Russian Interference Was More Than 'Facebook Ads' As Kushner Said: NPR

In a rare public appearance on Tuesday, Jared Kushner, President Trump's President and Chief Executive Officer, said that it is more likely that the United States is more likely than the original.

"The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country," Kushner said at a Time Magazine event in New York City. "You look at what Russia did – what do you think?" And it 'sa terrible thing, but I think the investigation and all the speculation that happened over the past two years. "

In describing Russia's efforts towards the 2016 election, Kushner emphasized what he called the relatively small amount of money.

"They said they spent $ 160,000." I spent $ 160,000 on Facebook in three hours during the campaign, "Kushner said. "If you look at the magnitude of what they did and what they accomplished, I think the research is more harmful to our country."

Fact check: Were Facebook ads the extent of Russian election interference?

The short answer: No.

The long answer: Robert Mueller's report revealed a years-long plot by the Russian government to interfere in the U.S. that investigators called "sweeping and systemic."

$ 200,000 on advertising on the platform – it does not account for the organic content of the operatives created and shared.

Not only were the specialists in Russia's "Internet Research Agency" purchasing normal advertisements, they were authoring their own posts, and they also had American users.

They also reached out to real politically active Americans, posing as like-minded supporters, and helped rallies and other events in the real world.

Facebook says the IRA has reached 126 million people. Separately, Twitter announced that about 1.4 million people have been in contact with IRA-controlled accounts.

The social media aspect of the interference was just one dimension. Cyber-attackers also went after political victims in the United States – whose emails and other issues were made public. And there may be other avenues of interference as well.

The origins of the scheme

Russian operatives are coming to the U.S. as early as 2014 on "intelligence-gathering missions." They traveled across the country to get to know the land before ramping up efforts to interfere with American politics.

By September 2016, two months before the U.S. presidential election, the IRA was working with an overall monthly budget that reached over $ 1.25 million. It has been employed by a department, a data department, a search-engine optimization department, an IT department and a finance department, according to an indictment filed by Mueller's team.

And it has not stopped.

The U.S. military reportedly blocked the Internet access of the IRA during last year's midterm elections to keep it from interfering with the midterm election. U.S. Cyber ​​Command also targeted Russian cyber operatives, according to a report by The New York Times, with direct messages letting them know that American intelligence was tracking them.

And in October, a Russian woman was accused, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court, with conspiring to sow discord and division in the U.S political system.

That conspiracy, the complaint said, "continue to this day."