Russia has switched tactics for undermining American democracy this year, focusing on the spread of misinformation instead of computer hacking to influence the presidential contest, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress on Thursday.
Moscow is using social media, online media outlets and other tools to spread misinformation and sow "divisiveness and discord" in the electorate in a bid to undermine confidence in the election, he said. And operatives have started using against Joe Biden many of the same techniques they deployed to spread falsities about Hillary Clinton four years ago.
The "malign foreign influence" campaign is designed not only "to denigrate" the Democratic nominee but also "what the Russians see as an anti-Russia establishment," Wray testified in one of the most explicit public descriptions yet of the Russian effort — one that almost totally contradicts the president's own descriptions about the foreign threat to the election.
Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee the FBI is working successfully with the largest social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, to remove phony accounts created by Russian operatives.
He said the key is to remove the accounts quickly before they have a chance to gain a lot of attention. "Misinformation or disinformation or fake information is only effective if it seems credible," Wray said, and the more that information gets passed around the more people come to view it as legitimate.
Since the revelation that Russia tried — mostly without success — to break into election computer systems across the country during the 2016 campaign, federal, state and local officials have spent countless hours and hundreds of millions in tax dollars trying to change voting practices and strengthen protections for election systems.
At the same time, some election security experts have been predicting for more than a year that the Russians would likely switch their focus for 2020 away from hacking and toward disinformation.
Wray's testimony affirming that shift was one of a handful of election security developments on Capitol Hill as the election countdown clock moved past the seven-weeks-to-go mark
In the Senate on Tuesday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders pressed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to appoint a bipartisan committee focused on election security. Noting the "great deal of concern about possible confusion and chaos" about the counting of votes, the Democrats' letter said hearings before such a panel could rebuild public confidence in the integrity of the election, which Trump has openly sought to undermine with his attacks on mail voting.
And the House on Wednesday passed a bill that would mandate federal research on issues related to election security. Among the topics that would be studied are online voting, voter privacy and data protection.
The measure, sent to the Senate on a voice vote, would also add electronic poll books and voter registration databases to the types of equipment for which the federal Election Assistance Commission sets standards. The agency's mandate now only covers hardware for casting ballots.
National security agencies have not seen any evidence Russia is trying to break into any of those election systems, Wray said.
His testimony was delivered in the shadow of recent efforts by Trump and other top administration officials to play up the theory that China is meddling to get Biden elected, while downplaying reports that Russia is working to help Trump win again.
Facebook announced this month, for example, that a troll group that was part of Russia's attempts in 2016 is trying to target Americans again.
The president continues to dismiss as a hoax the intelligence community's finding that Russia worked to help him win the White House in 2016.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.