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FNC: The Justice Department reportedly has garnered enough evidence to charge at least six Russian government operatives with hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers during the 2016 presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal prosecutors could bring charges early next year. The Journal reported that dozens of others may have also played a role in the cyberattack.
19,000 malicious links collected by Secureworks after Fancy Bear mistake.
4,700 Gmail users across the globe were targeted by the state hacking team.
Alongside Democrats, a handful of Republican targets were also identified.
The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defence contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.
The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.
“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”
The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.
Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet.
The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.
“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data. “I have no doubts.”
New evidence
Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.
In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, US Army Gen. Wesley Clark.
The list skewed toward workers for defence contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle.
The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.
Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.
“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.”
In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.
The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.
In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists.
Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.
“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.
Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organisation in Kazakhstan.
“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in Washington.
He was also on the list.
“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.”
Working 9 to 6 (Moscow Time)
Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren’t new. But raw data has been hard to come by.
Researchers have been documenting the group’s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia’s intelligence services. The “Fancy Bear” nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia’s national symbol.
In the wake of the 2016 election, US intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.
But the US intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.
That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake.
Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software.
He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.
The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders.
The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET.
The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95% of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 am and 6 pm Monday to Friday.
The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.
Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.
Fancy Bear have long been linked to the Russian security servicesiStock
And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.
“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.”
The myth if the 400-pound man
Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes — easily rivalling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history.
For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages — in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages — they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work.
The AP’s effort offers “a little feel for how much labour went into this,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
He said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated last year that the hacks could be the work of “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
“The notion that it’s just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd,” Rid said.
***
Axios: Marathon congressional hearings on Russian election interference and social media left execs from Facebook, Google and Twitter badly bruised and with a new view of just how mad Washington is about their handling of content aiming to divide Americans.
The big takeaway: Lawmakers’ rebukes went far beyond the companies’ responses to Russia’s interference. They also repeatedly revealed a discomfort with the size, power and limited accountability of the large web platforms.
Washington isn’t buying that Facebook, Google and Twitter aren’t media companies. Both Republicans and Democrats seemed baffled at times by an assumption that has been fundamental to Google, Facebook and Twitter’s growth: that they are neutral platforms for information, not judges of content. Multiple lawmakers questioned that argument: “That may well be a distinction that is lost on most of us, that you’re just a platform for other people to express their views as opposed to being a publisher in their own right of those views,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
We now know what the Russian ads look like. Lawmakers released some of the Russian-bought ads, which were focused largely on divisive political issues like civil rights, immigration and religion. According to the metadata released, the ads targeted both Republicans and Democrats and were paid for in rubles. For example, one “Black Matters” ad targeted adults in Georgia, Maryland, Missouri and Virginia and received more than 200,000 impressions and more than 12,000 clicks. It cost 53,425 rubles ($915).
Still no backing for a regulatory fix. The only piece of concrete legislation tied to this issue is the Honest Ads Act, which would require disclosure for online political ads. While the companies all committed to improving transparency, and companies indicated that they could work with lawmakers on the bill, they did not endorse it.
Lawmakers felt slighted by the CEOs’ absence. “I wish your CEOs were here,” said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, one of many lawmakers who voiced that sentiment. “They need to answer for this.”
The companies are putting significant resources toward vetting content. During nine hours of hearings, they repeatedly touted how much they were investing in both money and personnel to solve the election interference issue. Facebook is doubling the people working on safety and security issues to 20,000 by the end of 2018, for example.
Democrats were the harshest critics. Silicon Valley has long had a strong relationship with the liberal left, but that didn’t stop California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, as well as tech ally Sen. Ron Wyden, from lacing into the witnesses. Republicans, while critical of the companies, stopped short of conceding that social media manipulation was a deciding factor in Donald Trump’s win.
Congressional investigators are still learning the basics. One lawmaker asked Twitter’s general counsel to explain the difference between a bot and a troll. Several inquired about the definition of “impressions.” This highlights how steep the learning curve is for elected officials to fully grasp the nuances of what went wrong online in 2016.
Tech made a huge political miscalculation in not moving faster. Again and again, the companies were chided for how long it took them to deliver the goods to investigators. “I hear all your words,” said Sen. Mark Warner, “but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leaderships of your companies.”
What’s next? All of the companies indicated their investigations are ongoing, so the scale of the Russian disinformation campaign could turn out to be even bigger than we know now.
A Romanian politician sentenced to jail for rigging elections is trying to arrange meetings with Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), according to recent Justice Department filings.
Liviu Dragnea, who is speaker of Romanian Parliament’s lower chamber and party president, received a two-year suspended jail sentence last year for trying to rig a referendum election to impeach the country’s president.
Now, his Social Democratic Party is paying Washington public-affairs group Madison & Co. $100,000 to introduce Dragnea to Pence and Ryan “as soon as possible” and to arrange “political, media and academic meetings” for Dragnea. Operatives working on the case include Madison & Co. president Al Madison; Democratic lobbyist and “rainmaker” William Oldaker; Drew Willison, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid’s (Nev.) final chief of staff; and William Harris, a Republican operative who “has worked for the Trump Organization on a variety of political and business matters,” according to a disclosure filing. The Justice Department has not yet released disclosures forms for Oldaker or Willison.
This wouldn’t be Dragnea’s first brush with members of the current administration. In the days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Dragnea met with the president-elect, now-former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Ed Royce (R-Calif), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act is in fact a joke, but quite a lucrative one if you are part of a Washington DC law firm. As noted on the website, under the guidance and management of the Department of Justice:
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA is a disclosure statute that requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities. Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the statements and activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents. The FARA Registration Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the administration and enforcement of the Act.
The person at the Justice Department who is in charge of this division was Dana Boente. He suddenly resigned last week…..hummmm. Boente assumed the position of Deputy Attorney General, when Trump fired Sally Yates when she refused to defend Trump’s travel suspension executive order. Boente declared he would defend in court that executive order, but was that really true since he suddenly resigned?
Seems Boente was selected to oversee the department’s division handling the probe into alleged Russian election interference, overseeing efforts on cybersecurity and counterintelligence.
Another hummm
So back to foreign lobby and continued foreign interference in DC…
The last time I can remember a stir about a lobby firm evading disclosure law was in 2004, when Qorvis Communications’ offices were raided by the FBI in a probe about its work for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. However, nothing much came of it, and business carried on as usual among Washington lobbyists. Two years ago, reportedly, a number of Qorvis lobbyists quit because they were uncomfortable with the firm’s work. According to this 2015 story in the New York Observer, more than a third of Qorvis partners had left the firm—to start their own lobby shops—“partly because of the firm’s work on behalf of such clients as Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the Central African nation of Equatorial Guinea,” reported the Huffington Post. “‘I just have trouble working with despotic dictators killing their own people,’ said one Qorvis insider.”
The last time I can remember a stir about a lobby firm evading disclosure law was in 2004, when Qorvis Communications’ offices were raided by the FBI in a probe about its work for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. However, nothing much came of it, and business carried on as usual among Washington lobbyists. Two years ago, reportedly, a number of Qorvis lobbyists quit because they were uncomfortable with the firm’s work. According to this 2015 story in the New York Observer, more than a third of Qorvis partners had left the firm—to start their own lobby shops—“partly because of the firm’s work on behalf of such clients as Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the Central African nation of Equatorial Guinea,” reported the Huffington Post. “‘I just have trouble working with despotic dictators killing their own people,’ said one Qorvis insider.”
Imagine that….Europe may be more right on this issue than the United States is due to congress where decisions just cannot be made.
Going back to 2011, the Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
In 2016, Pentagon leaders are still working to determine when, exactly, a cyber-attack against the U.S. would constitute an act of war, and when, exactly, the Defense Department would respond to a cyber-attack on civilian infrastructure, a senior Defense Department official told lawmakers on Wednesday.
A cyber strike as an act of war “has not been defined,” Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security Thomas Atkin told the House Armed Services Committee. “We’re still working toward that definition.” More here.
So, is Europe ahead of the United States on this issue?
EU governments to warn cyber attacks can be an act of war
European Union governments will formally state that cyber attacks can be an act of war in a show of strength to countries such as Russia and North Korea.
Diplomats and ambassadors in Brussels have drafted a document, obtained by The Telegraph, that represents an unprecedented deterrent aimed at countries using hackers and cyber espionage against EU members.
The document, set to be agreed by all 28 EU members states, including Britain, in the coming weeks warns that individual member states could respond “in grave instances” to cyber attacks with conventional weapons.
The British government has now said it was all but certain that North Korea was behind the “WannaCry” malware attack that hit NHS IT systems in May. Work on the EU paper began among fears that Russia would attempt to influence this year’s German elections and over hybrid warfare employed in Ukraine. More here.
This could be a pretext for what is a probable threat.
Banks fearing North Korea hacking prepare defenses: cyber experts
WASHINGTON/TORONTO (Reuters) – Global banks are preparing to defend themselves against North Korea potentially intensifying a years-long hacking spree by seeking to cripple financial networks as Pyongyang weighs the threat of U.S. military action over its nuclear program, cyber security experts said.
North Korean hackers have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from banks during the past three years, including a heist in 2016 at Bangladesh Bank that yielded $81 million, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer at cyber security firm CrowdStrike.
Alperovitch told the Reuters Cyber Security Summit on Tuesday that banks were concerned Pyongyang’s hackers may become more destructive by using the same type of “wiper” viruses they deployed across South Korea and at Sony Corp’s (6758.T) Hollywood studio.
The North Korean government has repeatedly denied accusations by security researchers and the U.S. government that it has carried out cyber attacks.
North Korean hackers could leverage knowledge about financial networks gathered during cyber heists to disrupt bank operations, according to Alperovitch, who said his firm has conducted “war game” exercises for several banks.
“The difference between theft and destruction is often a few keystrokes,” Alperovitch said.
Security teams at major U.S. banks have shared information on the North Korean cyber threat in recent months, said a second cyber security expert familiar with those talks.
“We know they attacked South Korean banks,” said the source, who added that fears have grown that banks in the United States will be targeted next.
Tensions between Washington and Pyongyang have been building after a series of nuclear and missile tests by North Korea and bellicose verbal exchanges between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
John Carlin, a former U.S. assistant attorney general, told the Reuters summit that other firms, among them defense contractors, retailers and social media companies, were also concerned.
“They are thinking ‘Are we going to see an escalation in attacks from North Korea?’” said Carlin, chair of Morrison & Foerster international law firm’s global risk and crisis management team.
Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it is unlikely that North Korea would launch destructive attacks on American banks because of concerns about U.S. retaliation.
Representatives of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the top U.S. banking regulators, declined to comment. Both have ramped up cyber security oversight in recent years.
While many are questioning Robert Mueller’s role into the Russian investigation, be sure to understand Russian operatives had an open door for at least 8 years and earlier than that there were clandestine Russian spy rings functioning across the country.
Much less there are dead Russians in the UK as well as in the United States, the risks are extraordinary.
Thanks to the Democrats and the greed of money where Russia was happy to comply for agreements to all their requests, the Russian probe goes beyond that common term of collusion.
The Obama administration launched the back channels for nuclear talks with Iran in 2009 in Oman. Obama needed the Russian vote, so all things concocted by the Kremlin were given a wink and nod by the Obama White House as well as the Hillary and John Kerry State Department.
So, we now have the Trump White House which has been slow and measured to take additional actions regarding Russia. The ‘why’ has a convoluted answer. There is/was Russian hacking. There were/are Russian trolls and bots in social media. There is Russian involvement in Silicon Valley known as Skolkovo. There is conflicted military airspace in Syria. There is Russian support of the Taliban. There are Russian operations in Cuba, Latin America, Libya, Iraq, Ukraine (…)
Medvedev and Putin have a master plan and they are calculating and effective. One action results in unknown global consequences.
So, finally the Tillerson State Department provided approval of additional sanctions on Russia and Congress has the list. Is it enough or complete? Too early to know. However, the Magnitsky Act is gaining approval in countries allied to United States and Putin is seeking revenge by any means necessary including through Interpol.
WASHINGTON — The State Department gave Congress a list Thursday of 39 Russian individuals and entities it says support the Russian government’s intelligence and defense sectors. Early next year, anyone in the U.S. doing business with entities on that list will be hit with sanctions by the Trump administration.
“Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has authorized the department to issue guidance to the public specifying the persons or entities that are part of or operating on behalf of the defense or intelligence sectors of the government of the Russian Federation,” said State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert.
After President Trump signed sanctions legislation in August, the administration gave the State and Treasury Departments the authority to draw up a list of entities that enable Moscow’s intelligence and defense sectors. The State Department had a deadline of October 1 to send the list to Congress. Now, nearly a month late, State has done so.
There had been growing criticism that the administration was slow-walking the process. The State Department cited the complexity of the process when asked about the delay. Nauert also explained that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is “very hands-on in these types of things.”
Experts on Russia who reviewed the list, which was obtained by CBS News, say it covers most of the Russian defense sector.
“This seems to be a comprehensive list that broadly covers a significant portion of the Russian defense industry,” said Mark Simakovsky, a former Defense Department official and Atlantic Council fellow. “The administration likely took very seriously the review, required of the legislation, and has sought to abide by the terms.”
Rosoboronexport OJSC, which is on the list, is one of Russia’s largest exporters of defense products. Its partner company, Rostec, promotes technology products in both the civil and defense sectors and is also on the list. On the intelligence side, the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) are included.
The State Department is making the entire list public in advance of actual sanctions implementation in order to alert U.S. stakeholders, primarily those who do business with these companies, early notice, so they can draw down those transactions. If they don’t, they, too, will face sanctions.
“These are the types of entities that they can no longer do business with,” State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert said. “So it helps them to at least make their business decisions and be able to decide on the best course of action going forward,” she said.”
Making the list public before sanctions go into effect is a departure from the usual State Department policy of waiting for the sanctions to be announced. Congressional aides acknowledged that this caveat, which essentially enables both U.S. companies and the Russian companies to prepare, was a concern as the legislation was nearing its final hours before passage. In the end, there was no major effort to change this.
Once the Senate passed its sanctions legislation with an overwhelming majority, it put pressure on the House to pass it as well. Democrats applied intense pressure not to change anything because they did not want to water down the bill.
Senator Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the list a “good first step in responsibly implementing a very complex piece of legislation.” Senators Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, and John McCain, R-Arizona also welcomed the list as part of the effort to hold Russia accountable for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The two senators noted that questions remain about the implementation of the sanctions. Under the current plan, beginning Jan. 29, individuals involved in “significant” transactions with entities on the list will also be sanctioned. It’s still up to the State Department to determine how the sanctions are applied. McCain and Cardin are concerned about how the agency will come up with the staffing and resources to carry out the sanctions. In their statement they pointed out reports that say the sanctions office has been closed and “a number of its staff have resigned.” The policy planning staff, which doesn’t usually play a role in operations, is being tasked with implementing the sanctions.
Providing dedicated staffing and resources within the State Department will demonstrate the administration’s commitment to carrying out this vitally important law,” wrote McCain and Cardin.
The sanctions law signed by Mr. Trump in August targeted Iran and North Korea, in addition to Russia. It maintains and expands sanctions against the Russian government, Russian crude oil projects and also targets those who evade foreign sanctions and entities that abuse human rights. The legislation also prevents the president from unilaterally easing or lifting sanctions against Russia, a provision that came after Mr. Trump had consistently espoused the idea of a warming of relations with Russia, even in the face of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had meddled in the 2016 elections.
Obama is back in the game…this game is an old one but a terrifying one. It is called ‘gerrymandering’. It is Obama’s forever version of community organizing. He has big help too.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) and Organizing for Action (OFA) are launching an exciting new partnership that will channel the energy of grassroots activists into efforts to restore fair representation to Congress and state legislatures.
With this new partnership, OFA and NDRC will join forces to reform the practice of allowing politicians to redraw our congressional and state legislative districts in ways that cater to political extremes and leave too many voters feeling as if they don’t have a voice. As former President Obama has said, “Politicians shouldn’t pick their voters; voters should pick their politicians.”
OFA will use its vast grassroots infrastructure to organize, educate, and engage supporters both in the digital space and on the ground to help support NDRC’s mission. In the coming months, OFA will be organizing house parties to educate people around redistricting issues and outline future plans for how this program will make an impact on a state-by-state basis.
Is the Sessions’ Justice Department ready for this fight? Are you? The first target state is Virginia.
Obama’s army enlists in redistricting fight
Politico: Organizing for Action, the progressive group born out of Barack Obama’s old campaign apparatus, is joining the redistricting effort that Obama has made a central cause of his post-presidency.
On Monday, OFA officially launched a partnership with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former Attorney General Eric Holder.
OFA officially runs independently from Obama, though the former president made the announcement himself.
“OFA volunteers and supporters will provide the grassroots organizing capacity and mobilization that we’ll need to win state-level elections and move other initiatives forward ahead of the 2021 redistricting process, making sure that states are in the best position to draw fair maps,” Obama wrote in an email sent to the OFA’s list, which he called “Our Next Fight.”
The conversations have been underway for several months, but the announcement came as Obama is slated to appear at an OFA event in Chicago on Nov. 8, the anniversary of last year’s election, that will bring him together for a conversation with organizers and big donors for the group.
The NDRC has spent the past year fundraising and putting the pieces together in preparation for what it’s hoping will be a very active presence in the courts and on the campaign trail in 2018 and beyond — with some action in Virginia and New Jersey races this year — with the goal of changing the redistricting process to reverse the existing Republican tilt of maps in many states.
The results could significantly reshape the makeup of the House, as well as state legislatures.
“There is no better infrastructure out there to build in order to unleash the power of the people onto redistricting,” said NDRC Executive Director Kelly Ward, calling this “an awesome, seamless partnership.”
“It’s the support of President Obama’s network and the shared values that come with that that make it so seamless,” Ward said. “We are all in this together still.”
Obama and Holder have both campaigned in New Jersey and Virginia, and the NDRC put $750,000 into the Virginia governor’s race last month.
OFA, meanwhile, will start holding house parties, community meetings and conference calls geared to helping its organizers understand and internalize what gerrymandering is, and what the processes are for changing district maps in each state.
Katie Hogan, executive director of OFA, said some of their organizers had already started talking about redistricting and collecting ballot initiative signatures on their own.
“It’s really familiar work to us and not at all deviating to what we’ve done for years,” Hogan said.
Though OFA was very active in helping mobilize turnouts to town halls and other events as part of the resistance to Obamacare repeal efforts, this brings the group closer to direct political campaigns than it’s been since reconstituting after the 2012 election. As a 501(c)(4), the group has the ability to get involved in politics if it chooses to.
“We don’t have every single part of this mapped out,” Hogan said. “We do know that we are the best suited to play that public education role right now, and we’ll see where that takes us.”
