President Trump on Friday confirmed for the first time that the U.S. launched a cyberattack on the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) in 2018.
Trump confirmed the attack in a two-part interview with The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen. When asked whether the U.S. had launched an attack on the IRA — a troll farm that led the effort to spread disinformation around the 2016 presidential election and 2018 midterm elections — Trump said that was “correct.”
The cyberattack, first reported by The Washington Post in 2019 but not confirmed publicly by the Trump administration, involved U.S. Cyber Command disrupting internet access for the building in St. Petersburg that houses the IRA on the night of the U.S. 2018 midterm elections, halting efforts to spread disinformation as Americans went to the polls.
