Project Lakhta was an election subversion campaign executed by the Russian GRU military intelligence agency from 2014 to 2016 during the 2016 presidential election in the United States. The Russian government, through the hacking of Democratic Party information systems and the creation of alt-right "troll factories" on social media, secured a victory for Republican nominee Donald Trump as a means of destabilizing the United States, and Trump's relationship with Russia and its dictator Vladimir Putin was scrutinized during Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation from May 2017 to March 2019.
In May 2014, the same month as a series of Russian cyberattacks targeting the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election, President Barack Obama's administration received a report suggesting that the Kremlin was building a disinformation program which could be used to interfere in Western politics. Putin himself directed the operation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, seeking to undermine American trust in their own democracy and elect Donald Trump, whom he believed would ease economic sanctions against his regime. Putin also blamed the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for the "Snow Revolution" protests against his rule from 2011 to 2013.
The Internet Research Agency, founded in July 2013 and linked to pro-Putin oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, was directed to support the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in February 2016, using any opportunity to criticize Clinton and the other candidates. The IRA waged a social media campaign seeking to provoke and amplify political and social discord in America, creating bot accounts on social media to spam comment sections with comments attacking Clinton. The IRA created Facebook groups claiming to be conservative and Tea Party organizations, Black social justice groups, gay rights groups, religious organizations like "United Muslims of America", and even a false profile for the Tennessee Republican Party. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Michael Flynn reposted material from the IRA's Tennessee GOP Twitter account, and Russian operatives bought ads on Facebook that reached 10 million users.
The Russian GRU intelligence service also hacked emails belonging to members of the Clinton presidential campaign (including chairman John Podesta) and Democratic National Committee emails, obtaining thousands of hacked documents and publishing them via WikiLeaks. Podesta's emails formed the basis for the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, while the leaked DNC emails showed that chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other party officials had privately denigrated Bernie Sanders and his campaign. In July 2018, the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian GRU intelligence officials for conspiring to interfere in the 2016 elections.
During the 2016 election, Trump and 18 campaign officials and advisors had numerous contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak meeting several Trump campaign members and administration nominees. Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort also had several contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials, and he shared internal polling data with Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik. Michael Flynn also gave a paid speech at a dinner event at which he sat next to Putin, Jill Stein, Sergei Ivanov, Dmitry Peskov, Viktor Vekselberg, and Alexey Gromov. The Russians also used Josepf Mifsud to contact Trump advisor George Papadopoulos in March 2016, with Mifsud revealing that the Russians had "dirt" on Clinton. In June 2016, Trump Jr., Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin after Trump Jr. was informed that Veselnitskaya had incriminating information about Clinton; the meeting was later disclosed by The New York Times on 8 July 2017. Peter W. Smith, a longtime Republican operative, contacted several Russian hacker groups to obtain emails he believed had been hacked from Clinton's computer server, while Russia also attempted to pass hacked Clinton emails to Flynn.
In March 2018, Putin suggested that "Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, just with Russian citizenship" might have been to blame for election interference, and that Americans may have paid them for that work. Putin's statement was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, concluded in 2019, ultimately failed to conclude that Trump had committed a crime, but also did not exonerate him.