The United Kingdom announced Thursday that Russian actors likely attempted to interfere in the 2019 parliamentary election, highlighting leaked United States-U.K. trade negotiation documents that Jeremy Corbyn made a key part of his failed campaign against Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab updated members of Parliament in a statement about “the ongoing investigations into the leak of the U.K.-U.S. Free Trade Agreement documents” ahead of the December 2019 general election, revealing that, “on the basis of extensive analysis, the government has concluded that it is almost certain that Russian actors sought to interfere in the 2019 General Election through the online amplification of illicitly acquired and leaked government documents.”
Raab added: “Whilst there is no evidence of a broad spectrum Russian campaign against the general election, any attempt to interfere in our democratic processes is completely unacceptable. It is, and will always be, an absolute priority to protect our democracy and elections. There is an ongoing criminal investigation and it would be inappropriate for us to say anything further at this point.”
Johnson, the leader of the Conservative Party who took over for former Prime Minister Theresa May in July 2019, had made Brexit central to his general election campaign later that year, promising to follow through on the 2016 referendum in which the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. Corbyn, a member of Parliament and the far-left leader of the Labour Party, ran a flailing campaign against Johnson, taking a “neutral” stance on Brexit and attempting to hammer Johnson for what Corbyn claimed was the prime minister’s willingness to defund or undermine the U.K.’s National Health Service.
Hundreds of pages of leaked documents related to a possible post-Brexit trade agreement between the U.S. and the U.K. soon became a crucial part of Corbyn’s campaign.
In late November, as Corbyn was criticized for numerous allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party and for his repeated resistance to condemn it, Corbyn highlighted the leaked documents, first by bringing them up in a debate with Johnson and then by calling a press conference with dozens of reporters, in which he held up and waved around the leaked documents while attacking Johnson.
“These uncensored documents leave Boris Johnson’s denials in absolute tatters,” Corbyn claimed. “Voters need to ask themselves some very serious questions: Is the NHS safe in Boris Johnson’s hands? We’ve now got evidence that, under Boris Johnson, the NHS is on the table and will be up for sale. He tried to cover it up and his secret agenda, but today it has been exposed.”
Members of the Labour Party and some NHS staff then handed out the unredacted documents to the media at the press conference. A review of the documents showed that they did not actually prove Corbyn’s claims.
Johnson responded late last year by repeatedly insisting that “the NHS is in no way on the table — in no aspect whatever” and that “this is continually brought up by the Labour Party as a diversionary tactic.”
When pressed on whether he was unwittingly participating in a Russian influence operation, Corbyn said in December that “this is such nonsense — this is such an advanced state of rather belated conspiracy theories by the Prime Minister.”
Corbyn has previously supported Russian-backed Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, has been hesitant to blame Russian-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad for chemical weapons attacks, and has been widely criticized for being soft on Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Corbyn’s attacks proved ineffective and his own unpopularity too much to overcome, and Johnson and the Tories ended up winning the December election in a massive sweeping victory — the largest since Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 election landslide. The U.K. officially left the EU at the end of January, 47 years after it had joined, and trade talks between the U.S. and the U.K. are ongoing.
A broader report on Russian interference in U.K. business and politics over the years has not been made public after months of delays, which has resulted in a large amount of criticism from the Labour Party.
“The Government has robust systems in place to protect the UK against foreign malign influence. These bring together government, civil society and private sector organisations to monitor and respond to interference, to ensure our democracy stays open, transparent and resilient,” Raab said on Thursday, adding, “The Government reserves the right to respond with appropriate measures in the future. The UK will continue to call out and respond to malign activity, including any attempts to interfere in our democratic processes, alongside our international partners.”
In the U.S., former special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” through a Russian military intelligence hacking operation against the Democratic National Committee and the providing of thousands of emails to WikiLeaks for dissemination, along with a Russian-based social media disinformation campaign, but the special counsel “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
U.S. Attorney John Durham is conducting an investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators.
