Moscow is also campaigning: manufacturing fake democrats so the real ones lose

Russia is once again trying to influence the American election with a broad disinformation campaign, this time ahead of the November 3 midterm elections. That is the claim of the senior Democratic members of Congress's two intelligence committees, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, who on Wednesday received a classified briefing on election security. The briefing was requested on October 2 from Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, but the details cannot be made public because they remain classified.

According to Warner, Moscow is running the same kind of online influence campaign that U.S. intelligence uncovered in 2016, 2020 and 2024, but this time it is specifically targeting Democratic candidates. He cited two examples: James Talarico, who is running for a Senate seat in Texas, and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is seeking re-election — fake, AI-generated ads about both of them are circulating online. Himes said the Russians are "singing the same old tune" and are using whatever tools they can get their hands on to sow chaos and undermine voters' trust in voting machines.

The content of the fabrications is already known, since Bloomberg, The New York Times and several research groups have been monitoring the campaign for weeks. According to reports compiled by Hoodline, one fake video claimed that Talarico paid OnlyFans models, while another alleged that Ossoff owns eight undeclared properties, even though there is no evidence for either claim. According to a Bloomberg investigation, between September 10 and October 9, 130 fabricated videos and doctored newspaper front pages appeared, targeting 29 of the 36 Democratic gubernatorial candidates and 20 of the 35 Democratic Senate candidates, with the posts spread by automated accounts. Researchers say the manipulation is also revealed by the fact that view counts jumped to around 200,000 within an hour, then suddenly stopped. They also noted that earlier Russian campaigns tried to stir division on both sides of the political spectrum, whereas now they are targeting almost exclusively the Democrats.

Such fabrications are linked to Russian networks
such as Storm-1516 and Matryoshka

According to Bloomberg's data, Storm-1516 has spread more than 190 false stories since August 2023, racking up hundreds of millions of views combined. The network was also active in Hungary this spring: in March it circulated a video disguised as a Euronews report claiming that Péter Magyar had insulted Trump. The video was viewed 2.7 million times, yet it failed to save Viktor Orbán — the Kremlin's favorite — from his heavy defeat in April. According to The New York Times, Democrats are also being targeted by a Russian operation called Doppelgänger, which suggests they have turned their backs on Israel. The operation is run by a Russian company called Social Design Agency, which has been sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union.

At the same time, Warner and Himes stressed that they saw no indication in the briefing that any country is capable of penetrating U.S. election systems and altering the results, or that any such attempt is being planned. The Russian campaign, then, is not trying to rewrite the votes but to confuse voters. The two Democratic lawmakers are therefore more concerned that, in the event of a possible defeat, Donald Trump will dispute the results by citing a foreign hacking attack — a fear that is not unfounded, since according to Reuters/Ipsos polls, Democrats are leading nationally by margins ranging from a few points to more than ten, and Trump has never acknowledged his 2020 defeat. Himes said China has also not given up its "extremely targeted" influence efforts, while the Chinese embassy in Washington called this a "false accusation and serious slander." The Russian embassy, the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to Reuters' request for comment — in previous cases, Moscow has always denied interference. Reuters notes that Trump recently eased economic sanctions against Russia, while increasingly pressuring Ukraine to end its fight against the Russian occupiers.

Russian interference is nothing new. According to the report released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in April 2019, Russia interfered "in a sweeping and systematic fashion" in the 2016 presidential election, specifically to benefit Trump and harm Hillary Clinton. The report uncovered two channels. One was the St. Petersburg troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, which reached millions of Americans on social media through thousands of fake profiles posing as U.S. citizens, advertisements, and even the organizing of real street protests. The other channel was Russian military intelligence, the GRU. Its hackers broke into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and then leaked the stolen material in carefully timed releases through the DCLeaks website, under the alias Guccifer 2.0, and via WikiLeaks. Mueller's investigation led to charges against 13 Russian citizens, three Russian companies, and 12 GRU officers.

Although the report did not establish that Trump's campaign team had criminally conspired with the Kremlin, it documented numerous contacts. One was the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, which Donald Trump Jr. attended hoping to receive damaging material on Clinton from the Russian government, while campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik. The Senate's bipartisan Intelligence Committee later identified Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer and described the data handover as a "grave counterintelligence threat" — that committee was chaired in 2020 by none other than Republican Marco Rubio. On suspicion of obstruction of justice, Mueller examined ten instances and explicitly stated that the report did not exonerate Trump. Yet the public took away a different message, because Attorney General William Barr issued a four-page summary before the report was made public, claiming the investigation found no collusion, which Trump then turned into a claim of "total exoneration." Mueller protested in a letter, arguing that Barr's summary did not accurately reflect the substance of the report, and a federal judge later faulted Barr for a "lack of candor." Few people, however, read the more than four-hundred-page report in full, so the slogan of a "witch hunt" proved stronger than the evidence.

U.S. intelligence also documented Russian influence efforts in 2020 and 2024, and in both cases concluded that the votes themselves were not successfully manipulated. The second Trump administration, however, far from strengthening the country's defenses, dismantled them. In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI's task force on foreign influence; that same summer, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shut down its center for countering foreign influence, and the relevant unit of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), responsible for election security, was also downsized. At the same time, the administration has tried to portray the intelligence assessment that uncovered the 2016 interference as a political conspiracy. Experts say artificial intelligence is making the production of fabrications cheaper and faster, and according to Bloomberg, the Russian state plans to spend around $1.8 billion on state media and online propaganda in 2026. Ten years on, the Kremlin is thus running the same playbook as in 2016 — only with better tools, and this time against a Washington that has dismantled its own defenses.

Ugar