But in April 2016, this operation became more aggressive, according to the indictment. On April 6, 2016, shortly after Trump clinched the Republican nomination, the group began spending money to promote content explicitly supporting Trump’s candidacy and opposing Clinton’s. On June 13, the Internet Research Agency allegedly opened fraudulent bank accounts with funds to obfuscate the source of its spending in the United States. And from July 2016, onward it organized political rallies, mostly in support of Trump and some supporting Clinton. That August, the Internet Research Agency directly contacted unwitting Trump campaign officials to discuss times and locations of proposed rallies.
We don’t know what specifically precipitated this change of tack—or what coordination, if any, this operation had with the hacking of the DNC and of Clinton’s campaign chairman, Podesta. The indictment makes no mention of either event; nor does it establish a causal link between those hacks and the Internet Research Agency’s work. But it is perhaps useful to recall other events around the time for context.
The fateful phishing email targeting John Podesta was sent on March 19, 2016. Two weeks later, on April 3, the trove of documents on hidden wealth known as the Panama Papers was released. Those documents first publicly implicated corruption involving Putin on April 6—the approximate date on which the indictment alleges the Internet Research Agency bought its first advertisement explicitly attacking Hillary Clinton. Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov has
argued that Putin interpreted the Panama Papers as a personal attack against him and sought to intervene in the U.S. election in response.