Quote:
Originally Posted by PaceAdvantage
Since you're deep in the weeds on this, you must know the answer.
You agree that Russia has been meddling for decades in US affairs, including elections.
So I ask you. What candidates have they favored in the past. Let's assume for the moment you are correct and they really ramped it up in 2016. OK.
But, the intelligence community admits this has been going on before 2016, correct?
So, which candidates did they favor in the past?
Do you know this answer? Has it ever been talked about before?
Are we to assume Russia NEVER favored one candidate over another? Is that why it has never been reported before?
I'm quite curious what the history is on Russia meddling. Surely, something of this importance has been researched by the intelligence community before Trump, correct?
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It was common knowledge that the Soviet union did it previously.It is also common knowledge that new technology has expanded their abilities.
Soviet Efforts to Influence U.S. Presidential Elections
In at least two cases, the Soviet Union secretly tried to influence U.S. presidential elections. In 1968, the Soviet Politburo strongly favored the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, out of fear that the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, who had been known as a vehement anti-Communist in the 1950s, would take a harsh stance against the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders ordered their ambassador in Washington, DC, Anatoly Dobrynin, to approach Humphrey with an offer of clandestine funding for his campaign. When Dobrynin raised the matter with Humphrey, the latter immediately turned it down. Nixon ended up winning, but instead of confronting the Soviet Union, he embarked on a broad détente, much to Moscow’s relief. Soviet officials heartily welcomed Nixon’s reelection in 1972 and were dismayed when he was forced to resign in 1974.
In 1976, the Soviet Union again secretly adopted measures to influence a U.S. presidential election. Early in the year, the KGB warned the Soviet Politburo that Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, known for his fierce opposition to the Soviet Union, stood a good chance of gaining the Democratic nomination. Jackson’s victories in the Massachusetts and New York primary elections heightened these concerns. Service A prepared a wide-ranging set of measures to discredit Jackson, especially by falsely portraying him as a homosexual. The KGB sent forged FBI letters to leading U.S. newspapers and journalists claiming that Jackson was a closeted gay. Even after Jackson’s campaign faltered and he dropped out of the 1976 race, Service A kept up its homophobic war of disinformation against him, hoping to prevent him from ever again becoming a viable presidential candidate.
In 1983, amid severe tensions in U.S.-Soviet relations, the KGB proposed measures to try to undermine Ronald Reagan’s position in the 1984 U.S. election. But the proposal never got very far because the prolonged illness and eventual death of the Soviet leader Yurii Andropov meant that a wide range of steps were put on hold. Moreover, by 1984 the cables coming in from Ambassador Dobrynin left little doubt that Reagan was going to win in a landslide no matter what the Soviet Union did—a prediction that was amply borne out.
Russian Meddling Today:
New Technology, Same Activity
Service A’s active measures to influence U.S. politics and undermine the role of the United States in the world persisted until the final years of the Soviet regime. As late as 1991, KGB-inspired disinformation and forgeries continued to circulate. Throughout this time, the chief aim of the KGB and GRU was to “undermine the US-led liberal democratic order,” the same goal that is now being attributed to the Russian intelligence services.
