Recent discussions surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election highlight a crucial distinction between the hack-and-leak operations targeting political entities and attempts to compromise election infrastructure. As noted by Michael Weiss on social media, this distinction is often conflated, despite clear findings from official investigations.
The hack-and-leak operation, which involved the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and John Podesta, was definitively ratified in Special Counsel Robert Mueller ’s grand jury indictments. In July 2018, Mueller's office charged twelve officers of Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), specifically from Units 26165 and 74455, for their roles in these cyberattacks. These GRU officers allegedly engaged in spear-phishing campaigns, gaining access to computer networks, stealing emails and documents, and then releasing them through personas like "Guccifer 2.0" and "DCLeaks."
Conversely, the notion of widespread compromise of "election infrastructure" leading to vote altering was never alleged in any Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). However, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, overseen by then-Acting Chairman Marco Rubio, did document extensive Russian efforts to "probe" election infrastructure across all 50 states. The committee found an "unprecedented level of activity" by Russian intelligence in 2016, including scanning databases for vulnerabilities and, in some cases, successfully penetrating voter registration databases to exfiltrate voter data.
Despite these probing attempts and data exfiltration, the Senate Intelligence Committee explicitly stated that it found "no evidence that vote tallying procedures had been compromised or that any voting machines had been manipulated." This finding underscores that while Russian actors sought to identify weaknesses and gather information from election systems, there was no impact on the election outcome itself through altered votes. The intelligence community's consensus has consistently focused on the influence campaign and the dissemination of stolen materials, rather than direct manipulation of vote counts.