Category: Audio Posts: Selected Articles

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) – the gathering and analysis of publicly available information found on social media, and in databases and government records – can be invaluable in situations when information is sparse, controlled or censored. Journalists today leverage OSINT to expose corruption, investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity, and hold governments and other powerful actors to account.

The investigative journalism group Bellingcat has pioneered the use of OSINT in its cutting-edge reporting over the years. The outlet’s journalists have used OSINT to uncover Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysian Flight MH17 over Ukraine, provide critical evidence of the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, and revealed the massacre of civilians by Cameroonian soldiers in 2020, among other investigations.

“We’ve uncovered and verified lots of potential war crimes, […] spy networks, state-backed assassination teams, the movements and activities of drug cartel leaders, […] and sanctions breaches by the likes of Russia, Iran and many, many more,” said Bellingcat’s lead editor, Eoghan Macguire, during a recent IJNet Crisis Reporting Forum session. 

Macguire outlined how Bellingcat has used OSINT to support its investigations across Africa, and he provided key tools and resources for journalists interested in using OSINT in their own investigative reporting.

Using OSINT to identify war crimes

In his presentation, Macguire detailed how his team investigated alleged war crimes in Ethiopia’s Tigray region during the Tigray war, which lasted from November 2020 until November 2022. During what was a civil war, the Ethiopian government and its allies fought against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. 

Bellingcat reporters began their investigation in March 2021 when graphic videos purportedly depicting the execution of civilians by Ethiopian soldiers surfaced on social media. “Even though these were tough videos to watch, they contained clues that allowed us to verify crucial details,” said Macguire.

Bellingcat investigators analyzed the shadows cast in the footage to deduce the time of day the videos were filmed, and the team used PeakVisor, an app originally designed for mountaineers, to determine the location where the videos were filmed. 

An alternative to Google Maps, which offers only limited detail in rural areas, explained Macguire, PeakVisor provided valuable topographic information that Bellingcat’s journalists could identify in the videos, such as ridges and plateaus. They then compared these features against satellite imagery from Google Earth to identify the location of the massacre: a village known as Mahbere Dego in the Tigray region.  

To identify the perpetrators of the massacre, Bellingcat examined the language spoken in the videos and the uniforms being worn. “Using independent translators, we established that the soldiers were speaking Amharic, indicating they were not from the Tigray region,” Macguire said. This led to the conclusion that they were likely members of the Ethiopian military. 

Ultimately, in collaboration with Newsy and BBC Africa Eye, Bellingcat reported that the executions were carried out by Ethiopian forces. “It was important information to put out,” MacGuire stressed, noting that other major news organizations including CNN later corroborated their results using similar methods.

Tools of the trade

Crucially, many of the tools employed in the investigation, including Google Earth, Natural Earth, and PeakVisor, were free. “You don’t have to be a tech wizard or spend lots of money to conduct open-source investigations,” Macguire noted. “With simple online tools, we were able to do something really powerful.”

In another example, Bellingcat utilized open-source software to track and document the movement of ships to shed light on illicit grain trade originating from the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. The investigation highlighted how one ship, the Zafar, engaged in ship-to-ship transfers of grain at sea, obscuring the origins of the sanctioned grain, and later integrated the grain into the global market.

Using satellite imagery collected by Planet Labs and ship tracking data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence, Bellingcat reconstructed the journey of the Zafar from Crimea, where it was observed loading grain into silos with its Automatic Identification System (AIS) — a system that is required to be turned on to identify a vessel — turned off. The ship later activated its AIS en route to Yemen, where it transitioned through a U.N. inspection point in Djibouti without being flagged as evading sanctions. 

“Satellite imagery provided a different story from what conventional ship tracking revealed,” said Macguire. The investigation raised critical questions about the efficacy of sanctions and U.N. inspections, and ignited concerns about lack of oversight by U.N. officials of sanction-evading vessels.

The future of OSINT

The potential of open-source data extends beyond journalism; it has implications in legal settings, too, including being used as evidence in international courts. 

As the field matures, however, it faces unique challenges — developments in social media, AI, and disinformation, to name a few. “Social media platforms, once goldmines for information, have become more difficult to navigate,” Macguire observed. He highlighted, in particular, recent changes to platforms like X, which once offered a wealth of information as users regularly posted on the platform, but has seen its use decline after being acquired by Elon Musk.

Emerging technologies like AI, meanwhile, present both opportunities and threats. Although tools developed to analyze large amounts of data — for example, satellite image datasets — can enhance investigative capabilities, AI’s ability to generate deceptive content also poses challenges. “As AI improves, distinguishing between authentic and fabricated images may become increasingly complex,” Macguire warned.

Bellingcat encourages journalists and researchers to collaborate when utilizing OSINT data, sharing their findings and methodologies. As the outlet continues to refine its techniques and adapt to a shifting media landscape, it remains committed to transparency. “The results you can get [from OSINT] can be really, really important,” Macguire said.  

OSINT resources

Macguire offered several tools and resources for journalists interested in OSINT. Here are a few: 

Open-source community

Bellingcat’s Discord allows members to engage, learn and collaborate with fellow OSINT investigators. Beginners and experts alike are welcome.

General OSINT toolkits

Bellingcat’s Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit

BBC Africa Eye Forensics Dashboard

Free satellite imagery

Sentinel Hub EO Browser

Google Earth

Paid satellite imagery (generally of higher quality)

Planet Labs

Maxar Technologies

Free ship tracking data

Global Fishing Watch

Paid ship tracking data

Lloyd’s List Intelligence

Marine Traffic

VesselFinder

Aircraft tracking

ADS-B Exchange

Flight Radar 24

Free open-source tools

Bellingcat GitHub

---

Photo by Маk Каmmerer on Unsplash.

WASHINGTON, Nov 10 (Reuters) – During his campaign for re-election, Donald Trump vowed to purge the military of so-called “woke” generals. Now that he is president-elect, the question in the halls of the Pentagon is whether he would go much further.

Trump is expected to have a far darker view of his military leaders in his second term, after facing Pentagon resistance over everything from his skepticism toward NATO to his readiness to deploy troops to quell protests on U.S. streets.

Trump’s former U.S. generals and defense secretaries are among his fiercest critics, some branding him a fascist and declaring him unfit for office. Angered, Trump has suggested that his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, could be executed for treason.

Current and former U.S. officials say Trump will prioritize loyalty in his second term and root out military officers and career civil servants he perceives to be disloyal.

“He will destroy the Department of Defense, frankly. He will go in and he will dismiss generals who stand up for the Constitution,” said Jack Reed, the Democrat who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Culture war issues could be one trigger for firings. Trump was asked by Fox News in June whether he would fire generals described as “woke,” a term for those focused on racial and social justice but which is used by conservatives to disparage progressive policies.

“I would fire them. You can’t have (a) woke military,” Trump said.

Some current and former officials fear Trump’s team could target the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, a widely respected former fighter pilot and military commander who steers clear of politics.

The four-star general, who is Black, issued a video message about discrimination in the ranks in the days after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, and has been a voice in favor of diversity in the U.S. military.

Asked for comment, Brown’s spokesperson, Navy Captain Jereal Dorsey, said: “The chairman along with all of the service members in our armed forces remain focused on the security and defense of our nation and will continue to do so, ensuring a smooth transition to the new administration of President-elect Trump.”

Trump’s vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, voted as a senator last year against confirming Brown to become the top U.S. military officer, and has been a critic of perceived resistance to Trump’s orders within the Pentagon.

“If the people in your own government aren’t obeying you, you have got to get rid of them and replace them with people who are responsive to what the president’s trying to do,” Vance said in an interview with Tucker Carlson before the election.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to restore the name of a Confederate general to a major U.S. military base, reversing a change made after Floyd’s killing.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘LAWFUL ORDERS’

Trump has suggested the U.S. military could play an important role in many of his policy priorities, from tapping National Guard and possibly active-duty troops to help carry out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants to even deploying them to address domestic unrest.

Such proposals alarm military experts, who say deploying the military on American streets could not only violate laws but turn much of the American population against the still widely respected U.S. armed forces.

In a message to the forces after Trump’s election win, outgoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the results of the election and stressed the military would obey “all lawful orders” from its civilian leaders.

But some experts caution that Trump has wide latitude to interpret the law and U.S. troops cannot disobey legal orders they consider to be morally wrong.

“There is a widespread public misperception that the military can choose not to obey immoral orders. And that’s actually not true,” said Kori Schake of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Schake warned that a second Trump term could see high-level firings as he pushes ahead with controversial policies.

“I think there will be an enormous chaos premium in a second Trump term, both because of the policies he will attempt to enact and the people he will put in place to enact them in terms of appointments,” she said.

One U.S. military official downplayed such concerns, saying on condition of anonymity that creating chaos within the U.S. military’s chain of command would create political backlash and be unnecessary for Trump to accomplish his goals.

“What these guys will find out is that military officers are generally focused on warfighting and not politics,” the military official said.

“I feel they’ll be satisfied of that – or at least they should be.”

HOLLOW OUT CIVILIAN RANKS?

Career civil servants at the Pentagon could be subjected to loyalty tests, current and former officials say. Trump allies have publicly embraced using executive orders and rule changes to replace thousands of civil servants with conservative allies.

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters there was increasing concern within the Pentagon that Trump would purge career civilian employees from the department.

“I’m deeply concerned about their ranks,” the official said, adding that several colleagues had expressed concern about the future of their jobs.

Career civil servants are among the nearly 950,000 non-uniformed employees who work within the U.S. military and in many cases have years of specialized experience.

Trump vowed during the campaign to give himself the power to gut the federal workforce across the government.

During his first administration, some of Trump’s controversial suggestions to advisers, such as potentially firing missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs, never became policy in part because of pushback from officials at the Pentagon.

“This will be 2016 on steroids and the fear is that he will hollow out the ranks and expertise in a way that will do irreparable damage to the Pentagon,” the official said.

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.

Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

The election winner has five objectives: abandon Ukraine, lower taxes for the wealthy, fill the Administration with his loyalists, increase tariffs, and deport 11.5 million migrants

One of the differences between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the subsequent ones, especially this one that has just ended, is the complete disappearance of the president-elect’s worker-oriented rhetoric. In 2016, he said he would end the carried interest that allows billionaires in private equity funds to pay only a 20% tax rate on their financial investments, claimed that hedge fund managers “are like committing murders and getting away with it” (on August 23, 2015), and to justify his attacks on Barack Obama, he multiplied the U.S. unemployment rate by 10, from 4% to 40%.

These redistributive plans were nothing but electoral rhetoric from a candidate who stated that “we cannot afford” to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been frozen since 2009. In fact, Trump appointed those same financiers he abhorred to his cabinet, including “the king of foreclosures” (Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary) and “the king of bankruptcies” (Wilbur Ross, Commerce Secretary).

In this 2024 campaign, Trump’s program has been more elusive. His objectives are five: isolationism, which includes abandoning Ukraine; tax cuts for higher incomes and companies; taking over the Public Administration by his loyalists; tariffs; and deportation of 11.5 million undocumented immigrants.

The first three parts of that triad are more likely to be carried out, the fourth is in an intermediate situation, and the fifth presents more difficulties.

Trump can reach an agreement with Russia, which would impose on Ukraine, for that country to cede Crimea and all the territories that Putin’s forces have occupied in the wars of 2015 and the one that began in 2022. Certainly, with a Republican Senate, it seems almost impossible for the U.S. to approve more military aid to Kiev, so Trump and Putin will have an excellent bargaining chip over Ukraine. But it would be enough for Putin and Trump to sign it for it to take effect. In addition, Trump can easily veto Ukraine’s entry into NATO, and exert enough pressure on the EU so that it, showing its traditional ability to yield, prolongs the accession negotiations of Kiev.

Such an agreement would not be ratified by the Senate, as Republicans are far from having the 60 votes needed for approval in that chamber of 100 seats. But that is not a problem in itself. Also, there is an important issue: Trump does not like having to negotiate with Congress. He prefers to operate through executive orders, which reinforce his image of authority, even though they can be overturned by his successors.

Tax cuts may be a done deal. Senate Republicans would approve them, perhaps only for a limited period. And even if Democrats were to gain control of the House of Representatives, their majority would be so slim that Trump would have no trouble convincing them to approve, if not all of his tax plans, at least the majority of them.

This would mean extending the income tax cuts approved in Trump’s first term in 2017, which were set to expire in 2025. It is a tax cut that benefits higher incomes, further contributing to increasing the U.S. public deficit, which reached 7% of GDP this year. As for the Corporate Tax, the president-elect wants to lower it to 15% from the current 21%, where he himself set it after reducing it from a maximum rate of 39% in 2017 to 15%. That is the reason for the stock market rise this Wednesday, as the money that companies save on federal taxes will go towards dividends and share buybacks, increasing their value. Additionally, it will also increase the deficit.

To control the Public Administration, Trump only needs to issue a similar order to the one he launched in October 2020 – too late, as he lost the elections the following month – with the so-called Schedule F, which created a new category of officials who transitioned from technical roles to political positions of trust. This rule would increase the current number of political positions in the federal government from 4,000 to 30,000 and would be a decisive step in the politicization of the Administration following a model akin to Erdogan or Orban.

The issue of tariffs is more complicated. To raise them, as Trump proposes (20% with the entire planet Earth and 70% with China and 76% with Mexico), he needs Congress’s favorable vote. Such a steep increase is unlikely to be approved. However, he can use accusations of illegal trade practices or national security defense to raise tariffs in specific areas, from Spanish table olives to Chinese microprocessors, as he did in his first term.

Finally, there is the deportation of immigrants. Once again, it seems unlikely that Congress will approve additional funding, among other reasons because it would devastate the U.S. economy. But Trump can redirect funds from other Defense allocations, claiming that the country is being invaded. In any case, he cannot deport 11.5 million undocumented individuals simply because there would be no one to work in construction, clean floors, pick fruit, or cook in restaurants, including, according to many reports, those at his own Bedminster golf club near New York.

The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center—the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.

Jessica Brandt, a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world, is the center’s first director. Before her appointment, last year, she’d spent her career writing research papers at Washington think tanks, most recently on “digital authoritarianism”—the way dictators use technology to control or manipulate people, at home and abroad. At a thirty-seat conference table in the center, we talked about her move from theory to practice. Now that Brandt has access to classified intelligence, she knows as much as anyone about how foreign powers are trying to tamper with American elections. But she has also experienced firsthand how the polarization of U.S. politics is making it harder to protect the fairness and credibility of the vote. These days, a warning from the U.S. intelligence agencies is no longer accepted at face value. It’s immediately spun for partisan advantage.

Intelligence officials use the term “election interference” to describe attacks on the actual mechanics of vote counting. This is now considered an extremely slight risk. The hodgepodge of state voting systems makes a mass hacking impossible, and recent security upgrades have insured the preservation of paper backups for almost every ballot. The more realistic danger is what officials call “malign foreign influence”: hacks and leaks, bots and trolls, hidden payments and targeted attack ads. Adversaries can use these underhanded tactics to twist public opinion, discredit the vote, and sway its outcome. The center’s job is to mitigate the effects of such machinations, and one of its main tools is forewarning voters through public bulletins.

Yet ever since July 28, 2016, when the director of the C.I.A. began briefing President Barack Obama on the Kremlin’s plot to help elect Donald Trump, it has been agonizingly clear that government alarms about hidden meddling by foreign hands might themselves be perceived as tainting the electoral process. Obama decided not to alert the public before Election Day about the full extent of the Russian conspiracy to assist Trump, fearing that such a disclosure would look like a thumb on the scale in favor of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and potentially undermine her widely expected victory.

That, it turned out, was the wrong worry. When the Kremlin brazenly pulled off another hack-and-leak operation the next year, in Europe, France’s response provided an instructive contrast. The Russians had stolen gigabytes of e-mails and other data from the Presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron. But, before the day of the vote, credibly nonpartisan government agencies informed citizens of a foreign cyberattack; an electoral commission instructed news organizations not to report on the leaked material. David Salvo, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, at the German Marshall Fund, told me that the French government’s action, and the public’s trusting response, was “the best-case scenario.”

The U.S. intelligence agencies, though, waited until two months after Trump won the 2016 election to lay out the sweeping scale of the Russian operation. Instead of averting a partisan battle, the delay ignited one. Democrats argued that the Kremlin’s support rendered Trump an illegitimate leader; Trump and his allies claimed that the intelligence agencies were part of a deep-state conspiracy against him. Seven years later, the fight continues.

Now another U.S. Presidential election may hinge on tens of thousands of votes across a handful of states. Almost any illicit advantage could arguably decide the outcome (and cast doubt on the results), making the race a prime opportunity for foreign meddling. Indeed, intelligence officials and tech-company analysts say that more foreign spies than ever are getting into the game. Clint Watts, the manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told me that the Kremlin’s success in 2016 “convinced almost every authoritarian nation that they needed to jump into this.” And the biggest players, Russia and Iran, are working even harder at election influence than they did in 2016 or 2020. Yet the government’s warnings about foreign schemes are frequently undercut by the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to weaponize such intelligence. In 2024, Democrats have railed about Vladimir Putin “rooting for” Trump, while Republicans have insisted that Biden-appointed intelligence officials are underplaying Iran’s schemes to defeat the former President—including by plotting his assassination. Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee—and who recently put out a statement under the headline “Is the Biden-Harris Administration Colluding with Iran?”—told me, “You don’t hear a lot from the Administration about the malign influence of Iran in hacking the Trump campaign and attempting to kill Donald Trump.” According to people involved in a recent classified briefing on election security, the two sides of the House Intelligence Committee got into a shouting match over the relative scale of the threats.

Brandt told me wearily that she’d heard “the critiques,” and insisted that the center nevertheless stayed focussed on building “the most accurate threat picture we can.” But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on public opinion at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a book documenting the effects of the Kremlin’s influence operation in 2016, told me that, with so much partisan noise threatening to drown out the center’s warnings, “our system is still defective.”

A parliamentary election in Slovakia last September marked the advent of a new era in election chicanery. A pro-Russia faction promising to end support for Ukraine was locked in a tight race against a Western-friendly party, Progressive Slovakia. Three days before the vote, an anonymous Instagram account uploaded a recording of the voice of Progressive Slovakia’s leader, Michal Šimečka, describing a “secret plan” to curb alcoholism: raising the price of beer “by seventy per cent to a hundred per cent.” As that recording raced across Slovakian social media, a second one appeared to catch Šimečka conspiring with one of the country’s best-known investigative journalists, Monika Tódová. “Again, will someone walk in and insert the ballots directly?” Tódová’s voice asked.

Šimečka: “This has been taken care of already.”

Tódová: “All right, then. What about me? Is it true that ‘by coincidence’ I will win some kind of valuable prize?”

Šimečka and Tódová called the recordings fraudulent. But while tech-company fact checkers were struggling to determine their authenticity, the Slovakian media entered a legally required forty-eight-hour news blackout before the vote. By the time the recordings were debunked as A.I.-generated deepfakes, the pro-Russia party had won a narrow victory.

The impact of the deepfakes is difficult to quantify. Their exposure did not stop an ally of the pro-Russia party from winning the Presidency the following year. Yet the Slovakian election put Washington on guard that A.I. could blur the boundaries of political reality as never before. This year, U.S. intelligence agencies said that China was probably behind videos of A.I.-generated Taiwanese newscasters reading aloud from a made-up book containing made-up scandals about Taiwan’s President. Brandt, of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, told me that deepfakes “can come in thirty-six thousand flavors,” so teams of forensics experts from throughout the government had conducted a “summer of exercises,” rehearsing plans to quickly evaluate the authenticity and origin of inflammatory material that might surface in the final days of an American Presidential campaign.

In a one-page “election security update” issued in September, the intelligence agencies declared that various foreign adversaries had already posted numerous deepfakes on the Internet. Russia had deployed the most, spreading “conspiratorial narratives” and amplifying “divisive U.S. issues such as immigration” in order to help Trump and hurt the Democrats. Iran had used A.I. “to help generate social media posts and write inauthentic news articles” about everything from the Presidential race to the Israel-Palestine conflict. China was “using A.I. in broader influence operations” but “not for any specific operations targeting U.S. election outcomes.”

Intelligence officials said that, so far, foreign adversaries’ A.I. trickery was “a malign influence accelerant” but not “revolutionary,” in part because those countries had not yet caught up with Silicon Valley in their use of the technology. The report noted that one of Russia’s most widely circulated fakes—a video of a woman in a wheelchair claiming that Kamala Harris had disabled her in a hit-and-run accident—had actually been staged the old-fashioned way, with real actors.

Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, “A.I. is the dog that hasn’t barked—yet.” Warner, whose committee compiled a thirteen-hundred-page report on the Russian intervention in the 2016 election, believes that the U.S. is less prepared than ever to fend off foreign influence schemes. Major social-media companies, he told me, have slackened their crackdowns on misinformation—partly because of lawsuits claiming that the platforms’ coöperation with the government threatens free speech. Then, there’s the matter of who is in charge: Elon Musk has taken over Twitter (now X), and TikTok is owned by the Chinese. Moreover, Warner told me, political polarization has made voters increasingly credulous about fake claims that reinforce their instincts—whether the subject is a stolen election or the Vance family couch.

Voters have a limited number of ways to learn about the illicit attempts of foreign powers to manipulate them. One way is for private companies—Microsoft is currently the most active—to publish research about suspicious social-media content or cybercrimes that appear to be state-sponsored. Brandt described such civilian-identified plots as “caught in the wild.” But private companies can never speak with the authority of the government, and, without subpoenas or spies, they also lack the same breadth of information. Watts, a former F.B.I. special agent, told me that the government is “the ultimate source of confirmation on attribution and actors.” A deepfake that Microsoft spots “may be the tip of the iceberg,” he continued, and U.S. intelligence officials “can understand it at a much deeper level.” Then, there is what he called “a chicken-and-egg problem” facing private companies. The government asks them to shut their platforms to malicious foreign trolls, but the companies “are waiting for the state to tell them who those accounts are.”

Criminal prosecutions are another way that covert foreign plots targeting an election can be exposed. Since the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Kremlin’s gambit in 2016, federal indictments have consistently provided the most detailed, and therefore potent, accounts of such influence operations. This past summer, news reports about a hacking of the e-mail accounts of Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser, evidently prompted prosecutors in Washington, D.C., to file an indictment against three Iranians. They were charged with dozens of hacking attacks during a five-year period, almost all of them against Americans involved in national security or foreign affairs. The U.S. government had been watching these Iranians for at least four years; the indictment cites evidence that, in each of those years, two of the operatives repeatedly visited a Tehran address linked to the crimes. On June 27, 2024, according to the indictment, the Iranians e-mailed two Biden campaign officials a stolen copy of materials that Trump had used to prepare for that night’s Presidential debate. (The Iranians presciently warned that, if Biden lost the debate, the Democrats “will have to replace” him.) There’s no evidence, however, that the recipients read the e-mails; Biden flailed in any case. A subsequent attempt to give journalists stolen vetting materials about Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, also found no takers. The Times reported its editors had concluded that “publication was likely to serve the interests of the attackers.”

Other legal findings, also unsealed in September, described a sweeping Russian operation that was years in the making. An affidavit by an F.B.I. investigator quoted notes from meetings held at the Kremlin by a top aide to Putin as early as April, 2022. The aide had hired three Russian contractors to conduct a covert online propaganda campaign to weaken global support for Ukraine’s attempt to repel Russia’s invasion. In 2023, one of the contractors submitted a more detailed proposal, called the Good Old U.S.A. Project, to sway the 2024 election in America. The proposal asserted that an isolationist view of the Ukraine war had become a “centerpiece” of the Presidential race; Russia must therefore “put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican point of view (first and foremost the opinion of Trump’s supporters) wins over the U.S. public opinion.” (The names of the parties and candidates were redacted in the filing.) The proposal’s authors saw an opportunity in “the high level of polarization of American society,” which had created an “information situation” that “differs dramatically from that in all other Western countries.”

The Good Old U.S.A. Project envisaged setting up hundreds of fake online accounts, including eighteen seemingly apolitical “sleeper” groups on multiple social-media platforms across six swing states; “at the right moment,” they would “distribute bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events.” (Kremlin documents included in the filing describe Twitter as the most hospitable “mass platform,” although a partially redacted sentence suggests that the Russians liked Trump’s Truth Social even more.) To avoid detection, the Russians planned to disseminate misinformation by inserting comments or replies into authentic message threads; these comments would include links directing users to sites showcasing more elaborate propaganda. The Russians also set out to secretly promote real American influencers who supported “ending the war in Ukraine” and were “ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

In March, two of the Russian contractors were sanctioned by the Treasury Department for their role in the operation. In July, U.S. prosecutors, after receiving a tip from another government agency, seized nearly a thousand X accounts allegedly tied to a Russian “bot farm” that used A.I. “to create fictitious social media profiles,” evidently as part of the same scheme. Finally, in September, the government shut down thirty-two Web sites that disguised Kremlin propaganda as content from news organizations such as Fox News and the Washington Post. At the same time, prosecutors charged two Russian spies with conspiring to pay ten million dollars to a group of conservative American influencers. Although the unsealed indictment redacted the names, other details indicated that the Russians worked through a Nashville startup called Tenet Media. According to the indictment, in recent months the Russians had posted nearly nine hundred video clips of their own propaganda directly to Tenet social-media feeds. Until the indictment was unsealed, American viewers had no way of knowing that the Kremlin was behind this.

But U.S. intelligence agencies definitely did, just as they plainly knew about the disguised Web sites. Details from the indictments make clear that federal prosecutors were aware of the underlying schemes for months or longer before informing voters. Of course, educating voters about foreign plots is not the primary responsibility of law enforcement, which moves at its own methodical pace. Subpoenas must be obtained to legally acquire information that other agencies might have learned through spycraft; it takes time to squeeze conspirators to testify against one another, and to lock down conclusive evidence before unsealing charges. Law-enforcement agencies may also want to delay an indictment so that they can arrest suspects before they can flee—although, in the recent election-influence cases, the three Iranians and two Russians indicted were already far out of reach.

Prosecutors also work under their own deadlines. Justice Department policy precludes the agency from taking any public actions in the sixty days before an election which might affect the outcome—including filing indictments that expose a foreign adversary’s backing of a candidate. Prosecutors appear to have kept working on the Russia indictments in secrecy as long as they could. They were unsealed on September 4th, on the eve of the sixty-day deadline. Still, Brandt told me that, whatever the timing constraints, the Justice Department can “go much farther than we can” when releasing information. “That is how you end up making public multiple internal Russian planning documents, which is something the intelligence community could never release.”

For voters, the Russia and Iran indictments also raise questions about what else the government knows. Both filings offer keyhole views of major influence operations that surely were not limited to a few inconsequential hacks and to the staff of a small Tennessee media company. Watts, of Microsoft, told me that the government is cracking down on covert Russian influence operations more aggressively than it did before the 2020 election, when there were no such indictments; prosecutors have gone after a “sizable chunk of the Russian efforts we have noted.” But he said that law enforcement had not yet taken any visible action against two other Russian online networks that Microsoft had spotted meddling in the election. The company calls those two networks Storm-1516 (which pushed the staged video falsely accusing Harris of a hit-and-run) and Storm-1679 (which pushed a viral video showing a fake New York billboard that hyped false claims about Harris).

Representative Jim Himes, of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me he was “quite certain” that the foreign corruption of Tenet Media was not an isolated incident: “We are going to find out there are other cases where some cutout says, ‘Hey, I’ve got five million dollars for you to promote that Fauci is a Bolshevik,’ or whatever, and the answer is ‘Yeah, give me that five million!’ ”

Hearing directly from the U.S. intelligence agencies is the third way Americans can learn about foreign efforts to manipulate our elections. This election season, the Foreign Malign Influence Center has scheduled periodic “updates” to address the torrent of questions from journalists about such plots. For the spy services, one official told me, this level of public disclosure “is like standing there naked compared to what we have done in the past.” The agencies, always zealous about protecting their sources and methods, prefer to talk as little as possible, and as vaguely as possible. The resulting updates, typically about five hundred words each, are exasperatingly abstract. Speaking as the “intelligence community,” or I.C., an update from early October noted:

A range of foreign actors continue to try to influence U.S. elections as we approach November. These activities include broad efforts aimed at undermining trust in U.S. democratic processes and exacerbating divisions in our society, while also seeking to shape voter preferences toward specific candidates. Our assessments about the activities and goals of Russia, Iran, and China are unchanged from earlier election security updates. On the presidential race, the IC continues to assess that Russia prefers the Former President and Iran prefers the Vice President; China is not seeking to influence the Presidential election.

The center also holds hour-long conference calls with journalists, but the officials on the calls limit their answers to the contents of the written updates.

The opacity of such intelligence assessments, whether to journalists or to lawmakers, inevitably opens opportunities for political spin. In 2019, intelligence officials appointed a career spy named Shelby Pierson to the new post of election-threats executive. Her job was to coördinate the analysis of foreign interference or influence operations. After Pierson briefed the bipartisan leaders of the congressional intelligence committees, people on Capitol Hill leaked that she had said the Kremlin once again preferred Trump. The President exploded in anger, tried to get Pierson fired, and attempted to stop the briefings.

She survived. But Trump then appointed two new directors of National Intelligence, both of whom downplayed the Russian threat. The first was the former ambassador Ric Grenell, who served as temporary acting director. Under Grenell’s tenure, a declassified update provided to the committees declared that the intelligence community “has not concluded” that the Kremlin was aiding either Trump or Biden, “nor have we concluded that the Russians will definitely choose to try to do so in 2020.”

John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman and a former prosecutor, took over as director in May, 2020. He played up supposed intelligence about a major plot by China instead of Russia. Shortly before the election that fall, Ratcliffe was asked in an interview on Fox News whether China opposed Trump. Ratcliffe replied that he could not “get into a whole lot of details” in an unclassified setting, but did say that China was “using a massive and sophisticated influence campaign that dwarfs anything that any other country is doing.”

Democrats complained that the Trump appointees were twisting the conclusions of the career analysts, but the classified nature of the reports left no way to settle the dispute. Then, on January 6, 2021, the spy agencies’ “analytic ombudsman” released a report saying that, in the final year of the Trump Administration, intelligence about foreign efforts to influence the election had been “delayed, distorted, or obstructed” for “political reasons,” and that career analysts viewed some of the public statements issued under Grenell and Ratcliffe as a “gross misrepresentation” of the agencies’ assessments of the Russian and Chinese operations. (Grenell told me that the ombudsman’s report had relied on liberal partisans inside the intelligence agencies; Ratcliffe defended his statements about China as a dissenting view based on his own analysis.) Two months after Biden took office, a declassified version of the agencies’ post-election assessment stated that several arms of the Russian government had, in fact, carried out influence operations “supporting former President Trump” and that the Russians had also been spreading misinformation denigrating Biden for at least six years. A headline in the assessment declared, “China Did Not Attempt to Influence Presidential Election Outcome.”

Grenell has since become an informal adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign, and he argued to me recently that Biden Administration appointees were now slanting intelligence about foreign influence operations to benefit the Democrats. “You’re surprised?” Grenell asked me incredulously. He added, “Putin says he would prefer Joe Biden, or now Kamala Harris, because they are more predictable! Why would you dismiss that?” (Prosecutors unsealed their detailed Russia indictment a few weeks after I interviewed Grenell, and news reports that Trump had stayed in touch with Putin after leaving the White House emerged after that.) If Trump wins, Grenell, Ratcliffe, and Turner, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, are all prime candidates for senior roles in the new Administration.

Brandt, the Foreign Malign Influence Center’s director, told me that the intelligence agencies now adhere to a formal protocol designed to keep politics out of the process—thereby insulating Presidents from the anxieties that stifled Obama, and from the accusations of bias that have hung over Trump and Biden. The rules, which are little known to the public and are all but ignored by the political class, were formulated in 2019, initially under the tenure of Dan Coats, Trump’s first director of National Intelligence. Coats, a former Republican senator, remains widely respected by lawmakers of both parties for his handling of that role. Biden signed off on the protocol with only slight modifications.

The process hinges on an “experts’ group” of a dozen career intelligence analysts or other civil servants from across the relevant agencies. Brandt—who was tapped for her job by the current director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, a Biden appointee and an Obama Administration alumna—is excluded. Under the policy, the committee evaluates any intelligence of an imminent foreign-influence threat according to five criteria. Two of the criteria address the quality of the intelligence: Is it credible and specific? Three address the nature of the threat: Is it foreign in origin, underhanded or covert in nature, and severe in its potential impact? If the experts deem all five criteria met, the group can recommend a public notification.

One catch, however, is that the public does not know who sits on the experts’ group—all its members are anonymous, as is its chair. Since the Foreign Malign Influence Center was inaugurated, the intelligence authorities have withheld even the name of the election-threats executive, making Brandt (or Haines) the face of any public notifications.

Another catch is that, before a warning from the experts can be shared with the public, their recommendation must be reviewed by a “leaders’ group” composed entirely of political appointees. The group essentially duplicates the National Security Council: the director of National Intelligence convenes the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, and Homeland Security, along with the Attorney General and the directors of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the N.S.A., and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. An emergency notification becomes public only with the approval of these leaders. (A loophole: the notification protocol does not necessarily restrict a director of National Intelligence from making statements or giving interviews about election threats, as Ratcliffe did.)

The day I visited the center, Brandt, in an attempt to dispel doubts about partisanship, took the exceptional step of introducing me to the chair of the experts’ group—a stern veteran of the intelligence agencies who looked at least a decade older than Brandt, and whom I agreed not to name. She told me, “As a career civil servant, I try not to have a public persona.” During her two years leading the experts’ group, she said, nobody had ever discussed potential political repercussions: “Never in any of the meetings has it even come up—what will this mean for a political party, or what will it mean for an Administration?”

The main threshold for a public notification about a piece of intelligence, the experts’ chair said, is “Could it undermine the credibility of an election or potentially change its outcome?” Brandt, speaking as a former think-tank scholar, noted that political scientists still have no accepted way to gauge the impact of an online propaganda campaign. But the chair struck a firmer tone, saying, “If we think the activity might undermine the credibility or affect the outcome, we are going to weigh very seriously a public notification.”

The experts’ chair insisted that in this cycle the intelligence agencies had not withheld information “that met all five of the criteria”—and did not risk exposing sources and methods. Nor had the leaders’ group ever overruled a recommendation by the career experts. And if they did? It would be the job of the chair of the experts’ group to stand up or speak out, she told me: “That is why we pick a career civil servant who is retirement-eligible.” In other words, she can resign in protest.

Brandt said that, if a private player like Microsoft calls out a foreign influence operation, that can alleviate the need for a government notification. In other cases, she said, law-enforcement agencies tell their intelligence counterparts, “We’ve got this one.” And if a foreign operation aims at only an individual or a campaign—as is often the case—officials from the intelligence agencies may notify the target privately.

As a result, since 2019, the experts have proposed only three public notifications. All were carried out, and all were about Iran. The first occurred on October 21, 2020, when Ratcliffe, the director of National Intelligence, publicly announced that Iran was secretly behind a wave of e-mails, putatively sent by the Proud Boys, telling Democrats that if they didn’t vote for Trump “we will come after you.” At a press conference, Ratcliffe declared that the e-mails were an Iranian plot “to incite social unrest.”

Yet Ratcliffe went on to say that Iran also sought to “damage President Trump”—a conclusion that intelligence officials told me was Ratcliffe’s own inference. Playing up the Iranian threat, he added that “we have not seen the same actions from Russia.” Democrats, fearing that Trump might gain from the impression that Iran backed Biden, spun the revelation in another direction: in a television interview, Senator Chuck Schumer, the head of the Democratic caucus, insisted that his intelligence briefing had characterized the Iranian operation as a ploy “to undermine confidence in elections, and not aimed at any particular figure.”

The second and third expert-group notifications, which took place within a few weeks of each other this year, did not forestall controversy, either. A notification issued on August 19th confirmed earlier news reports that Iran had hacked Roger Stone’s e-mails in an attempt “to compromise former President Trump’s campaign.” But the notification, unlike those reports, also brought up the Democrats. To influence the “election process,” the notification added, Iran had also sought to access “the presidential campaigns of both political parties.” A few weeks later, another notification revealed that the Iranians had sent Trump’s debate-prep materials to the Biden campaign.

Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of National Intelligence, told me that the August 19th notification’s mention of “both parties” had been a favor to Kamala Harris: the gratuitous reference to an attack on her campaign had obscured the broader fact that Iran wanted her to win. But the chair of the experts’ group defended the assessment to me, insisting that the agencies had disclosed the hacking activities as soon as they learned about them—and not in response to news reports about Stone. “We go with what we know,” she said, and argued that withholding the information about “both parties” would have been the truly partisan choice.

Both Brandt and the experts’ chair contended that the public-notification procedure was as insulated as possible from the appearance of political influence, given that the U.S. government is headed by an elected official. Nonetheless, in two out of two Presidential election cycles, the protocol has failed to allay accusations of a partisan agenda. I could see why. As I spoke with the two officials, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was sitting across a table from people who knew much more than they were telling me about how foreign spies were trying to influence my vote or mess with our heads. My questions kept colliding with the intelligence agencies’ concern about protecting their sources and methods.

But even a little more real-time transparency would surely bolster public trust, if only by dispelling some of the mystery. Could the U.S. intelligence agencies have told the public any sooner that Iranian hackers with a history of conventional espionage were attempting to breach the Trump campaign? Did the government need to wait until almost exactly sixty days before the election to warn voters that the Kremlin was behind Tenet Media (whose YouTube videos in the past year have logged sixteen million views)? Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me that timely information about election-influence operations too often gets bottled up by the “tension between law enforcement and intelligence gathering.” He added, “Law enforcement wants to put people in jail. Intelligence would like the criminals to keep doing what they do for twenty years, so they can identify their associates. But maybe there should be more of a tension between prosecution and the public’s right to know.”

At the end of last year, the intelligence agencies released a public version of their assessment of foreign influence operations during the 2022 midterm-election season, and it underscored how little information the government shared with Americans before voters went to the polls. The assessment described an upward trend in activity by “a diverse and growing group of foreign actors,” which the agencies attributed to “perceptions that election influence activity has been normalized” and to “the low cost but potentially high reward of such activities.” The foreign mischief that had been detected in 2022 included “payments to influencers and enlistment of public relations (PR) firms” and efforts aimed at “amplifying authentic U.S. public narratives.” Like devious music producers, foreign powers were turning up the volume of certain “authentic” American voices to maximize discord. But which influencers took what payments, and how were narratives amplified? What other governments were in that “growing group of foreign actors”? Later in the assessment, bullet points name six foreign governments—all blacked out—whose covert influence activities “did not clearly meet” an intelligence-community threshold for public disclosure. People familiar with the classified assessment told me that the redacted names were often “frenemies,” such as Middle Eastern clients with their own agendas in Washington. (Senator Warner told me, “There are countries that are our friends one day and our challengers the next.”)

Although the Foreign Malign Influence Center has said that China is staying out of the Presidential race, the center’s updates have also said that the country is attempting to sway certain down-ballot races, including “tens” of congressional races. The assessment of the 2022 election also concluded that Chinese authorities had “tacitly approved efforts to try to influence a handful of midterm races” and had “identified specific members of Congress to punish for their anti-China views.” That included “covertly denigrating a named U.S. Senator online using inauthentic accounts.” Did anyone notify the voters in the senator’s state? The intelligence officials declined to say. (The Washington Post, citing a researcher at Clemson University, recently reported that in 2022 Chinese-linked accounts had spread memes and tweets attacking Senator Marco Rubio, a prominent China hawk who was on the ballot that year. Rubio declined to respond to my questions.) Nor have the intelligence officials disclosed which other statewide races China has tried to influence in either 2022 or 2024. (The Post identified one current target as Representative Barry Moore, an Alabama Republican. A Chinese-linked account called him a “Jewish dog,” although he is not Jewish.)

Brandt told me that the elliptical bulletins are “setting the table” for the possibility that future operations by China or other nations might rise to a level meriting a public warning. She argued that, if the intelligence agencies alerted the public about every scrap of intelligence on an influence scheme, no matter how minor the threat, the constant notifications would lose their power to arouse public alarm. The din of suspicion could also weaken the credibility of the democratic process. “We would be blowing wind in our adversaries’ sails,” she said. Still, she insisted, no foreign nation got a free pass: “If you are a foreign actor trying to influence our elections, you are in our sights.”

Salvo, of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, said that he now worries about what will happen if the intelligence agencies successfully expose a major foreign influence operation in the final weeks of the Presidential race. “The closer we get to Election Day, the less I think that would even matter, because of the hyperpoliticized moment that we live in,” he said. “The director of National Intelligence could come out then with information about a Russian or Iranian information operation targeting Election Day, and you’ll have tens of millions of Americans who don’t believe it, because national political figures are out there challenging the Intelligence director!”

During the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, the experts’ group has been meeting three times a week to evaluate any intelligence about potential threats, and staying in contact on the weekends. In a measure of both the group’s vigilance and the over-all threat level, an intelligence official recently told journalists that the number of “nominations” the experts had proposed for a notification had “increased threefold” from the 2020 election. All but the two notifications about Iran were privately rendered, but Brandt and the experts’ chair told me that, unlike the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies have no rule against publicizing allegations about a foreign influence plot in the days before the vote. Their mandate is just the opposite. The experts’ chair said, “What we don’t want to do is get the information out after the election.”

Brandt then added, “We’ll all be a lot smarter in January.” ♦

We have finally reached Election Day 2024. October alone seems to have lasted roughly 1,000 days. But what was the vaunted “October surprise,” that news event that may have changed the election’s result?

It’s hard to say when the single most outrageous political candidate of the modern era is running for office. Still, let’s look at what the events that most influenced this race.

Trump chickens out of “60 Minutes” interview

After attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and saying she was too afraid and not mentally competent enough to do sit-down interviews, Donald Trump ran faster than a chicken at a fox’s dinner table from a “60 Minutes” interview. Harris did the interview and nailed it. How badly scared was Trump? Almost a month later, he sued CBS for $10 billion, saying the editing of Harris’ interview amounts to “election interference.”

The Madison Square Garden rally

Nothing encapsulated the MAGA movement quite like the bigotry on display at Trump’s Bund-style rally in New York City’s famous Madison Square Garden. At the event, far-right comedian Tony Hinchcliffe hurled racist “jokes” about Blacks and Latinos, at one point referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

The blowback from the event has lasted, insulting an entire block of voters. The hateful display was so beyond the pale that even some Republican racists, like Florida Sen. Rick Scott, distanced themselves from the event.

Trump says a well-known critic of his should face a firing squad

This past Thursday, when former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a major Trump critic, came up during a Q&A with former Fox New host Tucker Carlson, Trump said, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her where the rifle’s standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about—you know when the guns are trained on her face.”

This indefensible statement was made worse when Trump surrogates attempted … to defend it. (They did very poorly, to say the least.)

Trump’s “enemy from within” statement

During a mid-October interview, Trump said that the people he considers the “enemy from within” are more dangerous than foreign adversaries in Russia and China, and he would consider deploying federal military forces against them. It was such a frightening statement that Fox News attempted to whitewash during its interview with Harris by trying to pass off a separate clip as the original statement.

Trump wished he had Nazi generals

On Oct. 22, The Atlantic published an article in which sources told a story of Trump admiring Adolf Hitler’s generals, saying, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. … People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” This article, along with one in The New York Times, also featured retired Gen. John Kelly, the longest-serving chief of staff in Trump’s White House, spoke about Trump’s admiration for dictators and correctly said Trump met the definition of a fascist.

Trump reminds everyone he is garbage

This one is multipronged.

First, in an attempt to distract from his racist Madison Square Garden rally, Trump staged a media stunt where he struggled to open the door of a garbage truck before taking questions and pictures while sitting in the passenger seat.

But also, despite the impending election, Trump and the GOP struggled to hide their misogyny. Whether it was the fury with which conservatives responded to the suggestion that a woman might have her own opinions of Trump as president, or Trump telling women he would “protect” them “whether the women like it or not,” Trump and his party could not stop themselves from proving, time and again, how little they think of women and women’s rights.

Maybe there is no one surprise, and maybe with someone like Trump one can never be surprised at how monstrously low he can sink.

If I missed any, please feel free to throw them in the comment thread below!

Donald Trump’s return to the White House as the 47th president of the United States comes at a critical time for the South Caucasus region, as Georgia remains highly polarised after the controversial re-election of the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party, and as Armenia and Azerbaijan seek to finalise a historic peace deal.

Trump’s victory has raised both hopes and concerns in Yerevan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was quick to congratulate Trump on his victory, expressing his hope to “work together”  on the strategic partnership between the two countries, but many in the region are worried that the transition of power in Washington could significantly decrease US involvement in the ongoing peace process with Azerbaijan. 

Pashinyan’s extensive message to Trump, however, was notably positive and optimistic. Pashinyan emphasised the “unprecedented” improvement in the two countries’ relations in the past years, hoping that the trend will continue under Trump’s presidency. Pashinyan praised Trump personally, saying that he is confident that Trump’s “rich experience, knowledge and abilities will best serve to ensure the well-being of the American people, promote the interests of the United States, and strengthen the global role of the United States”.

The timing of the elections is particularly crucial for Armenia, as Joe Biden’s administration has become increasingly involved in the process in the past year. The improvement that Pashinyan mentioned in US-Armenian relations in the “past years” took place during the Biden presidency, with the two countries’ relations switching to “strategic partnership” from “strategic dialogue” earlier this year. 

Trump’s election campaign did explicitly mention Armenia, as the US-based diaspora were potential voters. His promises regarding Armenia were direct and populistic, pledging to “protect persecuted Christians, work to stop violence and ethnic cleansing, and establish peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan”.

US-Armenian community leaders did not support any candidate, unlike previous years, explaining their neutrality by the lack of clarity on the issues regarding Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the presidential candidates. The leaders of the nationalist Hay Dat committee, however, remained hopeful that they could possibly advocate for sanctions against Azerbaijan, the release of Armenian prisoners. 

In the election, Trump’s opponent Democrat Kamala Harris won 54% of the votes in California, where most Armenian-Americans live, including in Los Angeles, which has over 150,000 Armenian residents. 

Trump’s promises for Armenia were seen as empty by many in Yerevan, as the Trump administration was in power during the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, with no particular focus on the region and little to no action during the war that ended with a devastating defeat for Armenia. 

Some see Trump’s comeback as a chance for Azerbaijan to minimise Western involvement in the Caucasus and achieve a deal with Armenia with maximum benefits for Azerbaijan. Russia, which has been backing Azerbaijan in recent years, also has warned against a “hasty” peace deal, complaining about the US government’s increased desire to finalise the deal before Biden’s departure. 

Trump’s return could also complicate Armenia’s regional relationships. His potentially more constructive approach toward Moscow might ease some regional tensions, but his harder stance on Iran – one of Armenia’s crucial neighbours and economic partners – could create new challenges. Trump’s strong pro-Israel position and potential alignment with Azerbaijan in anti-Iranian initiatives might further complicate regional dynamics for Armenia. In the meantime, any potential Russia-US rapprochement would further complicate Armenia’s foreign policy shift towards the West and the European Union. 

US pollsters are under fire for the third presidential election running for failing to foresee Donald Trump’s emphatic ballot box triumph that will propel him back to the White House.

Having seriously underestimated Trump’s support in the 2016 and 2020 elections, polling agencies trumpeted a recalibrated methodology for 2024 that was meant to more realistically reflect his standing while restoring their own credibility.

Instead, pollsters are now being called on to explain a broad range of surveys that showed the two candidates essentially deadlocked both nationally and in battleground states in a race that was deemed too close to call.

Compounding the embarrassment, many polling experts in the final days before election day predicted a narrow electoral college victory for Kamala Harris, who was foreseen by some as just about eking a win in a majority of the seven swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

In fact, Trump has won five of the states at the time of publication and was leading in Nevada and Arizona, which had yet to be called.

Standing out was a poll published at the weekend by the Des Moines Register that purported to show Harris with a three-point lead over Trump in the Republican stronghold state of Iowa – supposedly fueled by widespread outrage among women voters over the restriction of abortion rights.

The poll, carried out by J Ann Selzer – an Iowa pollster widely renowned among her peers for reliability – fed Democratic hopes of a groundswell of support among female voters that could potentially carry over to neighboring Michigan and Wisconsin.

Selzer vouched for its findings even while Trump’s campaign dismissed it as a “fake poll” and “a clear outlier”.

“I’ve been the outlier queen so many times,” Selzer, whose polling correctly foretold Barack Obama’s triumph in the Iowa caucuses in 2008, told the New York Times. “I’m not jumpy.”

Actual events proved the poll to be a dud. Iowa was called for Trump early, and with nearly all the votes counted on Wednesday, he led by an emphatic 55.9% to 42.7%.

Rick Perlstein, an award-winning historian who has written several books chronicling the rise of American conservatism, lamented the role of polling in modern elections in a series of posts on X.

“Iowa called for Trump. Polling is a very compromised enterprise. It would be great to see people start ignoring it,” he wrote on Tuesday evening.

In a later post, he wrote: “One of the trippy things about the polling enterprise is [the] fraught relationship they have with traditional journalism, complaining of their breathless coverage that does not understand polling methodology, but also soliciting that coverage for business purposes.”

The criticism was joined by Allan Lichtman, a historian at American University who forecast a Harris victory based on a system of 13 “keys” he had used to correctly predict the outcome of 11 of the past 12 presidential elections.

“Unlike Nate Silver, who will try to squirm out of why he didn’t see the election coming, I admit that I was wrong,” Lichtman wrote, adding that he would assess his method and the election in a live broadcast on Thursday.

Silver, a pollster who founded FiveThirtyEight, made Harris a marginal favourite hours before polls opened, but had written two weeks earlier that his “gut” favored Trump.

The pollsters’ discomfiture was also highlighted by online betting companies, who claimed they had more accurately predicted the result than self-proclaimed professionals with decades of experience in the field.

Five companies – Betfair, Kalshi, Polymarket, PredictIt and Smarkets – gave Trump a better-than-even chance of winning on the eve of polling day, the New York Times reported. As polls closed on Tuesday, their odds in favour of his winning shot up.

Polymarket boasted that it had “proved the wisdom of markets over the polls, the media, and the pundits”.

“Polymarket consistently and accurately forecasted outcomes well ahead of all three, demonstrating the power of high volume, deeply liquid prediction markets,” the company posted on X.

Tarek Mansour, the chief executive of Kalshi, put it more succinctly. “Polls 0, Prediction Markets 1,” he wrote.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

• How to watch Kamala Harris’s concession speech

• Trump wins the presidency – how did it happen?

• With Trump re-elected, this is what’s at stake

• Tracking abortion ballot measures

As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January, he continues to face a barrage of legal actions against him.  Syracuse University law professor Gregory Germain has been following the criminal and civil cases.

In this article, Prof. Germain summarizes the status of all of the cases and discusses what happens next. If you’d like to schedule an interview, please contact Ellen James Mbuqe, executive director of media relations at ejmbuqe@syr.edu.

Criminal Cases

1. Falsifying Business Records, New York Law.  Trump has been convicted and is scheduled to be sentenced for a Class E felony for falsifying business records in the criminal case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and pending before Judge Juan Merchan.  He faces potential prison time in the case.
2. Election Interference, Georgia Law.  Trump has been indicted in Georgia by District Attorney Fani Willis for election interference.  The case has been mired in controversy following revelations that Willis had an affair with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.  Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee allowed Willis to continue with the prosecution if Wade resigned, which he did, but the case has been derailed by an appeal from Trump and the other defendants.
3. Classified Documents – Federal Law.  Trump has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith on federal charges for stealing, retaining, and making false statements about classified documents that he took from the White House after losing the 2020 election.  The case was assigned to District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, and was reversed by the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals for earlier rulings improperly taking jurisdiction and appointing a special master during the investigation of the document theft.  Judge Cannon dismissed the charges against Trump on a technicality, by finding that Jack Smith’s appointment under the Department of Justice’s special counsel regulation, and the regulation itself, violated the appointments clause of the Constitution.  Cannon did not give the government an opportunity to remedy the election clause deficiency, such as by appointing a Senate approved United States Attorney to supervise the case.  Cannon’s decision is on appeal to the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals.
4. Election Interference – Federal Law.  Trump has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith for election interference in the 2020 election.  The case was delayed because of controversy concerning the standard for presidential immunity.  The trial court and the D.C. Circuit ruled that a former president has no immunity for crimes committed while in office.  The Supreme Court reversed that in Trump v. United States, ruling that a president has broad immunity for actions taken even in bad faith and for personal gain broadly connected with his official duties.  Prosecutor Jack Smith has attempted to limit the indictment to address the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, but serious immunity questions remain.  The case is pending before Judge Tanja Chutkan, a Barack Obama appointee.

Civil Cases

1. Defamation – New York Law.  E. Jean Carroll recovered an $83,300,000 civil judgment against Trump in Manhattan for defamation.  Carroll claimed that Donald Trump sexually attacked her in a department store in the 1990s, and claimed that Trump’s denials and attacks constituted defamation.  Trump posted a bond and obtained a stay pending appeal, and the case is on appeal.
2. Financial Statement Fraud – New York Law.  New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned for election on promises to “get Trump,” brought civil claims against Trump for disgorgement of gains realized by using an inflated personal financial statement used when seeking insurance policies and obtaining secured claims for his subsidiary corporations from sophisticated lenders.  State court judge Arthur F. Engoron awarded the Attorney General $363,800,000 in damages, which now amounts to over $450,000,000 with interest.  The court also barred Trump and other executives from being officers of a New York corporation, and appointed a receiver to liquidate Trump’s company.  The Court of Appeals granted a special stay pending appeal upon the posting of a reduced $175,000,000 bond.  The liberal 1^st Department Appellate Division raised questions about the propriety of the judgment.

There seems little doubt that the federal cases brought by Jack Smith will be terminated.

Gregory Germain

What happens to the Criminal Cases?

The Department of Justice has issued two detailed memorandum opinions, one in 1973 and another in 2000, discussing a sitting president’s scope of immunity from criminal and civil actions.  In both opinions, the Department determined that a sitting president cannot be indicted, prosecuted or jailed for a criminal claim while in office.  The Department based both decisions on the principles of separation of powers – holding that the indictment, prosecution or jailing of a sitting president would allow one branch of government (the judiciary) to interfere with another branch of government (the executive).  No other executive officers (including the Vice President – a matter of contemporaneous concern for Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973) would enjoy such immunity.  The opinions apply equally to federal and state prosecutions.

So it’s clear that the federal prosecutions brought by Jack Smith will not continue, even if Trump did not pardon himself or cause Smith to be removed from office and replaced with a loyal alternative.  And there is every indication from Trump that he will attempt to remove Smith or accept his resignation, or more likely will pardon himself.  While the Department has another opinion rejecting the President’s power to self-pardon, the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling stated that a President’s pardon power is unlimited – even suggesting that the corrupt sale of pardons would not affect the validity of the pardons.  So I have no doubt that the Supreme Court majority would uphold a self-pardon.  So there seems little doubt that the federal cases brought by Jack Smith will be terminated.

The President’s pardon power does not extend to state prosecutions.  However, the Justice Department’s separation of powers rulings apply to all criminal prosecutions, state and federal.  Under the Justice Department’s opinion, it seems clear that the state criminal prosecutions must be stayed while President Trump is in office.  There is even an argument under those opinions that the cases must be dismissed, because the opinions held that an indictment of a sitting president that was stayed from further prosecution while in office would interfere with the functioning of the presidency.  The same could be argued for a stayed sentence.  I also have no doubt that the current Supreme Court would agree with the separation of powers arguments made in the Justice Department’s rulings.  In its immunity decision, the Supreme Court adopted the broadest possible view of presidential immunity, and even the dissenting justices expressed concern about politically-based state prosecutions interfering with the functioning of the president.  So in all likelihood, the state criminal cases will be put on hold during Trump’s presidency.  If they try to continue with the prosecutions, or even to impose a stayed sentence, I suspect the decisions will be reversed on appeal.  It is even possible that the cases will be dismissed.

What Happens to the Civil Cases?

The continuation of the civil cases is far more uncertain.  There are two important civil precedents from the Supreme Court:  Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731 (1982), and Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997).  In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the Court recognized that the sitting president is broadly immune from liability in civil actions for official conduct, both while in office or afterward.  The case has limited applicability to the three civil actions discussed above, because all of the alleged acts (defamation, falsifying business records, and inflating financial statement) had nothing to do with his official acts, not did the acts occur primarily while he was in office.

The second case, Clinton v Jones, involved civil charges by Paula Jones for alleged misconduct before Clinton was in office and completely unrelated to his official duties.  The Supreme Court held that the civil charges could continue, but that the court would have to make special arrangements from the president’s participation in the action so as not to interfere with the performance of his presidential duties, suggesting that any depositions would have to be taken in the White House, and that the president could not be compelled to testify live).  So the Clinton case suggests that the appeals in the civil cases can continue, because they are unlikely to require President Trump’s personal participation.  If, as I think likely because of legal errors and excessive awards, the civil cases are reversed on appeal and remanded for new trials, the courts on remand would have to be very careful to conduct a fair trial without interfering with the president’s official functions.

If the election shows anything, it shows that the public does not like politically motivated prosecutions and impeachments.

Gregory Germain

Thoughts on the Future of Politically Motivated Prosecutions

The Democratic Party and its politically motivated government prosecutors also need to reconsider their actions.  If the election shows anything, it shows that the public does not like politically motivated prosecutions and impeachments.  The argument that Trump was a convicted felon backfired, as the public saw him as a victim of biased and politically motivated prosecutions brought in Democratic strongholds.  Now the ball is in Trump’s court to see if he will carry through on his threats to “do unto others as they did unto him.”  If he does carry through on his threats, I suspect his support will quickly fade.