Facebook to provide ads bought by Russian company to congressional committees probing Trump ties

 Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg would be 36 years old by the time the 2020 election rolls around. (Esteban Felix / Associated Press)
David S. Cloud David S. CloudContact Reporter
Facebook said on Thursday that it would turn over to Congress copies of more than 3,000 ads linked to a shadowy Russian company, for House and Senate committees’ investigations of Kremlin interference in the 2016 election.

The move is an about-face for Facebook, which earlier this month said it had given the ads and other information to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is conducting a criminal investigation of possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign. But Facebook has said it could not give the material to Congress due to privacy concerns.

Most of the ads did not mention Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but focused on immigration, gun control, gay rights and other divisive social issues. They were purchased by 470 fake accounts traced back to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm known for using troll accounts to post on news sites.

“After an extensive legal and policy review, today we are announcing that we will also share these ads with congressional investigators,” said Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, in a blog post. “We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election.”

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said that the company was taking steps to provide more transparency about political ads that run on the site and to prevent covert attempts to influence elections. He said Facebook would continue to investigate attempts by Russia and other “foreign actors” to use the site to interfere in other countries’ elections.

“I don't want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That's not what we stand for,” Zuckerberg said in a video statement.

Facebook executives had briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month on the Russian-linked ads. But Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, and other lawmakers had criticized the company for refusing to turn over the materials that it had given to Mueller.

Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the Facebook material “should help us better understand what happened, beyond the preliminary briefings we already received.”

He added, “It will be important for the Committee to scrutinize how rigorous Facebook's internal investigation has been, to test its conclusions and to understand why it took as long as it did to discover the Russian sponsored advertisements and what else may yet be uncovered.”

Schiff made clear that Facebook is not be the only company that investigators expect to hear from.

“As we continue our investigation to get to the bottom of Russia’s multifaceted attack on our democratic process,” he said, “I believe it will be necessary to hear directly from Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as others in the tech sector, including in open hearings that will inform the American public.”