A key witness in the U.S. intelligence community's assessments on Russian meddling into the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections and Congress' attempt to impeach President Trump for purportedly pressuring Ukraine to help him win the first race is now backpedaling from the roles he played.

Gavin Wilde, who now works at think tanks in the nation’s capital, co-authored the flawed January 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election prior to serving on the Trump National Security Council in 2018 and 2019. And he has also said that he worked on U.S. intelligence assessments on alleged Russian influence efforts ahead of the 2020 election as well.

Just the News previously reported that Wilde was the unnamed “Witness 2" identified in the Ukraine impeachment documents released in April by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, based on information from U.S. government sources familiar with the matter but who declined to be named.

Wilde did not respond to recent requests for comment related to whether he was indeed that witness. The queries were sent to him through the Carnegie Endowment, Defense Priorities and the Alperovitch Institute, organizations at which Wilde is listed as working.

The 2019 claims by Witness 2 were critical in helping Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson push Ukraine whistleblower Eric Ciaramella’s complaint forward, and Wilde’s "Russiagate"-linked biases were concealed from House investigators during the impeachment process. The Democrat-led House impeached Trump in 2019 on two charges: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate acquitted him on both charges.

In a section of the inspector general's report titled “Potential for Biases or to Be Discredited” it was also revealed that “Witness 2” had helped with the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian election meddling.

“If someone were to try to discredit information provided by Witness 2, they might focus on Witness 2 being the co-author of the 2017 ICA (Intelligence Community Assessment) on Russian Interference in the 2016 election,” the memo said, adding that “the ICA could have been, or could be looked at, as negative towards President Trump.”

The recently-declassified, August 2019,  36-page report also recounted that “one of the jobs Witness 2 is engaged in is to secure the election in 2020.”

Just the News has previously reported that Wilde worked with disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok and that just before he took on a role at the National Security Council during the first Trump Administration, Wilde used his post at the Defense Department and the National Security Agency to pen a series of articles in early 2018 that echoed left wing themes about Russian interference and Donald Trump.

Since leaving government, Wilde has now largely retreated from his hyping of Russian influence efforts, despite his important governmental roles focused on the issue. He has written numerous articles and spoken multiple times about how he now sees the Democratic overemphasis on Russian meddling attempts as dangerous and destructive.

Wilde even did an interview with Russia-based news media organization Meduza in June 2024 in which he discussed “my own de-conversion story from that period of panic” in 2016.

The following month, Rolling Stone magazine reported Wilde said he was "concerned that the MAGA conspiracy theories and the policies they inspire could have a chilling effect on American intelligence and foreign policy going forward.” 

Wilde speaks about working on the 2016 ICA: ‘Feeling of helplessness’

Wilde has spoken about his role in the January 2017 ICA since leaving government.

A report in February 2022 in MIT Technology Review stated Wilde “helped author the landmark intelligence community assessment that detailed Moscow’s hacking and disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing the election.”

Wilde told the outlet: “There was a feeling of helplessness [among U.S. intelligence] when clearly the American public was the target audience for the Russians,”

And he said, “There was still a sense of failure that we weren’t able to defuse these activities before the narratives were well seeded by the Russians and amplified by people in positions of prominence.”

USA Today reported in 2023 that Wilde “co-authored a U.S. intelligence community assessment of Russian activities targeting the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Wilde told the outlet that in 2016 the U.S. intelligence community assessment “explicitly went out of its way not to assess the impact” that the Russian disinformation efforts had on the outcome of the election.

Wilde told a Reagan Institute podcast in March 2024 that “in my experience, I think back to how, you know, what a watershed moment it was for some of us involved in that report to realize that we, the IC, are now treating the American public as a consumer.”

He said that during his time in government he looked at Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election, saying he was “able to make an intelligence difference” when he was at the IC, and added that he worked on implementing policy against “malign influence” when he was on the NSC in 2018 and 2019.

Wilde told the SlavX podcast in May 2024 that “understanding how SIGINT (signal intelligence) works and understanding how cyber works was _ I kind of begrudgingly went down that road when 2016 happened. And I got _ I was fortunate enough to be able to work on assessing what Russia had just done in the 2016 election.”

“Having to learn that lingo and collaborate with colleagues that were in those very technical fields and — they were translating, you know, very technical stuff to me. And I was in turn translating a lot of Russian strategic culture,” Wilde said. 

“I found it was advantageous for me to be able to understand the lingo and the terminology and the tradecraft behind so much that technical work that was going on, and in turn they found it advantageous for me and some of my kind of Russianist colleagues to be able to translate a lot of the geopolitical backdrop and the Russian strategic cultural context behind so much of this behavior. 

"In that kind of fusion of disciplines, there was so much power to be able to explain not only what was — what had just happened, but to try and maybe inform the decision-making going forward on how to deal with it. That was kind of the entry point for me and to the really opaque and thorny area of cyber conflict.”

Wilde shed further light on the process behind the ICA.

“The genesis for this paper starts in 2016, when myself and my colleagues in the intelligence community were working on trying to tell the story not only for the president and for the national security consumers of these products the intelligence Community puts out, but ultimately for the American people — because the president and then-Director of National Intelligence General James Clapper kind of said, ‘Look first you got to get all the cards on the table and look at what happened, and then we've got to go tell the American public about it.’ And it was in the process of working on that and drawing on the expertise that a lot of us had and our backgrounds in studying Russia to kind of first off level set how Russia thinks about information, how Russia thinks about influence and subversion, and certainly since 2016 there's been you know a deluge of great literature on that,” Wilde said in a May 2024 McCrary Institute podcast.

Wilde added: “But I think at the time where I started and where I think some of my colleagues were as well was this fear that that, wow, Russia has got this really holistic and very kind of logical idea about the role of information and how humans interact with information, how propaganda works, and how subversion works, and their national security thinkers and their intelligence thinkers have put together this model, and the U.S. doesn't have an analog or at least at the time in 2016 we kind of felt the U.S. doesn't quite understand this Russian model, and it doesn't really have an analog for how to counter it. And so at the time I think that was the deepest sense of urgency at least for myself was that, oh, we just haven't level set how to think about this problem yet.”

“We didn’t quite know what impact it had … But the point was it felt like a violation of our sovereignty. It undermined what political scientists call our sense of ontological security,” Wilde said of how he and the intelligence community felt in 2016.

Wilde did not argue that Russia’s main goal was to elect Trump – as the ICA had contended — but rather said that “what Russia really was trying to do in 2016 was kind of undermine our faith in these institutions and in the institution of democracy our faith in elections … and drive more and exacerbate those societal fissures that exist in any society whatsoever.”

​​Wilde spoke to Rolling Stone about the creation of the ICA, telling the magazine, “The circumstances may have been extraordinary – but the people and the process of putting the [report] together were remarkably ordinary and mundane. That’s the best description of public service I can think of. It’s also the highest compliment.”

2016 intel assessment cited Steele Dossier and helped hype Russia meddling fears

The Intelligence Community Assessment was written at the direction of then-President Obama and largely overseen by then- FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had pushed in December 2016 to include Christopher Steele' now debunked dossier in the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian meddling. The dossier was included in an annex to the assessment and was cited in the most highly-classified version of the ICA.

The House report declassified last year and the CIA review released last year sharply criticized Brennan for allegedly joining with these anti-Trump forces in the FBI in pushing to include Steele’s anti-Trump dossier in the ICA.

The Senate Intelligence Committee wrongly concluded in April and August 2020 reports that British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier was not used in the body of the ICA and that the dossier claims were not used to underpin any of the ICA’s findings — a conclusion debunked by a House Intelligence Committee report declassified last year and by a CIA review released in 2025, and contradicted by a years-old public House report and other declassified records as well.

In the context of the ICA and potential bias, the aforementioned recently declassified Ukraine impeachment memo said that “Witness 2 [Wilde] has been interviewed by the HPSCI [House Intelligence Committee] and SSCI [Senate Intelligence Committee] staff, during which Witness 2 has tried to be professional and apolitical at all times.”

Although specific names were not provided, the Senate Intelligence Committee has said that it held a “National Security Agency Panel” in May 2017, where NSA analysts told the committee of the Steele Dossier that they had "no role in drafting, nor role in its inclusion, no role in reviewing the source material, became aware of it as it was appended.”

The declassified House analysis stated that “contradicting public claims by the DCIA [Director of CIA Brennan] that the dossier ‘was not in any way’ incorporated into the ICA, the dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page CIA annex.” The House report said that the ICA “Misrepresented the Unsourced Steele Dossier” as having been reliable intelligence reporting on “Russian Plans and Intentions.”

The ICA stated that “we assess the [Russian] influence campaign aspired to help Trump's chances of victory” in the 2016 election, and the most highly-classified version of the ICA “was followed by four bullet [points] of supporting evidence,” the House report found.

"The fourth bullet [point] referred the reader to a detailed summary and analysis of the dossier," the report concluded in a bombshell revelation.

The highly-classified version of the ICA stated that “for additional reporting on Russian plans and intentions, please see Annex A: Additional Reporting from an FBI Source on Russian Influence Efforts” – the Steele Dossier.

The House report said that “the ICA referred to the dossier as ‘Russian plans and intentions,’ falsely implying to high-level U.S. policymakers that the dossier had intelligence value for understanding Moscow's influence operations.”

Admiral Mike Rogers, then the leader of the NSA, diverged from Brennan and Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Russia Presiden Vladimir Putin had “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances in 2016 by “discrediting” Democratic rival HillaryClinton "and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

The assessment was also supposed to include details on Chinese hacking efforts targeting U.S. presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 – but it focused solely on Russia instead, and never mentioned Beijing once.

The omission of any mention of China in the publicly available versions of the assessment is notable, given that internal emails indicate Obama ordered the assessment to include details on China’s 2008 cyber campaign targeting the campaign of Obama and of his opponent, since-deceased and then-Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona. 

Obama’s own White House also repeatedly said after the November 2016 election that the ICA would include details on any and all malicious foreign cyber efforts during the 2008 election as well as during the 2012 face-off between Obama and former Gov. and future Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.

Despite this, the assessment does not appear to have included anything about Chinese efforts in those two elecions. 

Wilde has close relationship with self-described 2016 ICA author

Wilde had a close relationship with Michael Van Landingam, a former CIA officer and the lead author of the 2016 ICA.

“The ICA ‘Annex A’ summarized the Dossier anti-Trump allegations, and included some analysis that struggled to imply that some dossier findings might have been corroborated by intelligence,” the recently-declassified House report said. “The lead author of ICA, a CIA officer, said that he drafted the Annex A in coordination with FBI.”

Wilde wrote a December 2022 piece on “Cyber Operations in Ukraine: Russia’s Unmet Expectations” and in the “Acknowledgments” section he wrote that “the author is grateful for generous contributions of time and expertise from … Michael van Landingham” and others.

Wilde also wrote a spring 2024 piece – titled “From Panic to Policy: The Limits of Foreign Propaganda and the Foundations of an Effective Response” – in which he said that “the author wishes to express sincere gratitude to … Michael van Landingham” and others.

Wilde further co-authored an article with Van Landingham in September 2024. The piece was written for the left wing Just Security and was titled, “Telegram’s Security Sham.”

Wilde shared tweets from Van Landingham’s Active Measures LLC account on X, including those focused on Russian influence efforts. He also promoted the Active Measures account on the Mastodon social media site.

Van Landingham’s biography on the Just Security website notes that “he was the lead author of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election” and includes a link to ODNI’s January 2017 statement sharing the ICA.

The ICA author tried to downplay the revelations found within the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, telling the Washington Post in November 2020 that “the email content really wasn’t about Joe Biden himself” and claiming that “it was a stretch to make a connection between the candidate and the leaked information from his son's laptop. 

Joe Biden was never charged with any crime related to information on the laptop. 

Van Landingham also did an interview with Rolling Stone in 2024 focused on the 2016 ICA.

“The intelligence community, anxious to figure out what was happening, formed an inter agency task force and van Landingham was tapped to join it,” the outlet wrote.

“We had a couple names for it that we were trying to come up with. Everyone wants to be on a team with a cool name,” Van Landingham told the outlet, adding that CIA leadership labeled it the “fusion cell.”

The outlet also stated: “The election was over and what Russia had done and why were historical questions. The fusion cell appeared set to wind down, but President Obama wanted the unit’s work memorialized. He ordered the intelligence community to preserve the work it had completed in the run-up to the election and include it in both classified and unclassified reports.”

The outlet also reported: “Van Landingham wasn’t pleased,” saying he thought, ‘‘Why do we have to write this? It’s just antagonizing the next administration.’”

The outlet also said “Van Landingham’s colleagues broke the news at a CIA holiday party. Managers had tapped him to write the first draft.”

The declassified House Intelligence Committee report had concluded: “One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from a single HUMINT [human intelligence] report – published under DCIA Brennan's December 2016 order – constitutes the only classified information cited by the ICA for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired to help Trump's chances of victory when possible.’ The ICA did not cite any report where Putin directly indicated helping Trump win was the objective. That judgment rested on a questionable interpretation of this one unclear fragment of a sentence.”

Van Landingham spoke with the Washington Post again in 2025 to argue that the source was “very reliable and well-regarded,” with the outlet writing that “analysts familiar with the source material believe it clearly indicated Putin wanted Trump to win — something a recent CIA review of the assessment said was consistent with the raw intelligence.”

The ICA author also told PBS News last year that “the CIA almost up to the senior management level did not want to include the Steele Dossier” and that he and his co-authors were “vehemently against including it” as he also claimed that “none of the information, if you want to call it that, in the Steele Dossier was included as evidentiary points in the broader body of the intelligence community assessment.”

The declassified House Intelligence Committee report revealed that, despite repeated denials, the 2016 ICA on Russian election meddling pointed to the dossier when attempting to underpin the conclusion that Putin aspired to help Trump win — with the ICA also allegedly ignoring evidence that the Russian leader may have favored (or at least fully expected) a Clinton victory instead.

Van Landingham condemned the release of declassified information about the ICA last year.

“I was shocked to see the declassification detailing the dates the U.S. IC [intelligence community] gathered material, naming specific Russian actors, and quoting at length from both raw and serialized intelligence reports of Russian leadership discussions,” he told NBC News. “This sort of information would allow for Russian authorities to easily find potential sources of the leaks, which would complicate the job of the US IC keeping America safe.”

Wilde has also claimed to have been involved with faulty 2020 ICA

Wilde also appears to have been connected to intelligence assessments related to foreign influence during the 2020 election as well.

A research paper written by Wilde in February 2025 – Pyrite or Panic? Deepfakes, Knowledge, and the Institutional Backstop – included a biographical description which said that “he previously served in leadership and analytic roles in the U.S. intelligence community for fifteen years, including as a co-author of assessments of foreign interference in elections from 2016-2020.”

Wilde also shed some light on his 2020 role on a Reaganism podcast in March 2024.

"What little I can say as far as my work at the NSA, I had the opportunity, probably first and foremost that I can say was examining the way that Russia thinks about information warfare and cyber conflict and all of those things, most prominently looking at their efforts to undermine and influence and interfere, whichever word you decide to use, in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections over the course of my career, those were areas where I can the opportunity to try to make a difference, both from an intelligence perspective in the IC,” Wilde said.

He continued: “And then in 2018 and 2019 when I was at the National Security Council, trying to kind of put together some policy around cyber security and around election security and countering foreign malign influence.” 

Wilde has also been described as having been involved in intelligence assessments on alleged Russian meddling in the 2020 election by outlets which have interviewed him.

It was reported by The Record in 2023 that “in his Cyber National Mission Force post, Air Force Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh also became the first co-lead of a joint election security task force with the NSA, originally called the Russia Small Group, that sought to protect the midterm election from foreign hackers” and that “it was a totally new mission for both organizations following Moscow’s multi-pronged assault on the 2016 presidential race.”

The outlet quoted Wilde as saying that the 2018 midterm election “offered a unique rallying point” to “force both organizations into a closer working relationship and a closer understanding and respect for one another” than what might have been doable otherwise. The outlet added that Wilde “was at NSA as a Russian specialist and was a member of the small group in 2018 and 2020.”

Politico reported in September 2024 that “Wilde … contributed to assessments of Russian efforts to target the 2016 and 2020 elections.”

The McCrary Institute did a May 2024 interview with him titled "Responding Effectively to Foreign Propaganda with Gavin Wilde.” The YouTube description for the episode stated that “Gavin Wilde helped create the formal U.S. assessment of Russia's foreign influence campaigns in 2016 and 2020.”

Wilde put out a lengthy and since-deleted Twitter thread in July 2021, in which he praised federal officials who had worked on election security matters – including specific praise for fired CISA Director Chris Krebs. He also criticized “grifters and conspiracists” while defending the security of the 2020 election.

“Putting the politics aside for a moment, let's examine ‘election security’ as a discipline. Since 2016, a vast community of analysts – *many from unrelated fields* – converged on a problem in a multi-disciplinary way that would make the Santa Fe Institute blush. Unprecedented,” Wilde wrote. 

“This community navigated a labyrinth of competing legal authorities, sprawling technological complexity, and a mixture of cooperative and antagonistic partners spanning industry and municipality. Oh, yes, and at least 3 or 4 very capable foreign adversaries looming.”

Wilde continued: “The organizational and human toll of this herculean swarm isn't measured solely in person-hours and budgets. It included nights and weekends, family time, and mental health. But these were noble sacrifices and stretches — in service to country. A patriotic duty. Hordes of specialists, most of whom could be far-better compensated elsewhere, applying their talents in service of a simple goal — that a vote could be cast unadulterated. And in 2020, their efforts bore fruit. A victory. A free and fair election, duly verified.

“Make no mistake, the election security heroes I know ([Chris Krebs] foremost) aren't only mad because the side that didn't win is kicking up dus t... .They're mad because that side hasn't applied even *an iota* of the time and sweat that would be required to make such a claim,” Wilde added. “They're mad because their years of effort and expertise are being put on equal footing with the rantings of grifters and conspiracists. It ain't politics. It's human. The experts have the receipts because *they put in the work*. And they're proud of it. All [Americans] should be, too.”

2020 ICA downplayed Chinese election influence compared to Russia

The wide-ranging approach taken by the FBI in response to claims of Trump-Russia collusion in 2016 stands in stark contrast to how the U.S. intelligence community sought to bury evidence of Chinese government efforts to undermine Trump’s candidacy in 2020. The Iranian regime’s efforts to harm Trump’s 2020 candidacy were also downplayed by some opponents of Trump.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a March 2021 assessment where agencies unanimously agreed Russia sought to hurt then-candidate Biden while Iran worked to harm then-President Trump in 2020 — but the agencies did not reach unanimity on China. The majority argued China didn’t try to influence the election against Trump, while a minority dissent contended that’s exactly what Beijing did.

Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is now Trump’s CIA director, revealed in early January 2021 that he had found evidence about the politicization of China election influence analysis inside the IC and of undue pressure being brought to bear against the analysts who had assessed that China had worked to stop Trump from being reelected.

An intelligence community inspector found in an early January 2021 report that U.S. intelligence analysts appeared to hold back information on Chinese meddling efforts because they disagreed with the Trump administration’s policies.

Iranian efforts to undermine Trump’s 2020 candidacy were also vigorously disputed by top Democrat Party leaders ahead of the crucial face-off between Trump and Biden.

It was revealed last year that a confidential human source told FBI counter-intelligence in the summer of 2020 that China’s communist government was seeking to meddle in the impending election in an effort to help then-candidate Joe Biden, according to a raw intelligence report distributed to federal agencies that was made public. 

The intelligence report was bluntly titled “Chinese Government Production and Export of Fraudulent US Driver's Licenses to Chinese Sympathizers in the United States, in Order to Create Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Mail-in Votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”

This report was soon recalled, with spy agencies told to delete the information before they had a chance to properly investigate its claims.

Bombshell revelations about alleged Chinese election meddling — and the politicized suppression of analyses pointing to Beijing trying to hurt Trump in 2020 — were made public on January 7, 2021.

Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman and longtime intelligence official, issued a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee where he noted, among many things, that some analysts appeared to hold back information on Chinese efforts because they disagreed with the Trump administration’s policies.

“Given analytic differences in the way Russia and China analysts examined their targets, China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. The analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies,” Zulauf wrote.

Zulauf later revealed that analysts said they didn’t want their intel used by “that vulgarian in the Oval Office” to pursue policies toward China they personally disagreed with.

Ratcliffe signed an unclassified letter in January 2017 contending that “from my unique vantage point as the individual who consumes all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence on the People’s Republic of China, I do not believe the majority view expressed by the Intelligence Community analysts fully and accurately reflects the scope of the Chinese government’s efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections.”

The ombudsman report, Ratcliffe contended, “includes concerning revelations about the politicization of China election influence reporting and of undue pressure being brought to bear on analysts who offered an alternative view based on the intelligence.”

Zulauf said that “due to varying collection and insight into hostile state actors’ leadership intentions on domestic influence campaigns, the definitional use of the terms ‘influence’ and ‘interference’ and associated confidence levels are applied differently by the China and Russia analytic communities.”

In his January 2017 letter, Ratcliffe said that “similar actions by Russia and China are assessed and communicated to policymakers differently, potentially leading to the false impression that Russia sought to influence the election but China did not.”

The ombudsman also revealed two national intelligence officers wrote an “NIC alternative analysis memo” in October 2020 “which expressed alternative views on potential Chinese election influence activities.” Zalauf said that “these alternative views met with considerable organizational counter pressure.”

Ratcliffe argued in his January 2017 letter that the majority view in the ICA on 2020 election meddling “gives the false impression” that the national intelligence officer for cyber “is the only analyst who holds the minority view on China” and that “placing the NIO Cyber on a metaphorical island by attaching his name alone to the minority view is a testament to both his courage and to the effectiveness of the institutional pressures that have been brought to bear on others who agree with him.”

The NIO for cyber is a leading intelligence official tasked with assessing foreign cyber threats and analyzing challenges to U.S. elections.

“I am adding my voice in support of the stated minority view – based on all available sources of intelligence, with definitions consistently applied, and reached independent of political considerations or undue pressure – that the People’s Republic of China sought to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections,” Ratcliffe said in January 2017.

The National Intelligence Council had concluded in 2020 that China had hacked or gained access to several state voter registration databases, but that information was suppressed from the American public, state election officials, and Congress despite whistleblower complaints from Christopher Porter – the former NIO for cyber – trying to bring attention to it. The current intelligence community inspector general, Christopher Fox, is reviewing Porter’s complaint anew.

Wilde has spent years backpedaling away from his role in 2016

Since leaving the federal government around 2020, Wilde had sought to backpedal away from some of the Russian election influence panic that he helped unleash in 2016 and beyond.

An article for the left wing Lawfare in August 2020 stated that Wilde “served as director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucasus Affairs at the National Security Council from 2018 to 2019, where his focus areas included election security and countering foreign malign influence and disinformation.”

The article – titled “The Intelligence Community’s Role in Countering Malign Foreign Influence on Social Media” – critiqued efforts that had wrongly labeled Americans as having been Russian agents.

“In November 2017, Twitter leveraged a mixture of algorithm and analysis to scrub its vast user base to identify fraudulent accounts run by an infamous Russian troll farm. Under increasing scrutiny in the aftermath of Russian online manipulation in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the social media behemoth reported its findings to Congress,” Wilde wrote.

Wilde continued: “Over subsequent months, however, researchers from Clemson University placed a large asterisk next to Twitter’s findings: Several of the accounts it had identified as inauthentic appeared to belong to genuine, unsuspecting U.S. citizens. The episode clearly illustrated a missed opportunity for collaboration — one that might have saved face for all involved and might have spared several Americans from being wrongfully sullied as agents of foreign influence.”

He made no mention that in 2018 he touted anti-disinformation-styled organizations which had helped wrongly label Americans as being online Russians.

Wilde also sought to downplay the efforts made by the Wagner Group and its Internet Research Agency, which had featured prominently in the 2016 ICA he had helped with and in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

“Guys, just because Wagner bought a shiny new WeWork and held a move-in party and rebranded the IRA to ‘Cyber Mutant Ninja Turtles’ or whatever doesn't really mean they're anything more capable or scary than they were eight years ago: professional shitbirds,” Wilde said in a since-deleted November 2022 tweet.

Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and IRA leader claimed at the time that "we have interfered (in U.S. elections), we are interfering and we will continue to interfere – carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do."

Wilde sought to criticize those – mainly on the left – who were spreading this quote.

“Washington should seriously consider the degree to which it securitized an ops floor of shit posters, playing right into the hands of its proprietor,” he said in another now-deleted tweet.

Wilde also co-authored an article that month for World Politics Review titled “Focusing on ‘Disinformation’ Creates More Problems Than It Solves.”

He was quoted in a USA Today article in 2023 where the outlet said he “cited” a report “that found that IRA efforts in 2016 likely had little effect because exposure to its postings was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans” and quoted him as saying “exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians.”

Wilde also spoke with The Record that year, which reported that he pointed to “the lack of evidence that the influence operations were effective.”

“There's no real understanding of how humans internalize narratives (causal vs incidental) to baseline from,” said Wilde was quoted as saying, adding that “I'm no seasoned researcher, but that's where I'd say the onus is on the adherents to the idea that ‘influence operations via social media work and are a national security threat’ — to demonstrate that empirically even with available data.”

Wilde told the McCrary Institute’s podcast in May 2024 that he had been worried about Russian influence operations in 2016 when he worked on the ICA, but that his thinking had “evolved” and now he might be even more concerned about the U.S. government’s response.

“Since 2016, I think my own thinking has evolved from concern about the fact that Russia has this view of information and propaganda, and now I think I'm equally if not more concerned that we in the U.S. national security apparatus have adopted a similar version of that thinking, and I think that kind of mindset or that worldview has or poses some real challenges for democracy in and of itself,” he said.

Wilde also co-authored a May 2024 piece for Foreign Affairs titled, “Don’t Hype the Disinformation Threat. Downplaying the Risk Helps Foreign Propagandists – But So Does Exaggerating It.”

 He also penned a piece that spring for the Texas National Security Review on “From Panic to Policy: The Limits of Foreign Propaganda and the Foundations of an Effective Response.”

He also wrote a piece for Diplomaatia in May 2024 which urged “more faith in democracy than fear of Russian propaganda.”

“In recent years, democracies have made great strides in recognizing and confronting Moscow’s duplicity,” he wrote. “But overemphasizing this threat and overestimating its current impact could encourage leaders to spread pessimism among the very people they are supposed to serve. This is likely to have the same corrosive effect on democracy as information operations themselves.”

Wilde also said during a Reagan Institute event in July 2024 that foreign disinformation “has been something of a scapegoat and a distraction.” He said that “we have kind of perception hacked ourselves into Moscow’s and certainly maybe Beijing’s mindset.”

“I absolutely agree that the Supreme Court ruled correctly in Missouri v. Biden,” he also said.

The attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana sued a number of federal officials and agencies in Missouri v. Biden in May 2022, including taking aim at then President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Disinformation Governance Board leader Nina Jankowicz.

Wilde had previously praised Jankowicz as a disinformation “expert” back in 2018, and has a long history of praising the work by CISA as well.

The complaint by Missouri and Louisiana alleged that “senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms.”

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2023 upheld the lower court decision in Missouri v. Biden barring the federal government from working with social media companies to remove First Amendment-protected content.

Wilde did an interview with Meduza in June 2024 on “how Russian disinformation really threatens the USA.” He was asked what happened to his thought process between 2016 and then, and why he had reassessed how he thinks about foreign influence.

He said that the papers he was now writing were part of “my own de-conversion story from that period of panic” in 2016, which “I kind of acknowledge is rational and was born of good intent” at the time, “but I think now the pendulum has swung too far.”

“The Misguided Emphasis on U.S. Political Campaign Hacks. On the spectrum of threats to free and fair elections, the airing of campaigns’ dirty laundry would be lamentable but hardly warrants catastrophizing,” was also the headline and subheadline of an August 2024 piece Wilde wrote for the Carnegie Endowment.

In Wilde's September 2024 interview with Politico the outlet also reported he said, "it was not clear whether foreign propaganda had a specific effect on how people voted. But he worries about the erosion of confidence in elections.”

“That’s been problematic, because our reaction to it can cause as much stress and a sense of precarity among the public as whatever you know the Russians or Chinese are doing,” he told the outlet.

Wilde also spoke at the Blavatnik School of Government in October 2024 where he again critiqued the U.S. overemphasis on the foreign influence threat, saying that “I think I would argue since 2016. However, that there are risks to the way that we've broadly conceptualized foreign interference, using it primarily as a shorthand for propaganda and disinformation, and the preponderance of this fear and focus while mostly well-intended has become problematic.”

He also called for simply ignoring Russian influence efforts earlier this year.

“The unpopular though I think completely valid suggestion that I offer is: ignore it,” Wilde said in a podcast episode with political scientist Marcel Dirsus in February.

Wilde argued that the problem with taking Russian meddling efforts overly seriously is that “I think it risks giving Moscow a lot of credit for political or social developments that were ... already underway, or blaming Russia for things that are essentially homegrown ills.”