and counter.
As to boldness, as the FBI Director has recently pointed out, the PRC has been "engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign," using bribery, blackmail, and other malign tactics to influence our year-round policymaking, which certainly has implications for our elections. Beijing's corrupt methods are not always as blatant as its illegal campaign financing was in 1996; PRC tactics are more subtly pernicious and complex. Beijing, for example, works relentlessly to co-opt seemingly independent middlemen who can influence members of Congress on a host of policies.
What is being done about all these malign foreign influence efforts? Rest assured, as this old problem takes on new looks, the Department of Justice has been responding to these challenges with our own tools. I'll mention five of them.
First, the FBI has established a Foreign Influence Task Force that brings together cross-disciplinary and cross-regional expertise, encompassing counterintelligence, cyber, criminal, and even counterterrorism agents and analysts who investigate and counter malign influence by China, Russia, Iran, and other foreign actors.
Second, the Department of Justice has been assisting social media companies, campaigns, and election officials in hardening their platforms, networks, and infrastructure against these threats, and has been providing them with defensive counterintelligence briefings and steps they can undertake to reduce their vulnerabilities.
Third, the Department of Justice has strengthened compliance efforts for the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, in order to identify and expose malign foreign influence. FARA helps to ensure transparency by requiring persons who engage in certain foreign influence-related activities to register with the department and publicly disclose those activities. It doesn't prohibit any speech, but instead enhances the public's and the government's ability to evaluate foreign influence-related speech by ensuring that the source is clear.
Fourth, where malign foreign influence operations violate our federal laws, as with hacking of email systems to make their contents public, these department of Justice has brought criminal charges. The department remains prepared to bring criminal charges where they are warranted.
Fifth, the department has supported the Administration's broader efforts to counter malign foreign influence. For example, the Administration has imposed financial sanctions for Russian efforts to sow discord in connection with the 2016 election, and imposed further sanctions in the last twelve months for Russia's additional influence operations since then. In short, the Justice Department and our colleagues in government have been adapting to foreign actors' malign activities-and actively combatting and defending against them.
At this point, I want to touch briefly on the current threat landscape as we head toward Election Day. The department of Justice, DHS, and other federal agencies, have engaged in an unprecedented level of coordination with and support to all 50 states and numerous local officials to ensure that their election infrastructure is secure. We have yet to see any activity intended to prevent voting or to change votes, and we continue to think that it would be extraordinarily difficult for foreign adversaries to change vote tallies.
We do, however, continue to see malign foreign influence efforts relevant to the 2020 presidential election. Some foreign actors are covertly trying to undermine confidence in our elections because they are authoritarian governments opposed to representative democracy. As the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently made public on August 7, some foreign governments have preferences about our election - and have taken or planned malign activities in support of their preferences - including efforts by China and Iran to undermine President Trump and his Administration's policies and efforts by Russia to undermine former Vice President Biden. The Intelligence Community, including the FBI, have briefed Congress, as well as both presidential campaigns, about these threats. ODNI also has also taken unprecedented steps to educate the public about these threats to "better inform Americans so they can play a critical role in safeguarding our election."
We are working to counter all of these influence activities. But it is important to remember that there are times when drawing attention to the threats can be precisely what the bad actors want, to generate concern and distrust, division and discord. And as Americans, we need to avoid the temptation to seek political advantage from the revelation of influence activities that were meant to divide us.
Instead, the right response is for our electorate to be knowledgeable and careful about the sources of information they rely on, to look for accurate information, to inform themselves about the candidates, and to cast their ballots accordingly. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves." So let me offer some final thoughts about what the historical records tells us that Americans can do to protect ourselves from the malign influence efforts of foreign governments, in addition to the strong measures being taken by the Justice Department and other government agencies.
We are given some advice from our predecessors. First, we all need to be aware that malign foreign influence efforts have always existed and they still do. It's one of the warnings that President George Washington shared when he counseled Americans that "against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake."
Second, this means we should not take information from foreign governments or questionable sources at face value. Information from countries or regions that have a history of propaganda, should be taken with "a grain of salt," if not "two and then three grains," as President Franklin Roosevelt said. We've been warning the public that "some foreign governments" have a track record of spreading fabricated stories, disinformation, and propaganda to try to shape voter perceptions, and the Intelligence Community continues to share information about what those governments are doing in 2020. All Americans can control what information they rely on and can exercise care by evaluating that information with a critical eye.
Finally, while we must remain vigilant, Americans should not be deterred from participating in elections by concerns of malign foreign influence efforts. All Americans, in the end, can control who they vote for. Foreign propaganda and other influence activities have been concerns since the founding of our Republic, but they are challenges that we've been successfully navigating for more than two hundred years. The measures I've outlined today can help us to do so once again this year.
References:
Remarks of Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen: https//www.justice.gov/opa/speech/remarks-deputy-attorney-general-jeffrey-rosen-malign-foreign-influence-us-elections
The First Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson (March 1, 1801). Referenced at: http//founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0116-0004
PETITION: Demand Legal Action On Election Fraud (also titled: "Petition To Remedy Voter Disenfranchisement Caused By Electoral Corruption In 2020"), Tom DeWeese and The American Policy Center (www.americanpolicy.org) - https://americanpolicy.org/archive/ OR https://americanpolicy.org/2020/11/25/demand-legal-action-on-election-fraud/ [NOTE: I have referenced the research and conclusions made by Tom DeWeese and the American Policy Center in the section above on the various examples of fraud and voter/election irregularities and on the section citing the Supreme Court case Anderson v. Celebrezze and the case Anderson v. United States (with the brilliant passage from Justice Thurgood Marshall)].
Connie Hannah, "The Trump Card Report," The County Compass, week of Dec, 24-29, 2020 [Connie writes a regular column grading President Trump on his performance for the particular week. She has provided me with information as to evidence of election fraud].
Peter Svab, "Fraud Analyst Finds Average of 2 to 3 Percent Shift for Biden in Counties That Used Dominion," The Epoch Times, Dec. 25, 2020. Reference at: Fraud Analyst Finds Average of 2 to 3 Percent Shift for Biden in Counties That Used Dominion (theepochtimes.com)
Anderson v. Celebrezze, 40 U.S. 780 (1983)
Anderson v. United States, 417 U.S. 211 (1974)
18 U.S.C. §241 ("Conspiracy Against Rights") - [USC02] 18 USC 241: Conspiracy against rights (house.gov) OR https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title18-section241&num=0&edition=prelim
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Thank-you Diane Rufino.