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russian-backed-organizations-amplifying-qanon-conspiracy-theories-researchers-s-idUSKBN25K136

reuters August 24, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Russian government-supported organizations are playing a small but increasing role amplifying conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, raising concerns of interference in the November U.S. election.

Academics who study QAnon said there were no signs Russia had a hand in the early days of the movement, which launched in 2017 with anonymous web postings amplified by YouTube videos.

But as QAnon gained adherents and took on new topics - with President Donald Trump as the constant hero waging a misunderstood battle - social media accounts tied to a key Kremlin ally joined in.

In 2019, accounts removed by Twitter and suspected of being controlled by Russia's Internet Research Agency sent a high volume of tweets tagged with #QAnon and the movement slogan #WWG1WGA, short for Where We Go One, We Go All, said Melanie Smith, head of analysis at social media analysis firm Graphika. The IRA was indicted by Robert Mueller in his election interference prosecution.

More recently, Russian government-backed media RT.com and Sputnik have stepped up coverage of QAnon, which began with a false proclamation Hillary Clinton would be arrested for an undetermined reason and now includes theories about child trafficking by Hollywood elites, the novel coronavirus and more.

Alethea Group disinformation expert Cindy Otis, a former CIA analyst, said RT, Sputnik and other Kremlin-backed media have been writing more about QAnon, using it to fit into their broader narrative of: "The U.S. is falling apart, look how much division there is."

After Twitter banned thousands of QAnon accounts last month, RT.com predicted the move would backfire by directing more attention to the cause, adding that "it gave QAnon followers the validation they craved."

Last week, it ran a similar article after Facebook removed about a third of QAnon groups and restricted the other two-thirds.

RT's story began: "Facebook has removed thousands of groups and pages related to the QAnon conspiracy after expanding its concept of ‘dangerous individuals’ to include those who merely ‘celebrate violent acts.’ Streisand effect, meet slippery slope."

The 27-year-old grew up with her grandmother who shared stories from 1944, when Umerova’s family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Crimean Tatars, were deported to Central Asia by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

The Streisand effect refers to when singer Barbra Streisand sued to get photos of her Malibu, California, home removed from the internet, only to win them more viewers.

The articles have fallen short of full-throated support, and others have been critical. But they cast QAnon as channeling legitimate outrage.

QAnon followers have taken note and begun to share more content from the Russian outlets, according to Graphika.

In a report released late Monday, it said the QAnon accounts it tracked had posted material from 69 other websites more often than RT stories in 2018.

By earlier this year, RT was the 23rd most commonly shared site in the community. In the month ended Aug. 20, it had climbed to No. 12. here

"Though Russia is only one foreign actor capable of targeting US political audiences through the QAnon community, its history of operations appear to be the most ideologically aligned with the overarching QAnon theory," the report said. "Russia also appears to have made the most effort to gain credibility within the community thus far."

QAnon was named by the FBI as a potential instigator of domestic terrorism, and followers have been charged with making a terror threat, murder and other crimes.

Russia is actively interfering with the campaign season in other ways, the government’s top counter-intelligence official said recently, including by disseminating false stories about Joe Biden in Ukraine. Democrats are pressing for the public release of more instances.

Researchers at Graphika, Stanford University and elsewhere stressed that QAnon for now remains a largely domestic phenomenon. Facebook took down two QAnon networks for coordinated artificial behavior, before its new content restrictions, and neither had Russian connections.

But tracking QAnon has become increasingly tough, Graphika’s Smith said. QAnon backers have moved heavily into other social media groups, helping to organize real-life protests against child trafficking last weekend and getting involved in a pro-police demonstration in Portland that degenerated into violence.

"It’s very difficult to understand what a QAnon account is, versus a Trump supporter’s account versus an anti-vaxxer,"

Smith said.

Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Tom Brown

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/factor-gmo-fake-science-russia

REF BUZZ

The World’s Largest GMO Study Was Launched By Russians In 2014. Then It Disappeared.

“The basic idea is to create doubts in people’s minds, whether about Big Agriculture, or chemtrails, or anything else.”

Dan Vergano

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on June 1, 2018 at 8:11 am

Be one of the first to comment

Rob Dobi for BuzzFeed News

In late 2014, an obscure Russian group called a press conference in London to announce the launch of the “world’s largest international study” — a three-year, $25 million experiment of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

In the Factor GMO project, the panelists explained, thousands of rats would eat genetically modified corn that had been grown with Roundup, a controversial weed killer. Scientists would then watch the animals for three years, round the clock, to see if they developed cancer or fertility problems.

“We hope this will be the definitive study that will establish whether or not these chemicals and these GMO products are safe and effective,” Bruce Blumberg, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, a longtime GMO critic and one of the three scientists originally on the project’s advisory board, told the crowd of reporters.

The event attracted wide news coverage in the British press, everyone from the Guardian to the Daily Mail. Then Blumberg flew home to California. And that’s the last he ever heard from the Russians.

"It is weird," Blumberg told BuzzFeed News.

Quest for Peace / YouTube / Via youtube.com

Bruce Blumberg

Now more than three years later, the Moscow-based Factor GMO is not answering emails from the press. Although the donation button is still active on its website, the effort hasn’t uttered a peep since 2015. So, how much money did it raise? Did scientists ever watch any rats?

Or was it all a ruse from the get-go, a grand Russian propaganda effort against GMOs and Western science?

"Factor GMO has many of the hallmark characteristics of Russian anti-GMO propaganda, though it gives itself a veneer of scientific objectivity," Iowa State sociologist Shawn Dorius told BuzzFeed News.

Russia, as it turns out, has pushed a lot of anti-GMO propaganda in this decade, the most recent a Russia Today documentary, The Peril on Your Plate. That’s partly because of the competition: Cheap GMO crops from the US could threaten Russia’s agricultural market, and particularly its recent boom in wheat exports.

But these messages serve another purpose, too: to sow distrust in Western innovations, whether agricultural science, fracking, or elections, said Nina Jankowicz, a scholar of Russian disinformation tactics. “The basic idea is to create doubts in people’s minds, whether about Big Agriculture, or chemtrails, or anything else.”

youtube.com

The agricultural behemoth Monsanto began selling Roundup in 1974. Unlike other herbicides, it killed just about any kind of weed and was a runaway seller. By the mid-1990s, the company had genetically engineered crops to resist Roundup, meaning that farmers could spray it with abandon. Its use grew fifteenfold.

In the two decades since, a subindustry of scientific studies has investigated the safety of these genetically modified crops and Roundup’s main ingredient, a chemical called glyphosate.

The most notorious of this oeuvre was a 2012 report by the French scientist Gilles-Éric Séralini finding tumors in rats fed GM corn and exposed to glyphosate. The study was widely criticized for its media rollout — journalists were asked to sign strange confidentiality agreements — and its conclusions, which the European Food Safety Commision found “inadequately designed, analyzed, and reported.” The study was retracted in January 2014 and then republished in a separate journal, without any more review, in June 2014. It’s been argued over ever since, with much of the criticism focused on its small sample size of 600 animals.

Factor GMO was designed to scale up the effort, tracking 6,000 rats for three years and measuring any fertility or hormonal changes. The project’s press conference on Nov. 11, 2014, was organized by the Russian nongovernmental organization National Association for Genetic Safety (NAGS), which has a history of hostility to GMOs. The group had organized “flash mob” events for a 2014 “March Against Monsanto” in Moscow, for example.

The London meeting began with two presentations in Russian, one by the head of NAGS, Elena Sharoykina, who had already called for a 10-year global ban of these products, and the next by Oxana Sinitsyn, an environmental health scientist at the Russian Ministry of Health. (Neither responded to a request for comment, nor did the listed contacts for the study.)

“The study will take place at undisclosed locations in Russia and Western Europe.”

Blumberg, the UC Irvine scientist, opened the English language portion of the event. An expert in chemicals that disrupt hormones, he said he was joining Factor GMO’s advisory board because he was “frustrated” by past safety studies failing to answer questions about how glyphosate exposure might alter the germline, affecting children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or even great-great-grandchildren. “This is very important to know whether these chemicals and these genetically modified organisms can have effects that are seen in those generations,” he said.

The presenters did not say exactly which scientists would conduct the study, or where it would be conducted. “The study will take place at undisclosed locations in Russia and Western Europe,” the Factor GMO website explains. “The exact locations of the study must be kept secret for security reasons as we want to avoid any outside interference.”

“That’s a great touch if you’re writing a script for a thriller, but not so great if you want to build a broad base of credibility and trust,” Nathanael Johnson of Grist noted a few months afterward, criticizing the “air of cloak-and-dagger paranoia” surrounding the effort.

At the time, Blumberg said he agreed to serve on the study’s review panel to replace his friend, prominent neuroscientist and herbicide critic Andrés Carrasco, who had unexpectedly died. “I wanted to help out for a friend,” he said, on what sounded like a good study. Aside from his travel, he didn’t receive any money for his involvement, he said. He did not know the actual study scientists or how much money was collected.

When asked what he thought about the Factor GMO website still collecting donations, Blumberg told BuzzFeed News by email: “What the FactorGMO people do or do not do is not really my concern.”

A decade ago, Russian researchers created potatoes that borrowed a gene (“kindly provided by Monsanto”) from a harmless bacteria to make the spuds resistant to beetles. The GMO potatoes were approved by the state. But after Vladimir Putin returned as president in 2012, Russia’s anti-GMO efforts kicked off.

At first, Russian biotechnologists noted, a lack of rules for approving more modern genetically engineered crops meant "cultivation and breeding of GMOs, for example in agriculture, is ruled out."

Then in 2015, Putin announced plans to make Russia the world’s biggest exporter of non-GMO food. In an address to the Russian parliament, he said: “We are not only able to feed ourselves taking into account our lands, water resources — Russia is able to become the largest world supplier of healthy, ecologically clean and high-quality food which the Western producers have long lost.” Russia banned GMOs completely a year later. (Europe has imposed stringent rules on GMOs since 2010.)

Sputnik

@SputnikInt

Protests against #GMO, toxic #pesticides erupt in several countries (PHOTO) https://t.co/OZirWejbW6

12:10 PM - 22 May 2018

Reply Retweet Favorite

By 2016, RT and Sputnik, the two main Kremlin-owned outlets producing stories in English, were preoccupied by — and strongly negative toward — GMOs, according to a March study conducted by Dorius of Iowa State.

His team scraped the websites of RT, Sputnik, CNN, Fox News, Breitbart, and Huffington Post to find all stories in that year that mentioned GMOs. They found that RT and Sputnik produced 53% of all English-language stories in the study. And their stories were overwhelmingly opposed to GMOs — unlike the US outlets, which produced a mix of anti, pro, and neutral stories on the topic.

“Russian state news gives substantial attention to anti-GMO tropes involving rats, fertility, cancer, and GMOs,” Dorius told BuzzFeed News.

S. Dorius / GM Food & Crop / Via tandfonline.com

Study findings on news shares of GMO stories.

The survey found that RT’s stories often contained scaremongering myths about genetic engineering (such as the headline “GMO mosquitoes could be cause of Zika outbreak, critics say”). “It is typically designed to look like legitimate news,” Dorius said.

In that way, Factor GMO — with its press conference theatrics — seems similar. “Factor GMO seems like a marketing campaign that fizzled,” Dorius said, its presentation intended to raise questions about all previous safety studies and findings.

Polling experts told BuzzFeed News that it’s difficult to know whether these Russian efforts have swayed US opinion about GMOs — particularly because so many Americans are already skeptical of this technology.

Pew Research Center polling from 2016 suggested that 39% in the US thought GMO foods were worse than others. About 1 in 6 people said they cared a lot about GMOs, and most of that group were opposed to them.

Overall, the US scientific consensus is that GMOs don’t appear to be dangerous, a US National Academy of Sciences report concluded in 2016. (The real risk from Roundup was that its ubiquity has led to resistant weeds.) And although glyphosate is less toxic than caffeine, scientists are still investigating it for any health effects, without turning up much.

Nevertheless, people in the US trust scientists on GMOs even less than they do on vaccines, evolution, nuclear power, evolution, or climate science, according to studies by Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire. Unlike climate change or evolution, GMOs have not become a matter of Republican versus Democrats politics, Hamilton noted.

But the US fight over GMOs, which has so far played out mostly online and in courtrooms, is about to get political attention. In July, the US Department of Agriculture is supposed to release mandatory disclosure rules for genetically modified food, leaving the decision for the Trump administration on how to proceed.

youtube.com

Factor GMO may have fizzled out because it didn’t get any public traction, and the organizers “just cut their losses,” said Jankowicz of the Wilson Center. (The project’s outdated website states that its funding was “sourced from around the world” and that “a high percentage of the total needed has been secured, allowing us to start the experimental phase in Spring 2015.”)

Alternatively, Jankowicz said, the nebulous status of the project might be intentional. As long as a Potemkin “largest international” study is perpetually in the offing, critics can say that questions still remain about the safety of GMOs. It serves as a model for a kind of fake science meant to inspire cynicism about new technologies and institutions in general, she said. “They get people doubting something, without having to do any work and without any follow-up.”

The nebulous status of the project might be intentional.

Blumberg said he has made no effort to contact Factor GMO since the 2014 news conference.

“I already have plenty on my plate,” he said. He’s one of the handful of US researchers concerned about glyphosate, part of a group that published a “statement of concern” claiming possible hormonal effects from the herbicide in 2016.

Blumberg pointed out that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has designated glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen,” a hotly contested designation amid a federal lawsuit brought by people who claim they developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from Roundup. (IARC has reserved the same cancer risk distinction for “very hot beverages” and “wood dust.”) Another court case in California right now revolves around a fight between Monsanto and the state’s environmental regulator over placing a carcinogen designation on Roundup.

That’s all despite numerous scientific societies endorsing the National Academy of Sciences report, which found animals “were not harmed” and that the herbicide brought no cancer risk.

The Factor GMO study may have gone to seed if not for Mary Mangan, a biologist affiliated with the pro-GMO advocacy group Cornell Alliance for Science. In April, Mangan blogged about the disappearance of the project (titling her post “Science Vaporware, From Russia, With a Bad Smell”).

Blumberg told BuzzFeed News that Mangan and other critics of the Russian effort are apologists for the herbicide industry. He compared them to deniers of climate science or the dangers of smoking.

"I wish someone would do this study," he said.

Mangan — who says she isn’t funded by industry — actually agreed. “I would love to see the Factor GMO data,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Whatever Blumberg thinks of me, it still doesn't exist and seems pretty dodgy.” ●

Dan Vergano

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Contact Dan Vergano at dan.vergano@buzzfeed.com.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tucker-carlson-2656827634/

no lnx vid

Tucker Carlson tries to gaslight his way out of having pushed Putin’s anti-Ukraine propaganda for a month

David Neiwert and Daily Kos March 02, 2022

Tucker Carlson is utterly baffled that people would think he is rooting for Vladimir Putin and Russia in its war on Ukraine. “You know, it’s such an awful thing to say,” he said on his Fox News show Monday, after playing a clip of Congressman Eric Swalwell saying he and other Republicans were on Putin’s side. “We hesitated to play that, even—it’s very common, you hear it every day. The question is: Why are they saying that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Gaslighting, of course, has become Carlson’s specialty. In reality, Carlson spent most of the month prior to the invasion praising Putin and echoing Russian propaganda: running down Ukraine, deriding it as a “State Department client state”—not a democracy, but “a tyranny”—and claiming that Russia just wants to keep its borders secure, everything the fault of Joe Biden. So much so that he became the hero of Russian state television, where his rants were translated and replayed, and he was praised as an astute American.

Now that the horror is hitting home, Carlson suddenly has realized that he backed the wrong horse and is scurrying hard to dig his way out. The first step in that, of course, is gaslighting his audience about what he had been saying just the week before, and blaming the war on Putin now—yet somehow it’s still all Joe Biden’s fault. Those clips have yet to appear on Russian TV.

The major tone shift occurred Friday, a day after the invasion: “It’s a tragedy, because war always is a tragedy, and the closer you get to it, the more horrifying it seems,” he said. He also squarely put the onus on Russia and Putin: “He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight in Ukraine.”

“Vladimir Putin started this war,so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it,” [CYA?] he said. “He fired the first shots.”

It’s a sharp and complete reversal of his previous arguments. On Feb. 17, he spouted Russian propaganda in claiming that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation. He also attacked U.S. officials who provided military aid to Ukraine.

“These people are so ghoulish,” Carlson said. “Of course they’re promoting war, not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.”

This narrative became a staple of Carlson’s defense of Russia’s war. On his Feb. 22 show, he again spouted Putin’s propaganda: “The point here is to defend democracy. Not that Ukraine is a democracy. It’s not a democracy. Ukraine’s president has arrested his main political opponent, he has shut down newspapers and television stations that have dared to criticize him. So in American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny. But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good.”

The next day, he again dismissed Ukraine as “a State Department client state,” claiming that Democrats wanted Americans to “wholeheartedly support jumping with both feet into a highly complicated conflict in a part of Eastern Europe where we have no national interests.”

The most noteworthy part of that Feb. 22 episode, however, washow Carlson defended Putin against his “haters” by comparing him to American liberals, who he clearly saw as far more nefarious:

It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, ‘What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?’ These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So do why does permanent Washington hate him so much?

The day after the invasion began, on Feb. 24, it was more of the same. The invasion, he claimed, demonstrated that Biden was a foreign-policy failure who had promised he would keep it from happening, making Putin’s war a “humiliating defeat for Joe Biden.”

Russian state media promptly began re-airing Carlson’s rants with translated subtitles, particularly the Putin-didn’t-call-me-a-racist episode. His attacks on Ukraine’s legitimacy also received heavy play. They also replayed Carlson’s Feb. 24 interview with ex-CongresswomanTulsi Gabbard, who told him: "Sanctions don't work. This is the whole problem with the Biden administration: They are so focused on how do we punish Putin."

The clips became the topic of Russian TV news talk shows, where Carlson was uniformly praised. “Excellent performance,” the editor of a Russian national defense journal commented. “We can only have solidarity with this view.”

Of course, Carlson is hardly alone in spreading pro-Russian propaganda on Fox News. On Feb. 24, just before bombs began falling on Ukraine, host Laura Ingraham interviewed ex-president Donald Trump by phone, who praised Putin—“I do know him very well. We’ve had many, uh, times together. I got along with him fantastically”—and ranted at length that the invasion was Biden’s fault, and the war never would have happened if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.

Near the end of the interview, Ingraham asked Trump about the speech given earlier that day by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, describing it as “a kind of really pathetic display” and described Ukraine’s United Nations ambassador as “looking like a defeated man.”

And despite the seeming change in tone, Carlson’s “pivot” still found him ardently defending Russian propaganda, and serving as its useful tool. Angry that authorities and platform owners in the U.S., Canada, and in Europe are taking action against the Kremlin-owned American news outlet Russia Today and other agitprop producers like Sputnik—both of whom also heavily replayed his pro-Russia rants—Carlson fumed that it all constituted “moral blackmail,” gaslighting away his previous remarks: “No one in America takes pride at the sight, feels anything but revulsion at the sight, of Russian troops within Ukraine.”

Sure enough, RT promptly retweeted Carlson’s clip: “Tucker Carlson defends media freedom as Senators use their power to shut down free speech on social media—especially so-called ‘Russian propaganda.’”

As Lis Wahl, a former anchor at Russia Today, explained to The Daily Beast, the distinction between a propaganda operation like RT and what’s aired on Fox News has essentially vanished:

While the American voices Russian media uses to influence Western audiences hail from the far-left and the far-right, the poison of disinformation asymmetrically originates on the ideological right. Research has demonstrated that followers of the former president stick to hyper-partisan and conspiracy-laden sources such as Breitbart, Info Wars, and Fox News. During Trump’s election and throughout his presidency, the rightwing ecosystem grew more conspiratorial, extreme, and anti-democratic. It is during this time that Russian media and right-wing media became indistinguishable.

Today, the chief purveyors of pro-Russian disinformation in the U.S. are now on Fox News. I have warned that quite often the pro-Putin claims on Fox and RT essentially mimic each other. But much of the American public, and even many in the mainstream media, fail to realize the extent to which this disinformation has become part of the fabric of the new media landscape, and therefore, American political discourse.

ccdh

RT.com is part of a Russian state-controlled news network. Founded in April 2005 as Russia Today, RT is “publicly

financed from the budget of the Russian Federation”, with additional revenue from advertising and sponsored

content.93 Sputnik.com was founded in November 2014 “by the Russian media group Rossiya Segodnya”, another

state-funded broadcaster.94

According to a 2020 report from the Oxford Internet Institute, RT.com “is one of the most important organizations

in the global political economy of disinformation.”95 A 2016 NATO report alleged that Sputnik spread a “fake story”

regarding asylum seekers in Germany.96

Disinformation campaigns waged by RT.com include coverage ahead of the US 2020 election that “amplified voices

of chaos” with headlines such as “The term ‘American democracy’ needs to be retired” and “election teeters on

the verge of chaos”.97 RT has also propagated so much vaccine misinformation that YouTube took the rare step of

suspending RT’s German account following its posting of anti-vaccine misinformation.98 According to King’s College

London research, both RT and Sputnik played an instrumental role in spreading misinformation about the poisoning

of Sergei Skripal, incorporating the views of a “parallel commentariat” and amplifying Russian government sources.99[screengrab]

This Russia Today article claims that the pandemic provided a convenient

opportunity for professional “doom-mongers” to spread fear by linking the

virus to climate change and overpopulation. It calls on people to not pay

attention to the “alarmist predictions for the planet.”100 Articles on RT.com

carry digital ads from Taboola, a “discovery platform” that typically promotes

content at the bottom of news articles and that states it has a commitment

to “minimizing [its] environmental impact”.101

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/matt-gaetz-2651215213/

no lnx twt

att Gaetz blasted after standing up for anti-LGBTQ hate group and promoting a 'fascist sympathizer'

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida speaking at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, D.C., Gage Skidmore

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 25, 2021

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Thursday stood up for the Family Research Council, a hate group that has spent nearly 40 years spreading dangerous lies about LGBTQ people under the cloak of "religious freedom." He also attacked the Southern Poverty Law Center, a decades-old institution that tracks and reports on the more than 800 current hate groups of all kinds across the U.S.

It did not turn out well for the Florida Congressman, as some rushed to remind Gaetz, a top Trump MAGA sympathizer, of his own associations with the far right.

Gaetz tweeted out an article from the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit, whose owner was regularly labeled the stupidest man on the Internet. The article, by Cassandra Fairbanks, paints Gaetz in a very favorable light to his far right supporters. Fairbanks previously worked for Sputnik, the Russian government state media site.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate group.The @splcenter's designation of @FRCdc as a "hate group" caused a… https://t.co/QiJ5oaTm1j

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@Rep. Matt Gaetz)1616693100.0

The SPLC is not a hate group.

Fairbanks, according to domestic extremism expert Jared Holt, is a "self-professed fascist sympathizer."

Sharing articles from a self-professed fascist sympathizer to own the SPLC https://t.co/a3kXCUcQ9o https://t.co/gIpDZWqBHo

— Jared Holt (@Jared Holt)1616700329.0

Journalist Christopher Mathias offered up a similar characterization:

Hardly a week goes by without a GOP congressman promoting/citing the propaganda of fascists. This time, it's Gaet… https://t.co/S6pvvRhI0f

— Christopher Mathias (@Christopher Mathias)1616701049.0

Gaetz also suggested MAGA is not a dangerous extremist group:

How long until MAGA hats are considered an "extremist symbol?" How long until Christian or pro-life groups are "to… https://t.co/igtqPlLpTr

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@Rep. Matt Gaetz)1616697480.0

Here's how some are responding to Congressman Gaetz's attack.

Journalist Daniel Moritz-Rabson posted a graphic of Fairbanks appearing on VDARE with its founder. VDARE is a white nationalist hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

oops pic.twitter.com/R17NOTDOug

— Daniel Moritz-Rabson (@DMoritzRabson) March 25, 2021

Journalist Sam Youngman notes Rep. Gaetz took Holocaust denier Chuck/Charles Johnson to the State of the Union Address and appears to continue to support Trump's attempt to overturn the election:

This person took a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union and voted against honoring the police who fought off… https://t.co/nYQj0c0PJs

— Sam Youngman (@Sam Youngman)1616701347.0

This Twitter user offered up the details:

===

620 an

President Donald Trump smeared a 75-year-old Buffalo activist seriously injured by police, in a tweet based on a conspiracy theory spread by a Kremlin-linked broadcaster.

The president identified the protester, Martin Gugino, as an “ANTIFA provocateur,” a claim that has bounced around right-wing media circles and then broadcast on the rabidly pro-Trump One America News Network by Russian propagandist Kristian Rouz.

“A new report finds the latest tensions in the Buffalo Police Department could be the result of a false-flag provocation by far-left group Antifa,” Rouz reported for OANN.

The San Diego-based Rouz has been simultaneously working for OANN and the Kremlin-owned Sputnik news aggregator that played a role in Russia’s 2016 election interference, cited a report by The Conservative Treehouse.

“Gugino was attempting to capture the radio communications signature of Buffalo police officers,” claimed the right-wing news blog. “CTH noted what he was attempting on Thursday night as soon as the now viral video was being used by media to sell a police brutality narrative. [Thread Here] Today, a more clear video has emerged that shows exactly what he was attempting.”

The website claims a slow-motion video shows Gugino was attempting to hack into the police radio signal by waving his cell phone across the officer’s communications belt.

“The practice, known as ‘skimming,’ is an old trick used by Antifa to locate police officers and plan violent activities bypassing the police response,” Rouz reported for OANN. “In addition, the 75-year-old, who’s been referred to as an agitator, was supposedly using the technology to black out police communications. That, however, didn’t quite work, and many Buffalo police officers support their embattled colleagues.”

Two Buffalo police officers — Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe — were charged with assault in the incident, and Gugino remains hospitalized in stable condition after bleeding from his head....matt geertz twt]

ref

11/19

https://www.thedailybeast.com/oan-trumps-new-favorite-channel-employs-kremlin-paid-journalist

no lnx pix

Trump’s New Favorite Channel Employs Kremlin-Paid Journalist

MOONLIGHTING

Kristian Rouz appears on segments for One America News Network—ironic given he is working for a Russian outlet fingered in the 2016 election attack.

Kevin Poulsen

Sr. National Security Correspondent

Updated Nov. 02, 2019 2:02AM ET / Published Jul. 22, 2019 4:41AM ET

EXCLUSIVE

If the stories broadcast by the Trump-endorsed One America News Network sometimes look like outtakes from a Kremlin trolling operation, there may be a reason. One of the on-air reporters at the 24-hour network is a Russian national on the payroll of the Kremlin’s official propaganda outlet, Sputnik.

Kristian Brunovich Rouz, originally from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, has been living in San Diego, where OAN is based, since August 2017, reporting on U.S. politics for the 24-hour news channel. For all of that time, he’s been simultaneously writing for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news wire that played a role in Russia’s 2016 election-interference operation, according to an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.

Trump’s New Favorite Network Embraces Russian Propaganda

OF COURSE

Kevin Poulsen

Rouz’s on-air reports for OAN include a wholly fabricated 2017 segment claiming Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifathrough her political action committee. Clinton, Rouz claimed falsely,gave antifa protesters $800,000 that “went toward things like bricks, hammers, bats, and chains.”

Other smears target billionaire financier George Soros, a longtime Kremlin bête noire. In one segment, Rouz amplified a thoroughly debunked claim that Soros collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, when the Jewish philanthropist was 14 years old. Another Rouz story accused Soros of secretly funding migrant caravans.

Kremlin propaganda sometimes sneaks into Rouz’s segments on unrelated matters, dropped in as offhand background information. A segment on the Syrian rescue workers known as the White Helmets references “allegations of the White Helmets’ involvement in military activities, executions, and numerous war atrocities,” but doesn’t disclose that those “allegations” were hoaxes that originated with Vladimir Putin and his proxies.

“This completes the merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media.”

— Clint Watts

In another report, Rouz cast Clinton’s criticism of Brexit as an extension of her “grievous insults and fake narratives against Russia”—an assertion that makes sense only in the context of Rouz’s multiple reports claiming Russia was framed for hacking Democrats.

In all of Rouz’s OAN segments reviewed by The Daily Beast, he is introduced as a “One America correspondent,” with no disclosure of his work for Russia’s state-owned media, where he continues to file stories daily, primarily on economic news.

“This completes the merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media,” said former FBI agent Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “We used to think of it as ‘They just have the same views’ or ‘They use the same story leads.’ But now they have the same personnel.”

Rouz didn’t respond to email and telephone inquiries for this story. Reached by email, OAN President Charles Herring invited The Daily Beast to submit written questions about the network’s arrangement with Rouz. But after receiving the questions, Herring cut off contact.

Online records show Rouz graduated from Novosibirsk State University in 2010 and went on to earn a master’s degree in international relations at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. His byline first appears on Sputnik in December 2014.

A few months later, he emigrated to the U.S., settling in Los Angeles in the spring of 2015, where he played guitar for an indie rock band called White Tar.

“Oh shit, it's fucking Kristian! That's my ex-guitarist…”

— Jov Paradice

A former bandmate, whose stage name is Jov Paradice, told The Daily Beast that Rouz was secretive about his day job, except to say that he wrote articles about economics for a Russian company. In August 2016, Rouz worked for theLos Angeles PR firm the Hoyt Organization, according to a since-deleted tweet by the firm announcing his hire. He appears in an October 2016 photo on Hoyt’s Instagram feed, but isn’t readily apparent in subsequent photos. Hoyt didn’t respond to repeated email and telephone inquiries from The Daily Beast.

Trump Pushed Enquirer to Probe Scarborough ‘Murder’ Rumor

Paradice said he and Rouz frequently clashed over their differing world views.

“We kind of had a thing musically, but we were total opposites,” said Paradice. “When Trump was getting elected, he went into full sports coat mode. He had an indie style before—the whole blurred-line-of-sexuality thing—then he was wearing red ties and a suit. I said, ‘I’m not getting on the stage with Trump.’”

In August 2017, Rouz said he was leaving the band to accept a job offer in San Diego, Paradice recalls. It was only recently that Paradice discovered what that job was, when a Facebook friend posted aOne America video purporting to document a link between antifa and ISIS terrorists.

“I’m thinking, there’s something familiar here, and then I go, ‘Oh shit, it’s fucking Kristian!’” said Paradice. “That’s my ex-guitarist… His bullshit propaganda is good enough now that they gave him a tiny bit of a platform.”

Rouz joined OAN at a time when his Russian employer was coming under heightened scrutiny over its role in Putin’s election interference, and its efforts to expand its American influence.

The Hell of Working at Trump’s New Favorite Network

CHANNEL ZERO

Kevin Poulsen

In July 2017, Sputnik contracted with a struggling Washington, D.C.-area radio station to begin broadcasting Sputnik content 24 hours a day. Until then, the station played bluegrass music.

The move came just months after a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment named Sputnik, and its sister television outlet RT America, as players in Putin’s election-interference campaign. By September, the FBI was investigating Sputnik for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.The next month, Twitter announced it would no longer accept ads from Sputnik or RT.

The FARA issue was resolved in November 2017, when Sputnik formally registered with the Justice Department as an agent of a foreign power.

One America pushes some of the same false stories as Sputnik and RT, but with none of the legal entanglements.

Founded and helmed by 77-year-old circuit-board millionaire Robert Herring Sr., OAN launched in 2013 as an answer to the chatty, opinionated content of mainstream cable-news channels—and a place for viewers too conservative for Fox News. Under Herring’s direction, the network embraced Trumpism enthusiastically, starting in 2016.

Over time, the network became increasingly dedicated to conspiracy theories and fake news, and became overtly supportive of Russia’s global agenda. When Rouz joined, the network had recently shed a number of anchors and other staffers who’d bristled at the change.

Though it’s available in only a handful of cable markets, OAN’s viewership includes some influential figures, including the president of the United States. According to Media Matters, Trump has fallen for at least two fake stories after seeing them on OAN.

Kevin Poulsen

Sr. National Security Correspondent

@kpoulsen

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.

new

https://mashable.com/2017/05/04/pro-trump-fake-news-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen/

Fake news was very much a part of U.S. elections last year and now it's trickled into the French elections as well.

During the presidential debate Wednesday night, Front National candidate Marine Le Pen, who runs on an anti-EU, far-right agenda, raised the allegation that the election's frontrunner, the centrist Emmanuel Macron, was engaging in tax evasion with an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.

"I hope that we will not find out that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas," Le Pen said during the heated debate.

Le Pen later backed down on her accusations, saying she doesn't have any proof. Macron filed a defamation complaint. "We will not hesitate to prosecute for defamation anyone who repeats this false information," a member of his team said, adding that the candidate was victim of a "cyber information campaign."

As pointed out by the Macron campaign in a press release to the French media, the "fake news" claims originated on4chan /pol/ just ahead of the debate:

An anonymous user alleged that two leaked documents, posted in the thread, were proof that Macron, a former investment banker, had a professional relationship with a bank involved in tax evasion in the Cayman Islands.

"People have known for a while that Macron underreported his income and assets to the government, but nobody knew where it was stored," the user said, "Here's where his money is stored. See what you can do with this, anon. Let's get grinding. If we can get #MacronCacheCash trending in France for the debates tonight, it might discourage French voters from voting Macron."

The attempt to spread the story by getting a hashtag, #MacronCacheCash, to trend is a tactic seen in the U.S. election.

The hashtag was tweeted by apparently U.S.-based, right-wing accounts in an attempt to make the story viral:

According to Nicolas Vanderbiest, a Belgian commentator for Radio France Culture, the Twitter accounts were linked, in France, to Sputnik and Russia Today.

He tweeted: “So the fake news story on Macron’s account in the Bahamas, we can say without being misleading, that it was by the Russians.”

Disobedient Media, a U.S. right-wing media organisation, published an article accusing Macron of setting up a tax evasion mechanism:

The two leaked documents allegedly show the "incorporation of a shell company in Nevis, a country that doesn't keep ownership records of corporation" and the proof "of a banking relationship with a bank involved in tax evasion in the Cayman Islands."

However, the Macron campaign in their press release was quick to debunk those claims. First of all, his signature looks counterfeited:

[pix sigs]

new

an 919

no lnx

Who fed Donald Trump his bogus Ukraine conspiracy theories?

Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly September 30, 2019

One of the more bizarre elements of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted Ukraine scandal is his seemingly genuine belief that some nefarious Democratic scheme is hidden on Ukrainian computers. And one of the most important questions we should be asking is where he got that information.

First, some context: while most of attention has focused on the White House’s hamfisted attempt to gather dirt on the Biden family and its apparently widespread (and illegal) misuse of classification to hide politically damaging and legally incriminating information, there is also another sideplot: his conspiracy theory that Clinton’s missing emails, and perhaps other nefarious things, are somehow being stored on Ukrainian servers. This is a reference to what is known as the “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory, a very fringe right-wing conspiracy theory so bizarre it barely makes it way onto onto Fox News. Rachel Sandler breaks it down at Forbes thus:

Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike was hired in 2016 by the DNC to investigate the origins of the hack. The company didn’t give the DNC’s physical server to the FBI, which has been seized on by conspiracy theorists as evidence of a cover up.

According to the theory, which has been prominent on right-wing blogs and news websites and repeated by Trump and former campaign consultantRoger Stone, Democrats and CrowdStrike concocted evidence to frame Russia for the hack in order to discredit Trump’s win in 2016.

The supposed evidence of Russia’s innocence relies on the belief that a DNC server has been hidden in Ukraine, possibly by CrowdStrike’s cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch.

That belief may stem from a statement by President Trump in a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, in which he questioned why the FBI didn’t look at the DNC server, that CrowdStrike is owned by “a very rich Ukrainian.” Alperovitch is actually a Russian-born American citizen.

The theory is, of course, totally bogus. It’s also an attempt to absolve Russia of its culpability in the hacking of the DNC:

Ultimately, the president seems to be alluding to an idea that alt-right commentators and pro-Russia sympathizers have pushed for years: that CrowdStrike was wrong about Russia hacking the DNC—and, moreover, that CrowdStrike intentionally blamed Russia for political reasons. CrowdStrike’s findings have, of course, been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, members of Congress, and the office of Robert Mueller. Last year the government indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking plot…

These straw-grasping claims and distortions of fact are fuel for the fire of disinformation. Further, the notion that there is some missing “server,” and that the server might exist somewhere—like in Ukraine—has no basis in reality. The DNC’s network consisted of many servers and computers which either had be put out to pasture, rebooted, or rebuilt to rid them of malware and intruders. As the DNC explained in a 2018 lawsuit filed against the Russian government, it had to “decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers” as a result of the hacking.

The unanswered question in all this is how Donald Trump came to believe in this nonsense, and why he continues to believe it. His own employees and administration official tried again and again to disabuse him of these notions, but he refused to give them up:

President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was “deeply disturbed” that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.

Rudy Giuliani has been significantly involved in the obsession over Ukraine, as his bizarre spiels on cable news networks have amply demonstrated.Most recently he claimed to have been attempting to prove that Donald Trump (and, by extension, the Russians) was “framed by the Democrats”–a notion that Trump recently promoted on twitter.

But it seems unlikely Giuliani has been Donald Trump’s primary conspiracy theory conduit. Rather, he seems to have been roped into it by Trump, and enjoys the cable news limelight.

One might think that Trump got the information from random corners of the internet. But the problem there is that the president barely knows how to use a computer, and has to have articles printed out for him and put on his desk.

So who was feeding him these conspiracies? Why did he continue to believe them even as his own intelligence services and White House staff were attempting to disabuse him of them?

We still don’t know. But we deserve to find out.

David Atkins is a writer, activist and research professional living in Santa Barbara. He is a contributor to the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal and president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html

How a Fringe Theory About Ukraine Took Root in the White House

President Trump has promoted a false conspiracy theory involving Democrats, an obscure security firm and the 2016 election — including on a call with the Ukrainian president that has led to an impeachment inquiry.

/The New York Times

By Scott Shane

Oct. 3, 2019

In an April 2017 interview with The Associated Press, President Trump suddenly began talking about the hack of the Democratic National Committee a year earlier, complaining that the F.B.I. had not physically examined the compromised server.

“They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based,” the president said.

“CrowdStrike?” the surprised reporter asked, referring to the California cybersecurity company that investigated how Russian government hackers had stolen and leaked Democratic emails, disrupting Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“That’s what I heard,” Mr. Trump resumed. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian; that’s what I heard.”

More than two years later, Mr. Trump was still holding on to this false conspiracy theory. In his July call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, he summed it up in a sort of shorthand— at least according to the White House memorandum, labeled “not a verbatim transcript.”

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people …,” the president said. It is unclear whether the ellipses indicate that words were omitted or that Mr. Trump’s voice was trailing off.

Then he added one novel detail: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Now, Mr. Trump’s call for Ukraine to look into his CrowdStrike story forms the background to the House impeachment inquiry, which is focused on the second request he made: that Mr. Zelensky investigate Mr. Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump has placed a concoction of disprovable claims, of the kind usually found on the fringes of the web, squarely in the middle of American politics and diplomacy.

The tale of the supposedly hidden server may have appealed to Mr. Trump because it undercut a well-established fact that he has resented and resisted for three years: The Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help him win, an effort thoroughly documented by American intelligence agencies and amply supported by public evidence.

By contrast, there is no evidence to support the president’s vague suggestion that Ukraine, not Russia, might be responsible for the hacking, or that CrowdStrike somehow connived in it. But his alternate history has provided a psychological shield for the president against facts that he believes tarnish his electoral victory.

Mr. Trump has long called for better relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and brushed aside complaints about its conduct. So there is a certain symmetry to his suggestion that Ukraine, Russia’s opponent and the victim of its territorial grab, may somehow have framed Russia for the 2016 election activity.

“Ukraine is the perfect scapegoat for him, because it’s the enemy of Russia,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who regularly visits Ukraine and is writing a book called “How to Lose the Information War.”

She noted that a number of Ukraine-linked stories, some of them distorted or exaggerated, have been pulled together by Mr. Trump’s supporters into a single narrative.

For example, there is the idea, promoted by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Ukraine’s government actively sabotaged Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. A Ukrainian-American lawyer who consulted for the D.N.C. looked into the finances of Paul Manafort and spoke with Ukrainian embassy officials. But there appears to have been no organized Ukrainian government effort to intervene — certainly nothing comparable to the activities of Russian intelligence agencies ordered by Mr. Putin.

It is true that a Ukrainian legislator helped publicize documents on Mr. Manafort’s multimillion-dollar payments from a Ukrainian political party, leading to his resignation as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman. But the claim of Mr. Manafort’s wrongdoing turned out to be justified. He is now serving seven and a half years in prison for financial fraud and other crimes.

In May, Mr. Trump recalled the American ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2016, telling others she was scheming against his administration. She has denied it.

And Mr. Trump has repeatedly charged that Mr. Biden, who handled Ukrainian affairs as vice president, tried to get a prosecutor fired for investigating a Ukrainian energy company that paid his son, Hunter, handsomely as a board member despite a lack of experience in Ukraine. In fact, multiple countries were pressing for the firing of the prosecutor, who they thought was turning a blind eye to corruption.

“Now it seems like all of these conspiracy theories are merging into one,” Ms. Jankowicz said. She studies disinformation, she said, but Mr. Trump produced one claim she’d never come across.

“I do this for a living, and I’d never heard anyone say the servers were in Ukraine,” she said.

Twitter removed a video posted by Mr. Trump that showed a meme of Nickelbacker’s lead singer, edited as an attack on Joe Biden.

In the 27 months between Mr. Trump’s two citations of the CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory,it has survived despite many denials from CrowdStrike, the F.B.I. and people directly involved in the investigations. It has survived despite the fact that the D.N.C. put one of its hacked servers on display — not in Ukraine but in its Washington offices beside the filing cabinet pried open in 1972 by the Watergate burglars(and a photo of the two artifacts ran on The Times’s front page). It has survived despite the indictment prepared last year by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, laying out in extraordinary detail the actions of 12 named Russian military intelligence officers who hacked the D.N.C. and other election targets.

The speculation springs from what Mr. Trump has called a “big Dem scam”— the false notion that the F.B.I. never really investigated the D.N.C. hack. In fact, according to people directly involved, CrowdStrike was in regular contact with the bureau in spring 2016 as it examined dozens of servers used by both the D.N.C. and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

It is true, as Mr. Trump has often tweeted, that F.B.I. agents never took physical possession of the Democrats’ servers. But CrowdStrike supplied the F.B.I. with digital copies of the servers so that the bureau could assess the Russian malware infecting them. The Mueller investigation later confirmed CrowdStrike’s findings.

Still, the president has clung to the theory linking CrowdStrike, Ukraine and the D.N.C. servers despite the repeated efforts of his aides to dissuade him, Thomas Bossert, his former homeland security adviser, said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “The D.N.C. server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” he said. “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”

To go in search of the roots of Mr. Trump’s CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory is to travel the internet’s most peculiar provinces and the darkest threads on Twitter and Facebook. On 4chan and pro-Trump spaces on Reddit, on websites likeZeroHedge.com and Washington’s Blog, you can find plenty of speculation about evil manipulation by CrowdStrike and secret maneuvers by Ukrainians — often inflamed by Mr. Trump’s own statements.

Until the president’s statements, however, even internet speculation did not attribute CrowdStrike’s ownership to a rich Ukrainian or suggest that the D.N.C. servers were hidden in Ukraine.

George Eliason, an American journalist who lives in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists fought Ukrainian forces, has written extensively about what he considers to be a “coup attempt” against President Trump involving American and Ukrainian intelligence agencies and CrowdStrike. He said he did not know if his writings for obscure websites might have influenced the president.

“CrowdStrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove,” he wrote in an email. “Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the U.S. to take a hardline stance against Russia? Are they using CrowdStrike to carry this out?”

Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.

Pro-Trump media leaped last week to defend the president’s Ukraine theories. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show that Mr. Trump’s “reference to CrowdStrike, mark my words, is momentous,” though he did not say why.

And Russian state news outlets are always ready to cheer on Mr. Trump’s efforts to point the blame for the 2016 hack away from Moscow. On Sept. 25, after the White House released its memo on the Zelensky call,Russia’s Sputnik news website ran a story supporting Mr. Trump’s remarks.

The Sputnik article cited Mr. Eliason’s writingsand suggested that CrowdStrike might have framed Russia for the D.N.C. hack — if it occurred at all. It quoted a Twitter account called “The Last Refuge” declaring: “The D.N.C. servers were never hacked.”

All this mythmaking about the 2016 hack frustrates Robert Johnston, who was the lead investigator for CrowdStrike on the D.N.C. inquiry. Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and Cyber Command operator, said he could make no sense of Mr. Trump’s assertions.

“It doesn’t connect with anything in my experience,” he said. “I’d be interested in the president of Ukraine’s impression.”

Mr. Johnston, now chief executive of the cybersecurity company Adlumin, said he was weary of the conspiracies surrounding what he considered a straightforward conclusion. Having seen the digital fingerprints of Russian intelligence in earlier hacking cases, he felt there was little doubt about the identity of the perpetrators.

“I don’t know how you get to this point,” Mr. Johnston said of the fantasies Mr. Trump has promoted. “This is a story that just won’t die.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Tale of Sabotage Took Root in Oval Office.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html

TDB

https://www.thedailybeast.com/oan-trumps-new-favorite-channel-employs-kremlin-paid-journalist

no lnx

OF COURSE

Trump’s New Favorite Network Embraces Russian Propaganda

Kevin Poulsen

Rouz’s on-air reports for OAN include a wholly fabricated 2017 segment claiming Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa through her political action committee. Clinton, Rouz claimed falsely, gave antifa protesters $800,000 that “went toward things like bricks, hammers, bats, and chains.”

Other smears target billionaire financier George Soros, a longtime Kremlin bête noire. In one segment, Rouz amplified a thoroughly debunked claim that Soros collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, when the Jewish philanthropist was 14 years old. Another Rouz story accused Soros of secretly funding migrant caravans.

Kremlin propaganda sometimes sneaks into Rouz’s segments on unrelated matters, dropped in as offhand background information. A segment on the Syrian rescue workers known as the White Helmets references “allegations of the White Helmets’ involvement in military activities, executions, and numerous war atrocities,” but doesn’t disclose that those “allegations” were hoaxes that originated with Vladimir Putin and his proxies.

“This completes the merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media.”

— Clint Watts

A few months later, he emigrated to the U.S., settling in Los Angeles in the spring of 2015, where he played guitar for an indie rock band called White Tar.

“Oh shit, it's fucking Kristian! That's my ex-guitarist…”

— Jov Paradice

A former bandmate, whose stage name is Jov Paradice, told The Daily Beast that Rouz was secretive about his day job, except to say that he wrote articles about economics for a Russian company. In August 2016, Rouz worked for the Los Angeles PR firm the Hoyt Organization, according to a since-deleted tweet by the firm announcing his hire. He appears in an October 2016 photo on Hoyt’s Instagram feed, but isn’t readily apparent in subsequent photos. Hoyt didn’t respond to repeated email and telephone inquiries from The Daily Beast.

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Paradice said he and Rouz frequently clashed over their differing world views.

In August 2017, Rouz said he was leaving the band to accept a job offer in San Diego, Paradice recalls. It was only recently that Paradice discovered what that job was, when a Facebook friend posted a One America video purporting to document a link between antifa and ISIS terrorists.

Rouz joined OAN at a time when his Russian employer was coming under heightened scrutiny over its role in Putin’s election interference, and its efforts to expand its American influence.

[CHANNEL ZERO

The Hell of Working at Trump’s New Favorite Network

Kevin Poulsen]

In July 2017, Sputnik contracted with a struggling Washington, D.C.-area radio station to begin broadcasting Sputnik content 24 hours a day. Until then, the station played bluegrass music.

The move came just months after a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment named Sputnik, and its sister television outlet RT America, as players in Putin’s election-interference campaign. By September, the FBI was investigating Sputnik for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The next month, Twitter announced it would no longer accept ads from Sputnik or RT.

The FARA issue was resolved in November 2017, when Sputnik formally registered with the Justice Department as an agent of a foreign power.

One America pushes some of the same false stories as Sputnik and RT, but with none of the legal entanglements.

Founded and helmed by 77-year-old circuit-board millionaire Robert Herring Sr., OAN launched in 2013 as an answer to the chatty, opinionated content of mainstream cable-news channels—and a place for viewers too conservative for Fox News. Under Herring’s direction, the network embraced Trumpism enthusiastically, starting in 2016.

Though it’s available in only a handful of cable markets, OAN’s viewership includes some influential figures, including the president of the United States. According to Media Matters, Trump has fallen for at least two fake stories after seeing them on OAN.

Kevin Poulsen

Sr. National Security Correspondent

@kpoulsen

Kevin.Poulsen@thedailybeast.com

almost 1400 results, interesting to compare to cherrypick list in lawsuit?

https://sputniknews.com/search/?query=kristian+rouz

almost 1400 results, interesting to compar to cherrypick list in lawsuit?

https://sputniknews.com/search/?query=kristian+rouz

see rouz

dunno but jaylo headline banner

https://deadline.com/2019/09/rachel-maddow-msnbc-one-america-news-network-1202729817/

One America News Network, one of the rivals to Fox News for right-leaning viewers, filed a defamation claim against Comcast, MSNBC and Rachel Maddow on Monday, over Maddow’s claim that the conservative channel “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego (read it here) claims that the defendants retaliated against One America because its president, Charles Herring, called out MSNBC’s parent company. Comcast, “for their anti-competitive censorship” in refusing to carry the conservative channel. In an email to Comcast’s president of content acquisition, Gregory Rigdon, Herring had sought carriage on Comcast’s cable platforms and stated his concern that the cable giant “opposes including another conservative counter channel to counter MSNBC,” according to the lawsuit.

A week later, Maddow opened her show by telling her audience that OANN “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda,” according to the lawsuit.

“Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said in the July 22 segment.

Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess who represents OANN, said in a statement: “One America is wholly owned, operated and financed by the Herring family in San Diego. They are as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and they’re going to answer for it in a court of law.”

Maddow made the claim after the Daily Beast ran a story by Kevin Poulsen reporting that one of One America’s on-air reporters, Kristian Brunovich Rouz, also was on the payroll for Sputnik, the Kremlin news outlet. One America then demanded a retraction.

But One America said in the lawsuit that “Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive approximately $40 if the articles were accepted.”

The lawsuit seeks more than $10 million in damages.

A spokeswoman for MSNBC did not immediately return a request for comment.

ref

LOUIS R. MILLER (State Bar No. 54141) smiller@millerbarondess.com

AMNON Z. SIEGEL (State Bar No. 234981) asiegel@millerbarondess.com

MILLER BARONDESS, LLP 1999 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1000 Los Angeles, California 90067 Telephone: (310) 552-4400 Facsimile: (310) 552-8400 Attorneys for Plaintiff Herring Networks, Inc

...

(“Rouz”). Rouz collects and analyzes articles from other sources and writes articles based on those sources for OAN. Rouz’s articles go through OAN’s editorial process before they are published. Rouz does not have decision-making authority with respect to the content that is aired on OAN. 24. Rouz was born in the Ukraine. When he moved to the United States, he had no friends or family here. To make ends meet, Rouz began writing articles for Sputnik News in 2014. Sputnik News is affiliated with the Russian government, but Rouz chose the topics and viewpoints of the articles he wrote for Sputnik News. Rouz’s articles provided updates about various topics in global economics and international finance. 25. The headlines of Rouz’s articles for Sputnik News include: “N. Ireland Pessimistic About UK Economy Amid Weaker Regional Growth – Poll”; “South Africa’s Struggling Utility Eskom Raises $361 Mln to Keep Lights On”; “Japan Q1 GDP Beats Expectations Despite Weak Consumer Spending”; and “Turkish Central Bank Relaxes Policy, Warns Against FX Purchases to Support Lira.” 26. Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive approximately $40 if the articles were accepted. 27. On July 22, 2019, the Daily Beast—an online publication—published an article entitled, “Trump’s New Favorite Channel Employs Kremlin-Paid Journalist.” The article was written by Kevin Poulsen (“Poulsen”), also known as “Dark Dante”—the first computer hacker ever to be charged with espionage against the United States government. 28. Poulsen spent 17 months as a fugitive from the law before being arrested in 1991. In 1995, Poulson pleaded guilty to seven counts of conspiracy, fraud and intercepting wire communications. He received the longest prison sentence ever for a computer hacker at that time. United States law enforcement

...

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One America News Network (OANN) demanded retractions from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and The Daily Beast, threatening a lawsuit, after both suggested links to the network and Russian propaganda.

Kevin Poulsen of The Daily Beast wrote an article stating OANN’s Kristian Rouz “appears on segments for One America News Network – ironic given he is working for a Russian outlet fingered in the 2016 election attack.” That same day, Maddow stated on “The Rachel Maddow Show” that OANN “really, literally is Russia propaganda.”

Rouz does write for Sputnik, a Russian government-owned news outlet. He has “never had decision-making authority with respect to the content that is aired on OAN,” one cease-and-desist letter reads.

“His outside work for other media outlets has no relation to — or bearing on — his work for OAN,” according to a cease-and-desist letter.

Poulsen quoted former FBI agent Clint Watts, who suggested OANN employing Rouz means the outlet has merged with “Russian state-sponsored propaganda.”

“This completes the merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media,” Watts said. “We used to think of it as ‘They just have the same views’ or ‘They use the same story leads.’ But now they have the same personnel.”

Miller Barondess, LLP is handling the case against on behalf of OANN.

“This is vile, sensationalistic reporting,” Miller wrote in a press release. “These defamatory statements must be retracted immediately. One America News Network has no connection to the Russian government or any other government — no connection whatsoever, financial or otherwise.”

“Kremlin propaganda sometimes sneaks into Rouz’s segments on unrelated matters, dropped in as offhand background information,” Poulsen wrote July 22, in which he referred to OANN as being endorsed by President Donald Trump.

If the stories broadcast by the Trump-endorsed One America News Network sometimes look like outtakes from a Kremlin trolling operation, there may be a reason. One of the on-air reporters at the 24-hour network is a Russian national on the payroll of the Kremlin’s official propaganda outlet, Sputnik.

The article also reads that OANN is “increasingly dedicated to conspiracy theories and fake news, and became overtly supportive of Russia’s global agenda.”

Maddow described OANN as a “boutique, little news outlet that is designed specifically for Trump mega-fans. It’s called One America … News Network.” She referred to The Daily Beast article during her show.

“We literally learned today that that outlet that the president is promoting shares staff with the Kremlin,” Maddow said July 22. “I mean, what? It’s an easy thing to throw out … ‘Hey, that looks like Russian propaganda.’ In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right-wing news outlet in America really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

OANN’s lawyers have given Maddow and The Daily Beast until Aug. 15 to retract its statements, according to the cease-and-desist requests.

Poulsen declined to comment. Maddow and The Daily Beast did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Shelby Talcott is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.