| Christopher Armitage Aug 19, Christopher Armitage from The Existentialist Republic |
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Publisher’s note on sources and standards
This report covers February 2025 through August 2026. Every factual claim is cited where it appears. Sources consist of federal indictments, court filings, agency memoranda, Congressional Research Service publications, Senate correspondence, published threat intelligence from named firms and university research groups, and news reporting. Filings from advocacy organizations are flagged and checked against the underlying documents.
Foreign interference in the 2026 midterms is positioned to be the most extensive in American history, and its full extent will likely never be known, because the Trump regime has made it clear that interference in their favor is invited, our resources largely undefended, violations to help the GOP will go unpunished, and will likely be rewarded through favorable trade and diplomatic treatment.
Further, the portion independent researchers have been able to identify has doubled in a year while the instruments that would have measured greater scale of interference have been thoroughly shuttered and defunded, while those who previously identified election interference that benefitted the GOP now find themselves facing weaponization of the criminal justice system and being treated as enemies of the Trump regime’s purged federal law enforcement apparatus.
This report documents the operations still visible to independent researchers and uses the remaining indicators to estimate the total.
In the first quarter of 2026, narratives from Storm-1516, a Russian operation run through a former Florida deputy sheriff granted asylum in Russia, more than doubled compared with the same period the year before, reaching near-daily output by spring. The count comes from Bloomberg, which identified the operation’s output using signature characteristics published by Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.
Finding 1: Documented foreign influence operations increased substantially through the 2026 election cycle
The Vice President of the United States has repeated a fabrication manufactured by Russian military intelligence. In November 2023, Storm-1516 published a false report that Zelensky’s associates had bought two yachts worth $75 million with money stolen from Western military aid; the brokers involved denied it. Then-Senator JD Vance repeated the claim publicly when explaining his opposition to continued U.S. support for Ukraine. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene shared it as well.
The documented operations running against American audiences right now:
Storm-1516, also tracked as CopyCop. Recorded Future reported that since March 2025 the network created “at least 200 new fictional media websites targeting the United States, France, and Canada,” on top of earlier waves, using uncensored variants of open-source language models and more than 1,000 fake journalist personas.
Spamouflage, a Chinese state-linked operation. The Clemson Media Forensics Hub documented the campaign’s targeting of then-Senator Marco Rubio, and Graphika reported in July that the network distributed manipulated event flyers to disrupt gatherings critical of the Chinese government in the United States and Europe.
A domestic artificial intelligence bot network. Clemson researchers identified at least 686 X accounts that posted more than 130,000 times, posing as conservative voters and working four Senate races and two primaries, and assessed the network as “an American political operation, rather than one run by a foreign government.”
Party-produced deepfakes. The National Republican Senatorial Committee published a deepfake of James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, on March 11: an artificial version of the candidate speaking to camera for over a minute, the first of its kind per CNN, with a disclosure label rendered in small, fading text. CNN reported the ad was the latest in a series of AI-generated products from the committee.
These operations demonstrate that the techniques are normalized, the tools are cheap, and disclosure requirements are minimal where they exist at all.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin measured what targeting like this does to turnout. Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2026, they tracked every digital ad seen by 10,441 people representative of the voting-age population for the six weeks before the 2016 election and matched each person’s exposure to their verified turnout record.
The researchers estimated that roughly 4.7 million people who would otherwise have voted were successfully influenced not to. Nonwhite voters in minority-majority counties in battleground states received the messages at four times the rate of their white neighbors, and the operators used “Martin Luther King Jr.” as a targeting keyword to identify nonwhite voters for suppression.
Lead author Young Mie Kim said the Russian operation was not about mobilizing people but about demobilizing certain groups of people, and that 17 percent of the campaigns studied were tied to Russian operations. Trump won the presidency that year on battleground margins under one percent, including Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes.
The prohibition those advertisers violated is one the Federal Election Commission has lacked the votes to enforce since May 2025.
Finding 2: The Trump administration has dismantled seven federal safeguards against foreign election interference.
The federal defenses against foreign election interference took nearly ninety years to build. Dismantling them began in February 2025 and has not stopped. The defenses had different architects across different decades. Congress wrote the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938 and created the Federal Election Commission in 1974. After Russia’s 2016 operation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation created its Foreign Influence Task Force in 2017, Congress established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018, the intelligence community established its Foreign Malign Influence Center in 2022 to track election interference by Russia and other adversaries, and the State Department ran a counter-disinformation office. The current administration has disabled every one of them since February 2025:
February 5, 2025. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force on her first day, writing that the move would “free resources to address more pressing priorities.”
The same memo limited criminal prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to “instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” Enforcement was narrowed, not ended; the act remains law.
December 2024 through April 2025. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center closed in December 2024, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut its successor office on April 16, and by September the department had halted “all frameworks” for countering foreign disinformation.
February through March 2025. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency froze its election security work and ended funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, telling states in an internal email that the work “no longer supports Department priorities.” Support ended fully on September 30, 2025.
May 1, 2025. The Federal Election Commission lost its quorum and with the quorum lost the legal ability to open investigations, issue penalties, or make rules. Chair Shana Broussard told NOTUS the agency is “hobbled.”
Through 2025. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence terminated 500 staff, a 30 percent reduction, with cuts announced to reach 40 percent of personnel by the end of 2025, and folded core functions of the Foreign Malign Influence Center into other offices. The Brennan Center for Justice noted that the Director of National Intelligence omitted foreign election threats from her worldwide threats testimony, unlike prior cycles.
July 9, 2026. Trump fired the three remaining commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan agency that certifies voting equipment and administers federal election funding, leaving it without a quorum months before the midterms. With CISA’s election work halted, the commission was one of the few remaining federal entities providing election security support to states.
Those offices produced indictments, sanctions, domain seizures, and critical warnings to states and campaigns.
The center found that federal support for election security is “notably absent this cycle,” the first such absence since election infrastructure was designated critical infrastructure in 2017. Election officials told MS NOW they have received no intelligence briefings on possible foreign threats and have no access to regional cybersecurity advisers, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond when asked about it. Sens. Alex Padilla and Mark Warner have demanded intelligence briefings on foreign election threats ahead of the midterms and report that the intelligence office failed to respond to their previous request.
The 2026 midterms will be the first federal election since Russia’s 2016 attack in which none of the defenses built in response are still functioning, and enforcement under the older laws has stopped as well.
Finding 3: Republicans have opened a working channel to the Kremlin and plan to continue using it through the election
In the same period, House Republicans hosted the first Kremlin parliamentary delegation on American soil in twelve years, over written Senate warnings that the visitors came to collect intelligence, with a reciprocal Moscow trip planned for the weeks around the election.
On March 26, 2026, a delegation of Russian State Duma lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., the first such visit since relations collapsed over the invasion of Ukraine, led by Vyacheslav Nikonov of the United Russia party and hosted on Capitol Hill by four House Republicans and one Democrat, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). Every member of the delegation was under United States sanctions. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats wrote to the administration on April 3: “The delegation came onto U.S. soil for one purpose: to advance the Kremlin’s strategic aims—including gathering additional useful intelligence.”
Rep. Luna told the Russian state news agency TASS in July that members of Congress plan to visit Moscow this fall or winter, that administration officials will travel as well, and that an announcement involving Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be coming.
The most senior travel already scheduled is FBI Director Kash Patel’s, who is planning a trip to Russia in October, reported by Politico, with the FSB, Russia’s security service, likely hosting. The agenda is undisclosed, and the Kremlin has declined to confirm the trip. The bureau that stopped investigating Russian influence operations is sending its director to meet the Russian security service one month before the election.
Finding 4: There is no longer an agency able to investigate and penalize illegal foreign campaign contributions
Federal law bars foreign nationals from contributing to American elections, and the Federal Election Commission is the agency that enforces it. It entered 2026 with roughly 195 enforcement matters pending and no authority to act on any of them. Nothing moves until the Senate confirms the commissioners nominated in February.
What that means in practice is visible in a complaint the commission received in February. Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy organization, asked the commission to investigate Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini. The complaint alleges he used his daughter Isabela Herrera, whose only prior federal political gift was $20, to move “prohibited foreign contributions in the name of another totaling $3.5 million” into MAGA Inc., the leading pro-Trump super PAC, while he sought clemency in a federal bribery case. President Donald Trump pardoned him in that case on January 16, 2026, a month before the complaint was filed. The center’s Saurav Ghosh said the sequence suggests Herrera Velutini “flouted the law to corruptly seek presidential clemency.”
When we look at the totality of the circumstances as we approach the midterm elections, we can see that the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have invited foreign interference in their favor, removed the guardrails built to stop it, and rewarded those who provide it. What that means for November is that the operations documented here will be at full operational scale from America’s enemies, and hyper-targeted to convince people to vote MAGA or not show up.
Suppressing turnout remains among the most effective tools these operations have, which is why researchers estimate 4.7 million Americans stayed home in 2016 because of ads aimed at them, and it is the tool that fails when people show up anyway.
Beyond November, the work is electing representatives at the city and state level who are prepared to fight back from a serious oppositional posture. The states retain authority over their own elections, and they can ban what the federal government now permits, fund what it has defunded, and prosecute what it declines to. That is achievable and within reach, so long as we arm ourselves with the knowledge and organize well enough to use it.
Let’s get after it.
Your state can stand up its own single payer healthcare system, arrest ICE agents who break the law, and even create New Deal style jobs programs. There are tremendous options available to us at the state level that are largely untapped.
Want to make that all reality and start winning some ground? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need to have a plan.
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