Jared Kushner is mistaken about the extent of Russia's interference

Jared Kushner, son-in-law and senior advisor to President Donald Trump, suggested that Special Adviser Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's ties to Russia and whether the president was obstructing justice was further disrupting country that the Moscow interference.

"The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country," Kushner told a Time magazine Event. "You look at what Russia has done – buy ads on Facebook to sow dissent.And it's a terrible thing, but I think the survey and all the speculation that has occurred in the last two years have had a much bigger impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads. "

Kushner has the right to have his opinion on the impact, but his description of Russia's activity during the 2016 political season is wrong. "Buying ads on Facebook to sow dissent" blatantly contradicts the US government's description of the Kremlin's "active measures" campaign, which was concluded to help Trump and hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russia has sought to help Trump win the White House

In the end, Mueller did not establish that there was an illegal relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia. But the idea that Moscow's efforts amounted to "a few announcements on Facebook" is belied by the factual record prepared by Mueller, as well as by the evaluation of the US intelligence community.

Russia's active measures campaign included two major efforts. The first was a cross-platform social media campaign, which Kushner downplayed as buying "some Facebook ads". The second was piracy and the dissemination of democratic documents aimed at undermining Clinton's electoral chances.

"The investigation established that the Russian government had perceived the benefit of a Trump presidency and had striven to achieve this result," notes Mueller's report.

Mueller's conclusion came after the US intelligence community publicly announced a similar conclusion after the 2016 vote.

"We further evaluate Putin and the Russian government has clearly defined his preference for President-elect Trump," says the US intelligence assessment report of January 2017. "When it seemed in Moscow that the secretary Clinton was about to win the election, the campaign of Russian influence was then attached to undermining its expected presidency ".

The Russian campaign on social media

The Russian social media campaign went well beyond the claim of "two or three Facebook ads" by Kushner.

A Kremlin-backed entity, called the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, led the social media campaign in St. Petersburg, Russia. According to Mueller, at the end of the 2016 US election, "the IRA had the ability to reach millions of people in the United States through their social media accounts."

The report indicates that the IRA has purchased more than 3,500 ads on Facebook and spent some $ 100,000 for political ads. The group also controlled several Facebook groups and Instagram accounts that "had hundreds of thousands of US participants," Mueller said.

About a year after the elections, a Facebook official told Congress that the IRA controlled some 470 accounts generating 80,000 accounts between January 2015 and August 2017.

But the most important statistic is the length of its range.

"Facebook estimated that the IRA had touched up to 126 million people through its Facebook accounts," the Mueller report says.

Their efforts go well beyond Facebook. In addition, the IRA controlled Twitter accounts with "tens of thousands of followers," said Mueller, adding that among the subscribers were "several US political figures having retweeted content created by the". IRA ".

Twitter then revealed that the IRA controlled more than 3,800 accounts and probably reached nearly 1.5 million Twitter users.

The hacking operation of Russia

Kushner's description also ignored the Russian intelligence operation aimed at stealing and handing over documents.

To help Trump, Russian pirates controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU have stolen e-mails from Democratic organizations and Clinton campaign president John Podesta and sent them to several publishers, including WikiLeaks. Mueller concluded.

Two detrimental Clinton hardware dumps on WikiLeaks came at crucial moments in the campaign.

At the end of July 2016, the Democrats chose Clinton as the presidential candidate for the Democratic National Convention. But just days before the naming convention, a ceremony to promote party unity, WikiLeaks began to publish stolen e-mails from the Democratic Party.

The first installment – nearly 20,000 emails – revealed an embarrassing overview of the internal deliberations of the Democratic National Committee. The correspondence seemed to show that the party apparatus was conspiring to give Clinton a boost and weaken her rival, Bernie Sanders.

The e-mails sparked democratic struggles just as the party was trying to rally Clinton's support.

The next big gathering of detrimental information about Clinton by WikiLeaks occurred the month before the elections on October 7th.

That afternoon, the Washington Post released the video of a 2005 interview with Access Hollywood, in which Trump boasted that his celebrity status allowed him to grope women.

Less than an hour after Trump was released, Wikileaks revealed that it had received 50,000 emails from Podesta. He published a first copy of about 2,000 messages from the president of the Clinton campaign.

The timing of the release of Podesta's email fueled suspicions that WikiLeaks wanted to distract the attention of the Access Hollywood newspaper. Almost all the findings of the Mueller report on the role of WikiLeaks are redacted.

Our decision

Kushner said that Russia's interference in the 2016 election amounted to "some Facebook ads".

This claim grossly distorts Russia's active action campaign, which included both social media efforts to help Trump's candidacy and a hacking operation to limit the electoral chances of Democrats.

On Facebook, the technology company estimates that accounts controlled by the Kremlin have affected up to 126 million people in elections.

We evaluate these pants on the fire.