FBI: Russian actors behind video showing Trump mail-in ballots being destroyed

By  MELISSA GOLDIN, MIKE CATALINI and ALI SWENSON
ASSOCIATED PRESS

YARDLEY, Pa. (AP) — Russian actors were behind a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania, U.S. officials confirmed on Friday.

The video had taken off on social media Thursday but was debunked within three hours by local election officials and law enforcement after members of the public reported it.

U.S. officials said in a statement sent by the FBI that they believe the video was “manufactured and amplified” by Russian actors. The officials said it’s part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans.”

The information was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The Bucks County Board of Elections had identified the video as fake on Thursday, saying the envelope and other materials in the video “are clearly not authentic materials belonging to or distributed by” the board.

The quick knockdown of the staged video showed how election officials have learned to move swiftly to counter false narratives over the last four years, ever since a large swath of American voters became distrustful in the voting process in 2020. Yet the video’s detailed mimicking of ballots in a key county in this year’s presidential race was a wake-up call that demonstrated how committed foreign actors are to undermining faith in the U.S. voting process in the critical stretch before voting concludes.

The video showed a person sorting through what looked like mail ballots labeled as coming from Bucks County. The person, who was Black, appeared to be tearing up ballots marked for Trump, and leaving alone ballots marked for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Researchers who closely study Russian foreign influence campaigns had previously connected the video to a Russian disinformation network known as Storm-1516 or CopyCop. The network has previously shared numerous videos with false claims about Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.

Darren Linvill, the co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who closely studies the group, said the user who popularized the Bucks County video on the social platform X had been an early amplifier of several other narratives from this network, including the first one his team ever tracked, in August 2023.

The style and appearance of the latest video matches other videos from the network too, Linvill said.

The video used a Black actor with a foreign accent — a choice that may be intentional as a way to inflame existing divisions on American soil, according to Josephine Lukito, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin who has researched Russian disinformation.

It’s a common strategy in fake videos originating in Russia, she said.

“It tends to amplify racism, right?” Lukito said. “There’s already this kind of groundswell of discussion about immigrants that are illegally voting or immigration broadly. Russian disinformation absolutely exploits that.”

After the video had been debunked, the X user who popularized it deleted their original post and shared multiple posts from other accounts decrying it as fake.

America PAC, a super political action committee launched by billionaire X owner Elon Musk to support Trump in his bid for a second term, was among those denouncing the video — a stark contrast to the misinformation that frequently spreads on X, often spurred by Musk himself. The PAC declined a request for further comment.