"Closer to home for Americans, Russian government trolls in 2012 went after a U.S. ambassador for the first time on social media, inundating his Twitter account with threats.
"But for U.S. officials, the real wake-up call came in early 2014 when the Russians annexed Crimea and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. An intercepted Russian military intelligence report dated February 2014 documented how Moscow created fake personas to spread disinformation on social media to buttress its broader military campaign.
"The classified Russian intelligence report, obtained by The Washington Post, offered examples of the messages the fake personas spread. 'Brigades of westerners are now on their way to rob and kill us,' wrote one operative posing as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. 'Morals have been replaced by thirst for blood and hatred toward anything Russian.'
"Officials in the GRU, Russia's military intelligence branch, drafted the document as part of an effort to convince Kremlin higher-ups of the campaign's effectiveness. Officials boasted of creating a fake Facebook account they used to send death threats to 14 politicians in southeastern Ukraine.
"Five days into the campaign, the GRU said, its fake accounts were garnering 200,000 views a day. The Ukraine operation offered the Americans their first glimpse of the power of Russia's post-Cold War playbook."
Unfortunately, the Obama administration didn't take the necessary steps to protect us from the coming Trump disaster, despite all these warning signs:
"In March 2014, Obama paid a visit to NATO headquarters, where he listened as unnerved allies warned him of the growing Russia threat. Aides wanted to give the president options to push back.
"In the White House Situation Room a few weeks later, they pitched him on creating several global channels -- in Russian, Mandarin and other languages -- that would compete with RT. The proposed American versions would mix entertainment with news programing and pro-Western propaganda.
"The president brushed aside the idea as politically impractical.
"In the Situation Room that day was Richard Stengel, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, who, like Obama, disliked the idea.
"'There were all these guys in government who had never created one minute of TV content talking about creating a whole network,' said Stengel, the former top editor at Time magazine. 'I remember early on telling a friend of mine in TV that people don't like government content. And he said, 'No, they don't like bad content, and government content sucks.'
"So Stengel began to look for alternatives to counter the threat. Across Eastern Europe and Ukraine, Russian-language channels mixing entertainment, news and propaganda were spreading the Kremlin's message. Stengel wanted to help pro-Western stations on Russia's periphery steal back audiences from the Russian stations by giving them popular American television shows and movies.
"Stengel got Voice of America to launch a round-the-clock Russian-language news broadcast and found a few million dollars to translate PBS documentaries on the Founding Fathers and the American Civil War into Russian for broadcast in eastern Ukraine. He had wanted programing such as 'Game of Thrones' but would instead have to settle for the likes of Ken Burns.
"'We brought a tiny, little Swiss Army knife to a gunfight,' he said."
So the counterintel-cyber-info attack never happened in the US and we were left exposed and vulnerable to Russian interference. What about a counter-propaganda campaign? Looks like Clapper nixed that idea. Read on:
"The task of countering what the Russians were doing fell to a few underfunded bureaucrats at the State Department who journeyed to the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon and the FBI searching for help and finding little.
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