On August 18, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the fifth volume of its Russia investigation, which examines Russia’s attempts to meddle in US politics during the 2016 elections. An entire section of the report is devoted to the Israeli cyber-intelligence company, Psy-Group, which the report concludes pitched, but may not have carried out, covert influence services on behalf of the Trump presidential election campaign. “Psy Group representatives engaged with Trump Campaign senior officials in 2016 for a contract to perform work on behalf of the Campaign,” it states. “These engagements… purportedly never materialized into any Campaign work.”
The report also says that Psy-Group on separate occasions worked for at least two Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, whom the report describes as “a proxy for the Russian state and intelligence services.”..
Later that spring and summer, according to the intelligence committee, Psy-Group pitched two influence and intelligence projects to the Trump campaign. These included offers to do opposition research on Hillary Clinton, offers to use fake social media profiles to covertly influence Republican National Convention delegates, and offers to target minority communities, suburban female voters, and undecided voters with covert messaging.
In internal company emails, employees also discussed the use of “hundreds of avatars driving negative messaging,” and “physical world ops like counter protests, hecklers, etc.”
According to Zamel, none of these campaigns were ever carried out: “Not a tweet, not a character, nothing,” Zamel told the committee. However, the committee noted that Zamel was paid over $1 million by George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates, with high-level Russian ties.