Bring on Russian trolls

One of the many times U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin received applause during her town hall at Sexton High School last week was for the simple comment that she read the entire 448-page Mueller report.

The commentary that followed, however, had little to do with President Donald Trump. It had to do with what has been described by others as “Russian trolls.”The former CIA agent didn’t use that term in talking to the crowd of close to 200, but that’s what she was talking about — Russian actors using social media and paid ads to sway swing state voters in Michigan and elsewhere during the 2016 elections.

Half of the Mueller report was “a straight-up description of Russian information warfare against our political system.” Roughly $100,000 was spent on Facebook alone on a campaign that was seen by an estimated 129 million Americans, she said.

Apparently, Eastern European countries like Montenegro and Albania are familiar with the Russian propaganda machine rolling into town. It’s not unique to the 2016 election or the recent 2018 mid-terms either. Slotkin said similar tactics were used during the Cold War against particular presidential candidates.

Updated for 2018, the new tactic is to create phony radical Muslim groups or African American groups to fan the flames of hatred. Another ad depicted Hillary Clinton with the devil while Donald Trump walked with Jesus.

“They are not shy about what they’re doing,” Slotkin said ... and it’s currently 100% legal. She and a few of her security-focused colleagues are working on legislation to “plug the holes” in the system to prevent foreign government propaganda in 2020.

The comment earned another round of applause.

As she bounced around Lansing last Thursday, the first-year 8th District Congresswoman said people wanted to talk about health care, rising drug costs and opioid addictions. And she’s more than willing to talk about those issues.

Water quality questions come up. The federal reaction to PFAS contamination. She is not weighing deeply into the Trump impeachment question at this point. Maybe later.

What really gets Slotkin fired up, though, is national security stuff. The former national security official has been using her expertise to focus on what she sees as the next big threats the United States is facing and what she can do as a member of Congress to stop those threats.

Earlier in the day last Thursday, the former U.S. Department of Defense official strolled through the grounds of the Emergent BioSolutions lab off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. That’s the big, heavily guarded lab where they make the anthrax vaccine.

After she was done, about 60 employees gathered in the breakroom to pepper her with various questions. There was one about NAFTA and tariffs. Someone asked if Washington was as dysfunctional as it seems. Another asked what she does for fun. She loves to paddle rivers and streams Up North with her husband, BTW.

Then someone asked about the future of warfare and cyber threats.

She looked like a major league slugger ready to jump on a fastball down the middle.

She talked about how the nature of warfare is changing. The next big wars, she said, will not be tanks and ground troops taking over larger swaths of land in hand-to-hand combat. The wars will be over information seized or defended over the internet. Financial data. Critical infrastructure. Satellites in space.

“The private sector is on the front lines of a lot of this,” she said.

We’re already seeing it with the Russians playing in both the 2016 and 2018 elections. A Russian company called the Internet Research Agency worked with Russian political interests to create at least one contrived protest in Pennsylvania.

With her husband working in the Pentagon, “We talk about these things all the time,” she told me later.

Facebook is hurriedly trying to delete the phony accounts as the hackers essentially laugh at the U.S. intelligence and the private sector. According to CNN, the Internet Research Agency bragged about meddling and how it couldn’t be stopped in one post.

That’s not good enough for Slotkin. She said she is working with those in the Problem Solvers Caucus and others in Congress on legislation before the next presidential election.

“No one, no Republican, Democrat or independent that I know wants foreigners influencing our political process,” she said. “There’s a lot we need to do to protect ourselves for 2020. It should have already been done. We’re doing it now.”

(Kyle Melinn, of the Capitol news service MIRS, is at melinnky@gmil.com.)