A Russian woman was charged on Friday by the U.S. for meddling in the midterm election, which will take place next month. She is said to play a role in a plan supported by Kremlin, with the goal of influencing the upcoming congressional elections.
A plan to interfere in congressional elections
According to the complaint, the citizen of Russia was a chief accountant of an operation initiated in 2014, called Project Lakhta. It was funded by Evgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin, and his two companies: Concord Catering and Concord Management and Consulting LLC. His mission was to create social media campaigns that were supposed to instigate distrust in candidates and interfere with federal agencies’ work. In the complaint, the conspirators were accused of conducting “information warfare against the United States” and trying to influence the course of congressional elections that will take place in November of this year.
A group that interfered in the 2016 presidential election
This is not the first time the Russian woman takes part in projects interfering in the U.S. elections. According to prosecutors, she was part of the group that was indicted this year in the investigation into a suspected cooperation between Donald Trump and Russia. 13 people, including Prigozhin, were indicted at the beginning of 2018 for conducting disinformation campaigns during the presidential election that took place in 2016. The main way they tried to meddle in the election was by pushing out enormous amounts of postings on some of the most popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, in order to instigate animosity between different political and social groups. Donald Trump, who was later elected as the president of the U.S., has denied any ties with the conspirators.
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