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Inside the Biden campaign's pushback against foreign interference

Author Name, ProPublica

2020-07-20 00:00:00

Biden’s remarks came on the same day that Democratic lawmakers raised new concerns about foreign influence operations in a letter to the FBI requesting fresh counterintelligence briefings ahead of the election. And they come as Biden’s campaign advisers have begun speaking out with fresh urgency about what they fear could become a serious threat.

“Despite the exposure of Russia’s malign activities by the U.S. Intelligence Community, law enforcement agencies, and bipartisan Congressional committees, the Kremlin has not halted its efforts to interfere in our democracy,” Biden’s statement reads. “Congress passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017. The Trump administration has thus far failed to make adequate use of these authorities to counter and deter foreign election interference.”

The former vice president’s comments reflect a growing concern not only about President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to commit to not accepting foreign help in the election, but also about what the former vice president’s campaign and bipartisan members of Congress see as an escalating disinformation campaign emerging out of Ukraine, said people familiar with his thinking.

They point to late last month, when a former student of a top Russian spy academy convened a press conference to unveil what he called “facts of international corruption and treason at the highest state level.”

In a well-choreographed, 75-minute presentation set against the logo of Russian news agency Interfax—and overlaid with English subtitles by the time it was posted on YouTube—Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach accused Biden, his son and members of his team of an elaborate conspiracy to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine through bribery and extortion.

Many of the misconduct accusations against Biden, which were examined during President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial last year, have been debunked; others remain unsubstantiated. But the former vice president’s advisers are bracing for an onslaught of accusations that, they say, recall Russia’s efforts to damage Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016.

Internal divisions remain over how to handle what some current and former U.S. officials say bears the hallmarks of a foreign influence operation. But the Biden camp believes it at least requires constant attention, and has invested significant resources into monitoring the disinformation, according to three people close to the campaign. It has stood up a team that works with the DNC to track misinformation and foreign interference efforts, which is now positioned to quickly flag issues to staff to determine the best response, the people said—though in most cases, that means no overt response at all.

Michael Carpenter, the managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement who now serves as an informal foreign policy adviser to the Biden campaign, said the campaign is “closely monitoring and exposing these methods, and actors, as Russian tools, precisely so that it’s unmistakably clear to the American people, if something fabricated or tampered with or dishonestly presented were to drop later in the campaign, that it's coming from the same people who have been spewing lies and disinformation for months.”

The impact of the Ukrainians’ accusations has so far been minimal; the allegations are byzantine, requiring a familiarity with Kyiv’s oligarch-dominated, cut-throat politics that few Americans possess. During the Democratic primary, Biden weathered Trump’s attacks on his son Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma; the president’s hamfisted attempts to enlist his Ukrainian counterpart in the effort ultimately led to his impeachment, while the former vice president may have benefited from having the issue litigated in the public arena more than a year out from the general election.

But some close to Biden’s campaign have expressed concern in recent weeks that actors like Derkach are laying the groundwork to hammer Biden on the Ukraine issue using heavily edited or doctored tapes in the waning days and weeks of the election—with the help of Trump, who has signaled he would happily accept foreign dirt on an opponent, and his allies on Capitol Hill, whose investigation of Burisma and the Bidens has at times mirrored Derkach’s accusations.

Recordings of Biden speaking to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko have already been released by Derkach, whose YouTube video unveiling them has been viewed nearly 300,000 times in the last 3 weeks. The leaked tapes’ provenance is unknown and reveal no new information, but have been used by the Ukrainian to make new, unsubstantiated claims against Biden and Poroshenko.

Derkach, an independent MP who was formerly aligned with Ukraine’s pro-Russia Party of Regions, told POLITICO in a lengthy statement that his press conferences were focused on “international corruption,” and called it “nonsense” that he is trying to interfere in the U.S. election. He also denounced efforts “to tie me to the special services of other countries,” like Russia, and said his critics were trying to discredit him by drawing attention to his studies at Moscow’s FSB academy, formerly known as the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB.

Derkach’s father, Leonid, was a KGB operative for decades before becoming the head of Ukraine’s security services until he was fired in 2004 over his alleged involvement in a murder plot.

“The main purpose of our activity is pursuing the interests of Ukraine, exposing international corruption, [and] maintaining partnership relations between strategic partners – Ukraine and the USA,” said the younger Derkach, who hired lobbyists earlier this year to set up meetings for him with White House officials and members of “the Senate Foreign Relationship and House of Foreign Affairs Committees.” (He now alleges his U.S. visa has been revoked.)

Derkach was openly hostile to efforts by Ukraine to assist former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Paul Manafort—Trump’s former campaign chairman who was convicted of bank and tax fraud stemming from his work in Ukraine, where he was also investigated by the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) over alleged illegal payments. NABU is now one of Derkach’s chief targets.

Meanwhile, Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy who has also worked with Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to undermine Biden, told POLITICO in a phone interview on Wednesday that he gave more recorded conversations between Biden and Poroshenko to a third party who will decide whether and how to release them.

“I’m not releasing anything on my own,” Telizhenko said. “I don’t want to interfere in anything. I gave it to a U.S. source and had them decide what to release and what not to release, not to interfere in any political situation in the United States.” He also vehemently denies any allegations that he’s working with the Russians, saying, “I’m not supporting Russia in any way” and “I again see myself as a patriot of Ukraine.”

The Biden campaign is reluctant to address the Ukraine recordings; his aides would prefer to focus on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, the collapsing U.S. economy and Americans’ concerns about health care than to dignify what they see as scurrilous and misleading attacks. Indeed, in his statement on Monday, Biden said he has “no desire to escalate tensions with Russia or any other country" and “would prefer to focus the full energies of my administration on bringing the international community together to fight COVID-19 and the economic pain it has caused, and to tackle other pressing issues of international concern.”

“But if any foreign power recklessly chooses to interfere in our democracy, I will not hesitate to respond as president to impose substantial and lasting costs,” he added.

There is no evidence that Derkach, Andrii Artemenko — a former Ukrainian lawmaker Derkach hired to lobby for him in the US — and Telizhenko are working with Russia. And so far, the recordings have drawn little sustained media attention. But some in the Biden camp see tactics that, at a minimum, resemble the Russian playbook; others explicitly accuse the Kremlin of involvement in the accusations.

An informal campaign adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue, said they are trying to avoid “the trap that the Russians are clearly trying to lay here.”

Biden and several of his top campaign advisers—including former deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken, former national security adviser Susan Rice and her then-deputy Avril Haines—are more than familiar with Russia’s tactics: They dealt with them firsthand in 2016, when the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Kremlin’s brazen hacking-and-dumping and disinformation operation, and targeting of electoral infrastructure.

Biden himself has made discouraging foreign interference, both in the U.S. and abroad, a key initiative. He joined the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity in 2018, which aims to raise awareness about foreign election meddling and ever-shifting disinformation tactics, and has pledged not to accept foreign help or use stolen or fabricated material to attack his opponents—his campaign has even instructed staffers and volunteers to severely limit their interactions with foreign officials to avoid even the perception of outside interference.

“This is a very deep campaign, with a lot of people who have expertise on Russia and Ukraine and who went through this kind of operation in 2016,” said an informal Biden adviser. “They understand what the Russian government is capable of doing.”

So how are they dealing with it this time around? Quietly and strategically, people close to the campaign said.

“We absolutely need to be monitoring this and we are,” said a third adviser. “And we need to be cognizant that Russia is certainly replaying the 2016 playbook. But the circumstances are slightly different.”
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[1] URL: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/20/biden-foreign-russia-kremlin-373277
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