After then-President Donald Trump repeatedly denied or downplayed interference in Russia’s 2016 elections, senior Trump administration officials, including Trump himself, refused to recognize or elevate Russia’s operations in 2020 and sought to portray China as the biggest threat. characterize.
The sanctions also include the U.S. government’s acknowledgment for the first time that a Russian-linked intelligence agent named Konstantin Kilimnik provided election strategy information and Trump campaign data to Russian intelligence agencies in 2016.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described the sanctions in a statement as “the start of a new US campaign against Russian malicious behavior.”
The Biden government imposed sanctions on 16 entities and 16 individuals whom it accuses of attempting to influence the November elections, including Russia’s first deputy chief of staff Alexei Gromov, who is leading the use of the media device by the Kremlin that discredit tensions in states by the 2020 US election process. ”
Last month, the intelligence community released a report that concluded that the Russian government was interfering with a disinformation push in the 2020 election that sought to belittle President Joe Biden’s campaign and back Trump. The report from the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence Agency found that Russia was using “proxies related to Russian intelligence” to push unsubstantiated claims about Biden.
The intelligence report cited Kilimnik as a key player in the meddling efforts. Kilimnik was among those punished on Thursday as “a Russian and Ukrainian political adviser and a well-known Russian intelligence agency conducting influence operations on their behalf.” The Treasury Department noted that the FBI was offering a reward of up to $ 250,000 for information leading to his arrest.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Kilimnik, according to the Finance Ministry’s announcement, “provided the Russian intelligence services with sensitive information about polls and campaign strategy.”
But the Mueller report only said that he had given that information to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs he worked for, leading many to question whether the campaign poll ever made its way to the Russian government, which was actively meddling in the 2016 election at the time. to help Trump win.
The Treasury Department press release on Thursday marked the first time the U.S. government has ever revealed that Kilimnik has provided these internal Trump campaign insights to Russian intelligence.
The Mueller report said it “identified no evidence of a link between Manafort’s sharing of polling data and Russia’s interference in the election,” but also said they had limited access to the truth because they could not interview Kilimnik and Manafort lied about the data transfers. .
In addition, the US issued sanctions on Thursday against a slew of disinformation points and individuals and entities operating as part of the Internet Research Agency Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s troll farm.
Some of the sanctions target disinformation centers controlled by Russian intelligence agencies, which, according to the US, operate a network of websites disguising their Russian ancestry in order to appeal to and manipulate the American and other Western audiences. It includes the Strategic Culture Front, an online magazine registered in Russia and directed by Russia’s foreign intelligence agency that has “produced false and baseless stories about US officials involved in the 2020 US presidential election,” according to a Treasury Department fact sheet , and InfoRos, a self-identifying news agency, is run by the Russian military intelligence unit that “spread false conspiracy stories and disinformation promoted by military intelligence officials.”