NPR's "FACT CHECK: Russian Interference Went Far Beyond 'Facebook Ads' Kushner Described."

At a Time magazine event, Kushner got out an effective talking point.

The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country. You look at what Russia did — buying some Facebook ads to try and sow dissent. And it's a terrible thing, but I think the investigation and all the speculation that's happened over the past two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy... They said they spent $160,000. I spent $160,000 on Facebook in three hours during the campaign. If you look at the magnitude of what they did and what they accomplished, I think the ensuing investigations have been way more harmful to our country.

Here's NPR's fact check:

The redacted version of Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller's report revealed a years-long plot by the Russian government to interfere in the U.S. that investigators called "sweeping and systemic."...

As to the amount of money expended on Facebook ads, the company said Russian operatives did spend less than $200,000 on advertising on the platform — but that doesn't account for the organic content the operatives created and shared. Not only were influence specialists within Russia's Internet Research Agency purchasing normal advertisements, they were authoring their own posts, memes and other content as they posed as American users.

They also reached out to politically active Americans, posing as like-minded supporters, and helped organize rallies and other events in the real world.... Cyberattackers also went after political victims in the United States — whose emails and other data were released publicly to embarrass them — and state elections officials and other targets. And there may have been other avenues of interference as well....

By September 2016, two months before the U.S. presidential election, the Internet Research Agency was working with an overall monthly budget that reached over $1.25 million. It employed hundreds of employees, a graphics department, a data analysis department, a search-engine optimization department, an IT department and a finance department, according to an indictment filed last year by Mueller's team....

The U.S. military reportedly blocked the Internet access of the IRA during last year's midterm elections to keep it from interfering with the midterm election. U.S. Cyber Command also targeted Russian cyber operatives, according to a report by The New York Times, with direct messages letting them know that American intelligence was tracking them.

Kushner didn't say the Facebook ads were all there was. His main point, it seems to me, is that what we did to ourselves was far out of proportion to what they did. If we credit the Russians with figuring out how actively and doggedly we'd damage ourselves and aggrandize them, they did amazingly well, but I don't see NPR making that argument. Indeed, I suspect that NPR folks think that everything that worked to hamstring and delegitimize our President wasn't damage at all, but damage control. In that view, the damage was that Trump was elected, and even though he wasn't elected because of Russian interference, it was worth using the Russian interference to distract, trouble, and limit him as much as possible.

And that is the harsh impact on our democracy.