Andrei Soldatov, co-author of Red Web, a book about Russia’s cybersecurity and use of the Internet to silence dissent, thinks that the likelier target of Moscow is not Trump but rather his now powerful party. “I doubt there can be any kompromat on Trump which can hurt him,” Soldatov said. “But the Republican Party is a different story.”
For Soldatov, the threatened publication of documents confirming rumors or alleged ties between Trump’s cabinet picks and the Russian government could be a useful tool to keep the administration in check. “Remember the story about a former Defense Intelligence Agency chief giving interviews to [Russian state propaganda channel] RT and being paid for that?” Soldatov said, referring to Flynn, who is now Trump’s national security advisor. “It would be bad enough simply to produce documentary evidence confirming things we already knew.”
A former Russian spymaster agrees with that assessment.
Oleg Kalugin was a KGB general in charge of operations in the United States; he also ran the First Chief Directorate’s K Branch, or arm of counterintelligence, which got up to the very sort of dirty tricks, or “active measures,” that state hacking of a political party amounts to. “In the old days, in my time, we relied on human efforts: penetration, handling, manipulating people from the inside,” Kalugin told The Daily Beast, noting that he wasn’t personally convinced the DNC and RNC hacks were done by the Russian government and not by “individual actors.”
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