The long-awaited, redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report released Thursday refers to several Florida links to Russia’s attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.
New information is sparse in relevant sections of the report, which isn’t in a searchable form and which blacks out some material — including details about some of the people and events related to Florida.
“As you will see, most of the redactions were compelled by the need to prevent harm to ongoing matters and to comply with court orders prohibiting the public disclosure of information bearing upon ongoing investigations and criminal cases, such as the IRA case and the Roger Stone case,” Attorney General William Barr said at a Washington, D.C., briefing.
The IRA refers to the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Florida election hacking
The Mueller report references, but doesn’t provide additional details about, a previously reported attempt by Russians to infiltrate Florida’s elections systems before the 2016 election.
“In November 2016, the GRU sent spearphishing emails to over 120 email accounts used by Florida county officials responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. election. The spearphishing emails contained an attached Word document coed with malicious software [commonly referred to as a Trojan] that permitted the GRU to access the infected computer.
“The FBI was separately responsible for this investigation. We understand the FBI believes that this operation enabled the GU to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government. The [Special Counsel’s] Office did not independently verify that belief and, as explained above, did not undertake the investigative steps that would have been necessary to do so.”
One of the Mueller indictments alleged that an officer in the Russian military who worked in Russian intelligence and his co-conspirators relied on an email account designed to look as if it came from a vendor used by election officials.
The attempted infiltration has been reported previously, and state and local officials have said it wasn’t successful. Supervisors of Elections in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties said last year they had no reason to believe their voter registration rolls had been compromised by hackers
The same section of the Muller report states: “In August 2016, GRU officers targeted employees of [redacted], a voting technology companies that developed software used by numerous U.S. counties to manage voter rolls, and installed malware on the company network.”
An elections system vendor, VR Systems, which wasn’t named, has repeatedly denied reports in 2017 that information was stolen from it and used to send phishing emails to local elections officials. A VR Systems executive repeated those denials at a May 2018 convention of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections in Fort Lauderdale.
Roger Stone
Roger Stone, the Fort Lauderdale resident who is a longtime informal adviser to President Donald Trump, was indicted in January on seven counts of obstruction, false statements and witness tampering.