A Lavish Gift, A Leaked Signal: New Revelations Highlight Russia’s Ongoing Election Warfare
Newly published reporting has thrust the Trump family back into the crosshairs of Russia-related controversy, revealing that President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., accepted a wedding gift of extraordinary magnitude from a man with direct ties to the Kremlin. According to a ProPublica investigation released this week, Umar Kremliev, a Russian oligarch who runs an international boxing association and who has been accused of corruption and expelled from the Olympic movement, footed the bill for a lavish three-day celebration following Trump Jr.’s May wedding to Bettina Anderson. The event, reportedly held in the Bahamas, came with a price tag valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The newlyweds have confirmed the gift, dismissing Kremliev as nothing more than a close friend, while the White House has sought to downplay the entire affair, asserting that the president has never even heard of Kremliev. Yet with the U.S. midterm elections now only weeks away, this substantial gift to the president’s immediate family raises the specter once again of foreign meddling in American democracy. To unpack the significance of this revelation and the broader landscape of Russian interference, The World turned to investigative reporter David Corn, author of the newly released book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. Corn, who has covered intelligence and politics for decades, offered a sobering assessment of how Moscow has refined its tactics, exploited American divisions, and now stands to benefit from a dismantled firewall of federal counterintelligence.
Corn began by revisiting the central components of Russia’s successful intervention in the 2016 presidential election, which he described as a two-pronged attack. The most overt and damaging element was the hack-and-leak operation, carried out by Russian military intelligence (GRU). These operatives breached the computer networks of prominent Democrats, including the Democratic National Committee and senior campaign officials, and then used WikiLeaks as a conduit to release stolen emails in a manner deliberately designed to embarrass, impede, and harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In a contest as agonizingly close as 2016, Corn argued, that operation was one of several factors that likely tipped the final outcome. Simultaneously, Moscow mounted a massive disinformation campaign, planting pro-Trump messages across social media platforms and aggressively exacerbating the political discord that already plagued the American public sphere. While the precise impact of these social media operations remains difficult to quantify, they undoubtedly reached millions of Americans and contributed to a climate of chaos and distrust. But Corn stresses that this was not a one-off event. The core thesis of his book is that “what happened in 2016 didn’t stay in 2016.” The same playbook was deployed again in the 2018 midterms, and with renewed intensity in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. “Russia has been running a 10-year-long covert warfare operation against the United States,” he said. “It’s not kinetic warfare; it’s information warfare.” And as the current midterms approach, Corn warned that we have already witnessed the early stirrings of these networks beginning to inject themselves into the election cycle once more.
When asked what key lessons the Kremlin took from its success in 2016, Corn’s answer was succinct and deeply alarming: “That they could get away with it.” This sense of impunity was reinforced, he explained, by the political environment that followed. With Trump in the White House from 2017 onward, and with Trump dominating political discourse in subsequent elections by discrediting those who raised the issue of Russian attacks, Putin was given a wide-open field to continue operations without fear of meaningful retaliation. There has never been a united, bipartisan American counter-response to this information warfare, Corn observed. Worse, since Trump reentered the White House, he has systematically dismantled the entire architecture of U.S. government agencies that were created to track and counter Russian disinformation. The Foreign Influence Task Force at the FBI, the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department’s unit dedicated to exposing Russian propaganda have all been shuttered. “They’re all gone. They don’t exist,” Corn said, describing this move as a “unilateral surrender in this twilight warfare coming from the Kremlin.” He noted that this assault is not confined to the United States; it is happening throughout the West, in NATO countries, in Hungary’s recent election, and in targeted campaigns in France, Moldova, and England. By eliminating these oversight bodies, Trump has effectively put up the white flag, which Corn said looks like an open invitation for Putin to keep interfering with impunity.
The conversation then turned to a pivotal moment from 2016 that continues to reverberate: the infamous Trump Tower meeting. In June 2016, three senior members of the Trump campaign—Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort—met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had known connections to Russian intelligence. The meeting was arranged after the son of a Russian billionaire, an oligarch closely tied to Putin, contacted Donald Trump Jr. with the promise that the Kremlin wanted to help the Trump campaign and was sending an emissary with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr.’s now-infamous email response—“If this is what you say it is, I love it”—has become shorthand for the campaign’s willingness to accept foreign assistance. Corn explained that while the meeting participants claim they received nothing useful from Veselnitskaya, the true significance lies in the signal it sent. “What this meeting did was send a signal to the Kremlin that the Trump campaign was okay with Russian intervention in the election,” he said. Fast-forward a decade, and Corn sees a disturbing echo in this week’s ProPublica story. “Donald Trump Jr. had a lavish wedding in the Bahamas, and it was paid for by a Russian oligarch close to Putin,” he noted. The gift, accepted by the president’s son, demonstrates that people close to Putin are essentially giving the Trump family hundreds of thousands of dollars today—a continuing pattern of entanglement and obligation that underscores the unresolved nature of these relationships.
On the role of social media platforms in amplifying Russian interference, Corn painted a picture of inconsistent and reactive enforcement. He acknowledged that when the Justice Department has directly identified specific accounts operated by Russian bots and troll farms, platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook have occasionally taken them down. However, he argued that these companies have been neither able nor willing to stop the piecemeal transfer of disinformation that originates with Russian sources and then jumps into the authentic American bloodstream. The Russians have mastered a technique of creating fabricated videos, reports, memes, and messages, distributing them on X and YouTube, and then allowing American users to amplify and boost them organically. Once that occurs, the disinformation becomes nearly indistinguishable from genuine political speech. “It’s a very hard thing to fight,” Corn admitted, “but it’s really hard to fight when you’re not even trying.” This challenge has been exponentially compounded by the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Over the last few days, Corn revealed, we have begun to see Russian involvement in the current midterm cycle in the form of deepfake videos. One of the networks he profiles in his book—Storm 1516, among others—has been producing AI-generated videos that purport to show Hollywood celebrities disparaging the Democratic Party and urging viewers to vote Republican. While these particular efforts have not gained much traction, Corn views them as a prelude to more sophisticated operations. The speed at which Russia can ramp up such efforts is alarming: with the midterms just seven weeks away, he noted that these operations do not require long lead times. They may focus on just a couple of key races, and through AI, they can generate fake websites and social media posts by the tens of thousands per month, hoping that a few will break through. “We’ve seen the beginning of this,” he said, “but because Donald Trump has decimated or ended all these offices and agencies that were supposed to track this and respond to it, there may be other stuff happening now that we don’t see and that we may never know about.”
Finally, Corn addressed the broader ecosystem of foreign interference, the coming election, and the deeper strategic objectives of the Kremlin. He acknowledged that other actors are also in the fray: Iran has attempted to insert anti-Trump disinformation, and China has sought to sow generic discord. Yet he asserted that Russia remains the most accomplished and sophisticated practitioner of this dark art, with a decade of experience targeting not just the United States but other Western democracies. Moscow has a portfolio of different disinformation outfits—Storm 1516, Storm 1679, and Matryoshka, among others—each with its own specialty in injecting falsehoods into American discourse. Looking ahead to November, Corn identified a consistent Russian tactic: undermining trust in the electoral process itself. In nearly every election, they have either prepared to or actually disseminated messaging that American elections cannot be trusted, that there is chaos and confusion, along with disinformation about how and where to vote. Trump has made this task even easier by fueling controversy over mail-in ballots. Should Trump dispute the results in November, Corn expects Russian troll farms and disinformation networks to do everything in their power to boost and amplify that messaging, exacerbating the political conflict that already exists. Vladimir Putin’s ultimate goal, Corn said, is to demonstrate to the world—and especially to his own people—that democracy does not work, that elections cannot be trusted, and that a strongman like himself is necessary to run a country and provide security. Therefore, anything Moscow can do to amplify the messiness of American democracy, or to pour fuel on the flames of chaos caused by Trump, will be eagerly pursued. The dismantling of U.S. counterintelligence agencies means these efforts will unfold largely out of public view, leaving American voters to navigate an election landscape where foreign adversaries are not only active but increasingly invisible. As the nation barrels toward the midterms, the ProPublica revelation about Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding gift serves as a pointed reminder: the lines between personal enrichment, political influence, and foreign intrigue have never been more blurred, and the mechanisms once in place to police those boundaries have been systematically extinguished.