The day after the midterm elections last fall, President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies spent the day celebrating the results. The same day, roughly 5,000 miles away, Russia withdrew military forces from Kherson, a key city in southern Ukraine, in one of Vladimir Putin’s biggest setbacks of the war.
It was against this backdrop that a Kremlin spokesperson conceded, also on the same day, that Russian officials were “carefully analyzing“ the U.S. midterm elections.
It wasn’t long before observers started wondering whether the dots needed to be connected. Was it a coincidence that Russia withdrew from Kherson the day after the midterms, or did Putin’s government deliberately delay the humiliating developments until after Americans had cast their ballots?
CNN reported at the time that there was some domestic intelligence indicating that Russia hoped to deny “giving the Biden administration a political win ahead of the midterm elections.”
There’s new reason to believe that reporting was accurate. The Wall Street Journal reported:
The Russian government and its proxies attempted to denigrate the Democratic Party and undermine voter confidence ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, an operation that most likely sought to weaken U.S. support for Ukraine, U.S. intelligence agencies said.
According to the reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the redacted U.S. intelligence report was written late last year, but it was only declassified this week. Among the revelations: The desire to harm the Democratic Party at times appeared to affect Russia’s prosecution of the war itself. The report says that Russian military officials delayed withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Kherson until after the midterms to avoid giving Democrats a perceived win before the election. Russia announced its withdrawal a day after the election.
The full, 21-page assessment from the U.S. intelligence community is online here (pdf). The revelations are notable in large part because they remind the public about Russian efforts to undermine Democrats, but the point is not entirely retrospective. Peter Strzok, who served as the head of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, referenced the intelligence report’s findings and wrote online that it’s “hard to overstate how critical the 2024 elections are to Russia — and Putin personally.” Strzok added that the American public should “expect unprecedented interference across national races.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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