The Plot to Hack America

First, Kremlin insiders or other powerful individuals buy, steal or manufacture incriminating information about an opponent, an enemy, or any other person who poses a threat to powerful interests. Then, they publish it, destroying the target’s reputation in order to settle public scores or manipulate public events.⁵¹

Taub writes that after the DNC email leak—if Russia is indeed responsible—“we may be seeing one of the most sordid tools of its domestic politics deployed as a hostile weapon in foreign policy.”⁵² She argues correctly the same position held by the U.S. intelligence community: That the DNC hack is materially different from other hacks the U.S. has experienced. She wrote, “Rather than using the information seized for intelligence purposes, the hackers selected damaging excerpts from the cache of stolen data, and then leaked them at a pivotal moment in the presidential election.”⁵³ In other words, a classic case of Kompromat.

Collecting and exploiting information in political warfare is so common among Russian politicians that there is a series of websites dedicated to tracking the incidents, such as kompromat.ru. This site is run by a Russian blogger who sells salacious stories gathered from the steamy political underbelly of Russians who use it to their own advantage on a local scale.

David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, writes that whether or not Russia was responsible for the DNC hack and subsequent leak to WikiLeaks, “what’s undisputed is that the gathering of Kompromat—compromising material—is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal… For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online.”⁵⁴

In a previous article for The New Yorker, Remnick described one infamous case of Kompromat:

In 1999, on the eve of a national election, a prosecutor named Yuri Skuratov was investigating corruption at the Kremlin and among its oligarch allies. Now all that anyone remembers about Skuratov is the grainy black-and-white film of him attempting, without complete success, to have sex with two prostitutes; the film was broadcast nationally on state television, and that was the end of Skuratov and the investigation. (The head of the secret services at the time was Vladimir Putin.)⁵⁵

Franklin Foer writes in Slate, “There’s a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO.”⁵⁶ In an interview on Slate’s podcast “Trumpcast,” Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum also mentioned Russia’s “pattern” of interfering in elections of Western democracies, citing as one example Russia’s funding of Marine Le Pen, president of France’s National Front, a far right political party.⁵⁷ Computer hacking adds another dimension to Kompromat. Applebaum said that the events unfolding in the 2016 presidential election seem to follow a pattern that other European countries have experienced when Russia has exerted its influence: