Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate. The British government has released a long-awaited report on whether Russia has interfered in UK domestic politics. For years, establishment Western voices warned that Russia may have duped British voters into supporting Brexit in 2016, just like Russia, we were told,

also decided the U.S. election that same year.

In November 2017, the New York Times even warned that reports of Russian meddling, quote,

could raise questions about the legitimacy of the Brexit referendum itself.

That same month, then British Prime Minister

Theresa May, issued a stern warning to the Kremlin.

It is seeking to weaponize information, deploying its state-run media organizations to plant

fake stories and photoshopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions.

So I have a very simple message for Russia.

We know what you are doing and you will not succeed.

But missing from all this fear-mongering panic and tough talk about Russian meddling was, you guessed it, actual evidence.

One of the few pieces of evidence that we got was, let's say, underwhelming.

Twitter reported that the Kremlin-backed network RT spent over $1,000 to promote its Brexit

coverage to UK-based viewers.

And Facebook reported that a Russian troll farm spent a grand total of 97 cents on three ads,

all of them about immigration, not even mentioning Brexit.

So if that was what Russia was doing, you can see why Theresa May was perhaps so confident

that they would not succeed. Well, this report

was supposedly going to deliver the elusive evidence of Russian meddling in the UK. But as is

becoming a very familiar story, the report did not deliver. The investigators found no evidence

of Russian interference in Brexit. But they did find a good explanation for why they found no evidence.

As Scottish MP Stuart Hosey told the media, the British government found no evidence because it didn't look for it.

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