For years, Ukraine has been Russia’s disinformation laboratory, the Cassandra of the information war. And what does this glimpse prophecise? It should warn us that despite greater public awareness, increased attention from social media platforms, and millions of dollars of government investments to counter hostile influence campaigns, disinformers in Russia and other adversarial states have not been deterred. They have adapted. And now the American presidential election is in their sights.

I was living in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, before the last US election, in 2016. Disinformation was already part of daily life there; I watched as the country attempted to defend itself against Russian attacks, not only on the physical battlefield, where a war that Russia instigated claimed thousands of lives, but in the information space as well. These attacks showed no signs of letting up in Ukraine, or across Europe. If anything, online warfare was intensifying. It seemed that every day a Ukrainian was telling me the United States ignored Eastern and Central Europe’s struggles at its own peril. Information warfare does not respect international borders. I knew it would reach us soon, too.

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Revelations about the extent of Russia’s influence campaign and the vulnerability of American society to disinformation did indeed flood our collective consciousness after election night. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s collusion investigation details the Internet Research Agency’s now infamous “social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States”, as well as the Russian intelligence service’s hack-and-leak operations, and attempts by the Russian government to influence the Trump campaign itself. 

But the United States’ and its Western allies’ understanding of the disinformation concept has barely evolved since it first entered collective awareness four years ago. You can tell by the language used. In unsophisticated fashion, governments and media outlets still describe Russia as having “hacked” the US election. They discuss Russian “bots” and “trolls” interchangeably, without knowing what either word means (a bot is an inauthentic automated account controlled by lines of code; a troll is controlled by a human). Russian ads spread “fake news,” they say, and they’re ready to do it again.

The trouble is, most of these assertions are misconceptions or blunt shorthand that don’t help voters understand how they are being targeted and manipulated. Russian operatives create informational chaos without the deployment of cut-and-dry “fakes”. In fact, fake news describes only a sliver of Russian influence operations. The most convincing Russian narratives, and indeed, the most successful, in both Central and Eastern Europe and the United States, are narratives grounded in truth which exploit the divisions in societies.

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These truths can be undisputed facts or the perceived realities of life for marginalised populations that Russian operations target. So, in Estonia, in 2007, Russian media amplified and exacerbated the complaints of ethnic Russians toward the post-independence Estonian government about the opportunities available to them as Russian speakers. In Poland, Russia continues to fuel conspiracy theories about the 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 100 members of the country’s political elite. And as Ukraine continues to pursue democratic reform, Russia’s disinformation amplifies well-founded accusations of corruption, seeking to undermine the post-revolution Ukrainian government and its legitimacy at home and abroad. And American vulnerabilities around race, income, sexuality, and geography continue to fuel Russian operations in the United States. 

Contrary to popular understanding, these campaigns never ran on malicious bots and ads purchased in rubles alone; emotion is their primary currency. This has, in fairness, become clearer to US audiences in recent months as Russia and now China have amplified discord and government missteps amid the Covid-19 infodemic and George Floyd protests.

Even so, Americans and their government have been slow to recognise that disinformers are adapting their tactics. From bot farms in Ukraine, to the co-opting of local organisations in Nigeria and Ghana, and the use of American Facebook Groups to sow discord, Russia has been constantly re-writing the disinformation playbook to make their operations more difficult to track and counteract.

Popular awareness lags woefully behind. This is reflected in our response to the attacks. In its missteps and hesitance, combined with a desire for an easy fix, the United States has effectively abdicated leadership of this critical issue. Where it ought to have been setting the rules of engagement, the tone, and the moral compass in responding to Russia’s information war, the United States has been a tardy, timid, or tertiary player, with any efforts stymied by domestic politicisation.

One consequence of American political acrimony is that its lawmakers have effectively issued social media companies a “get out of jail free” card for their role in the erosion of our information ecosystem, the demise of democratic debate, and their complicity in the spread of disinformation. In Britain, politicians have launched well-informed inquiries and attempted to hold social media platforms to account, and the Government is in the midst of crafting social media regulations that keep users’ democratic rights at their core; but in the United States, regulation has become a partisan issue, understood through the lens of alleged bias on platforms, ignoring the fact that disinformation knows no political party. 

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As a result, with the 2020 election only five months away, the United States is still vulnerable to Russia. Basic election security legislation, including the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill that would mandate transparency around online political advertising, languishes in the Senate, politicised by the Republican majority, which refuses to put it on the agenda. Social media platforms have been forced into action by an irate public and are now engaged in a furious game of Whack-a-Troll, removing accounts and networks that clearly violate their terms of service. But they are slow to adapt to the disinformers’ rewritten playbooks. 

The biggest failing of the past four years, however, comes from the US government itself: it has has eschewed its responsibility to protect equitable, democratic discourse at home and abroad. No single US government agency or entity holds the reins in the American response to Russian disinformation at home. And any attempts that have been made — sparse, disparate and uncoordinated — do not have the support from the President or his closest advisers.

In April last year, for example, The New York Times reported that top officials charged with protecting US elections were told not to bring up their work in front of the President, who views any discussion of Russian interference as an attack on the legitimacy of his administration. Even outside of this, there is a stark incongruity between what the President says and what his administration does. How can US allies, or moreover, the American people, trust that the Trump administration’s efforts to protect the democratic process are adequate or legitimate when Trump praises and jokes with Putin?

Even if Trump were to give a speech from the Oval Office today decrying nefarious efforts to influence our democratic process, urging Congress to fund election security measures and pass common sense online advertising regulations, we would still be on the back foot. That’s because he defines the problem as something being done to us, rather than a weaponisation of our own weaknesses.  

The investments we so desperately need to repair the fissures in our society that bad actors manipulate — in media and digital literacy, critical thinking, civics, and journalism as a public good — have been neglected at best. More often, this administration has actively divested from these projects. 

Until our elected officials begin to once again respect the truth, then, it is up to us, the people — at protests, in the voting booth — to remind them it exists. It would be easy to check out, to seek entertainment instead of information as many of us have done during the incessant flow of coronavirus information over the past three months. It would be easy to shirk our civic duties and ignore democratic discourse entirely. But unless we want to live in an autocracy, it really is time to make sure we are heard.

This essay is adapted from Nina Jankovicz’s book, How to Lose the Information War, which is published by Bloomsbury on 9th July.

Far from settling the issue, though, Mueller’s findings merely represented the culmination of just one phase in the interminable Russiagate journey. Now, Trump has apparently endeavoured to rebrand the “scandal” instead as “Obamagate” — so as to almost invert its contours, and depict the true “scandal” as always having been principally about shameful malfeasance on the part of Obama-era security state officials.

The hope, presumably, is that this will tarnish the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by association. Whether or not the tactic is actually in Trump’s best political interests is questionable, as it seems doubtful that anyone but the most plugged-in partisans and hobbyists are invested enough in the intricate, often confusing details to even know what he’s talking about. Nonetheless, Trump’s complaints — while characteristically over-simplified and bombastic — do have some substantive merit.

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To understand why, one must turn back the clock a bit. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, huge portions of the left-liberal US political and media class collectively decided that the executive branch of the federal government — soon to be headed by someone they regarded as unthinkably grotesque — had lost all legitimacy.

In desperation, they vested their hopes in unelected members of the executive branch, namely the national security bureaucracy, to constrain or even overthrow Trump — because they saw him not just as a demented fascist madman, but as an active conspirator with a hostile foreign nation in Russia. Josh Marshall, the publisher of the liberal blog Talking Points Memo, encapsulated this mentality when he wrote in November 2016: “Let’s hope there’s a deep state, and if there is that they have their shit together.”

It was in this frenzied climate that the upper echelons of the security state apparatus, buoyed by the eager assent and even conscious participation of the elite media, seized the power to launch unprecedented encroachments into domestic political affairs. By now, many of these astonishing encroachments have been well-documented.

One of the most egregious is the spellbinding saga of Carter Page, a middling “adviser” with only the most tangential connection to Trump, who nonetheless found himself subjected to massively invasive state surveillance on the basis of the so-called “Steele Dossier” — the infamous collection of preposterous rumours and gossip alleging vast conspiratorial collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

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Page’s ordeal is just one example of many. As progressively more information trickles out about how these absurd security state machinations took shape in the hysterical days of 2016 and 2017, by way of newly revealed court filings and Congressional transcripts, Trump is being granted more ammunition to batter his Democratic opponents with, simply because those machinations were so patently ill-founded. Hence the logic of the “Obamagate” rebranding effort.

Armed with the fact that no conspiracy took place, Trump can justifiably claim to have been targeted for unwarranted punishment by members of the previous administration. And the latest developments bolstering Trump’s case involve new information relating to his beleaguered former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, who was forced out of office in February 2017.

Flynn’s great crime was to take part in phone conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition period in December 2016, and urge him not to overreact to punitive measures imposed by the outgoing Obama administration. That’s it. That’s the affront that impelled high-ranking FBI officials to conduct an entrapment-style interview with Flynn in the White House, which resulted in him telling them a purported “lie” about his innocuous conversations with Kislyak, which then created enough political pressure for Trump to capitulate and fire Flynn. That this should be the action that resulted in his firing is doubly ironic, given Flynn’s predilections toward extreme hawkishness in other foreign policy domains. Because in this rare instance, he was actually seeking to ameliorate tensions — with a nuclear-armed power, no less.

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Eventually Flynn pleaded guilty to “making a false statement” to the FBI, even though just-released documents show that the FBI officials who conducted his interview “had the impression at the time that he was not lying”. While there is still some ambiguity as to the exact chronology around if and when these security state officials had caused Flynn’s identity to be “unmasked” — a concept heavily promoted by Trump and the Republican commentariat — there is no doubt that Flynn became the object of bizarrely vigorous federal law enforcement attention during late 2016 / early 2017, on grounds that increasingly appear fraudulent. Underscoring the absurdity of the affair, FBI officials even eagerly conjured up a half-baked theory that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act — a comically obsolete statute enacted in 1799 under the administration of President John Adams — in order to justify their wild goose chase.

Flynn’s eventual sacking as a result of this FBI-manufactured controversy — aided by strategic leaks to the Washington Post — marked a turning point in the development of the early portion of the “Russian collusion” narrative that would subsequently engulf Trump’s first several years in office. Now there was tangible proof that such manufactured controversies could tangibly impede Trump’s ability to govern. Trump himself was evidently oblivious to this dynamic, as an anecdote relayed in Volume II of the Mueller Report illustrates:

On February 14, 2017, the day after Flynn’s resignation, the President had lunch at the White House with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. According to Christie, at one point during the lunch the President said, “Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over.” Christie laughed and responded, “No way.”

The anecdote portrays Trump as clueless that Flynn’s forced departure had signalled only the beginning of the unfurling political hysteria caused by the “Russia issue” (its exact contours seldom well-defined in the press, Congress, or really by anyone.) Indeed, the “issue” escalated dramatically over the next several months, with the Special Counsel investigation headed by Mueller initiated in May 2017.

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Trump’s seemingly blasé attitude at the time was informed by his belief that there was no Russia conspiracy to be uncovered, therefore there was nothing for him to worry about. He did not sufficiently appreciate the extent to which security state officials (as well as the opposition party and much of the media) would pull out all the stops to generate the impression of a conspiracy, by furiously hyping every incremental “bombshell” development, none of which actually pointed to a conspiracy but did create a general sense of sinister wrongdoing — accompanied by breathless speculation that the next domino was ready to fall at any moment.

But as we now all know, and as should have been obvious all along, there were no more dominoes. Over a year after Mueller’s final Report, though, there still has been no serious reckoning with what really happened. Recognising that Trump’s recurrent complaints about the matter are correct has long been essentially impossible for most Democrats, liberals, and leftists. Conceding that Trump could be right about anything, or even that his grievances contain the smallest kernel of truth, is widely seen in these quarters as tantamount to endorsing fascism, Nazism, the Kremlin, or some terrifying combination thereof. “Obamagate” is Trump’s attempt to force just such a reckoning — one that is indeed long overdue.

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However, Trump does not necessarily aid the process of coming to an accurate collective understanding of “Russiagate” by describing it as “Obamagate”. This imputes an excessively partisan motivation to the security state officials who manufactured the drama.

Figures such as the former Director of the FBI, James Comey, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and the former Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein — all of whom connived to one degree or another against Trump — could not be reasonably said to have acted on the basis of pure partisan animus. Comey and Brennan, for instance, were initially appointed to high-profile positions by George W. Bush. Rosenstein, a Republican, was himself appointed by Trump. What united them was not partisanship per se, but their immersion in the peculiarly bipartisan ideology of the American national security state.

Trump wasn’t viewed with such frantic alarmism by these figures simply because he was a Republican. Rather, they viewed Trump — incorrectly, for the most part — as an agent of subversion. And so the term “Obamagate”, with its tedious invocation of the legacy of Watergate, obscures the real culprit of this fiasco: the myopic and irrational pathologies of the American security state, which continue under Trump unabated.