disinformation

SEE DISINFO 2

disambig but could be bak or even disaggregate?

originally for russian, but we  grow our own trump alt fact post -truth, qanon

adding misinfo 10 21 domestic

see meddling active measures

elected to gop in SC

russia hackers amplified or created an amp/escalator?

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-qanon-cyber-idUKL1N2HD00Z

disputed see homegrown?

QAnon received earlier boost from Russian accounts on Twitter, archives show

By Joseph Menn

Nov 2 (Reuters)- Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts.

:{

}:

Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, reut.rs/2TFWoWc, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters. bit.ly/2HTReUh

:{

}:

A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement as it started, early in the previous month.

From November 2017 on, QAnon was the single most frequent hashtag tweeted by accounts that Twitter has since identified as Russian-backed, a Reuters analysis of the archive shows, with the term used some 17,000 times.

The archives contain more than 4,000 accounts that Twitter suspended for spreading Russian government disinformation in 2018 and 2019 but preserved for researchers.

The trove shows that some of the Russian accounts tweeted about QAnon’s most important popularizer even before the anonymous figure known as Q emerged, then rewarded her with more promotion when she put videos about Q on YouTube.

Asked about support for QAnon, the Russian embassy in Washington said Moscow does not interfere in U.S. politics.

“Malicious activity in the information space contradicts the principles of Russian foreign policy, national interests and our understanding of interstate relations,” a spokesman said.

A current Twitter executive said Russian accounts are not driving the present iteration of QAnon, which has expanded to include baseless claims about COVID-19 and other issues.

The original posts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory appeared in late October 2017, purporting to be from a Trump insider with “Q” security clearance who said Hillary Clinton faced arrest and her allies were running a massive child-sex ring.

The fantasy was confined to a small piece of the internet for a few days until conservative video blogger Tracy Diaz, known online as TracyBeanz, began to post regular videos promoting it. She soon began amassing undisclosed donors and now has more than 10 million video views on YouTube.

A few Russian accounts had been retweeting Diaz as far back as April 2017, according to the archives of suspended accounts. After her first Q video on Nov. 3, the number of Russian tweets pushing Diaz’ handle surged to 40 monthly through the following spring, the archives show.

Diaz did not respond to an email seeking comment.

It remains unclear how much the Russians influenced Diaz before she hit it big. But former Twitter security staffers said a handful of accounts that tweeted to Diaz from mid-2017 illustrated the extreme difficulty of detecting covert influence.

Now suspended for undisclosed reasons or abandoned by their operators, these accounts claimed to be American but displayed unusual interest in Russian issues. The visible tweets between them and Diaz were first flagged to Reuters by open-source researcher Chris Scott.

One account called CrusadersPost retweeted obscure Russian officials and appeared to be the first account to use the term “Q Anon” on social media, on Nov. 2, according to people with access to all public tweets.

CrusadersPost had reached out to Diaz in April to wish her a happy birthday and offer to help her with a new project.

“YOU ROCK,” she replied. The account also encouraged Diaz to publicize MegaAnon, which preceded and resembled QAnon.

Another Diaz fan ran an account called SlicksTweetz, which the banned Russian accounts mentioned 871 times. The day of her debut Q video, Diaz publicly thanked SlicksTweetz for sharing it.

:{

}:

A week later, as she worked on new videos, she replied to him: “There are so many connections—that’s a good one I hadn’t seen yet :).” (Reporting by Joseph Menn. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Steve Orlofsky)

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.

300 pp bk mention koch network

“Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered”: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy Nancy MacLean

...The program offers a case study in corporate propaganda. In its bid to convince listeners that the American way of life depends on the free market – and that any move toward social democracy presents a threat – the show dramatizes argumentative and rhetorical procedures that continue to shape American political culture. Chapter 5 by Nancy MacLean examines an important source of the strategic disinformation now rife in American public life: the Koch network of extreme right donors, allied organizations, and academic grantees. She argues that these architects of the radical transformation of our institutions and legal system have adopted the tactic of disinformation in the knowledge that the hard-core libertarian agenda was extremely unpopular, and therefore required stealth to succeed. The chapter tells the story of how Charles Koch and his inner circle, having determined in the 1970s that changes significant enough to enable a “constitutional revolution” (in the words of the political economist James McGill Buchanan) would be needed to protect capitalism from democracy, then went about experimenting to make this a reality. In the 1980s, they first incubated ideas for misleading the public to move their agenda forward, as shown by the strategy for Social Security privatization that Buchanan recommended to Koch’s Cato Institute, and by the operations of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the network’s first astroturf – or fake grassroots – organizing effort. Subsequent practices of active disinformation by this network, for a project that could not succeed by persuasion and organizing alone, become more comprehensible when understood as driven by a mix of messianic dogma and self-interest. Later cases include tobacco “scholarship” for hire by Buchanan’s colleagues at George Mason University to deter the public health campaign against smoking; climate science denial to stop action on global warming; promotion of the myth of mass voter fraud to leverage racism to restrict the electorate; assurances of the benefits of an Article V Constitutional Convention, restricted to a few pre-announced changes; and the use of concocted memes of violent mobs

requiring restraint, in order to win passage of new legislation to criminalize protest, particularly against the fossil fuel industry. The next section bridges the historical roots of the problem with the challenges of making contemporary policy to regulate these abuses of transparent communication. Chapter 6 by Dave Karpf explores how online conspiracy theories, disinformation, and propaganda have changed over the twenty-five-year history of the World Wide Web. Drawing a historical comparison between digital disinformation in the 1996 presidential election and the 2016 presidential election, the chapter explores how the mechanisms of online diffusion, the political economy of journalism and propaganda, and the slow, steady erosion of load-bearing norms among political elites have combined to create a much more dangerous context today than in decades past. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how technology platforms, political elites, and journalistic organizations might respond to the current state of online disinformation. Chapter 7 by Heidi Tworek explores five historical patterns in information manipulation and suggests how these patterns can guide contemporary policy-making about the Internet

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/1F4751119C7C4693E514C249E0F0F997/9781108843058AR.pdf/The_Disinformation_Age.pdf?event-type=FTLA

toxic ten

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

Misinformation and disinformation' have caused COVID-19 infections to 'soar' in Alaska: Emergency room doctor

Alex Henderson

October 28, 2021

At least 75% of U.S.-based adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have been either partially or fully vaccinated for COVID-19. But in Alaska, the Mayo Clinic reports, the number is only 59...

==

an 1021

Intelligence expert Malcolm Nance spoke to MSNBC about the ways in which the Russian government are able to wage a war against a country without even firing a shot.

Host Maria Teresa Kumar noted that President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to have taken up the playbook of Russia and created their own propaganda machine. As a Russia propaganda expert, Nance agreed, saying that the plot Russia concocted in the early 2000s, the Gerasimov Doctrine, handed Trump and his team the plan.

Nance explained that it was a tactic Russians used where they combined an information warfare strategy where they flood a country with so much misinformation that a country would welcome an invasion without a war.

"That didn't really happen" in the United States, Nance explained. "What the Russians did in the year 2016 is they created an information bubble in which the Trump campaign was seen as friendly and then, the Trump data team took that information, including stolen information from the Democratic National Committee, and created their own information sphere. Once the Russian bubble was popped after the 2016 election, the Trump team took the ball and ran with it. The Russians barely have to do anything."

Nance explained that the Trump team and their control over conservative television stations like Fox News and OAN enabled them to indoctrinate their own followers into believing some of the most insane things ever crafted, "to the point where they view it."

He talked about a kind of radicalization that gives Trump's supporters the confidence their actions are not only patriotic but that "violence is the only solution and they're carrying out a second Lexington, a second Concord, as your other guests said, 1776 2.0."

"They think they're restoring the United States, despite the fact they are physically attacking the United States, and believe me, the way that ammunition prices went up within the last year on the public market, I think these people really believe they're going to affect the revolution at some point," said Nance.

Earlier in the conversation, Nance addressed Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin holding up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a "peaceful protest" and treatingitems used in the attack as their own kind of religious relic or a "talisman" as Nance characterized. "As if it's going to give them some connection deeper to Donald Trump."

"It all flies in the face of their own storyline, their story arc in which it was Antifa and Black Lives Matter that carried out the attack," said Nance. "Now, on some signs, we see them actually not only recognizing that they've carried out this event but, as I said in the video, a peaceful protest at the Capitol and now carrying an American flag, which took part in that. It's absolutely disgraceful that any of this is happening. But what you're seeing, it is a strategy by the Republicans and Trump play out where they're now embracing the popularism of that violence."

See his full take in the video below:

===

omg aha: polarization disinformation Fox, oann, facebook

1021

an

The far right wing cable network One America News (OAN) is funded almost entirely by telecom and tech giant AT&T.

OAN, which is even more far right than Fox News or Newsmax, served as a mouthpiece for the Trump administration and is being sued in a $1.6 billion defamation case by Dominion Voting Systems. The extremist network regularly promotes far right wing conspiracy theories as it attacks Democrats and the left.

OAN, according to aReuters special report, is "at the center of a bitter national divide over politics and truth."

But it's how OAN got there that is disturbing for the AT&T brand.

"AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN," Reuters notes, adding: "Ninety percent of OAN's revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant."

AT&T, the world's largest telecom company and majority owner of DirecTV, has funneled "about $57 million" into OAN. The "news" network's founder and CEO, Robert Herring Sr., "has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network's value 'would be zero.'"

"If Herring Networks, for instance, was to lose or not be renewed on DirecTV, the company would go out of business tomorrow," OAN lawyer Patrick Nellies told the court, a transcript shows.

How did a far right wing "propaganda machine," as The Daily Beast called OAN in 2019, come into being, seemingly overnight?

"They told us they wanted a conservative network," Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. "They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one."

Numerous reports have documented OAN's lies, propaganda, and mistruths, yet despite – or because of – that, Reuters notes, over a two-year period "Trump touted the network, known as @OANN online, to his 88 million Twitter followers at least 120 times."

Read the entire Reuters report here.

kid killer teen suicide?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/facebook-teen/

salon

It's been a rough week for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Ire against the 37-year-old Harvard dropout and his social media platform has been one of the rare points of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill this week as revelation after revelation about Facebook's pitfalls continues to trickle out, many from a series of internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Lawmakers are now calling for Zuckerberg to testify in front of Congress, in particular about a number of internal reports cited by the Journal that determined Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, had a marked negative impact on young women.

Researchers for the company reportedly found in March of 2020 that "32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse." In another study, Facebook found that more than 40% of teenage Instagram users in the U.S. and U.K. reported feeling "unattractive", and said the feeling began on the app.

This information was allegedly shared with Zuckerberg personally last year during a presentation — though he didn't mention any of those findings at a Congressional hearing just a few months ago on the impacts of social media on children, saying simply, "Social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits."

When asked point-blank whether Facebook researches the effects of social media he added, "I believe the answer is yes."

A group of Democrats, including Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Reps. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass., wrote a letter to Zuckerberg asking him to scrap plans to roll out a version of Instagram specifically for children.

Another bipartisan group of Senators, announced a probe of told CNBC Tuesdaythey are "in touch with a Facebook whistleblower and will use every resource at our disposal to investigate what Facebook knew and when they knew it — including seeking further documents and pursuing witness testimony."

The head of public policy at Instagram, Karina Newton, responded to the allegations in a blog post highlighting research by Pew Internet on teens in the US that stated"81% of teens said that social media makes them feel more connected to their friends, while 26% reported social media makes them feel worse about their lives."Newton also said the company is researching ways to shift users away from repeatedly looking at certain topics that might "contribute to negative social comparison."

Among the other pitfalls the Journal uncovered at Facebook include reports that cartel activity on both Facebook and Instagram has gone unchecked, and that worldwide, the response to posts that are against the terms of use is "inadequate" at best and at worst, is non-existent. Other reports found that while Zuckerberg himself wanted to use Facebook to get America vaccinated, the platform was a breeding ground for anti-vaxxers, who "swarmed" the WHO and UNICEF pages with comments against the vaccine. The MIT Technology Review also obtained an internal report that foreign troll farms were able to reach more than 140 million Americans a month with misinformation leading up to last year's election, a development that surely had an effect on the millions of Americans who still believe, without any real evidence, that President Joe Biden's victory was somehow illegitimate.

The news also highlights how the ownership structure of Facebook essentially allows Zuckerberg to rule by decree — despite the protests of others both within and outside the publicly traded company. Zuckerberg holds 57.9% of the voting power at the company and is both chairman of the board and CEO, meaning there's not much anyone else can do to promote greater transparency or big-picture changes that they believe may be better for society.

"At Facebook, the annual general meeting is largely just theater," Robert Bartlett, a law professor at UC Berkeley who teaches securities regulation and corporate finance, told Marketwatch this week.

But even without voting power, shareholders of the company are still pushing the company to make changes that would benefit society as a whole — part of a trend that has seen "activist investors" take greater control over behemoth companies that have long operated with one goal and one goal only: profit.

The most high profile example came earlier this year when an "activist" hedge fund managed to win three seats on the board of ExxonMobil — the result of continued backlash against the company for the role it plays in climate change.

It remains unclear whether Mark Zuckerberg will make any changes at Facebook as a result of this week's news.

721 sorta

neglected but see GUK leaked report on putin meddling

--==

an 721

n o lnx

The New York Times profiles 'most influential' purveyor of online COVID vaccine misinformation

Dartagnan and Daily Kos July 25, 2021

Many of us who maintain a social media presence have at least one acquaintance, "Facebook friend" or real-life, actual friend who has in the past year shared some type of official-sounding, medical jargon-laden post questioning the value of the COVID-19 vaccines — or worse, directly asserting or implying that such vaccines are ineffective, harmful, deadly, or will lead to untold health problems.

https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_750e5af82aea4920a270b1c5a8b094c2.pdf

According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a U.S./UK non-profit dedicated to fighting online disinformation and hate, nearly two-thirds of the anti-vaccine propaganda peddled in online forums and social media can be traced to exactly twelve individuals, colloquially labelled the "Disinformation Dozen." If you are someone who spends a significant time in social media forums, the chances are high that you have seen, scrolled through or otherwise had some awareness of their activity online, be it in your local school board's Facebook feed or other community sounding boards where supposedly informed individuals trade opinions and information.

According to the New York Times, and as confirmed in the CCDH's comprehensive report profiling these individuals, the number one purveyor of this vaccine misinformation is a gentleman named Joseph Mercola, described by the Times as an osteopathic physician. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he currently headquarters his company in the state of Florida, which, as USA Today's Nada Hassanein illustrates, is rapidly emerging as the nation's predominant "hotspot" for spiking COVID-19 infections, almost entirely among those who have refused to be vaccinated against the virus.

On Saturday the Times' Sheera Frankel profiled Dr. Mercola and cited multiple examples of his work, beginning with an article he published that appeared on Facebook in February. As Frankel reports, that article, clocking in at 3400 words, "declared coronavirus vaccines were "a medical fraud" and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease." The article (now deleted by Facebook) purportedly claimed that COVID-19 vaccines "alter[ed] your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch." Spread by other anti-vaccine activists and translated into multiple languages, these assertions eventually reached 400,000 Facebook viewers.

Mercola, described as an "internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens," has, according to Frankel's reporting, published approximately 600 articles on Facebook since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Mercola is the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement," said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. "He's a master of capitalizing on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, to grow his movement."

As the vaccination effort in this country approaches what can charitably be described as peak acceptance, the focus of many in the media has justifiably been on such political propaganda outlets such as Fox News, whose motivation for disseminating such lies can be attributed to political ends. It has become increasingly obvious, however, that many of those who refuse to be vaccinated (and thus contribute to the spread of COVID-19 through mutations such as the current delta variant) are having their political preconceptions against vaccinations reinforced through pseudo-medical misinformation they read online.

Several of the individuals profiled in the USA Today article (linked above via Yahoo News) illustrate the huge role social media has taken in fueling and perpetuating the COVID-19 pandemic in this country. As one physician in Florida's Calhoun county -- one of the epicenters of the recent surge in the state's COVID cases, with a current vaccination rate of only 23% -- observes, it is virtually impossible to dissuade people from believing something they read on social media about these vaccines, particularly when it carries the imprimatur of medical expertise.

"We're a small community. We all know people who passed away from COVID. When someone passes away, it's people we know," Davis said. "But I still don't feel like that overrides what people have seen on social media."

Davis has heard it all – from the myths that the vaccine will turn people magnetic to the virus being a hoax. She tries to quell fears, countering the false claims with research and data but patients often shut the conversation down.

The responses she and other medical providers in Florida hear from people who refuse the vaccine typically include assertions that the vaccines are untested, "experimental", and that there is too much contradictory information about them online. Significantly, some of these opinions are being influenced by medical providers themselves; one gentleman quoted in the USA Today article was told by his wife, a registered nurse, that "the vaccines hadn't been studied enough."

As Frankel's article points out, the general scientific and medical illiteracy most of the US population provides the perfect breeding ground for purveyors and profiteers of unreliable information. Mercola is a case in point:

[R]ather than directly stating online that vaccines don't work, Dr. Mercola's posts often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance.

According to Frankel's article, Mercola, who originally practiced in Illinois, began in the 1990's to shift his practice towards alternative medicine and promoting natural health cures and treatments. A prolific author, he has even had a book on the New York Times' bestseller list. As his fame (and wealth) have increased, he has developed a multinational presence through various consulting companies and offices. His selling tactics, bolstered by a Facebook following of over 1.7 million (he has a Spanish language page with one million followers as well), resort to a routine pattern, according to Frankel:

It starts with making unproven and sometimes far-fetched health claims, such as that spring mattresses amplify harmful radiation, and then selling products online — from vitamin supplements to organic yogurt — that he promotes as alternative treatments.

As Frankel reports, both Twitter and Facebook have taken down and issued cautions about several of Mercola's postings, He has been sued by the Federal Trade Commission for purveying disinformation regarding the cancer-reducing qualities of tanning beds, and he has received a warning from the FDA regarding his claims of about the efficacy of vitamin treatments in treating COVID-19 infection, and for selling unapproved health products. None of these actions appear to have dissuaded him from continuing to post misinformation. Frankel cites a recent example of Mercola continuing to raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccines through his social media feed.

As noted above, Mercola is hardly the only one responsible for vaccine denialism; he is simply has the biggest audience. It's clear though, from what is happening on the ground in Florida, for example, with the widespread refusal among a susceptible, medically ignorant population to accept these vaccines (even in the face of increased infections and deaths), that this country faces an almost perfect storm of disinformation.

Fear is indeed the "mind-killer." By cynically downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic over the past year and a half, Republicans like Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and their allies in the US. Congress and state legislatures have fostered an environment where people's fears and doubts take precedence over science. Those fears and doubts are then exponentially amplified and reinforced by what they read on social media. The anti-vaccine movement has taken full advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to sow doubt and regurgitate false or misleading information.

What we are witnessing right now in this country is the predictable outcome of these two insidious, destructive, and wholly complementary narratives, almost in real time.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Research exposes how right-wing media misled viewers about the ... ›

Senator Ron Johnson booted from YouTube after violating medical ... ›

WaPo torches Ron Johnson with a full rundown of his dangerous ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Coronavirus: The human cost of virus misinformation - BBC News ›

How misinformation is distorting COVID policies and behaviors ›

Facebook and YouTube are still full of covid misinformation - The ... ›

//? any russion involvement?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop-2653812354/

me

Since the onset of the pandemic, Republicans have viewed the coronavirus through a relatively different lens than the rest of the country. As the months progressed, not only did their political views shape their belief systems about many aspects of science and the virus but also their opposition to the vaccine.

Although former President Donald Trump has adamantly demanded credit for the COVID vaccine, ironically Republicans have been the most apprehensive to get vaccinated despite blindly following the former president on many other key issues.

According to The New York Times, the Republican "wave of opposition to COVID vaccines" has accelerated in recent months due to the onslaught of **misinformation**perpetuated by conservative, right-wing news outlets. In fact, some Republican lawmakers have even embraced conspiracy theories that have influenced their push-back against initiatives pitched in order to improve vaccination rates across various states.

"A wave of opposition to Covid vaccines has risen within the Republican Party, as conservative news outlets produce a steady diet of misinformation about vaccines and some G.O.P. lawmakers invite anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists to testify in statehouses and Congress. ["expert" woman magney key on skin]With very little resistance from party leaders, these Republican efforts have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation."

For example, in the state of Tennessee, Republican lawmakers have managed to deter public health officials' efforts to get children vaccinated across the board. From the COVID vaccine to routine inoculations, the lawmakers' guidance prohibits health officials from sending reminders to students. Instead, lawmakers are wanting those reminders rerouted to parents.

On July 13, Tennessee's Public Health Department [head fired?!] spokesperson Sarah Tanksley explained how the department is making changes to incorporate lawmakers' new guidance, according to The Tennessean. She said, "the agency's online vaccine scheduling system also sends out automated reminder emails, but the agency is working to alter the system so reminders never go to minors and are instead rerouted to their parents."

Currently, Republican lawmakers are pushing back against the Biden administration's push to implement a door-to-door vaccination strategy in order to get low-income Americans vaccinated.

"Think about what those mechanisms could be used for," Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) said condemning the Biden administration's proposed initiative as he baselessly added, "They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could go door-to-door to take your Bibles."

However, a small number of Republican lawmakers have pushed back against the widespread opposition to vaccines. "We don't control conservative media figures so far as I know — at least I don't," Sen. Mitt Romney(R-Utah) told the publication. "That being said, I think it's an enormous error for anyone to suggest that we shouldn't be taking vaccines."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• GOP chair tweets proof that Biden was right about Trump's COVID ... ›
• New polling reveals GOP governors' disastrous handling of COVID ... ›
• The GOP's pro-COVID plan is straight out of its usual playbook ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

• How Many Lawmakers Got The Coronavirus Or Self-Quarantined ... ›
• Kristi Noem criticizes GOP governors who enacted Covid-19 ... ›
• Some G.O.P. Leaders Speak Out in Favor of Covid Vaccines - The ... ›

fbi 250K$ reward for KK? trms

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/trump-russia-campaign/

max Boot, a Russian-American author and historian and a fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations,says the U.S. Intel Community's just-released report on Russia's attack on the 2020 presidential election is "evidence of cooperation" – at least – between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

The report details that **Russian President Vladimir Putin** once again interfered in the election, again to help President Donald Trump, and to hurt now-President Joe Biden.

"I would say this is certainly evidence," Boot says, "it may be evidence of collusion, but it's definitely evidence of cooperation and congruence between the Russians and the Trump campaign."

Boot praised the Biden administration for authorizing the release of the report, which he says Americans would not have seen under the Trump administration, while singling out Acting Trump DNI and DNI Rick Grinnell and John Ratcliffe, who "consistently tried to minimize and downplay Russian election interference."

Importantly, Boot notes the report shows "just how closely the Russian messaging during the election echoed the messaging of the Trump campaign of Fox News and this kind of whole right wing media industrial complex."

"It's fascinating to see the extent to which the Russians were pushing the same messages about alleged Biden corruption, about his supposedly corrupt son, about you can't trust mail-in ballots, that the Democratic Party is trying to interfere with the election. These were the things that Trump was saying, but these were also the things that the Russians were saying, and in fact, the report highlights the close ties between Russian agents of influence like Andrii Derkach from Ukraine. Ukraine and Rudy Giuliani the president's lawyer, Konstantin Kilimnik is another one, who is a former business partner of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, so these ties are a copious and disturbing and to use a word we haven't heard in a few years, I would say this is certainly evidence. If not, it may be evidence of collusion, but it's definitely evidence of cooperation and and congruence between the Russians and the Trump campaign."

Watch...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/propaganda-2020/

long]

partisan disinformation to undermine 2020's presidential election shadowed every step of the voting process last year but took an unprecedented turn when the earliest false claims morphed into intricate conspiracies as Election Day passed and President Trump worked to subvert the results, according to two of the nation's top experts tracking the election propaganda.

At the general election's outset, as states wrapped up their primaries and urged voters to use mailed-out ballots in response to the pandemic, false claims began surfacing online—in tweets, social media posts, text messages, reports on websites, videos and memes—targeting the stage in the electoral process that was before voters. These attacks on the nuts and bolts of voting, from registration to the steps to obtain and cast a ballot, began as "claims of hacking and voter fraud… [that] honed [in] on specific events," said Matt Masterson, who helped lead the Department of Homeland Security's election security team.

"This is a lot of what we talked about with you at CISA [the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] in the lead-up [to Election Day], anticipating that were there were problems experienced, and then in the contested elections, those would be used to blow out of proportion or lie about what was actually taking place," Masterson said, speaking to the nation's state election directors in early February at a winter 2021 conference.

But as November 3's Election Day approached and the vote-counting continued afterward in presidential battleground states, Masterson and a handful of teams working inside and outside of government to trace and track disinformation, and to urge online platforms and sources to curb their false content, saw an unexpected development. The narrowly focused threads that attacked earlier steps in the process of running elections swapped out purported villains and protagonists and became a full-blown conspiratorial tapestry attacking the results.

"They all got combined into one big narrative… one large lie to try to undermine confidence in the election," said Masterson, whose presentation at the National Association of State Election Directors' (NASED) meeting traced this evolution.

"Misinformation is the frontier in election security and election integrity," said Aaron Wilson, senior director for election security at the Center for Internet Security, which tracked 209 cases of misleading or deliberately false attacks on voting, at the same NASED forum.

Early Predictable Attacks

Masterson's and Wilson's presentations were some of the most detailed analyses yet tracing the evolution of propagandistic attacks on 2020's voting process and election administration. The Stanford Internet Observatory, where Masterson is a fellow, will release a full report—including naming the biggest purveyors of 2020 election disinformation, both the platforms and their highest-volume users—later this winter.

Election officials knew they would be targets for partisan misinformation (mistaken claims) and disinformation (intentionally distorted claims) in 2020. Their first lines of defense, following the cyber intrusions by Russia in 2016, were hardening their infrastructure—the computers that run elections—and creating clearinghouses to rapidly communicate about threats and responses among the nation's more than 8,000 election jurisdictions. Masterson and Wilson led efforts within this sphere, where, by all accounts, 2020 saw no major cybersecurity breaches.

But while election officials were pleased with the steps they were taking inside their state and local offices, the outside attacks on the nuts and bolts of voting kept building during the general election. The early attacks were narrowly focused but shrewd, noted Wilson, who said election disinformation's purveyors exploited the public's lack of knowledge of how elections are run. As Masterson noted, the initial wave cited procedural steps to claim voter fraud and hacking.

For example, as voting rights groups sent absentee ballot applications to voters in swing states, posts appeared on social media falsely stating that voters—and dead people—were receiving multiple ballots, Wilson said. As states put up online voter registration portals to assist voters during the pandemic, online posts falsely asserted that voter information could be sabotaged—altered by political opponents to block would-be voters. When early in-person voting began, false claims erupted about when and where to vote, using ballot drop boxes, the results (before there were any), and votes being thrown out.

"A theme that permeated the misinformation that was reported to us was that it really resulted from or took advantage of people's lack of knowledge of how elections are run," Wilson said.

In the week before Election Day and in its immediate aftermath, the volume of misinformation and disinformation increased. Half of CIS's cases emerged in this period. As the process shifted to casting ballots and counting votes, more conspiratorial narratives emerged where the vote-counting process became the target—and the villains were swapped to fit the new storyline.

Masterson offered two examples of this transition. The first showed how ex-President Trump's fervent supporters rapidly embraced the false claim that Trump votes were being disqualified because of the pens they used to mark their ballots. The second example showed how older false claims were updated and expanded in ways not seen in prior election propaganda.

More Than Echo Chambers

The first example was "Sharpiegate," which emerged on November 4, a day after Election Day.

"Sharpiegate was, of course, the claim that using Sharpies [pens] on ballots either invalidated the ballots or the votes weren't counted," said Masterson. "It originated in Arizona. And what you saw was these messages really begin to take off. Of the 100 messages that were shared [on Twitter], they got 200,000 or more retweets, or likes, or furtherances."

Within hours, fact-check organizations like PolitiFact posted responses on Twitter, he said. But those posts barely drew more than 10,000 viewers on November 4 and the next day, whereas the "#Sharpiegate" retweets escalated to 20 times that volume. Masterson said Sharpiegate showed "how quickly a narrative can take off, and despite really good efforts to push back, how fast people will latch onto a false or misleading narrative."

The episode didn't stop there—and showed how the architecture of online communications amplified a patently false claim to an audience primed to receive it.

"It started in Arizona, but it didn't take much time to then have those claims alleged in other states, other jurisdictions, Michigan specifically, even if the same [voting] systems, the same pens, Sharpies, weren't used at all," Masterson said.

Election officials did not sit idly by. The secretaries of state in Arizona and Michigan, and county election departments in those states, all responded with their own tweets on November 4, he said. Their rebuttals took the best form at dispelling misinformation: first stating facts, then addressing the disinformation's claims, and then laying out other information, he said.

Notably, two Arizona NBC TV affiliates reported on the fabricated controversy and posted on its Twitter page, "Sharpies do not invalidate ballots," Masterson recounted, showing slides of the posts. "Those are two local television stations pushing back, offering facts, [yet] along the side there, in the comments, people are basically saying, 'You're lying,' 'You're incorrect,' 'You don't know what we are talking about…' 'You're covering it up.'"

Masterson then turned to his second case study, which showed "the building of the conspiracy or narrative around a fraudulent election."

Hammer and Scorecard Becomes Dominion

Masterson started with a November 2018 post on a social media page for QAnon, which is an increasingly popular and layered far-right conspiracy that, among other things, baselessly accuses leading Democrats of operating pedophile rings and drinking the blood of children. The 2018 post includes "claims or theories—false, incorrect—that DHS [the Department of Homeland Security—where Masterson was a senior adviser for election security] was putting watermarks and isotopes on ballots in order to track those ballots to track voter fraud."

"It was not new to 2020. But it built. It grew. The narrative got more and more complex as it went on," he said. "And 'Ballotgate' became a phrase that started with that tighter conversation around how DHS was going to track voter fraud and crack down on it, and began to be used to describe any claims of any manipulation of any ballots… which then grew into 'Hammer and Scorecard."

"For those of you not familiar, Hammer and Scorecard was a claim that there were two pieces of software that U.S. intelligence had developed to use internationally to rig [voting] systems, and the two pieces of software allowed for the manipulation of the systems in it," he continued. There were several versions of this claim. One said that foreign governments were using the software against Trump. Another claimed that federal officials were using this software against Trump. Another blamed unspecified domestic "bad actors."

The "obviously, demonstrably false" Hammer and Scorecard story drew hundreds of thousands of retweets and shares in the week after Election Day, Masterson noted. By the next weekend, the related traffic on Parler—an unregulated platform favored by Trump supporters until it was taken offline in January—escalated into hundreds of thousands of messages, as traced hashtags. Those conversations then began to blend with claims that Dominion Voting Systems, whose balloting and counting machines were used in a few swing states, were secretly stealing Trump votes.

"Hammer and Scorecard morphs into, instead of just this CIA-, intelligence community-focused theory, to then begin to talk about Dominion and the various conspiracies about Dominion," he said. Theories about unadvertised counting features on voting systems being used by insiders to steal votes have circulated among the political left for two decades, Masterson noted.

"But now they got all combined into one big narrative that used Hammer and Scorecard, and Dominion, and other systems into one large lie to try to undermine confidence in the election," he said, "to the point… [where] there were conversations [by Republican legislators in Arizona] about the seizure of voting systems. That should make any state election official's skin crawl and shudder. Because none of it is true, and yet there's this push to use the lie to undermine the results completely."

More Transparency, More Propaganda

Masterson and Wilson discussed other 2020 trends that had unexpected consequences that fed the stolen election narrative. By many measures—live video streams, public and press viewing areas, partisan election observers—the 2020 presidential election was the most transparent ever. But some of those public images were put forth as false evidence of election theft, they said. Images of ballot drop boxes and storage bins were top examples, where pro-Trump pundits and bloggers claimed that the images showed vote theft in progress.

"The same goes for data," Masterson said. "We have more data available around elections than we've ever had before. I think that's only going to increase. That is, again, a positive, a good thing. But we saw over and over again the misapplication of election data, whether it was election night reporting… [or] vote totals—you know, the claims that there were dumps of votes, even though election officials had messages over and over and over again [about] how the vote count was going to proceed."

More insidious were statistical reports that purported to show vote count irregularities from and others who had little experience running elections or that made big assumptions—such as that registered Republicans would only vote for Trump. "I know [MIT election scholar] Charles Stewart and the folks at Stanford [Internet Observatory and its partners] just picked apart all these statistical inaccuracies and claims. But [those making the claims were] using the data to create really good-looking but completely misleading and incorrect charts… to undermine confidence."

Masterson said that foreign adversaries, such as Russia and Iran, both overtly and covertly drew on the domestic disinformation campaigns to fan an already chaotic election—for example, there were reports of Iranian intelligence officials posing as the far-right Proud Boys and sending threatening emails to Democrats....[more

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/qanon-origins/

beyerstein

The cult of QAnon is at a crossroads. Adherents of the conspiracy theory/new religious movement convinced themselves that Donald Trump was poised to purge the cannibal pedophile cabal and its traitorous enablers in a cleansing burst of political violence. But with Joe Biden in the White House, and Capitol rioters facing charges for their insurrection of January 6, prophecy has apparently failed. QAnon has been banished from major social media platforms. You can't even sell Q merch on Etsy anymore. True believers are struggling to make sense of it all. Q himself has fallen silent. It has been over a month since his last dispatch to the faithful.

In just three years, QAnon has exploded from an anonymous post on 4chan to a household word. The FBI has declared QAnon a domestic terrorist threat and the QAnon ideology has been the impetus for numerous terrorist attacks, not even counting the major role played by QAnon adherents in the assault on the US Capitol. QAnon has fractured families and destroyed lives. Astonishingly, we still don't know who Q is.

The enduring mystery of Q's identity has led to speculation about QAnon being an influence operation, (aka a psyop). Which raises the question of who's supposedly running this operation. QAnon's critics typically blame Russia or an alliance of Russia and Trump's inner circle. Disillusioned former QAnon sympathizers including Trump advisor Steve Bannon have also embraced a version of the psyop theory, claiming that QAnon was a deep state hoax designed to fool patriots.

Whatever role Russia may have played in promoting this conspiracy theory, the real problem is that there's a huge market in the United States for conspiracy theories that promise the violent overthrow of democracy.

Influence operations are typically military- or intelligence-led efforts to shape how a population thinks or feels without resorting to physical force.

Russian intelligence operates within the vast QAnon ecosystem but QAnon is a home-grown phenomenon, deeply rooted in American prejudices and preoccupations. QAnon and its forerunner Pizzagate were forged on 4Chan, a crucible of both the Alt-Right and American conspiracy culture. Understanding the racist, ultranationalist, conspiratorial culture of /pol is key to understanding the likely origins of QAnon. It's also important to understand how contemporary conspiracy theorizing incorporates and elaborates on older conspiratorial themes.

Q is old conspiracies made new

Many of the central tenets of QAnon are retreads of the antisemitic hoax tract, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which purports to be the minutes of a criminal conspiracy of rabbis to take over the world. The Protocols, in turn, recycles the ancient antisemitic superstition known as blood libel, the notion that Jews are harvesting the blood of Christian children.

Q asserts that the Houses of Rothschild and Soros are "puppet masters" covertly manipulating historical events. (Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene notoriously speculated that a space laser from "Rothschild, Inc" might have caused the Camp fire in California. Video of Greene berating a Parkland shooting survivor as a pawn of George Soros resurfaced recently.) Many of the QAnon faithful have their own take on blood libel, with the cannibal pedophiles being said to harvest a molecule known as adrenochrome from the blood of their child victims.

Ironically, the Protocols were commissioned by the head of the Russian secret police in the late 19th or early 20th century. The goal was to set back the cause of liberalism by convincing Czar Nicholas the II that the rise of capitalism in Russia was a conspiracy by Jews and the Freemasons. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was created by Russian conservatives to fool their own ruler, but the impact of the document was much broader. The forgery became the Ur-text of global conspiracy culture. Henry Ford's newspaper published the Protocols in 1920. The Nazis cited the Protocols to justify the Holocaust. The influence of the Protocols can even be seen in Dan Brown's bestselling Da Vinci Code novels.

In 2017, Vladimir Putin's personal confessor was hyping the idea that Czar Nicholas and his family were ritually murdered by Jews. (In fact, the deposed Nicholas and his family were assassinated by Bolsheviks shortly after the Revolution of 1917. The leader of the death squad was commended by Lenin for his work.)

QAnon sprang from the primordial soup of 4chan's Politically Incorrect board, aka /pol. 4chan is an anonymous imageboard where anyone can post almost anything. 4chan is often described as the birthplace of the Alt Right. Users are known as "anons."

"Q" is short for "Q Clearance Patriot." Q purports to be a high-ranking US intelligence official leaking details of Donald Trump's campaign against his enemies in the deep state. Q's revelations began in late October of 2017. The researcher who posts as Q Origins on Twitter has published his findings on the investigative news site Bellingcat.

Some have speculated that various pro-Russian themes in Q's body of work are evidence that the QAnon phenomenon was a Russian influence operation, but this argument ignores the fact that Vladimir Putin's Russia is organically popular in the Alt Right and /pol. Q and his message board disciples may admire Putin's brand of hyper-masculine authoritarianism without being Russian agents.

In order to understand the origins of QAnon, it is necessary to understand the imageboard tradition of LARPing. "In the 4Chan context, a LARP is when you pose as a big insider," explains the anonymous author of the Q Origins Project.

Q isn't a psyops

There's a long history of imageboard anons pretending to be high-ranking national security officials who, for inexplicable reasons, have decided to divulge highly classified information to one of the web's most notorious cesspools.In imageboard culture, LARPing is like spinning ghost stories around the digital campfire. Most people know it's fake, but it's fun to pretend that it might be real.Before Q, posters with names like FBIAnon and MegaAnon acquired followings as LARPers, often exploring themes that would later be featured in Q drops. LARPers will often entertain their followers with puzzles and cryptic predictions--a style that is familiar to anyone who has read Q drops. Followers become invested in decoding the riddles. A LARPer may gain respect if their predictions seem to come true.

The anonymous researcher behind the Q Origins project has painstakingly reconstructed the pre-history of QAnon. He notes that, like other LARPers before him, Q constructs his pronouncements out of conspiracy theories that are already popular on /pol.

"They love them a conspiracy theory and Q built on that. He stitches together the various LARPs and just creates this Frankenstein that very quickly explodes off of /pol."

The first major proselytizers for Q were two /pol moderators and a YouTuber named Tracy Diaz. Within weeks, they started spreading Q content to YouTube and other social media platforms.

There is evidence that trolls from the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency helped to disseminate the forerunner conspiracy to QAnon, Pizzagate. The breakout Q drop of 2017 continues the Pizzagate narrative of the year before. We're told that Hillary Clinton is going to be arrested.

If Pizzagate is the Old Testament, QAnon is the New Testament.Pizzagate diagnosed the cannibal pedophile problem and Q framed Donald Trump as the solution. Q is the prophet, the self-proclaimed intelligence insider whoreveals the "truths" the OPs of /pol expected to hear: Donald Trump is the messiah who is going to usher in a golden age through a spasm of apocalyptic violence.

Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in order to sabotage Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. One of their prizes was a trove of personal emails by Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta.

The basic tenets of the Pizzagate conspiracy gelled on 4Chan's /pol board on or about November 3, 2016, as users combed through Podesta's hacked emails. They fixated on banal emails chronicling Podesta's social life, which included references to DC restaurants like Comet Ping Pong as well as to home cooking. The anons decided that words like "cheese pizza" were actually code for "child porn." This collective world-building exercise eventually decreed that Podesta and Clinton were part of a network of pedophiles enslaving children in the (non-existent) basement of Comet Ping Pong.

The Trump campaign, like the Republican community at large, were enthusiastic consumers and distributors of lurid anti-Clinton conspiracies. Trump campaign luminaries like Gen. Michael Flynn and right-wing media outlets like Breitbart and InfoWars furiously amplified Pizzagate content. This content was discussed by anons on 4chan's /pol, reworked and elaborated into their conspiratorial worldview, including the next round of LARPs.

We know that accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, the notorious Kremlin-linked troll farm, hyped Pizzagate and QAnon. Russian state-controlled media like Sputnik and RT have also given sympathetic coverage to these narratives, in keeping with Russia's well-known strategy of amplifying existing rifts within the United States. Russian disinformation takes many forms, including amplifying content created by others. It's easier and often more effective to amplify an American voice rather than to try to imitate one.

The researcher behind the Q Origins Project cautions against putting too much weight on the theory that QAnon was created by Russians. We don't know exactly who Q is, but the researcher's investigations have convinced him that Q is primarily a domestic phenomenon. Q's writings show a deep familiarity with U.S. evangelical culture, he notes. The researcher observes that Q has an uncanny knack for distilling only those elements of /pol culture that would be acceptable on Fox News. Unlike his fellow chan anons, who have no compunctions about racial slurs, Q works just clean enough to be mainstream. In the researcher's opinion, navigating the subtleties of U.S. racial politics would be very difficult for someone who wasn't raised in the United States. Q also has a deep familiarity with US pop culture, particularly Hollywood movies. The famous "Where We Go One We Go All" slogan is from a 1996 Jeff Bridges sailing movie called White Squall, not the kind of material you'd expect an IRA troll to be familiar with. The researcher points out that the time stamps on the Q drops suggest that the author is working on West Coast time.

Whatever role Russia may have played in promoting this conspiracy theory, the real problem is that there's a huge market in the United States for conspiracy theories that promise the violent overthrow of democracy.

It's comforting to tell ourselves that QAnon is an exogenous phenomenon foisted upon us by a demonic Other. But that only distracts from the deeper rifts in our society that allow QAnon to flourish and thrive.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• How a QAnon conspiracy theorist won a Georgia GOP ... ›
• Watch: QAnon true believers let loose with their ridiculous theories ... ›
• Is QAnon an Elaborate Leftist Prank Targeting Right-Wing Boomers ... ›
• The deep, twisted roots of QAnon: Delusions of demon-cannibal ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

• QAnon: What is it and where did it come from? - BBC News ›
• What is QAnon: The origins of how this bizarre conspiracy theory ... ›
• How three conspiracy theorists took 'Q' and sparked Qanon ›

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/rudy-giuliani-2649955361

salon

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions on seven foreign members of Rudy Giuliani's inner circle who sought to interfere in the U.S. election and sway the results in Trump's favor.

The president has also reportedly dropped his reliance on Giuliani for his second impeachment trial, refusing to pay Giuliani for his unsuccessful post-election campaign to overturn November's results. Meanwhile, the New York State Bar Association has moved to disbar Giuliani this week. Needless to say, the week after he told thousands of Trump supporters to hold "trial by combat" before many of them violently stormed the U.S. Capitol with aims to halt the Constitutionally mandated certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for Rudy Giuliani. [twt doc]

the  Treasury's targets include Russian-linked Ukrainians Konstantin Kulyk, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, Andriy Telizhenko, Oleksandr Dubinsky, and –– most principally –– Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker sanctioned just last year, who played a key role in orchestrating the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory. It was with the help of these actors that Giuliani spearheaded a failed campaign to smear President-elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, with false claims of past corruption. Trump's call to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky –– in which the President pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden on his behalf –– would become the impetus for the President's own impeachment.

"Since at least 2019," said the Treasury in a statement on Wednesday, "Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine."

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a steadfast Trump loyalist, also attempted to add distance between his agency and Giuliani and his goons. "Russian disinformation campaigns targeting American citizens are a threat to our democracy [...] The United States will continue to aggressively defend the integrity of our election systems and processes."

"Trump has been blaming his longtime personal attorney and many others for the predicament he now finds himself in, though he has not accepted any responsibility in public or in private," CNN reported this week. "Giuliani is still expected to play a role in Trump's impeachment defense but has been left out of most conversations thus far."

The New York State Bar Association has also made moves to disavow Giuliani in light of last Wednesday's chaos. The Bar announced on Monday that it has launched an inquiry into Giuliani's role in Trump's months-long crusade to undermine the election. The group's bylaws make explicit reference to anyone "who advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States, or of any state, territory or possession thereof, or of any political subdivision therein, by force or other illegal means" and disowns anyone who has engaged in such activity.

The Association stated, "Mr. Giuliani's words quite clearly were intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election's outcome to take matters into their own hands," adding, "Their subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup, intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power."

Giuliani, who called for "a trial by combat" in the rally leading up the riot on Capitol Hill, now faces the threat of permanent expulsion from the Bar, which would render him unlicensed to practice law in the state of New York. "We cannot stand idly by," said the Association, "and allow those intent on rending the fabric of our democracy to go unchecked."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• Defeated Trump reportedly tells aides not to pay Rudy Giuliani after ... ›
• Reporter details why Rudy Giuliani may have just perjured himself ... ›
• Michael Cohen scorches Rudy Giuliani: He was 'used by Russians ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

• New York State Bar Association Considers Expelling Rudy Giuliani ... ›
• New York State Bar Association Launches Historic Inquiry Into ... ›
• Rudy Giuliani hospitalized after testing positive for coronavirus ... ›
• Trump Has Discussed With Advisers Pardons for His 3 Eldest ... ›

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/capitol-riot-2649960031

ME

It's no secret that President Donald Trump's angry supporters were seen storming the U.S. Capitol but the president's Kremlin-controlled Russian state broadcasts are still circulating lies the series of events that erupted on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. According to Russian media, members of Antifa were seen storming the Capitol—not Trump supporters.

According to The Daily Beast, Russian media outletsclaimed "the pro-Trump insurrectionists were merely "peaceful demonstrators" and blamed "Antifa" for the violence that took place in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021."

Although the (FBI) has announced a series of developments regarding the Capitol riots, including the arrests of more than 100 Trump supporters, Russian media has focused on featuring clips from conservative news networks like Fox News in addition to remarks from widely known conservative public figures including Tucker Carlson, a number of Republican lawmakers, and other Trump allies and apologists.

But the truth never stopped the Kremlin's propaganda networks from continuing to disseminate a convenient fable. Russian-speaking eyewitnesses were shown intermittently—or some might argue interchangeably—with clips from Fox News, featuring Tucker Carlson, Marco Rubio, and other Trump apologists. Appearing on state TV channel Rossiya-24, two Russian-speakers living in the United States were identified as "those who participated in the events" on Capitol Hill and later took part in numerous shows on Russian state television.

Despite Russian-controlled media propagandists' attempts to control the narrative regarding what happened amid the Electoral College certification, the publication notes that even Republican lawmakers are now distancing from that false narrative.

In fact, Rep. Kevin McCarthy even addressed the rumors when he spoke on the House floor during the hearing for Trump's second impeachment. "Some say the riots were caused by Antifa," McCarthy said, adding, "There is absolutely no evidence of that."

More disturbing is that despite the Electoral College certification, and Trump finally admitting that a new administration will be taking the White House on Jan. 20, he has still convinced many of his supporters that the presidential election was stolen from them. Yet, he still has no proof to back his claims.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• 'reconnaissance' tours of US Capitol one day before pro-Trump riot ›
• Trump supporter found dead in Georgia after being charged in ... ›
• Lawyer for 'QAnon Shaman' defends client's involvement in Capitol ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

• Investigators pursuing signs US Capitol riot was planned - CNNPolitics ›
• Response To Capitol Riot Could Hurt Minorities, Civil Libertarians Say ›

no lnx vid

Expert breaks down the ultimate goal of Trump’s ‘classic Russian-style disinformation campaign’

Elizabeth Preza November 29, 2020

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, spoke with CNN's Brian Stelter on Sunday to explain the ultimate goal of President Donald Trump's false accusations of a rigged and stolen election.

Rauch was asked by Stelter if the issue is Trump is simply trapped in the delusion that he actually beat President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

"Is delusion a fair word for these election lies?" Stelter wondered.

:{

}:

"No, actually, I don't think it is," Rauch replied. "It's hard to know what's going on in the mind of the president, but you don't really need to. What you need to know is that what he is running right now is a classic Russian-style disinformation campaign of a type known as the firehose of falsehood. That's when you utilize every channel, not just media, but also the bully pulpit, even litigation to push out as many different stories and conspiracy theories and lies and half-truths as you possibly can in order to flood the zone if with disinformation."

"The goal here is to confuse people, and he is doing very well at that," Rauch continued. "This is classic propaganda tactic. he is very good at it. doesn't matter what's going on in his head. what matters is what he is doing.

Rauch described Trump's tactic as "information warfare," arguing he's "manipulating and organizing the social environment and the media environment to confuse and discombobulate [his] enemies, to isolate them, to demoralize them so they don't know what's true or false anymore, they get very frustrated."

Stelter then asked if the issue is that Trump is engaging in a "massive conspiracy theory" which in turn creates a "collective identity" among his supporters. Rauch disagreed with that suggestion.

"There actually is no theory here," Rauch replied. "In a fire hose falsehood campaign, it's not about having one idea and pumping it out consistently. It's about throwing spaghetti against the wall. It's anything and everything. It can be wild. iI can be random. It's to create confusion and epistemic chaos. That's what we are seeing. That's very hard for democracies to deal with it."

Watch the interview below, via CNN:

‘Firehose of falsehood’

youtu.be

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'Eight big Trump lies' debunked in under three minutes by CNN's ... ›

A neuroscientist explains why Christian evangelicals are hardwired ... ›

Here's why the most determined tracker of Trump's lies finally had to ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

All of Trump's Lies About the Coronavirus - The Atlantic ›

Trump is averaging more than 50 false or misleading claims a day ... ›

Opinion: Why evangelicals should care about Trump's lies (and ... ›

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/russian-media-are-promoting-trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/

alexh

Many European leaders, from U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, were quick to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on his victory over President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election — and it isn't hard to see that Johnson, Merkel and Macron all believe that U.S. voters made the right choice. But one leader who has yet to congratulate Biden is Russian President Vladimir Putin. And writer Cathy Young, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, stresses that Russian media pundits have been tirelessly promoting the bogus conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud.

In Russia, Young notes, media pundits have been describing the 2020 election as evidence of the failure of U.S. democracy.

"So far, Putin is the only major national leader to have held back on congratulating Joe Biden on his victory," Young explains. "Meanwhile, the Russian state-run or state-friendly media have alternated mostly between open gloating over an American election in chaos and equally open sympathy for Trump."

According to Young, "On November 4, discussions of America's election drama on Russian airwaves eclipsed a patriotic holiday at home, Russian Unity Day, and the pro-Trump cheerleading grew more heavy-handed. That evening's edition of the political talk show 'Big Game' on TV-1, Russia's main federal channel, was almost entirely dominated by pro-Trump voices."

Young observes that "Big Game" host Andranik Migranyan, a staunch Putin supporter, told Russian viewers, "The majority of American voters want law and order, and today, alas, only Trump symbolizes the idea of law and order." Migranyan, according to Young, joined Trump in saying that Democratic governors and mayors in the U.S. are allowing rioters and looters to run amok — and Migranyan also made the offensive and racist comment that Democrats "get down on their knees and kiss the feet of Blacks."

Must read by @CathyYoung63 ---> Trump’s Men in Moscow https://t.co/OvhcN4CjVG via @BulwarkOnline

— Charlie Sykes (@Charlie Sykes)1605377956.0

Another Russian program that has been promoting Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, according to Young, is "Evening With Vladimir Solovyov," which airs on Russia's Rossiya-1. Host Solovyov echoed the talking points of Trump supporters in the U.S., claiming that Republican observers were kept away from vote-counting facilities.

Solovyov scoffed, "Some precincts simply barred observers…. It's just brilliant. This is what they call an electoral system."

One of Solovyov's guests, pundit Sergei Stankevich, told him, "Most likely, the Democrats will be able to torture the arithmetic until they get a win — that is, Biden will be declared president of the United States. But he will be a president without legitimacy, because a thick cloud of doubt will hang over his presidency for many Americans. Millions of his votes came from mail-in ballots, and no one will ever know how many of those votes were from real people."

Young observes, "The only anti-Trump voices in Putin's Russia came from the dissidents. Opposition activist Alexei Navalny, currently in Germany recovering from a poisoning widely blamed on Kremlin agents, congratulated Biden and (Vice President-elect) Kamala Harris on their victory in a 'free and fair election.'"

Young wraps up her article by noting how quick pro-Putin pundits in Russia believed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that were invented in the United States.

"For less discerning people in Russia and elsewhere," Young writes, "the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election will surely undermine not only America's moral authority, but that of her democratic institutions. And that's on the people who have spread or condoned these toxic fictions."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• The bombshell report on Trump and Russia is flying under the radar ... ›
• Russia used Trump's personal lawyer to feed misinformation to the ... ›
• Facebook confirms that Russia is at it again - Alternet.org ›
• Here's how elections are actually stolen in Russia - Alternet.org ›

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/how-did-russia-meddle-in-the-election/

ME oddly text does not match headline

no lnx

Trump's supporters appear to have surpassed Russians' spread of misinformation as election vote counting continues in multiple states.

Back in September, U.S. intelligence officials raised awareness about the possibility of the pandemic delaying the results of the 2020 presidential election and that foreign operatives might seize the delay as an opportunity to spew misinformation. However, it appears foreign adversaries have taken a backseat and are now opting to report on misleading claims made by Trump and his allies, according to NBC News.

In fact, one example of misinformation circulating on social media focuses on a report from the Russian-affiliated media outlet Sputnik.

"US President Donald Trump said that every vote that came in after Election Day will not be counted," Sputnik reported shortly after Trump tweeted, "Stop the count," Thursday morning.

#URGENT | 'Stop the count', Donald Trump urges on Twitter amid election results uncertainty https://t.co/1G6Ec5JabH… https://t.co/FYPYb48C5Q

— Sputnik (@Sputnik)1604585861.0

Other Russian-controlled media outlets have also shared misleading claims from the president with headlines like: "Trump calls results 'big WIN' & accuses opponents of 'trying to STEAL' election, gets 'misleading' label from Twitter," said RT, another Russian media operation, on Wednesday.

In addition to Trump's claims, his allies have also taken to Twitter under hashtags like #StoptheSteal as they spread more misinformation about the election results. Newt Gingrich has also echoed Trump's baseless claims.

On Thursday morning, he tweeted, "It is increasingly clear that Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are all being stolen by Democrats and the research is almost certainly going to yield far more votes stolen than Biden's current margins."

All of the misleading tweets have been flagged on Twitter with a label that reads: "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Dan Rather Hammers Trump and His Enablers in Facebook Screed ... ›

Donald Trump Jr. Has Destroyed Kellyanne Conway's Favorite ... ›

Top election security official who briefed lawmakers on latest ... ›

Russian state hackers are accused of trying to infiltrate Biden's ... ›

Noam Chomsky: The real election meddling isn't coming from Russia ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump | The New Yorker ›

Here's What We Know So Far About Russia's 2016 Meddling | Time ›

Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections - Wikipedia ›

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/listen-democratic-voters-are-receiving-suspicious-calls-in-effort-to-suppress-votes-on-election-day/

no lnx

listen: Voters in at least 6 swing states are receiving robocalls designed to spread election misinformation

Meaghan Ellis November 03, 2020

Voters in multiple states have received suspicious calls urging them to "stay home and stay safe" on Election Day — an effort state and local officials say is an attempt to suppress votes across the country.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to raise awareness about the robocalls reported by residents in Flint, MI. She made it clear that the calls were completely false as she described the tactic as "an effort to suppress the vote."

"Getting reports of multiple robocalls going to Flint residents that, due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow," Nessel tweeted, adding, "Obviously this is FALSE and an effort to suppress the vote. No long lines and today is the last day to vote. Don't believe the lies! Have your voice heard! RT PLS."

Getting reports of multiple robocalls going to Flint residents that, due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow.… https://t.co/PbNzaKJuu1

— Dana Nessel (@Dana Nessel)1604418091.0

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has also chimed in with her report about the robocalls. She tweeted, "We received reports that an unknown party is purposefully spreading misinformation via robocalls in Flint in an attempt to confuse voters. Let me be clear — if you plan to vote in-person, you must do so, or be in line to do so, by 8PM today."

Statement from Secretary of State @JocelynBenson on correcting misinformation being shared in Flint… https://t.co/kq5cBzhgUb

— Michigan Department of State (@Michigan Department of State)1604421495.0

Audio of the call has also begun circulating on social media platforms. The six-second clip features an automated voice that tells voters: "Time to stay home. Stay home and stay safe."

Listen to the clip below:

Deen Freelon · voter suppression voicemail 11/2/2020]

In addition to the calls reported by Flint, MI, residents, calls have also been reported in multiple other states. Ahead of the election, residents in other battleground states including Nebraska, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have also reported suspicious robocalls.

According to The Washington Post, there are a number of reasons why the disturbing calls have also caught the attention of the tech company, YouMail.

Upon further investigation, the tech company — which boasts its own robocall-blocking application for smartphones — has reported that the "reach and timing" of the mysterious calls signals the possible involvement of foreign operatives. Multiple robocalls have been conducted to people in approximately 280 of the United States' 317 area codes.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/youre-not-supposed-to-understand-the-hunter-biden-smear-chaos-is-the-point

kos

Acclaimed journalist and historianAnne Applebaumunderstands the universe of propaganda as well as anyone alive today. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has devoted the past three decades to studying Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, with an emphasis on disinformation and propaganda so acute that she washerself targeted—by a Russian-originated smear campaign in retaliation for her writings about Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea. She now contributes her cache of knowledge toThe Atlantic, among other publications.

For someone so well-versed, analyzing the blatant behavior of propagandist right-wing media outlets such as Fox News is something akin to a chess master analyzing the strategy of Tic-Tac-Toe—simple, and even relaxing. So after watching the antics of Donald Trump during his final debate with Joe Biden, she wrote a piece for *The Atlantic*on Friday that explains what millions of Americans are still shaking their heads in bewilderment about today: the source—and more importantly, the purpose—of Trump's bizarre accusations about Hunter Biden and his allegedly nefarious dealings with certain obscure individuals.

Of course the direct conduits of this nonsense are what we in the sane world regard as the fever swamps of paranoiac right-wing conspiracy thinking, most visibly manifested on the Fox News channel. As Applebaum notes, the actual storyline, spun out of whole cloth, is purposefully designed to be opaque, leading someone trying to divine the actual facts to become frustrated and give up trying to make sense of them. In fact, as her article's title suggests, "You're not supposed to understand the rumors about Biden."

Because the story is not intended to make sense, but to create a fog of doubt.

Just like the fictional legend these same people wove around "Hillary's emails," the Hunter Biden fiction also concerns emails—these ones allegedly kept by a former business partner of Hunter Biden, and miraculously disclosed to a peripheral former and supposed "investigative journalist" named Matthew Tyrmand. Tyrmand, notably, was formerly (and peripherally) associated with the right-wing fraudster and provocateur James O'Keefe.

That piece of critical information would lead most knowledgeable people to immediately shelve the unfounded Hunter Biden scheme in that mental compartment where bad ideas go to eventually die. But the Fox News audience is by definition anything but "knowledgeable people." On that network, the Hunter Biden nonsense is not something analogous to the disappointingly empty caverns of "Al Capone's vault," but rather an ever-opening flower, chock full of conspiracy-thinking goodness.

In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are alsoproviding the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night's debate to "the mayor of Moscow's wife," from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works.A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.

Applebaum provides some basic background for the uninformed and uninitiated (i.e., normal Americans).

Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been published, the very worst thing that Tyrmand's email cache could reveal (if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use Hunter Biden's surname and connections to get business deals or score a visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about Hunter Biden's involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of people visit the White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers.

Applebaum then helpfully includes a laundry list of Trump's corruption that puts to shame whatever the right hopes to spin out of this email concoction. As readers of Daily Kos, you're more than familiar with these.

But there is a purpose lurking here in the mind of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch. The first and most obvious? To assist Trump in deflecting attention—for these final 10 days—from his horrific malfeasance in the face of a pandemic whose vicious resurgence is soon likely to be the sole focus of the nightly newscasts. The second reason is to provide a ready well of sludge to draw upon in the seemingly likely event (as Murdoch himself has acknowledged) that the polls turn out to be correct, and Trump loses the election.

They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute "news." Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will,over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham's monologues.

Applebaum, a rapt student of propaganda, knows that outside of hosting the inevitable guest appearances (between court dates) that Donald Trump will insist on during the next four years—assuming he loses—the Fox News yappers need something to talk and talk about, and it certainly isn't going to be Republican policies. So this fictional narrative serves the interests both of Fox News—whose main concern is keeping its soon-to-be demoralized audience content and soporific—and also helps to deflect the inevitable horror stories that will be uncovered by a Democratic-controlled Congress investigating the Trump crime family's vast trail of detritus throughout our government.

By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history...

[...]

None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don't have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it.

Put simply, assuming Joe Biden wins this election, we should all gear up for four long years of Fox News-inspired fantasy programming.

Of course, there's always the mute button.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/new-report-reveals-russia/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumpworld-is-going-full-qanon-with-the-election-less-than-2-weeks-away-report/

Whenever President Donald Trump is asked about QAnon extremists, he will say a few nice things about them while insisting that he knows very little about the movement. But journalist Will Sommer, in an article published by the Daily Beast on October 22, reports that Trump's allies are trying to use the QAnon conspiracy theory to get him reelected.

To say that QAnon's beliefs are absurd would be an understatement. According to the QAnon conspiracy theory, the U.S. government has been infiltrated by an international cabal of child sex traffickers, pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals — and Trump was put in the White House to combat them. An anonymous figure named Q, according to the theory, is giving them updates on Trump's battle. QAnon also believe that R&B superstar Beyoncé is really an Italian woman named Ann Marie Lastrassi and is working with billionaire George Soros as part of the conspiracy.

But as ridiculous as QAnon's beliefs are, Trump's allies are willing to promote the cult if it will help his reelection campaign. One of those allies, Sommer notes, is former Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon, who has been using QAnon-like rhetoric and claiming that at least some of their beliefs are true. Bannon said of QAnon, "How are they not at least — at least an aspect of their argument — at least appears, directionally to be correct?"

Sommer explains, "With less than two weeks before Election Day and Trump lagging in the polls, some of the president's most prominent allies are going all in on QAnon, while Trump and other top supporters refuse to denounce the conspiracy theory. It is, at its most innocent, a crass political calculation designed to keep a relatively modest, though loud and influential, chunk of the party's base engaged. At its worst, critics warn, it's a green light of acceptance to dangerous conspiracy theorists and a normalization of their beliefs."

The Beast reporter goes on to say that Trump has "refused to disavow QAnon, which the FBI considers a potential source of domestic terrorism." And in Georgia, Sommer notes, "Two Republican candidates are competing for their own QAnon endorsements. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) touted the backing of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and outspoken QAnon supporter who's set to win a House seat in Congress in November. Loeffler's challenger, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), meanwhile, rushed out his endorsement from former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a hero to QAnon believers who recently took the QAnon oath with members of his family."

Flynn, CNN's Marshall Cohen reported on July 7, posted a video using QAnon rhetoric. In the video, Flynn declared, "Where we go one, we go all" — which is a QAnon slogan. [also lemmings]

Another QAnon slogan is, "The storm is here." And Sommer notes that Bannon has been using "storm" references when promoting conspiracy theories involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.

Bannon recently declared, "It's gonna be a storm. The storm clouds are around the Biden camp. The storm clouds are around the Biden camp — a gathering storm."

proud boys email threat

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/fbi-reveals-new-election-interference-by-iran-and-russia

cody f

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced on Wednesday in a last-minute press briefing that both Iran and Russia have obtained voter registration information and have "taken specific actions to influence public opinion."

In particular, Ratcliffe said that Iran has been found to have sent "spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump." He seemed to be referring to an incident described in a Washington Post story published right before the conference, which said the U.S. has concluded that Iran had sent emails pretending to be from the right-wing group the Proud Boys to Democratic voters.

The Post explained:

The messages appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as "voter files," some of which are commercially available. They told recipients the Proud Boys were "in possession of all your information" and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.

It's not exactly clear the intent behind the emails. Ratcliffe, a partisan Republican put in place by President Donald Trump because he wanted a crony leading the intelligence community, seemed to give contradicting explanations. If the emails were intended to intimidate Democratic voters out of voting, that would presumably help Trump. But if the emails were meant as a false flag, designed to make Trump supporters look dangerous, then that would "damage President Trump," as Ratcliffe said. It's hard to see how Iran could have intended both outcomes. It's troubling that his explanation was this unclear, especially since he doesn't have a reputation for independence and credibility. (Ratcliffe and Wray took no questions at the briefing, refusing to give the press any opportunity to clarify their remarks.)

The other aim, though, seems quite plausible — the emails were designed to sow doubt, fear, and confusion about the election and its security. When Wray spoke, he encouraged viewers to trust in the American election system.

"You should be confident that your vote counts," Wray said. "Early, unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. We encourage everyone to seek election and voting information from reliable sources, namely, your state election officials. And to be thoughtful, careful, and discerning consumers of information online."

He added: "We are not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections or any criminal activity that threatens the sanctity of your vote or undermines public confidence in the outcome of the election."

Neither Wray nor Ratcliffe mentioned any details about how Russia is interfering in the election or what it might use voter registration data for. It's not clear whether that's because the FBI doesn't have any details about Russian interference or if it is simply unwilling to share them for whatever reason. This, too, is concerning, because the despite Ratcliffe's claim that foreign election interference isn't a "partisan" issue, Trump himself has repeatedly tried to cover up Russia's intervention in 2016 on his behalf. There's no way to be confident that isn't happening now.

But there was another even more glaring omission in the pair's comments. Neither mentioned the fact that Trump — not Russia, Iran, or anyone else — is by far the greatest threat to the credibility of the election. He has been fueling bogus conspiracy theories that the election is going to be "rigged" for months, and he has called mail-in ballots a "hoax." So there was something ridiculous about the press conference emphasizing the threat of foreign election interference, especially as Ratcliffe name-checked the president as authorizing the intelligence community's efforts to protect American democracy.

"The president has instructed me to keep the country informed as appropriate," Ratcliffe said. "We will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections."

Wray's remarks about "early, unverified" claims that votes won't count, and that state election officials are the most reliable sources of information about the process, could be read as an implicit rebuke to the president. Trump has repeatedly contradicted local election officials in trying to spread doubt about the integrity of the vote.

And in urging Americans to be "thoughtful, careful, and discerning consumers of information online," Wray was, essentially, telling them to be the opposite of Trump, who has spread absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theories on Twitter recently. When asked to defend himself at an NBC News town hall, he said simply: "l put it out there, people can decide for themselves."

https://www.salon.com/2020/10/19/fox-news-rejected-hunter-biden-expos-new-york-post-writer-refused-to-put-his-name-on-it-reports/

oct 20?

when former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani approached Fox News with the trove of emails he alleged had been retrieved from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the network declined to run the story over concerns about its credibility, according to a new report.

Sources told Mediaite that "the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden's alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network's news division to pass."

Giuliani previously told The New York Times that he had chosen to place the material with The New York Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."

The Post, a sister company of Fox News, published the unverified emails in a Wednesday exposé, which drew widespread blowback for its dubious sourcing. The Times earlier reported that most of The Post article had been written by a staff reporter who refused to allow the tabloid to attach his name to the byline over doubts about the article's credibility.

The alleged emails informing the article were obtained in a circuitous route by two Trump allies: Giuliani and former White House strategist **Steve Bannon,** who currently faces wire fraud and money laundering charges in a federal court. The pair gave the outlet a copy of what they claimed was content copied from a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, the youngest son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which they said had been obtained from a computer repairman who wished to remain anonymous.

The repairman told a group of reporters last week that a man named Hunter Biden had dropped the laptop off at his store, but medical issues with his vision prevented him from making an identification.

A number of Post staffers questioned the vetting process for the article and expressed concerns about the sources and the timing as the election nears, The Times reported. Upon publication, other journalists pointed out major errors and holes in article, and the FBI has since opened an investigation into the story as part of a possible Russian disinformation operation, according to multiple reports.

The Times also reported that one of the article's two bylined authors had first learned that her name was on the report after publication; the other writer never previously had a byline at the paper. Both writers formerly worked at Fox News.

The Trump-friendly cable network's so-called "Brain Room" had previously warned hosts about Giuliani's reputation for "amplifying disinformation,"according to The Daily Beast.

One day after The Post published its story, The Washington Post reported that U.S. officials had repeatedly warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was a target of Russian intelligence, and information he passed along might be tainted by his interactions with pro-Putin officials in Ukraine.

In the days leading up to publication, a team of The New York Post's top editors met to determine a course of action, including the editor-in-chief and the digital editor-in-chief, a person with knowledge of the meeting told The Times. At least two writers refused to put their names on the report, according to The Times.

The bylines eventually went to Emma-Jo Morris — a deputy politics editor who joined the Murdoch-owned tabloid this spring after four years at Fox News — and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a reporter at The Post since 2014.

At Fox, Morris worked as an associate producer for Trump "pillow-talk" confidante Sean Hannity,according to her LinkedIn profile.Morris' Instagram, which has sent been set to private, included photos of her posing with Bannon and Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally and Republican operative. In July, President Donald Trump commuted Stone's sentence on seven felony counts.

Fonrouge, the article's other acknowledged writer, "had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article," according to The Times.

"The senior editors at The Post made the decision to publish the Biden files after several days' hard work established its merit," a senior Post official told The Times in an email.

The Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have all reported that they were not able to independently verify The New York Post's reporting or the contents of the hard drive.

News outlets have repeatedly debunked allegations of corruption against the Bidens, and a roundly discredited investigation by Senate Republicans — predicated in part on information Giuliani acquired from a Russian agent sanctioned by the Trump administration — found no evidence that the former vice president had engaged in wrongdoing related to his son's business dealings.

Reports of the FBI investigation echoed headlines from the final weeks of the 2016 election cycle, when U.S. intelligence agencies began probing whether individuals connected to the Trump campaign were involved in Russian government efforts to harm Hillary Clinton via dumps of emails stolen from Democratic officials.

"At least in 2016, Trump's allies pushed powerful disinformation," national security attorney Bradley Moss told Salon last week. "These last-ditch efforts barely qualify as trying anymore."

"It's a garbage fire story with obscene numbers of legal holes and flaws," he added.

A Post spokeswoman told The Times in a statement that the story had been "vetted," and it "stands by its reporting."

Roger Sollenberger is a staff writer at Salon.

aha qanon is apoc in minature, trump = messiah , wicked will be vanquished

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/the-extremist-qanon-movement-is-growing-and-being-weaponized-to-boost-trumps-reelection-campaign-report/

Whenever President Donald Trump is asked about QAnon, he will say a few nice things about the far-right conspiracy theorists while insisting that he doesn't know much about them. It isn't hard to understand why Trump is taking that approach: he wants the votes of QAnon supporters, while keeping some distance from them. In an article published in Axios on October 21, journalists Stef W. Kight and Sara Fischer report that the movement is still "growing" — and thatQAnon is being "weaponized to boost President Trump ahead of the election."

Kight and Fischer explain, "What began as a single conspiracy theory linking Hillary Clinton to child trafficking four years ago is now part of a convoluted web of falsehoods being spread to undermine Joe Biden…. In a year of unrest and expected election turmoil, experts are concerned that belief in QAnon could be another instigator of violence in some communities if Trump loses in November."

According to the QAnon conspiracy theory, the federal government of the United States has been infiltrated by an international cabal of child sex traffickers, Satanists and cannibals — and Trump was put in the White House to fight against them. An anonymous figure named Q, members of the cult believe, is providing updates on the president's battle. QAnon members believe that everyone from billionaire Democrat George Soros to R&B superstar Beyoncé is part of the conspiracy, insisting that Beyoncé isn't really African-American but rather, is really an Italian woman and Soros ally named Ann Marie Lastrassi.

But as absurd as QAnon's beliefs are, FBI agents have warned that the movement is dangerous. Kight and Fischer note that security experts are worried about how QAnon will respond if Biden wins the election — and Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, who specializes in cyber-security for GroupSense, says that QAnon's possible response to a Biden victory on November 3 "keeps me up at night."

"Recent reports about what was purported to be Hunter Biden's computer hard drive have sparked renewed activity from Q, with more concrete ideas to latch onto," Kight and Fischer explain. "On the day the New York Post reported on the alleged hard drive, Q posted 16 times, per GroupSense."

President Trump's son Donald Trump, Jr., the Axios reporters point out, has been encouraging QAnon.

"Earlier this year, Donald Trump, Jr.jokingly insinuated that Biden was a pedophile — a nod to QAnon lore that many Democrats use their political power to hide widespread pedophilia," Kight and Fischer note. "Some Republican politicians' adoption of aspects of the theory has helped bring it more mainstream, Webster-Jacobsen said."

Some tech companies have been taking a stand against QAnon.

Kight and Fischer report, "On Monday, Spotify removed QAnon podcasts, and TikTok officially banned all QAnon content. YouTube and Peloton announced QAnon crackdowns last week. Facebook and Triller both banned QAnon earlier this month. Etsy banned QAnon products two weeks ago, and Twitter shut down QAnon accounts in July."

However, the Axios reporters add that "despite these bans, QAnon followers still find other places online to congregate, like Parler, a far-right social media app."

as in Fr Macron le pen hack then mix fake emails in tranche? 6 GRU indicted

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/hunter-biden-e-mail-story-has-all-the-marks-of-russian-involvement-intel-experts/

Supporters of President Donald Trump are hoping that e-mails found on a laptop allegedly belonging to former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, will be the "October surprise" that derails the older Biden's presidential campaign. The New York Post, owned by Fox News' Rupert Murdoch, published that story after receiving an alleged copy of Hunter Biden's hard drive from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — and more than 50 intelligence officials, according to Politico's Natasha Bertrand, have signed a letter saying that the story has the markings of a Kremlin propaganda operation.

Bertrand explains, "While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them 'deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case' and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin's hand at work.'"

Intel experts who signed the letter range from Russ Travers, who served as acting director for the National Counterterrorism Center, to Rick Ledgett, former deputy director of the National Security Agency. Former Central Intelligence Agency directors or acting directors who signed the letter include John O. Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell.

The letter reads, "If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election — and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."

The intel experts also said, "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the e-mails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not — and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement… (But) there are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement…. Such an operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently by the intelligence community, to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen political divisions here — but also, to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/how-to-not-be-a-useful-idiot-for-the-rights-smear-machine/

Trump is trying hard to recreate the perfect storm that landed him in the White House in 2016 despite being the most unpopular candidate in the modern polling era. That year, the Clinton campaign's hacked emails were dribbled out over the final six weeks of the race. There wasn't much to them, but internal campaign communications tend to be frank and are easily mined for scandalettes. Having established the storyline that Clinton was as corrupt as Trump, they provided a steady stream of stories with "emails reveal" in the headlines which served to reinforce the right's narrative.

We can expect a similar stream of stories of ostensible "smoking guns" stemming from Hunter Biden's emails (whether hacked or fabricated) to come our way in the final weeks of this race.And some people who want to see themselves as fair will inadvertently amplify the right's preferred narratives by assuming that there must be something there.

So it's very important to keep in mind that the "scandal" is supposed to be that then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to stave off an investigation into Burisma Holdings--the Ukrainian gas company whose Board Hunter sat on--in order to protect his son. It is supposed to be a story about conflict of interest--of the elder Biden using the office of the Vice Presidency to help his son.

There is not a shred of truth to those claims. The effort to get Shokin fired "was prompted by a push for anti-corruption reforms developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund," The Washington Postreported. Andaccording to CNN, a bipartisan "letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time."

Shokin was corrupt, and that was a problem. Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy of Shokin's who resigned over his boss's habit of stymieing corruption probes, toldBloombergthat Shokin was not investigating Burisma during the period in question. "There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against" the firm or its owner. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," Kasko said. And Daria Kaleniuk, a prominent Ukrainian anti-corruption crusader, told The Washington Post that"Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation."

Without some impropriety on Joe Biden's part, Hunter Biden's business ventures aren't a story. He isn't running for office. Like many, if not most children of the powerful, the younger Biden leveraged both his family name and the connections he'd made at Yale to land various business deal and secure a cushy, high-paying position on a corporate board. Both Hunter and Joe Biden have acknowledged that associating himself with a shady Ukrainian gas company--as opposed to, say, a reputable American or Western European firm--was an error of judgment, but it was neither illegal nor unethical. This isn't a meritocracy, and this is one way that wealth and power are reproduced from one generation to the next. It's distasteful and unfair, but that's a class issue, not a scandal. Hunter isn't running for office and his judgment, or lack thereof, isn't a matter of public concern.

Joe Biden spent years in the Senate, and year after year he ranked among the least wealthy members of that body. We know how he came into his wealth--mostly through a multi-million dollar book advance and speaking gigs after leaving office. Biden may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there's no evidence that he's corrupt.

mma 1020

• A new study found that the president was the main source for misinformation in voting: A Harvard study published on October 1 found that most misinformation on voter fraud comes from social media promoting information from “political and media elites,” especially Trump.
• Russia is using American conservative news sites to spread propaganda:The Wall Street Journal published an October 7 report that found Russian news outlet RT was still getting a lot of traffic in the United States. RT is part of the Mixi.Media traffic-swapping network along with multiple major conservative outlets, including RealClearPolitics, National Review, The Daily Caller, and others. This allows members to display their content on the other network members’ home pages, giving RT the ability to put Russian narratives in front of the eyes of American conservatives.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/barr-confirms-gops-russian-report-will-not-be-complete-by-election-day/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/oldest-living-cia-agent-believes-russia-infiltrated-gop-long-before-trump-took-over/

raw

The oldest living CIA agent believes Russia sank its hooks into the Republican Party well before President Donald Trump emerged as a viable candidate.

Peter Sichel was one of the CIA's first agents at the start of the Cold War, and he sees evidence of Russia's spycraft against Trump and the GOP in the Senate Intelligence Committee, reported The Daily Beast.

"One great advantage the Soviets always had over us, is that they played the long game. We thought in terms of quarters, whereas they thought in terms of years or even decades," Sichel said. "They were opportunistic, willing to let matters gradually develop until the right political faction or right leader to support had emerged."

Senate investigators found the Kremlin sought to infiltrate the Republican Party long before Trump became its nominee as part of Russian president Vladimir Putin's effort to deny the White House to Hillary Clinton.

Putin had fostered right-wing political movements across Europe to gain influence there, and Trump's presidential campaign promoted many of the same nationalist themes, and Sichel found numerous instances where Trump campaign operatives opened themselves up to possible Russian blackmail.

"The KGB were absolute masters at it," Sichel said, "and they would use whatever they could get their hands on. A favorite was honey traps [or sexual entrapments], but bribes, favors, whatever they could find. And once they had their hooks into you, they owned you."

Paul Manafort stayed in close contact with Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik throughout the campaign, while Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn met with Russian intelligence operatives promising dirt against Clinton.

"The key thing is that all of them then lied about it to investigators, and that's where the potential blackmail comes in. Imagine if the FBI hadn't caught Flynn out, and he had remained in his post," Sichel said. "The Russians knew he lied — I'm sure they taped all their communications with him — so they would have had him over a barrel forever."

The 97-year-old Sichel said the president himself continued to compromise himself by lying about his own dealings with Russia.

"I know he doesn't see it this way, but by having all this stuff brought out in public, it removes the blackmail threat," Sichel said."The smartest thing Trump could have done when all this started to break was to just come out and say, 'Yes, it appears there was Russian involvement with my campaign, but that's over with now, I'm the president, so let's move on.' But he didn't do that, obviously. Perhaps there were reasons why he couldn't."

1020 an

trump ‘is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts’: HR McMaster

Sky Palma Raw Story

During an appearance on MSNBC this Thursday, former National Security advisor to President Trump, H.R. McMaster, was asked if President Trump is posing a greater threat to the 2020 election than Vladimir Putin.

McMaster said that he agrees Trump is "aiding an abetting

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/propaganda-experts-blast-trump-dni-for-declassifying-unverified-anti-clinton-russian-disinformation

no lnx

Director of National Intelligence, pro-Trump former MAGA congressman John Ratcliffe, has just declassified and released what is being described as "unverified" Russian chatter and "disinformation" that suggests Hillary Clinton may have been in touch with the Russians in an attempt to help her 2016 presidential campaign.

:{

}:

Ratcliffe, just hours before Tuesday night's presidential debate, sent a letter to Republican Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, who is facing his own major re-election challenge.

The letter claims in 2016 "U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians; hacking of the Democratic National Committee."

The DNI's letter then clearly says the intelligence community "does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect fabrication."

The Director of National Intelligence heads all 17 U.S. intel agencies and offices.

(Ratcliffe's installation as Director of National Intelligence was, according to some, illegal. Congress passed a law requiring the DNI to have prior "extensive national security expertise," which Ratcliffe, like his two predecessors, lacks.)

It took the President's son, Donald Trump Jr., no time to try to weaponize it:

OMG??????JUST DECLASSIFIED: The Russia hoax was Hillary’s plan, and the Obama-Biden White House was briefed on it. https://t.co/ytquclKKg1

— Donald Trump Jr. (@Donald Trump Jr.)1601407501.0

Intelligence experts and reporters are furious that Ratcliffe would declassify and release what they see as unverified Russian propaganda.

Intelligence analyst Eric Garland:

THE RATCLIFFE DOSSIER: Unverified, except obvious propaganda, no tradecraft, and less pee-pee. https://t.co/qLI2fk2lhA

— Eric Garland (@Eric Garland)1601407092.0

CNN national security reporter Jeremy Herb:

The latest declassification from Ratcliffe to Senate GOP: Russian intelligence that the Clinton campaign planned to… https://t.co/Vm55rnROmJ

— Jeremy Herb (@Jeremy Herb)1601406864.0

U.S. intel and terrorism expert Malcolm Nance:

Trump crony Ratcliffe sends a letter declassifying Russian intel report. It’s full of statements intended to look l… https://t.co/QRJRV9YWFq

— Malcolm Nance (@Malcolm Nance)1601407085.0

Politico Congressional reporter Andrew Desiderio:

To recap: The country’s top intelligence official just declassified a Russian intel assessment that he acknowledges… https://t.co/wpdJHhcEQF

— Andrew Desiderio (@Andrew Desiderio)1601405922.0

Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko:

Even for Ratcliffe, this is shocking. https://t.co/DDlGSg3sTy

— Adam Parkhomenko (@Adam Parkhomenko)1601406638.0

Former U.S. intelligence officer, current NBC News national security and intelligence analyst Ned Price:

This is less about tonight and more about tomorrow, when Comey will appear before Graham's Committee. Ratcliffe is… https://t.co/NmewLaUnPh

— Ned Price (@Ned Price)1601407273.0

920

foreign hackers cripple Texas county’s email system — raising election security concerns

Pro Publica September 25, 2020

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Last week, voters and election administrators who…

 ===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-say-the-gops-attempt-to-smear-biden-accidentally-exposed-a-trump-officials-corrupt-scheme/

igor salon

the Republican report aimed at raising questions about the dealings of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine appears to have accidentally implicated former Energy Secretary Rick Perry in an energy scheme in the foreign nation, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., released their much-hyped report on Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma on Wednesday. However, it found no evidence of actual wrongdoing and relied largely on debunked claims, old statements and narratives pushed as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

But the report did find new evidence related to Perry’s actions in Ukraine while he served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Amos Hochstein, a member of the supervisory board at the state-owned Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, told lawmakers that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government” to place Texas oil executive Robert Bensh on the board of the company while officials at the Department of Energy pressured the government to sign a deal with a “private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh,” according to a :{letter Wyden:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ sent to Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:.

perry also pressured the Ukrainian government to place one of his longtime campaign supporters, Michael Bleyzer, on the board during a trip to Ukraine for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in 2019, Wyden wrote. Bleyzer and his partner were later awarded a drilling contract in the country.

“Mr. Bleyzer’s contract that he was awarded was despite the fact that he was not the highest bidder in the process,” Hochstein told lawmakers. “Other . . . bids were higher, and therefore, Ukraine chose a bid that paid itself less.”

The heads of the state-owned Naftogaz conglomerate have since filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the contract, arguing that the Ukrainian government acted “illegally and with bias” in agreeing to the deal, Wyden noted.

“Witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing, and the department more broadly, in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community,” Wyden wrote.

Politico reported last year that Perry — who along with then-Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker were the “three amigos” who pushed a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine — played an active role in the Trump administration’s pressure on Zelensky, which ultimately led to thepresident’s impeachment.

ProPublica reported earlier this month that Perry repeatedly pushed deals that “were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors” and could “stand to benefit” the secretary himself. Two of the deals, including one worth $20 billion, went to the Texas firm Energy Transfer. Perry served on the company’s board before and after his stint at the Energy Department and bought shares now worth about $800,000 three months after leaving his post, according to the report.

Ethics experts told the outlet that Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. His actions also caught the attention of federal prosecutors, though he is reportedly not the target of any investigations.

The interview with Hochstein was part of the Senate Republicans’ investigation into whether Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma affected U.S. foreign policy. The report asserted that his position was “problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” However, it did not include any new evidence suggesting his role affected the Obama administration’s policy. It also acknowledged that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”

Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the probe pushed “Russian disinformation.” He further described it as “an attempted political hit job facilitated by the State Department.”

A Finance Committee aide told Talking Points Memo that finding new evidence against the Trump administration “was certainly not Republicans’ goal.”

“While Republicans’ Ukraine investigation showed Vice President Biden did nothing wrong,” the aide said, “it succeeded in implicating former Secretary Perry in a corrupt scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to change the board of Naftogaz.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/documentary-filmmaker-explains-how-agents-of-chaos-including-donald-trump-are-taking-a-wrecking-ball-to-american-institutions/

r President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin clearly hope to sow discord in the 2020 election — and the FBI has warned that the Russian government will try to interfere in this election just as it interfered in the 2016 election. Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney discussed Russia’s election interference with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota during a September 23 appearance on the morning show, “New Day,” describing some of the things Russian operatives have been doing.

Gibney, creator of the documentary “Agents of Chaos,” explained, “For the 2016 election, past is prologue. I mean, so many things that the Russians did and the way they took advantage of certain flaws in our system in 2016 are now coming back to haunt us in 2020. In 2016, you know, Donald Trump on the stump kept saying: if I lose, the election is going to be rigged. And the Russians were in election systems not to flip votes, but to sow doubt on the legitimacy of what everyone saw as an inevitable Hillary Clinton win.”

The filmmaker added, “Today again, Donald Trump is casting doubt on the legitimacy or the accuracy of results if he were to lose. And so once again, I believe that the Russians, by a cyber means, willamplifyour own president’s attempts to undermine confidence in the system.”

Camerota responded that “Russian trolls” have been echoing Trump’s conspiracy theories and “getting their material” by “lifting President Trump’s Twitter feed.” And Gibney responded that his new documentary is called “Agents of Chaos” because that is exactly what Putin’s allies are trying to encourage in the 2020 election: chaos.

Putin’s allies, according to Gibney, have been “exasperating [autocorrect vic 2x?] and flaming passions that were already here.”

Gibney told Camerota, “So, in the case of Donald Trump, you know, the film is called ‘Agents of Chaos,’ and I think that one of the key agents of chaos is Donald Trump. Russia never supported his candidacy because of policies — they supported his candidacy because they felt he was an agent of chaos who would do a lot to take a wrecking ball to American institutions.”

Watch the video below:[trialer] hbo

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/cia-director-suppressed-information-on-russia-to-avoid-angering-trump-intel-officials/

intelligence officials are worried that CIA Director Gina Haspel is intentionally withholding information about Russian activities from the White House to avoid angering President Donald Trump.

:{

}:

Nine current and former intel officials tell *Politico* that intelligence on Russia “is being suppressed” because Trump simply does not want to hear about any nefarious activities being conducted by the Russians.

In fact, several sources said that Haspel has assigned CIA general counsel Courtney Elwood to review every piece of intelligence about Russia before it gets sent over to the White House, which these officials said was “unprecedented that a general counsel would be involved to this extent.”

In fact, things have reportedly gotten so poisonous over at the CIA that one Russia specialist “quit earlier this year after Haspel accused him of lying about intelligence — an accusation that happens fairly often,” Politico’s sources say.

Trump’s anger at hearing intelligence about Russia’s efforts to interfere in American elections is well known, in the last week publicly attacked his own FBI director for saying that Russia is once again working to upend the 2020 election.

In fact, several sources said that Haspel has assigned CIA general counsel Courtney Elwood to review every piece of intelligence about Russia before it gets sent over to the White House, which these officials said was “unprecedented that a general counsel would be involved to this extent.”

In fact, things have reportedly gotten so poisonous over at the CIA that one Russia specialist “quit earlier this year after Haspel accused him of lying about intelligence — an accusation that happens fairly often,” Politico’s sources say.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

see disinfo note dems not getting briefings/ reports?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/classified-cia-report-putin-probably-directing-disinformation-campaign-against-biden-with-gops-help/

russian president Vladimir Putin is “probably directing” a disinformation campaign against Joe Biden ahead of November’s election, according to a top-secret CIA assessment.

Two unnamed sources told the *Washington Post* the Kremlin was attempting to interfere with the 2020 presidential election through a Ukrainian parliamentarian with ties to President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

“We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. vice president, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November,” the report states in its first line.

The highly classified report was reportedly published for agency use at the end of last month, and is based on intelligence gathered by the FBI and the NSA. ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach,who has been working publicly with Giuliani and was recently sanctioned by the Treasury Department for election meddling, has been spreading disinformation about Biden through Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

wray

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/malign-foreign-influence-fbi-director-warns-on-russias-very-active-efforts-to-influence-election-against-biden/

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/new-report-paints-a-disturbing-picture-of-the-kremlins-ability-to-wreak-havoc-in-the-2020-election

russkie President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have a preference in the United States’ 2020 presidential election, and it isn’t former Vice President Joe Biden. Efforts by Russian operatives to interfere in this year’s election — just as they interfered in 2016’s presidential election — and help President Donald Trump win a second term have been well documented. Journalist Franklin Foer, this week in an article for The Atlantic, warns that the Kremlin will be relentless this time.

:{

}:

“Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed,” Foer explains. “Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win (in 2016), but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him — discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.”

The United States’ election vulnerabilities, Foer warns, have “widened, not narrowed, during the past four years.” And Trump, according to Foer, “has dismissed Russian interference as a hoax and fired or threatened intelligence officials who have contradicted that narrative, all while professing his affinity for the very man who ordered this assault on American democracy.”

Foer is, of course, referring to Putin.

"The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses and how to exploit them,” Foer notes. “Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day — and possibly, without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods…. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.”

Foer specifies some of the United States’ election vulnerabilities, observing that the U.S. has “alluring targets: the vendors, niche companies that sell voting equipment to states and localities, the employees of those governments — each with passwords that can be stolen — voting machines that connect to the internet to transmit election results.”

Putin supporters in Russia, Foer adds, could use malware to go after U.S. voter databases.

“If the Russians attached such a bug to a voter registration database, they could render an entire election logistically unfeasible,” Foer warns. “Tracking who had voted and where they’d voted would be impossible.”

Foer adds, “But Russia need not risk such a devastating attack. It can simply meddle with voter registration databases, which are filled with vulnerabilities…. Such meddling could stop short of purging voters from the rolls and still cause significant disruptions: hackers could flip the digits in addresses, so that voters’ photo IDs no longer match the official records. When people arrived at the polls, they would likely still be able to vote, but might be forced to cast provisional ballots. The confusion and additional paperwork would generate long lines andstoke suspicion about the underlying integrity of the election.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-trolls-hype-coronavirus-and-giuliani-conspiracies

db no lnx pix docs

The network of Russian-linked trolls identified by The Daily Beast goes beyond just a single post on COVID-19 conspiracies. From at least 2016 through this year, trolls sought to spread disinformation on elections in the U.S. and Europe, pit Western countries against each other, and ruin Ukraine’s international reputation.

In December 2019, as impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump took place, Russian-linked trolls spread an article that falsely claimed Democrats colluded with a former KGB officer during the 2016 elections. The article, “Former KGB agent sponsored Democrats in the 2016 election,” falsely accuses Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk of having worked for Soviet intelligence during the Cold War and financing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The theme of Democratic collusion with Ukraine to undermine Trump’s candidacy, often touted by President Trump and his allies, is a theme Russian intelligence operatives have pushed for years, according to The New York Times.

Relying on Rudy

Many of the Secondary Infektion stories used phony screengrabs or forged documents to further their narrative. By contrast, the authors of the fake KGB support story relied on the conspiracy theorizing of Rudy Giuliani and the Trump-cheering cable news channel OANN to push their story.

“Rudy Giuliani's recent visit to Ukraine exposed many secrets of the Democratic Party, which is trying to distract the public from its crimes through the impeachment of the incumbent US president,” the trolls wrote alongside links to OANN’s coverage of the impeachment scandal.

The Secondary Infektion crew also ventured beyond the relitigation of America’s 2016 presidential election to meddle in elections in Europe.

In advance of Sweden’s 2018 elections, the trolls used a series of fake conspiracies focused on the right wing nationalist Sweden Democrats party to interfere in Sweden’s 2018 election.Secondary Infektion propagandists forged a fake letter in stilted English purporting to show Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warning Poland’s foreign minister that “Russian special services are going to provide technical and material support to the Swedish Democrats and help them in the election campaign” as part of a hacking campaign.

“It bears the digital hallmarks of forgery,” said Sam Meyer, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Meyer ran the Pompeo letter image through the Tungstène imagery analysis software and found that the image was based on a digital template bearing the State Department letterhead and Secretary Pompeo’s signature with the text digitally added separately.

Many of the the Secondary Infektion articles identified by The Daily Beast appeared aimed at dividing the U.S. from its allies in Europe.

Since its forces began occupying eastern Ukraine, Russia has tried to oppose the U.S. sale of lethal aid to Ukrainian forces, particularly the Javelin anti-tank missiles which could be useful in fending off Russian armor. As the Trump administration mulled the prospect of a sale in the fall of 2017, Russian trolls published a forged screenshot pretending to come from the Twitter account of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria. “Javelins from Ukraine will help #YPG/#YPJ fighters defeat #IS in Deir al-Zour. #JazeeraStorm #defeatDaesh.”

Except the tweet was never sent and neither American nor Ukrainian forces ever transferred Javelins to partner forces in Syria. The apparent goal of the forgery and accompanying article was an attempt to paint the Trump administration’s arms sale to Ukraine as reckless and to create tensions between the U.S., Ukraine, and Turkey, which has strongly objected to transfers of less sophisticated arms to Kurdish forces in Syria.

But not all of the articles fit into such neat thematic categories. At least one appeared aimed at diverting attention from or at least provoking confusion about a criminal case involving the theft of classified information from the National Security Agency.

Federal prosecutors charged former NSA contractor Hal Martin in 2016 with unlawfully taking home vast amounts of classified NSA data. Martin had initially come under suspicion as a result of an investigation into the publication of classified NSA hacking tools released by a group calling itself “The Shadow Brokers,” which some believe may be a front for Russian intelligence.

Martin was never charged with involvement in the Shadow Brokers leak. But in November 2016, a month after prosecutors arrested him, personas bearing the hallmarks of the Secondary Infektion campaign began posting articles falsely claiming that Martin had betrayed the identities of undercover CIA officers associated with the Bush-era torture program.

Another Secondary Infektion article took aim at what would seem an unlikely target for the Kremlin: former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. In 2018, while Medvedev was still serving as prime minister of Russia, the trolls used a fake screenshot of a nonexistent article from The Guardian to cast doubt on his political future, writing that Medvedev was “facing a whole bunch of problems, from lack of financing to health issues and even alcohol.”

Bang for the buck?

For all the effort put into the troll campaign, the impact appears to have been small to nonexistent. In 2016, IRA trolls operating Twitter and Facebook accounts racked up millions of views throughout the U.S. presidential election, but the greater scrutiny of Russian disinformation and more cautious operational security practices used by the Secondary Infektion have come at a steep cost in terms of reach.

None of the articles or forgeries identified by The Daily Beast appear to have been picked up and amplified by news outlets or social media users outside of Secondary Infektion.

"One of the biggest mysteries about Secondary Infektion is what the operators thought they were doing,” said Nimmo. “I've never seen so little bang to the buck."

In the history of documented Secondary Infektion articles, only one appears to have gained any traction—the leak of authentic U.K.-U.S. trade documents shortly before the British general election in 2019.

[Leaked: Secret Documents From Russia’s Election Trolls

RED SPILL

Spencer Ackerman,

Gideon Resnick,

Ben Collins

Trump’s New Favorite Channel Employs Kremlin-Paid Journalist

MOONLIGHTING

Kevin Poulsen]

The reach of articles identified by The Daily Beast is much shorter. The posts, published to obscure and niche web forums like WorthyChristianForums and DefendingTheTruth, garnered just a few dozen views according to view counters available on some of the sites. Some generated agreement or at least debate among a handful of forumgoers and social media users where they were posed, but they also generated derision and skepticism as well.

“Arthur,” one Reddit commenter wrote under a Secondary Infektion persona’s piece about Brexit, “you've done something that I couldn't imagine was possible. You've written a piece so poor that brexiteers and remainers can unite around how dreadful your opinions are. There's something in here to make everyone scoff.”

Others social media users noticed the pattern of single-use accounts posting articles on known Russian themes and found them appropriately suspicious. “New Reddit User. 1 post. Article about the east.” a Redditor commented on a post trying to stir up tensions between Hungary and Ukraine. “You almost got me Putin.”

Adam Rawnsley

adam.rawnsley@thedailybeast.com

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/7-bombshell-allegations-in-a-damning-new-trump-administration-whistleblower-report/

a new whistleblower complaint from U.S. Department of Homeland Security employee Brian Murphy released Wednesday provided a slew of provocative and disturbing allegations of criminal behavior and abuse of authority within the Trump administration.

The document was released by the House Intelligence Committee, and it actually summarizes numerous previous complaints that Murphy, the principal deputy under secretary for the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, has previously filed with the inspector general.The complaint alleged that he has since faced professional retaliation from his superiors because of his previous allegations, despite the fact that he is protected from such actions by federal law.

While the retaliation is condemnable on its own, most striking are the series of allegations the complaint described. It paints a picture of a department completely warped by the president’s distorted priorities and determined to cater to his whims and prejudices, regardless of the facts — sometimes putting the country in danger.

Here are seven key details:

1. Murphy said he was illegally directed to manipulate intelligence assessments to support aggressive border policies.

On or about October 29, 2018, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that instructions from Mr. Taylor and Ms. Marquadt had been issued for Mr. Murphy to ensure the intelligence assessments he produced for Secretary Nielsen’s review supported the policy argument that large numbers of KSTs were entering the United States through the southwest border. Mr. Murphy declined to censor or manipulate the intelligence information, viewing it as an improper administration of an intelligence program, and stated to Mr. Glawe that doing what was being requested would constitute a felony.

2. The complaint makes a compelling case that former DHS Secretary Kirtjen Nielsen repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress to exaggerate the threat at the border.

Murphy said that the secretary purposely tried to blur the distinction between “Known or Suspected Terrorists” (KSTs) and other categories of migrants, thereby misleadingly suggesting the border posed a greater threat of terrorism than it actually does. Even after he explained these distinctions to Nielsen, Murphy said, she consistently misled Congress about the matter:

Prior to Secretary Nielsen’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 20, 2018, Mr. Murphy attended a preparation session that went over the information within the proposed testimony. During that session, Mr. Murphy sought to clarify for Secretary Nielsen the distinction between a KST and a Special Interest Alien (“SIA”). An SIA is a term of art created by U.S. Customs and Border Protection meant to describe a category of migrants who come from countries where there is a significant terrorism threat but regarding whom there is no individualized basis for suspecting the person is themselves a terrorist. An SIA does not constitute a KST.

Notwithstanding the clarification provided by Mr. Murphy, he has a good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen subsequently provided on December 20, 2018, regarding KSTs constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. This assessment formed the basis of the anonymous OIG complaint Mr. Murphy submitted on November 2, 2018. On January 9, 2019, without consulting with Messrs. Glawe or Murphy, DHS issued a document – apparently crafted by Messrs. Wolf and Taylor, and Ms. Marquadt – entitled “Myth/Fact: Known and Suspected Terrorists/Special Interest Aliens”. The document contained erroneous information regarding the number of KSTs and SIAs encountered along the southwest border.

On March 5, 2019, Mr. Murphy participated in another preparation session with Secretary Nielsen, this time in advance of her testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Messrs. Wolf and Taylor were also present. During the session, Mr. Murphy provided Secretary Nielsen with documentation reflecting that the number of documented KSTs crossing the southwest border only consisted of no more than three individuals, not 3,755 individuals as she had previously attested to in her testimony on December 20, 2018. 3 Mr. Wolf and Mr. Taylor responded by saying Secretary Nielsen should claim the details were classified, state any KST crossing was one too many and deflect away from addressing the significant discrepancy in the data. Mr. Murphy advised Secretary Nielsen that he did not believe that was appropriate, and noted that the few “known” KSTs who were apprehended were derivative contacts, in so much as they merely had a name or phone number of a person who was known to be in contact with a terrorist. At that point, Mr. Murphy was removed from the meeting by Mr. Wolf. He then informed Messrs. Glawe and Hanna what transpired that evening.

It is Mr. Murphy’s good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen delivered on March 6, 2019, regarding KSTs again constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. Mr. Murphy outlined that assessment in his anonymous May 13, 2019, OIG complaint.

3. Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli illegally tried to distort intelligence reports he viewed as too favorable to asylum seekers, claiming they were concocted by the “Deep State,” the complaint said. 

In December 2019, Mr. Murphy attended a meeting with Messrs. Cuccinelli and Glawe to discuss intelligence reports regarding conditions in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The intelligence reports were designed to help asylum officers render better determinations regarding their legal standards. Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed the intelligence reports and he presented them to Mr. Cuccinelli in the meeting. Mr. Murphy defended the work in the reports, but Mr. Cuccinelli stated he wanted changes to the information outlining high levels of corruption, violence, and poor economic conditions in the three respective countries. Mr. Cuccinelli expressed frustration with the intelligence reports, and he accused unknown “deep state intelligence analysts” of compiling the intelligence information to undermine President Donald J. Trump’s (“President Trump”) policy objectives with respect to asylum. Notwithstanding Mr. Murphy’s response that the intelligence reports’ assessments were consistent with past assessments made for several years, Mr. Cuccinelli ordered Messrs. Murphy and Glawe to identify the names of the “deep state” individuals who compiled the intelligence reports and to either fire or reassign them immediately.

After the meeting, Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Glawe that Mr. Cuccinelli’s instructions were illegal, as well as constituted an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program.

4. Under Secretary David Glawe was reportedly almost fired by Trump after he testified about the threat posed by Russian election interference.

In approximately September 2018, Mr. Glawe testified in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Mr. Murphy was not present during the testimony. Immediately following that hearing, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that he had been “challenged” by Republican members of the Committee regarding Mr. Glawe’s confirmation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Mr. Glawe was subsequently summoned to the White House a few days after his testimony. Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that Secretary Nielsen had warned him that President Trump had demanded Mr. Glawe be fired. However, Secretary Nielsen and White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, had convinced President Trump to “give Glawe another chance”. After that meeting at the White House, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that while he (Mr. Glawe) would continue to support him on most matters he (Mr. Murphy) was on his own when it came to election interference assessments.

5. Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Murphy to stop reporting on Russian interference and to focus on China and Iran, which Murphy believed “would put the country in substantial and specific danger,” the complaint said.

In mid-May 2020, Mr. Wolf instructed Mr. Murphy to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Wolf he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.

6. Officials were concerned that discussing the threats posed by white supremacists and Russian intelligence operations would reflect badly on Trump, and they preferred that Murphy’s team work on “violent ‘left-wing’ groups” like “antifa.”

These changes would clearly better match Trump’s preferred rhetoric, though not reality.

In March 2020, Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed a Homeland [Threat] Assessment (“HTA”). Completion of the HTA was a requirement set forth by Acting Secretary Kevin McCleenan prior to his departure from DHS. Mr. Murphy was intimately involved in the editing and crafting of the HTA. Following its completion, the HTA was distributed by Mr. Glawe to Messrs. Wolf, Cuccinelli, and Gountanis. Shortly after the distribution, Mr. Glawe was informed that further distribution of the HTA was prohibited due to concerns raised by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding how the HTA would reflect upon President Trump. Two sections were specifically labeled as concerns: White Supremacy and Russian influence in the United States. Mr. Murphy stated to Mr. Glawe that this constituted an abuse of authority by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli, and Mr. Glawe concurred with that assessment.

In May 2020, Mr. Glawe retired, and Mr. Murphy assumed the role of Acting Under Secretary. In May 2020 and June 2020, Mr. Murphy had several meetings with Mr. Cuccinelli regarding the status of the HTA. Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent “left-wing” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to make the requested modifications, and informed Mr. Cuccinelli that it would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.

…

During multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to modify any of the intelligence assessments based upon political rhetoric, and advised both officials he would only report accurate intelligence information as collected by DHS I&A.

7. Classified material

Much of what is concerning about the complaint is what it doesn’t mention. At several points, the complaint makes clear it can’t repeat the substance of allegations regarding DHS officials because the material involved is classified. This is particularly concerning because other parts of the complaint indicate that officials abused the classification system to cover up embarrassing or inconvenient facts.

Additional point: One interesting point to note is that Murphy tried to push back on some reporting that was critical of DHS because it supposedly implied falsely that DHS was collecting intelligence information on journalists and reporters.

Murphy claims this didn’t happen. Putting aside the particulars, this detail in the report may be seen as bolstering Murphy’s credibility. Defenders of the administration will likely argue he’s a disgruntled employee trying to hurt Trump and DHS,  but it’s notable that he seems to be willing to defend the department when he thinks the facts have been unfairly reported. This suggests Murphy is someone who cares about getting to the truth, rather someone who is trying to hurt the president and the administration no matter the cost:

To be unequivocally clear, the press reporting was significantly flawed and, in many instances, contained completely erroneous assertions. For example, DHS I&A never knowingly or deliberately collected information on journalists, at least as far as Mr. Murphy is aware or ever authorized. There were, to be sure, efforts to track publicly available media reporting that included information that had been leaked from the U.S. Government, including publicly-accessible posts by journalists on social media, but DHS I&A did not seek authorization to and was not engaging in surveillance of journalists’ private data.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/is-it-a-coincidence-that-moscow-is-peddling-the-same-lies-as-the-trump-campaign/

ana j wa mo

no  journalist has done a better job of fact-checking Donald Trump during his presidency than Daniel Dale. But now the CNN reporter, formerly of the Toronto Star, has done an invaluable service by outlining the nine conspiracy theories the president is continuously peddling. As Dale suggests, “Trump has been a conspiracy theorist for years.” but never before has he pushed so many at one time.

Two of them align completely with disinformation campaigns coming out of Moscow. For example, we learned that the Russian government began promoting the lies about mail-in ballots as early as last March.

Russia has sought to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News, again echoing a frequent and unfounded complaint raised by President Donald Trump.

Analysts with the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence branch issued the warning on Thursday to federal and state law enforcement partners after finding with “high confidence” that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March.

The timing raises the question of where the conspiracy theory originated—in the Kremlin or the White House.

Similarly, we now know that the Department of Homeland Security hid a report about how Moscow was promoting the idea that Biden is mentally unfit. Their excuse for not sharing that information is that the intelligence report was “poorly written and thinly sourced.” But according to the document that was finally released, their data was incredibly solid.

the report cites posts by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik about Biden’s mental health between September 2019 and May 2020. In March, a Russian proxy website “refuted media claims that the candidate’s gaffes are the result of a stutter, instead arguing these verbal miscues are symptoms of dementia,” the bulletin said.

Once again, if this disinformation campaign began in September 2019, the attacks on Biden’s mental health seem to have started in Moscow and migrated to the Trump campaign.

This is all reminiscent of the coordinated attack on Hillary Clinton’s physical and mental health in 2016. What we now know is that conservative author Jerome Corsi was in contact with Julian Assange on the release of hacked emails by Wikileaks. He communicated with Roger Stone, who then coordinated with the Trump campaign. Here is what Corsi wrote to Stone on August 2, 2016:

Word is friend in embassy [Assange] plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging…Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke—neither he nor she well.

When it comes to the lies about mail-in voting and Biden, it is clear that both Putin and Trump are drawing on the same playbook. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence. But given this history, that is unlikely.

DNI, barr, DHS stand down to not PO trump? to help VLAD?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-warning-lights-are-flashing-red-how-trumps-toadies-are-helping-him-collude-with-russia/

After reviewing classified intelligence reports about Vladimir Putin’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election over three weeks ago, Senator Richard Blumenthal tried to sound the alarm.

The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack.

This week, I reviewed classified materials in the Senate’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and received a similarly classified briefing on malign foreign threats to U.S. elections. I was shocked by what I learned — and appalled that, by swearing Congress to secrecy, the Trump administration is keeping the truth about a grave, looming threat to democracy hidden from the American people. On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued astatement that only hints at the threats.

The facts are chilling. I believe the American public needs and deserves to know them. The information should be declassified immediately.

Blumenthal went on to say that what he learned makes “Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” We still, however, have no idea of what shocked him enough to write that op-ed in the Washington Post.

What we do know is how the Trump administration reacted. Last Friday, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, told Congress that his office would no longer brief them in person about foreign election interference, but would submit written reports. Clearly they don’t want to face probing questions from Congress. In defending his actions, however, Ratcliffe admitted that it goes beyond that.

[no twt]

ratcliffe’s initial argument doesn’t make any sense. He said that he is going to stop in-person briefings because members of Congress leaked classified information to the press. What he didn’t explain is how that would stop leaks. Classified information provided in writing is even easier to share with reporters.

In a scathing rebuke of Ratcliffe’s announcement, the Washington Post editorial board pointed out that the only so-called “leaks” came from the kind issued by Senator Blumenthal.

After the intelligence community briefed members of Congress in late July about threats to the upcoming election, Democrats expressed alarm about what they had learned — and about the fact that the information had not been shared with the American public. “The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack,” wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in a Post op-ed, without disclosing any specifics…

[T]he only “leak” was the simple fact that the administration was withholding critical information about Russia’s interference — which, of course, is intended to help President Trump win reelection.

In that clip of Ratcliffe’s Fox News appearance, he eventually got to the point by saying that Democrats leaked information that “simply wasn’t true, that somehow Russia is a greater security threat than China.” In a case of obvious projection, Ratcliffe is telling us that the Trump administration doesn’t want Congress or the public to know what Moscow is doing to interfere in the election, but instead wants to change the narrative to focus on the distraction they’re offering about the threat posed by China. In other words, Ratcliffe is suggesting that he will now cherry-pick what intelligence is shared with Congress to provide cover for what Moscow is up to.

Added to that is a troubling story about yet another purge in the Justice Department by Attorney General Barr.

Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr’s recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience.

Barr has reassigned 23-year career professional Brad Wiegmann, who had been serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Law and Policy. As ABC News reports, “The office shapes government efforts by ensuring that new policies and executive actions don’t violate federal law.”

We’ve heard stories from former Trump administration officials who have said that they often found themselves having to tell the president that the actions he wanted to take were not legal. As former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor said, Trump would claim to have “magical authorities” to break the law.

Now Barr has removed the person whose job it is to tell the administration when they are breaking the law and replaced him with a partisan loyalist. While it might not be unprecedented to do that, the fact that it comes a couple of months before an election makes this one troubling. Here is the most telling part about Wiegmann’s replacement, Kellen Dwyer:

From 2018 to 2019, he served as a fellow at the conservative-leaning Leonine Forum, a non-profit organization that says its alumni are “committed to the cause of reintroducing the tenets of [the Catholic church] into the political, policy, legal, business, and cultural activities of society.”

The Leonine Forum was created by the Catholic Information Center (CIC), an extremist group founded by Father John McCloskey, who eventually left the organization over allegations of sexual assault. Several members of the Trump administration have close ties to the CIC, including Attorney General Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.

What appears to be happening is that both Ratcliffe and Barr are paving the way for Putin and Trump, who speak regularly by phone, to illegally collude in their efforts to influence the election—this time from the Oval Office with the entire federal bureaucracy at their disposal.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/networks-warned-the-republican-national-convention-will-be-a-disinformation-cesspool/

In a letter to the presidents of major news networks Monday, a coalition of progressive groups asked that the airing of the Republican National Convention be delayed by one minute in order to “help prevent the spread of dangerous disinformation in real time.”

Members of the coalition—including UltraViolet Action, ACRONYM, BlackPAC, Color of Change PAC, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and others—warn that a number of scheduled speakers at the RNC, with speeches and prime time coverage kicking off Monday night, have actively spread disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, police violence, and abortion.

“As our nation battles the dual crises of systemic racism and the coronavirus pandemic, relying on the media for factual, life-saving information is crucial to the health of the American people and our democracy,” the letter to the presidents of CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBCUniversal and CBS reads:[twt]

the letter highlights Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist who has advocated against wearing masks to curb the spread of Covid-19, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple made famous when a photo of the pair waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters went viral, and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has compared Covid-19 deaths to deaths from influenza while pushing the theory that the coronavirus was developed in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the letter.

The groups called out President Donald Trump for pushing a “birther” conspiracy against former President Barack Obama and, more recently, about Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

“The best way to combat the spread of disinformation is to stop it at its source,” the letter reads. “By putting the Republican National Convention on a one-minute time delay, your network will be able to actively correct disinformation in real time, and prevent the American people from being lied to on your airwaves. The future of our country, our people, and our democracy are at stake.”

CNN‘s Brian Stelter warned that news outlets would have to deal with“asymmetric lying” by the nation’s political parties, noting CNN fact-checks of the DNC convention last week showed the Democrats spoke mostly in “generalities or offered subjective opinions” but that factual assertions made by convention speakers “have largely been accurate.”

“We have seen throughout history how false theories and misinformation have been used to justify oppression and racism if they are not countered and debunked in real time,” said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, director of Higher Heights Political Fund. “The rhetoric that is anticipated to come from the RNC will put lives in danger whether it is misinformation about Covid-19 or language that can be used to justify attacks on Black and brown people. We strongly implore all of the major networks to institute a time delay and fact checking because it can and will save lives.”

Bridget Todd, a spokesperson for UltraViolet Action, warned the GOP gathering would be a “disinformation cesspool filled with toxic misogyny, virulent racism, and flat out lies about the coronavirus pandemic.”

Todd said that while it’s not possible to keep the networks from airing the convention, “we can ask that they do their part to correct disinformation in real time and help stop its spread.”

“CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS have previously cut away or run fact-checks in real-time during coronavirus briefings, and this should be no different,” Todd added. “We’ve seen what happens when disinformation is allowed to spread unchecked, and the risks are just too great.”

...

wapo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html

no lnx

National Security

Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ had repeated contact with Russian intelligence, Senate panel finds

By Karoun Demirjian and

Ellen Nakashima

August 18, 2020

:{

}:

President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday that found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.

:{

}:

In its report, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee states that Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that purported Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.

It found that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, along with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016, had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report stated.

But the panel also concluded that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election was “flawed” and that the bureau gave “unjustified credence” to allegations about Trump’s Russia ties made in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”

Document: Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election]

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three-and-a-half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The panel, significantly, agreed that the FBI overestimated Steel’s reliability and that Manafort and other aides exposed the campaign to undue Russian influence. But its leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the report’s significance, and several committee members — including its acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — endorsed dissenting conclusions about Trump’s own culpability.

The partisan divisions are a sign that the panel’s tome likely will not put to rest the political wrangling over how seriously to treat foreign interference in U.S. democracy as the country heads into its most divisive election in modern history.

“After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion,” a group of six panel Republicans, including Rubio, wrote in a statementinstead accusing the Democratic Party of coordinating with foreign actors to produce Steele’s dossier.

“In 2016, the Democratic Party, using a series of arm’s length transactions, hired a foreign citizen to seek out dirt on a political opponent, provided by foreign sources,” the Republicans wrote, attacking the FBI for “sloppy work and poor judgment.”

Five Democrat senators ­— including Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the party’s 2020 vice-presidential nominee — asserted the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “This is what collusion looks like.”

The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who did not sign onto the Democrats’ dissenting views, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”

The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr(R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation and also steered clear of the GOP’s dissent, struck a position in the middle.

“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”

Senate panel told Justice Dept. of suspicions over Trump family members’ Russia testimony

Burr and Warner launched the committee’s probe before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and sustained the bipartisan investigation over the following three and a half years, even as other Congressional investigations into the same matter faltered along partisan lines. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee began its probe, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also released a 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — and Trump was impeached and acquitted after Democrats accused him of coercing Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election.

Though the committee’s probe covers much of the same turf as Mueller’s investigation, it was different in nature. Mueller was running a criminal probe; the Senate committee was conducting an intelligence investigation — a distinction that helps to explain some of nuanced differences between their conclusions.

The Senate panel’s probe, which was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, included more than 200 witnesses and considered evidence relating to Russian disinformation, Trump’s personal, business and campaign contacts with Russians and the transition period following the 2016 election.

:{

}:

At one point, the document all but concludes that Trump aides were duped and manipulated by Russian interests they were too callow to understand.

“Russian officials, intelligence services, and others” acting in concert with the Kremlin “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report concluded. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”

The report also presents a damning portrait of the Trump campaign’s hasty move in March 2016 to assemble a foreign policy team, asserting that it had recruited inexperienced people without thoroughly vetting them and thus potentially exposed itself to Russian influence.

“Ultimately,” the committee wrote, “the foreign policy team exposed the Trump Campaign to significant counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

The committee pointed to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who attempted to secure a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin through “highly suspicious” contacts with people close to the Russian government. Ultimately, investigators concluded, Papadopoulos “was not a witting co-optee of the Russian the Russian intelligence services. The panel also found that while Russia seemed to show an interest in campaign adviser Carter Page, investigators “found no indication that Page had useful Campaign information for the Russian intelligence services to extract, nor meaningful influence for them to exploit.”

The committee did find however that Putin personally directed the 2016 hack-and-leak campaign targeting the Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Clinton campaign. The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks “actively sought and played a key role in the Russian campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” the report stated, surmising that a Russian military spy agency, known as the GRU, transferred hacked emails to WikiLeaks likely because it offered a more effective platform for publicity than the GRU’s own methods.

Yet investigators could not “reliably determine the extent of authentic, nonpublic knowledge” Trump’s friend Roger Stone had about WikiLeaks’s coming releases and shared with the campaign.

The panel noted that its investigation was hampered by several witnesses’ refusing interviews and to produce documents, citing Fifth Amendment rights that protect against self incrimination. These included Stone, Manafort and Rick Gates, the campaign’s deputy chair at that time. The panel’s request to interview Julian Assange was rebuffed.

The committee also outright accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying that it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”

:{

}:

The committee previously released other volumes detailing aspects of its inquiry. Those reports focused on U.S. election security, Russia’s use of social media in disinformation campaigns, the Obama administration’s response to the perceived threat in 2016 and the intelligence community’s joint assessment that Russia had interfered in an attempt to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.

Yet the panel’s effort to maintain a bipartisan approach has not saved it from partisan scrutiny. Last year, the panel came under fire from Senate Republicans after issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. to come in for a second round of testimony.

After his testimony, Trump Jr. was one of several witnesses that the panel referred to the Justice Department for closer scrutiny over discrepancies between their testimony and that of Gates, the ex-deputy campaign chair who was a key witness in Mueller’s probe.

:{

}:

:{Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks he sold in industries hit badly by the coronavirus pandemic. Rubio has been serving as acting chairman in his place.

}:

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/history-repeating-trump-is-openly-pushing-russian-propaganda-against-biden

no lnx

Cody Fenwick August 18, 2020

Though former Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not establish that Donald Trump or members of his campaign conspired with the Kremlin in 2016 to influence the election, he famously concluded:

The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign” or “Campaign”) showed interest in WikiLeaks’s releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.

…

[The] investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts…

And this is, undoubtedly, happening again. Despite everything that happened in 2016, the chaos and scandal it unleashed, and all we’ve learned about the Russian efforts to interfere an American Democracy since then, Trump is welcoming Russia’s help once again.

On Sunday, Trump shared a tweet that included audio that U.S. intelligence has determined to be Russian propaganda.

As CNN reported:

Late Sunday, Trump amplified a tweet that contained audiotapes of a 2016 conversation between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko — material that was released earlier this year by AndriyDerkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker named by the US intelligence community in its August 7 statement about Russia’s disinformation campaign against Biden. US authorities labeled Derkach’s efforts as disinformation because they are intentionally designed to spread false or misleading information about Biden.

By retweeting material that the US government has already labeled as propaganda — and doing so with the 2020 Democratic National Convention kicking off on Monday — Trump demonstrated once again that he is willing to capitalize on foreign election meddling for his own political gain.

The conversation does not actually implicate Biden in any wrongdoing. A voice, purportedly Poroshenko, seems to cast doubt on the claim that the prosecutor Biden pushed out of a top position in Ukraine while he was vice president was corrupt. However, it was the official position of the U.S. government that the prosecutor was corrupt, and his removal was a goal shared by international allies. Additionally, Poroshenko has dismissed the recordings as fake.

The AP reported:

By amplifying the recording to his more than 85 million Twitter followers, Trump underscored the ease with which pro-Russian narratives can seep into American public discourse ahead of the 2020 election despite being flagged by intelligence officials as the product of a concerted Russian effort.

Russia has also published disinformation under the guise of legitimate news stories, U.S. officials say, reflecting something of a shift in tactics from 2016, when Russia relied on a social media campaign to sow discord and also orchestrated the release of stolen Democratic emails.

To be clear: Trump has undoubtedly been briefed on what’s going on. So either he knows what he’s doing or is barely paying attention enough to care.

And he’s not the only one. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has been warned that the investigation he’s leading into Biden’s past is tainted with Russian disinformation. But he has dismissed these concerns. And despite the obviously opportunistic nature of the inquiry — Republicans had no interest in Biden’s actions in Ukraine until he became a candidate for president — he is shamelessly ramping it up.And he has openly admitted that the section of he could use the portion of his probe focused on Trump’s “Obamagate” conspiracy theory to have an impact on the election.

“The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more we expose of the corruption within those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden,” Johnson saidin a recent interview, as Politico reported.

More broadly, the GOP has, again and again, rejected Democratic efforts to secure our elections and to forestall further foreign intervention in our politics. While not as overt as Trump and Johnson, the party as a whole has — tacitly or otherwise — become comfortable with letting Russia help the president. What was scandalous in 2016 has now become commonplace.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/democrats-warn-the-fbi-that-a-gop-senator-is-laundering-a-foreign-operation-to-attack-biden-report/

On  Monday, Politico reported that Democratic congressional leaders have sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding a briefing on foreign efforts to target members of Congress as part of an influence campaign.

“Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for ‘laundering’ a foreign influence campaign to damage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the demand,” reported Natasha Bertrand. “Though the letter did not mention the Johnson investigation, it included a classified addendum that the two sources say identified the probe as one of the sources of their concern.”

The letter was signed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA).

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, opened the investigation ostensibly to audit the origins of the Russia investigation in the previous administration. But even some Republicans have raised concerns that the overly political nature of the probe will backfire on them.

==

aha: seedisinfo GRU if goal is to divide, make cynical thus apathetic (elections are not legit) then whattabout/mirror/crypto is useful because THEY ALL DO IT

aha: is Q an interdisc hub? // anti-mask? [vax, militia?] alt rt boogaloo?

aha: gop/rt busted so many times for dark $/corruption that it needs whatabout so soros = kochs and actblue = dark $/scam

plus they need to neutralize blm demand for justice, and it's a scam than racism not real

note chan origin then moves up escalator to dobbs

=---

6/20

https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/debunked-conspiracy-theory-about-black-lives-matter-actblue-and-democrats-can-be-traced

no lnx many pix

A false money laundering conspiracy theory regarding the Black Lives Matter movement's use of a payment processing company for donations has gained traction online among right-wing figures and can be traced back to far-right message boards.

The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments. ActBlue is a payment processor used widely by progressive groups and organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has an equivalent processing company called WinRed. As the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has noted, “many candidates use [ActBlue] to process donations but that money isn't pooled to be shared across candidates or groups,” and “a donation to BLM through ActBlue goes just to BLM, not any other group.” But the conspiracy theory still has earned well over a million shares and views on social media and has been amplified by a Fox Nation host.

A review by Media Matters found that before it gained traction, the conspiracy theory had been circulating for days on far-right message boards. The earliest mention our review found was at the beginning of June on Twitter, when an account that has pushed the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory repeatedly tweeted the claim on June 1 and June 2. The account claimed it had sent the conspiracy theory to the FBI and President Donald Trump, and it urged the Ohio Police Department to investigate the claim.

@OneVoiceUS

The conspiracy theory popped up days later on June 5 on TheDonald.win, a new forum for the subreddit “r/TheDonald,” which was known for violent rhetoric and was ultimately quarantined by Reddit. On TheDonald.win, a user wrote that “when you go to donate on the blacklivesmatter.com website,” you are redirected to ActBlue, which means entities “donating to Black Lives Matter are actually donating to ActBlue.” That means, the user wrote, that the donations may be “just going straight to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.” 

The next day, another user on the forum wrote in a post that “BLM is a bait and switch fundraising scam” for the Democratic National Committee “by laundering money through Act Blue.” The user urged others to “tell everyone you know.” This post gained more traction on the forum than the first one, which it directly referenced in the comments. Similar language made its way to Facebook minutes later.

The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1

Over the next few days, the conspiracy theory also began circulating on 4chan’s “/pol/” message board, a known hotspot for white nationalists, where users pointed to ActBlue to claim Black Lives Matter was “a fundraising apparatus” and a “slush fund” for Democrats. One 4chan user pushing the claim on June 8 used nearly the exact same language as the June 5 post from TheDonald.win.

4chan ActBlue claim

The conspiracy theory also continued to circulate on TheDonald.win on June 8 and reached the subreddit “r/conservative,” where a user called Black Lives Matter a “money laundering scheme” for Democrats via ActBlue. That post was later shared in a YouTube video.

The following day, on June 9, The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has a history of publishing misinformation, posted that the BLM site “appears to be aninternational money laundering scheme used by the Democrats to raise money from an international audience,” claiming ActBlue appears to be “a funding arm of the DNC.” (The site’s owner Jim Hoft shared the post on Twitter, calling it an “exclusive.”) The post gave a “hat tip” to TheDonald.win for the claim. The post was picked up by multiple far-right figures, including by a QAnon-supporting former congressional candidate on Twitter, another QAnon Twitter account with a major following who keeps evading his Twitter ban, and by trollMilo Yiannopoulos on Telegram.

Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim

On June 10, right-wing pundit Candace Owens quote-tweeted an Instagram video pushing the conspiracy theory and accused Black Lives Matters of being a “shell company” for Democrats via ActBlue(Owens also posted the video on Instagram, where it received well over a million views). Minutes later, “Q,” the central entity of the QAnon conspiracy theory, posted a link to Owens’ tweet on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board. Owens’ post has been retweeted more than 64,000 times so far.

Candace Owens ActBlue claim

Following Owens’ post, the conspiracy theory began spreading to other conservative figures, such as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; a Florida Republican congressional candidate who has given credence toQAnon; Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier (who, like Owens, incorrectly called ActBlue a “Democrat super PAC”); Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s London bureau Raheem Kassam.

Additionally, two major conservative TikTok accounts, @therepublicanhypehouse and @conservativehypehouse, both posted videos pushing the conspiracy theory, getting more than 370,000 views combined (even though TikTok has an anti-misinformation policy).

The conspiracy theory also apparently reached Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has a history of pushing claims from message boards. She tweeted, “When you donate to BLM you’re donating to the Dems.”

Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim

These tweets and videos combined have gotten hundreds of thousands of shares and views and have amplified the conspiracy theory far beyond fringe message boards.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/outright-lies-how-voting-misinformation-flourishes-on-facebook/

ProPublica 

On April 3, Terrence K. Williams, a politically conservative actor and comedian who’s been by President Donald Trump, assured his nearly 3 million followers on Facebook that Democrats would light ballots on fire or throw them away. Wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat, Williams declared, “If you mail in your vote, your vote will be in Barack Obama’s fireplace.” The video has been viewed more than 350,000 times.

On May 8, Peggy Hubbard, a Navy veteran and police officer who this year sought the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, warned on Facebook that the country was heading toward civil war. “Your democracy, your freedom is being stripped away from you, and if you allow that then everything this country stood for, fought for, bled for is all in vain.” The cause? California’s recent expansion of voting by mail: “The only way you will be able to vote in the upcoming election in November is by mail only,” Hubbard said. The video has attracted more than 209,000 views.

On June 27, Pamela Geller, an anti-Muslim activist with nearly 1.3 million followers, weighed in. “Mail-in ballots guarantee that the Democrats will commit voter fraud,” she said on Facebook.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

There’s no evidence for any of these statements. While California will mail absentee ballots to all registered voters, polling places will also be available. Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, including with mail-in ballots. A recent Washington Post analysis analyzed three states with all-mail elections — Colorado, Oregon and Washington — and found just 372 potential irregularities among 14.6 million votes, or 0.0025%.

Facebook’s community standards ban “misrepresentation of who can vote, qualifications for voting, whether a vote will be counted, and what information and/or materials must be provided in order to vote.” But an analysis by ProPublica and First Draft, a global nonprofit that researches misinformation, shows that Facebook is rife with false or misleading claims about voting, particularly regarding voting by mail, which is the safest way of casting a ballot during the pandemic.Many of these falsehoods appear to violate Facebook’s standards yet have not been taken down or labeled as inaccurate. Some of them, generalizing from one or two cases, portrayed people of color as the face of voter fraud.

The false claims, including conspiracy theories about stolen elections or outright misrepresentations about voting by mail by Trump and prominent conservative outlets, are often among the most popular posts about voting on Facebook, according to a review of engagement data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool.

On Facebook, interactions — the number of comments, likes, reactions and shares that a post attracts — are a proxy for popularity. Of the top 50 posts, ranked by total interactions, that mentioned voting by mail since April 1, 22 contained false or substantially misleading claims about voting, particularly about mail-in ballots.

“We have a long history in this country of voter suppression that goes all the way back to our founding,” said Jessica Gonzalez, the co-CEO of Free Press, an advocacy group focused on media and technology. “This is a new way to suppress the vote, and I don’t know why Facebook wants any part of it.”

In an email, Geller said that “what I wrote was factual and accurate” and that the contention that voter fraud is rare “is ridiculous on its face.” She added: “You’re trying to deceive your readers into not believing what they see with their own eyes.”

Hubbard and Williams did not respond to questions. After ProPublica flagged their posts to Facebook, it deleted them.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the company is “running the largest voting information campaign in American history,” including aiming to register 4 million voters. It plans to create a Voting Information Center — a box on top of user feeds — “to connect people with authoritative information about the elections” and add labels that link voting-related posts to official election information.

“Making sure people have accurate information about voting is especially critical during the COVID crisis,” the spokesperson said.

From March to May 2020, Facebook removed more than 100,000 pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram for violating its policies against voter suppression, according to the company’s website. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month that he stands against “anything that incites violence or suppresses voting.”

ProPublica and First Draft tracked Facebook posts using voting-related keywords — including the terms “vote by mail,” “mail-in ballots,” “voter fraud” and “stolen elections” — since early April, when Trump began attacking voting by mail. Mentions of these voting-related terms nearly tripled on Facebook, with interest in the topic spiking after Twitter attached a fact-checking label to Trump’s false tweets and directed users to a fact-check page on May 26. Twitter’s intervention prompted Trump to claim that Twitter is “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “stifling FREE SPEECH.” Facebook has refused to take down Trump’s false claims about voting by mail.

Facebook’s inaction on Trump’s posts spurred pushback over misinformation on the site. Gonzalez helped organize an advertising boycott of Facebook that now includes more than 1,000 companies and some of the platform’s biggest advertisers. Among other demands, they’re calling on Facebook to remove voting misinformation.

In a long-awaited assessment of its civil rights record, Facebook was faulted last week for being “far too reluctant to adopt strong rules to limit misinformation and voter suppression.” Also last week, civil rights groups met with Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg, to push their demands and came away disappointed.

“It was all talk, no action,” Gonzalez said. “We hear words like ‘We know we need to do better’ and ‘We’re working on this,’ and yet misinformation still seems to be quite pervasive on the site.”

Facebook expects to meet one of the groups’ demands by hiring a vice president to coordinate civil rights issues internally, according to the company.

The posts identified by ProPublica and First Draft offer outright false claims about voting, blend opinion and factual errors, or mislead users about the reliability of voting methods. Facebook has said it is committed to both free speech and to providing reliable information about voting, but those goals may sometimes conflict.

Facebook has removed more than 90% of false posts referred to it by VoteSure, a 2018 initiative by the state of California to educate voters and flag misinformation, Secretary of State Alex Padilla said. In VoteSure’s first election, the 2018 midterms, 272 of 276 posts and tweets reported to social media platforms were taken down.

Still, VoteSure only identifies a small portion of misinformation, and Facebook needs to do more, Padilla said. The platform, he said, has made progress but still has “baseless outright lies, claims about massive voter fraud, and posts that are clearly wrong, or clearly erroneous.”

Trump’s false attacks on voting by mail had a total of 3.8 million interactions on Facebook. Among them, a Trump post that falsely claimed Nevada had illegally sent out ballots had the most interactions of any post that has mentioned vote by mail in the last 12 months in the U.S. Trump’s false claim that California is sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there” drew the third most interactions of any post that mentioned voting over the same period, ranking behind a post from Obama and a pro-Trump meme.

In recent months, Trump has also claimed on Facebook that “mail-in ballots will lead to a “RIGGED ELECTION!” and falsely said they are “substantially fraudulent”; he made false statements about the legality of actions taken by election officials in Michigan and Nevada; and he misrepresented his own power to deny funding to states that expand vote by mail. Trump continued those false claims last week, arguing a debunked distinction between mail-in voting and absentee voting.

“What is frustrating is that Trump can post or tweet whatever he wants without the proper checks and balances,” Padilla said. “What keeps me up at night is that he’s clearly setting the stage to question election results that he might not like in November.”

Breitbart, a conservative website that has long championed Trump, has had more engagement on its voting-related stories than any other publisher from April until July 1, according to our analysis. In fact, voting-related stories on Breitbart have garnered more interactions since April than equivalent articles by The Washington Post, The New York Times and NBC News combined. Many of the Breitbart posts are misleading at best. “Obama ratchets up Democrats’ Cheat-by-Mail scheme!” read one post, linking to a story that misleadingly framed how often voter fraud occurs. Another post declared: “Flooding the nation with ballots that can be stolen, sold, discarded, and forged—THAT’s the path to Leftist victory in November.”

In a video by Fox Nation, Fox News’ streaming service, that has been viewed nearly 500,000 times, host Tomi Lahren said, “I firmly believe the only way Donald Trump loses in November is because of voter fraud.” In the video, Lahren falsely claims that voter fraud is rampant in California. “You think coronavirus is a crisis, wait till you see the voter fraud epidemic we have here in California. And mark my words it’s heading to your state like a diseased bat out of hell.” (There’s no evidence that voter fraud is rampant in California, or in any other state.)

“This is an editorial video, not a news report, which is very clear to any Fox Nation viewer,” said John Finley, executive vice president of development for Fox News Media. The White House, the Trump campaign and Breitbart did not respond to requests for comment.

In a Facebook group dedicated to fans of Candace Owens, a conservative commentator, one post circulated a 2016 video that describes a widely debunked conspiracy theory linking billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros to “rigged” voting machines. The post has received more than 16,000 shares. Soros’ Open Society Foundations donate to ProPublica.

Claims of “stolen elections” were common across the political spectrum. A post by the left-leaning page Ridin’ With Biden contended that Trump and Kanye West were trying to steal the election. A clip of Joe Biden saying that his “single greatest concern” is that Trump would try to “steal the election” was touted as evidence of a conspiracy by Republicans. Other claims of stolen elections have come from Secure America Now, quoting Newt Gingrich; Trump’s former White House doctor Ronny Jackson, now running for Congress; and liberal accounts like StandWithMueller and Occupy Democrats.

Facebook is reportedly considering banning political ads in the days before the election. But our review showed that misinformation or false claims about voting by mail on Facebook are rarer in paid political ads than in posts. The vast majority of ads that used voting-related terms were factual and promoted voter participation broadly, including ads from Democratic and Republican groups, nonpartisan voting organizations and state election offices. However, we did find a handful of ads that pushed questionable claims about voting by mail.

A group called Morning in Nevada PAC, created by supporters of Adam Laxalt, the state’s former Republican attorney general, has launched a handful of ads attacking voting by mail, spending between $14,800 and $20,998 this year, according to a search of Facebook’s political ad library. Some of these ads make unsubstantiated claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to fix the election using mail-in voting.

A similar ad from the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs describes absentee ballots as the “‘tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud.”

Several posts identified by ProPublica and First Draft seized on isolated incidents to link people of color to voter fraud, a tactic reminiscent of the 1988 George H.W. Bush campaign ad that featured mug shots of Willie Horton, a Black felon who committed a rape while on a weekend furlough, to paint Michael Dukakis as weak on crime. One meme-like post has appeared on at least 136 Facebook pages and groups, including Hubbard’s, as well as groups like “2nd Amendment Hotties” and “Dullards for Trump,” which have produced 100,838 interactions. The post features a headshot of Sherikia Hawkins, a former Southfield, Michigan, clerk. Text on the image reads:

“THE DEMOCRAT CLERK OF SOUTHFIELD, MICHIGAN IS FACING TRIAL ON 6 FELONY COUNTS OF VOTER FRAUD FOR EDITING HUNDREDS OF BALLOTS. PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS BEEN RIGHT ALL ALONG ABOUT DEMOCRATS’ ELECTION TAMPERING AND VOTER FRAUD.”

The post is inaccurate. Hawkins was not charged with editing ballots themselves. She was charged in state court with altering voter records used to track ballots. No voters were disenfranchised. Hawkins, who has not yet entered a plea, is expected to face trial this year.

In June, a Patterson, New Jersey, city councilman and a councilman-elect, along with two other men, were charged with illegally collecting ballots from voters and delivering them to an election office. New Jersey prohibits anyone from delivering more than three ballots on behalf of voters. The case is pending, and the councilman and councilman-elect have said they will plead not guilty. On Facebook, Breitbart and several other conservative pages have displayed mugshots of the defendants, all of whom are people of color, to suggest that voter fraud is rampant.

“There is already a sense in the Black community that our votes will be lost and that the election won’t be fair,” said Brandi Collins-Dexter, a senior campaign director at Color of Change, a civil rights group organizing the ad boycott. “What this stuff does is just confuse people and sow distrust.”

Though vote by mail was less controversial before the pandemic, misinformation about other aspects of voting also plagued Facebook in 2016. Before Rhode Island’s presidential primary that year, Bernie Sanders supporters wrongly accused its secretary of state, Nellie Gorbea, on social media of suppressing turnout, based on a news report that the number of open polling places would be considerably less than in a November general election.

However, it’s common for states to have fewer polling locations during a primary, when turnout is lower. Rhode Island actually had 15 more locations available than in the 2012 presidential primary. In any case, the state Board of Elections, not Gorbea, was in charge of polling places.

“In 24 hours, we received thousands of comments on Facebook and Twitter,” Gorbea said. “Nothing would quell it.” Her office received angry messages from 36 states and three countries, but just one message from a Rhode Island constituent. Her office has since hired a full-time employee to monitor social media.

Exaggerating the prevalence of voting fraud can backfire. In a study released in June, researchers showed respondents a series of tweets. Some were actual 2018 tweets by Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio that put forth unfounded claims of voter fraud; others were more generic “placebo” tweets. The false claims reduced confidence in elections for everyone, the researchers found, especially Republicans and those who approve of Trump. Those groups “reported significantly lower confidence in elections after exposure to a low dose of voter fraud allegations even when those claims were countered by fact-checks.”

As a result, Trump’s rhetoric may cause fewer Republicans to vote by mail than Democrats, said Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study and a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Still, Nyhan is worried about broader effects of misinformation. “The problem has clearly gotten worse in terms of elite rhetoric,” Nyhan said. “We’ve seen what happens in other countries when there isn’t a shared trust in the rules of the game in democracy and it’s not good.”

For now, misinformation may be difficult to stop before it goes viral. On July 13, conservatives on Facebook pounced on a video in which an unidentified Trump supporter said she was denied the right to vote, apparently in Louisiana. Many of these pages framed it as evidence of voter fraud and a Democratic plot to steal the election. By the time the post was deemed false by PolitiFact, a Facebook fact-checking partner, it had received more than 3.7 million views and been shared more than 170,000 times.

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

no lnx pix twet

The term disinformation tends to conjure up images of Twitter bot armies with thick Russian accents, but the disinformation landscape in 2020 is a lot more complex. While Russia has great expertise in roiling U.S. political waters, it isn’t the only foreign actor in the disinformation and trolling games. The Oxford Internet Institute issued a report finding “evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017.”Social media companies have removed content with disinformation campaigns originating in Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran.

Iranian Facebook post targeting Americans. (Source: Facebook)

But homegrown disinformation is a much bigger problem, starting with President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and extending into a vast network of pro-Trump super PACs, right-wing media outlets, and an organized army of MAGA warriors happy to amplify every lie, false conspiracy, and misdirection online. Domestic disinformers have adopted tactics deployed by Russia and other hostile actors in 2016, optimizing them for 2020.

The lessons of 2016 haven’t been lost on the legions of far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who have their own web-based video and audio shows. With the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout posing threats to Trump’s reelection, the president’s online far-right boosters have taken up disinformation messaging designed to discredit the judgment of public health officials and scientists on the severity of the pandemic and the resulting COVID-19 disease. For instance, Rodney Howard-Browne, a Florida megachurch pastor who convened large church services in defiance of social distancing orders, claimed that the pandemic was “planned” at a 2019 New York event hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And Rick Wiles, a religious-right broadcaster and font of anti-Semitic lies, suggested that the coronavirus emergency may have been “staged” to shut down the U.S. (Despite ample documentation of Wiles’ conspiracy-mongering and anti-Semitism, he is regularly granted press credentials by both the White House and the Trump campaign.)

In fact, MAGA-world influencer Brenden Dilley, whose YouTube channel has more than 12,000 subscribers, laid bare the MAGA disinformation playbook last year when he baldly asserted, “It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to go viral.” In that episode of his show, he used the example of the false claim that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination, had a racist knick-knack on display in her kitchen. On a more recent edition of his YouTube show, he reiterated that reasoning when explaining why he was advancing a false story about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

Right Wing Watch

@RightWingWatch

MAGA life coach Brenden Dilleypraises Trump for baselessly suggesting that Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of an intern: "It doesn't matter if it's true. This is how you fight back against people who are trying to destroy you."

Embedded video

177

11:14 AM - May 4, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

180 people are talking about this

The Trump campaign and pro-MAGA super PACs have made it clear that the old rules of politics no longer apply, and their base now largely believes in an alternative reality. The president spreads and amplifies so much disinformation on his Twitter feed that it’s nearly impossible to keep up, and GOP elected officials for the most part now follow suit. Republican operatives have built disinformation tactics into their strategies.

Trump Campaign Facebook ad with misinformation.Facebook refused to take this ad down per their policy not to fact check political ads on their platform. (Source: Twitter, Judd Legum)

Trump’s online supporters can’t merely be dismissed as bots. His online fanbase is overamplified but made up of actual individuals happy to spend considerable time and resources getting pro-MAGA messages out into the ether. Social media researcher Erin Gallagher has a fascinating piece on #TrumpTrains, self-organized cells of Trump fans working in Twitter direct messaging groups to spread Trump’s rhetoric and recruit new supporters to the cause.Gallagher was able to get a #TrumpTrain “conductor” to go on the record about how the #TrumpTrains are organized, recruiting volunteers or “riders” to tweet pro-Trump content in large volume at the direction of “conductors.”

Facebook groups and pages are another hub for pro-Trump disinformation. Writing for Media Matters, social media researcher Natalie Martinez details how the far-right propaganda machine operates on Facebook, “On Facebook, right-wing meme pages play a vital role in condensing and recycling far-right talking points and keeping the MAGA base engaged online. These pages regularly post extremist content, arguably violating Facebook’s hate speech content policy, and often exploit tragic events in the news cycle, images of veterans, and violent anti-immigrant rhetoric for likes and shares.” Multiple candidates running for office as Republicans have been caught participating—some as page administrators—in right-wing Facebook groups.

Meme shared on a volunteer “Trump Train.” (Source: Facebook, Trump Train MAGA)]

With a few narrow exceptions such as COVID-19, Facebook refuses to fact-check ads for disinformation and recently announced that it will allow political campaigns to pay influencers on Facebook and Instagram for sponsored content, but it will not require said influencers to disclose they are being paid by a political entity.

McCay Coppins, writing for The Atlantic, describes the potential power of the MAGA universe thusly: “The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.”

Pro-Trump meme shared via Facebook. (Source: Facebook)

Russia’s own efforts have evolved since 2016 and 2017 when, according to an analysis by Recode, 2,752 Russian fake Twitter accounts were cited by U.S. media outlets in stories about politics. Ranging in credibility from the reporting of The Washington Post to the rantings of the alt-right hub Infowars, this amplification of Russia’s propaganda peaked on Dec. 1, 2016. On that single day, 164 citations of tweets from accounts linked to the Russian Federation appeared in U.S. news outlets.

And since then, the situation has only grown more complex.The Stanford Internet Observatory published a white paper warning of Russia’s use of “pseudo-think tanks and personas” to move narratives into the wider media ecosystem. According to the paper, “The GRU created think tanks and media outlets to serve as initial content drops, and fabricated personas — fake online identities — to serve as authors. A network of accounts additionally served as distributors, posting the content to platforms such as Twitter and Reddit. In this way, GRU-created content could make its way from a GRU media property to an ideologically aligned real independent media website [like One America News or Breitbart] to Facebook to Reddit—a process designed to reduce skepticism in the original unknown blog.” It’s a new layer to the ongoing social media manipulation targeting Americans that Russian actors never ceased.

Who Are Disinformers Targeting? (And Why?)

Media coverage of disinformation often focuses on who the culprits are (and if they’re using bots!) with little analysis of who disinformers are targeting and what the strategy is. But disinformers have always targeted their content with great care. Whether they’re shoring up Trump’s base, directing hate at minority groups, or encouraging voter suppression of key Democratic constituencies, disinformers continually target their craft to select audiences. They also dehumanize other groups as a way of stoking fear and hatred, energizing their own base.

Black voters are heavily targeted by disinformers both foreign and domestic. In 2016, both Russian trolls and the Trump campaign targeted black voters heavily with ads and organic content intended to suppress the vote. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference found that black voters were targeted more than any other group by IRA trolls. And Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale bragged about running digital voter suppression ads targeting three groups, including African Americans.

Pro-Trump Twitter accounts target Kamala Harris with a smear against her black identity. This line of disinformation was shared by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son. (Source: Twitter, Caroline Orr)]

Stop Online Violence Against Women recently released a comprehensive report on digital voter suppression targeting black voters. The report outlines past and present disinformation campaigns around such wedge issues as reparations, criminal justice, climate change, and immigration, which were meant to discourage black voters from voting for Democrats.

Pro-Trump trolls also impersonate black Americans on Twitter in an effort to sow discord in black online communities and create the impression that Trump’s support among African Americans is larger than it actually is.

In addition to black Americans, Jewish, Muslim, and Latinx communities are among the vulnerable groups disproportionately targeted online with “disinformation, harassment, and computational propaganda.” A report from the Institute of the Future examines the human cost of computational propaganda in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

Among the report’s findings:

[Computational] propaganda took various forms, ranging from issue-specific false news or disinformation to racially and religiously specific defamatory content.

Vulnerable demographics within already marginalized social groups—including young people, the elderly, military veterans, and those for whom English is a second language—were often particular targets of disinformation and harassment.

In already embattled minority and social groups, both human groups and bot armies spread harassing content and misleading information about voting and worked to foment in-group fighting both online and off-line.

The report also notes that disinformation campaigns tapped into “age-old stereotypes and conspiracies—often in attempts to pit marginalized groups against one another.”

Muslim American candidates running for office were also targeted specifically with disinformation and propaganda during their campaigns. Research from the Information Disorder Lab at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found that Muslim candidates were falsely tied to extremist groups, falsely accused of following Sharia law, targeted with coordinated disinformation operations, and had their non-Muslim campaign surrogates targeted for harassment and abuse as well. Soon after they were elected, Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib—the first Muslim women to serve in Congress—were the targets of a massive disinformation operation on Facebook. An Israeli-based group infiltrated right-wing Facebook pages and groups to spread Islamophobic content that targeted Omar and Tlaib in particular.

Meme attacking members of Congress who are women of color. w hitler (Source: Twitter, SAmeirca)]

Finally, yes, MAGA warriors target their own base with disinformation and conspiracy theories to the point where Trump’s base now wholly believes in an alternative political and news consumption reality, and many of the supporters targeted become amplifiers of the disinformation and conspiracies on their own social media feeds. In her report on right-wing propaganda on Facebook, Martinez identifies six themes that drive pro-Trump Facebook:

:{

}:

anti-immigrant, guns and mass shootings, pro-Trump, race-baiting, voter suppression, veteran engagement bait, and nonpartisan clickbait. These memes play a vital role in keeping the base engaged, echoing disinformation and conspiracies from right-wing media and the president himself.

Types of Disinformation to Look Out for

The pro-Trump coalition is large and loud, but the playbooks by which its members play are fairly consistent. Once you know what to look for, pro-Trump disinformation, conspiracies, and propaganda are much easier to spot online and in the news. The following are some broad common themes that pro-Trump disinformers engage in repeatedly.

Voter Suppression: 2020 will be a turnout election, and Trump’s base won’t be enough to help him cross the finish line. In addition to turning out Republican voters, the pro-Trump coalition will spread and amplify disinformation intended to suppress the vote of key Democratic constituencies. In 2016, the Trump campaign was open about running voter suppression ads as part of their strategy, and disinformation about when and where to vote ran rampant in the days leading up to the 2016 election. A Brennan Center report on digital voter suppression and the 2018 midterm elections found three types of voter suppression campaigns running on Twitter and Facebook: “deception (lying about the time, place, and manner of voting); calls for boycott; and voter intimidation or threats.”

Facebook and Twitter now ban disinformation and ads intended to suppress the vote on their platforms, but disinformers are already adapting to the rules. Expect to see fewer outright lies about when and where to vote, and more content intended to intimidate voters and spread voter apathy.

Claims of Rigging and Voter Fraud: Trump never misses an opportunity to claim that the elections are rigged. Whether it’s claiming that the DNC is rigging the primary against Bernie Sanders (a position the Sanders campaign denies), that nonexistent voter fraud cost him the popular vote, or that out-of-state voters cost him New Hampshire in 2016, Trump uses his presidential megaphone to amplify conspiracy theories designed to plant the notion that that the system is rigged. This tactic precedes Trump’s presidency. In 2016, candidate Trump claimed multiple times in the weeks before Election Day that the election was rigged.

Trump’s MAGA coalition has adopted this narrative wholesale, and if Trump loses the 2020 election, expect Trump and his base to claim that the election was invalid due to massive voter fraud and rigging.

Conspiracy Mongering: Conspiracy theories have long been a fixture of extremists and right-wing media but have become mainstream in the era of Trump, himself a conspiracy theorist. Extremist actors have continually used conspiracy theories as a way to galvanize Trump supporters online.

QAnon supporters at a Trump campaign rally. (Source: Flickr, Marc Nozell)]

Online conspiracy-theory communities can also serve as recruitment hubs for trolls. Research suggests that people with extremist political views (left or right) are also likely to believe in conspiracy theories. The QAnon conspiracy theory, currently popular among Trump supporters, is the most prominent current example of this. While Trump has never openly supported QAnon, he frequently retweets accounts known to amplify the conspiracy theory.

Most recently, the coronavirus pandemic has provided fertile ground for the growth of conspiracy theories designed to either shore up the narrative advanced by the Trump administration (that they did a great job, and anything bad that happened is somebody else’s fault) or undermine public health authorities—especially those whose advice is at odds with whatever the president says or does.

Race-Baiting: Race-baiting has always been a central tenet of Trump’s electoral strategy, but in the final weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s use of this strategy reached new heights. As Vox put it in an explainer on Trump’s closing argument for the midterms, “There’s no subtlety in President Donald Trump’s closing message to voters: Be very scared of brown people in this country.”

The pro-Trump coalition’s race-baiting is so vast it’s nearly impossible to categorize but includes alarmist rhetoric about a border crisis that doesn’t exist, claims that “both sides” were violent at the 2017 Unite the Right melee in Charlottesville, Virginia, and disinformation about migrant caravans. This is in addition to the conspiracies and claims of voter fraud discussed in the last section.

Reproductive Health Disinformation: Reproductive freedom will be a wedge issue in 2020, and the pro-Trump coalition’s playbook for amplifying disinformation about abortion is well worn. In her report on reproductive disinformation, Media Matters’ Julia Tulbert found that “Right-wing media and anti-abortion groups have used manufactured controversies as part of a playbook for attacking abortion rights supporters and have already proven they’ll deploy the same strategy against candidates.”

According to the report, the playbook involves:

1) Hounding candidates with anti-choice questions — and spinning any abortion-related answers — to generate an outrage-based news cycle

2) Manufacturing fake “grassroots” support for anti-choice misinformation

3) Using candidate comments about unrelated topics as a jumping-off point to criticize them about abortion.

It should be noted that disinformation on reproductive freedom is also a global health problem. A report from Open Democracy found that “Trump-linked religious ‘extremists’ target women with disinformation worldwide,” giving women in 18 countries false information about reproductive health.

Demonizing Socialism, Antifa, Leftism:A staple of MAGA is to demonize their political opponents. Disinformation about leftist activist movements has become a staple of pro-Trump messaging. It’s intended to stoke fear in Trump’s base and drive a wedge between the center-left and these movements, alienating them from one another.

Anti-fascist organizers (also known as antifa) are a frequent target. Trump has frequently tweeted about antifa and implied that the movement should be designated a terrorist group. Far-right extremist groups and individuals (such as the right-wing writer Andy Ngo) often set up confrontations with anti-fascist groups with the intention of provoking violence to aid in the spread of disinformation about the so-called dangers of anti-fascists to the public. As Huffington Post has reported, leaked chats from the far-right Proud Boys group show members plotting violence against counterprotesters in “order to assert a claim of self-defense should they face charges.”

A meme critical of anti-fascist street activists. (Source: KnowYourMeme)

Socialism is also a frequent target for pro-Trump disinformers, who conflate the social-democrat ideologies of such left-leaning politicians as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with communism. Trump frequently makes the false claim that all Democrats are socialists and demonizes socialists and socialism at every opportunity. The Trump campaign plans to make demonizing socialism and socialists a core argument of their reelection effort.

How the Media Amplifies Disinformation

...

...How the Media Amplifies Disinformation

:{

}:

To thrive, disinformation needs amplification and lots of it. Disinformers generally have a plan not just to create disinformation but to disseminate it using both willing amplifiers and dupes. Journalists and media outlets often become unwitting carriers of disinformation, helping viral online conspiracies, propaganda, and disinformation go mainstream.

Pro-Trump disinformers have optimized their strategies to include media amplification as part of their disinformation campaigns. They count on right-wing media to amplify content to their base and traditional media to cover their base in a way that amplifies their disinformation, conspiracies, and extremist views to a mainstream audience.

In her landmark report, The Oxygen of Amplification, researcher Whitney Phillips explains the crux of this problem:

The choices reporters and editors make about what to cover and how to cover it play a key part in regulating the amount of oxygen supplied to the falsehoods, antagonisms, and manipulations that threaten to overrun the contemporary media ecosystem—and, simultaneously, threaten to undermine democratic discourse more broadly. This context demands that journalists and the newsrooms that support them examine with greater scrutiny how these actors and movements endeavor to subvert journalism norms, practices, and objectives. More importantly, journalists, editors, and publishers must determine how the journalistic rule set must be strengthened and fortified against this newest form of journalistic manipulation—in some cases through the rigorous upholding of long-standing journalistic principles, and in others, by recognizing which practices and structural limitations make reporters particularly vulnerable to manipulation.

There are three areas of media manipulation often exploited by disinformers that are easy for news consumers to spot when they know what to look for:

Social Media as Segment Producer: Traditional media often mine social media and trending topics for story ideas. Given that trending topics and viral content are so easily gamed by trolls and activists, overamplifying content in an attempt to force traditional media to cover it is a common tactic of pro-Trump disinformers. The #ReleasetheMemo conspiracy theory and the resulting media coverage is a prime example of this; the recent “Against Excessive Quarantine” protests is another. Trump is also masterful at using his tweets to drive coverage, knowing that media outlets consider every tweet of his to be newsworthy.

Repeating Disinformation in the Headlines: Often when media outlets cover disinformation, even with the intention of debunking it, they will repeat the disinformation in the headline without correcting it, furthering the amplification even when the intention is the opposite. These headlines often spread further on social media via the media account and shares or retweets of the story. In a study of headlines,Media Matters “documented some egregious cases of news outlets repeating lies and other misstatements in headlines or tweets”and found that “all together, these accounts shared demonstrably false information from the president an average of 19 times a day; 65% of the tweets did not include any context indicating the statement was false.”

Amplifying Disinformation Because Both Sides: Media outlets that attempt to cover both political parties or both sides fairly often amplify disinformation and give it added credibility by presenting it as equally valid to truthful information from another political viewpoint. Columbia Journalism Review’s John Allsop, writing on bothsiderism as it pertained to the recent impeachment coverage, explained, “When it comes to much impeachment coverage, bothsidesism isn’t the beginning and end of the problem, but part of our broader reflex to frame contentious political stories around the concept of partisanship.” Pro-Trump disinformers, including Trump himself, rely on this amplification of false content and continually game the refs, claiming the media is biased against them to put media outlets on the defensive....

:{

}:

===

:{

}:

primary 220 on mcguire fired for telling congress schiff that vlad at it again

719 disambig but also aggregation

for domestic see election/ fraud tamper

see collusion (which i guess is more about cooperation between putin and the trump campaign? whereas this is about cyberwar against election integrity

see ukraine 2 crowdstrike on rudy try to shift blame from putin

capt 520 resigned

activ meas doc: try to sow dissention: bernie FB, latinos? ~ EU, NATO 19 white women bodies , BLM

gru built community online then exploit (reverse of SOP?] work 12 hr days, quota per hr to post; "russia our friend" meme?

top 20 FB stories > real news? on?

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Who Are the Disinformers?
3. Who Are Disinformers Targeting? (And Why?)
4. Types of Disinformation to Look Out for
5. How the Media Amplifies Disinformation
6. Disinformation and Coronavirus
7. Conclusion

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/newly-released-fbi-documents-reveal-extent-of-roger-stones-direct-communications-with-julian-assange-report/

veteran GOP operative and long-time Donald Trump ally Roger Stone, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in February for felonies that included witness tampering and lying to Congress, continues to vie for a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, FBI documents continue to offer insights on Stone’s past communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: according to FBI documents made public this week, Stone asserted in a 2017 direct message via Twitter that if prosecutors came for him, “I will bring down the entire house of cards.”

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that FBI documents show that Stone sent that message weeks after former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed to head the Russia investigation. According to AP reporters Eric Tucker, Colleen Long and Michael Balsamo, the FBI records “reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic e-mails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”

FBI records, according to AP, show that in a direct Twitter message sent inJune 2017, Stone “reassured Assange that the issue was ‘still nonsense’ and said, ‘As a journalist, it doesn’t matter where you get information — only that it is accurate and authentic.”

Stone, AP reports, mentioned a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for newspapers and magazines to publish the Pentagon Papers — documents about the Vietnam War that had been classified. The Trump ally, via Twitter, told Assange, “If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards. With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped, I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.”

Stone, in that message, appeared to be referring to the Swedish government’s sexual assault case against Assange, which was dropped.

==

==

https://www.c-span.org/video/?468349-1/the-reality-game

JANUARY 29, 2020

The Reality Game

Samuel Woolley discussed the origins of online disinformation and laid out a plan to combat it in the future.

==

somewhere i read/heard that gru studying divisions in dem debate for 2020 taCTICS/SCHISM

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/21/21147801/bernie-sanders-russia-presidential-campaign-trump-election-interference

Russia is interfering in the Democratic primary to help Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign,US officials reportedly told the Sanders camp according to *The* *Washington Post*. According to a subsequent report by *The New York Times*, Sanders received the briefing about a month ago.

There are few details from either report about what substantive actions Russia took to advance Sanders’ campaign. The White House and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also been briefed on Russia’s latest interference efforts.

In a statement responding to the news, Sanders harshly criticized the Russian government and any efforts at election interference. “Unlike Donald Trump, I do not consider Vladimir Putin a good friend. He is an autocratic thug who is attempting to destroy democracy and crush dissent in Russia,” Sanders said. “I stand firmly against their efforts, and any other foreign power that wants to interfere in our election.”

It’s a partial replay of the 2016 primary, in which Russian troll campaigns used social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to hurt Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and back Sanders.

Earlier this week, Sanders was asked to disown online harassers that claim to support his candidacy, commonly referred to as “Bernie bros,” on the internet, at both a CNN town hall on Tuesday and Wednesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sanders responded, suggesting that the harassment campaigns could be led by Russian operatives, not just his real supporters.

“All of us remember 2016, and what we remember is efforts by Russians and others to try to interfere in our elections and divide us up,” Sanders said earlier this week. “I’m not saying that’s happening, but it would not shock me.”

US intelligence officials have also notified lawmakers that the foreign country is also working to advance Donald Trump’s reelection, as reported by *The New York Times* on Thursday. As a response to this discovery, Trump cursed his acting Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire for allowing the briefing, apparently seeing it as giving Democrats a political advantage. Maguire formally resigned on Friday.

==

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0227-8

2/19

Divide and rule: ten lessons about Russian political influence activities in Europe

• Geir Hågen Karlsen

Palgrave Communications

:{:{volume}:

 5, Article number: 19 (2019)

}:

abstract

The purpose of this study is to improve understanding of how Russia is conducting political influence activities against Europe. It examines current thinking and perceptions on this topic among Western secret services and is based on an analysis of approximately 40 annual reports from 15 secret services in 11 Western countries, covering the period 2014–2018. This activity is by nature covert, and the analysis given in these reports from Western secret services complements other research and shows the broad range of tools and techniques employed for political influence, and much detail on the execution of these activities. According to these secret services, Russia is the foreign state that tries to influence European politics and decision-making most, and more so than China and other states. These influence activities support three main Russian strategic objectives: regime security, predominance in Russia’s near abroad, and world-power status for Russia. The long-term objective of Russian influence activities is to weaken NATO and the EU. In the shorter term, it is to lift the sanctions imposed after the Russian intervention in Ukraine in 2014. Russia also has more specific objectives related to each individual country. Russia is targeting the West through a divide and rule approach, using multiple tools of influence. The population is mainly reached through media and social media, exploiting divisive issues. Minorities, refugees, and extremists are used to further this divide and rule approach. Human intelligence and cyber operations are important covert tools of influence. Russia also uses the energy sector, business, and corruption as venues for influence. It has an extensive network of allies and front organizations, and reconstructs reality and rewrites history to legitimize itself and undermine others. Finally, military force is Russia’s ultimate tool of influence. These influence activities are of large-scale, and the threat should be taken seriously, but the reports studied also indicate that the effects of these activities are limited.

Introduction

States, organizations, and individuals have always tried to influence others to achieve what they want. Multiple means and methods have been used, some legitimate, some not. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine brought the term propaganda back on the front pages of mainstream Western media. The U.S. presidential election campaign and subsequent investigations shattered any remaining illusions about Russian interference in Western politics. Concerns about fake news, cyber-attacks, and manipulation of elections abounded all over Europe, and it became clear that Russian secret services were not only involved in espionage, but also aiming to influence Western politics. Russia was conducting political influence operations supported by intelligence activities. The German security service described the close interaction between Russian intelligence and influence activities:

...

==

operation infektion

pt 1

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006210828/russia-disinformation-fake-news.html

7 cmd fake news 14 min

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006188102/what-is-pizzagate.html

47 min

==

an 220

no lnx?

senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has addressed the great purge of intelligence officials who have warned about Russia’s ongoing efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on behalf of impeached president Donald Trump—leaving out the part, of course, that it’s Trump it’s trying to help. “Recent reports suggest that adversaries including Russia are likely continuing efforts aimed at dividing Americans,” he said, “sowing chaos in our politics, and undermining confidence in our elections.” Then he issued this bucketload of bullshit: ”Fortunately, in stark contrast to the failures of the Obama admin in 2016, the Trump admin once again appears to be doing the right thing—in this case, by promptly providing a specific counterintelligence briefing to the Democratic presidential candidate in question.” Like the briefing McConnell got in 2016, the one where he threatened the CIA under President Barack Obama with all-out partisan warfare if the public was warned that Russia was trying to help Trump win. Of course, the Trump campaign didn’t need to be briefed that Russia was intervening on Trumps’ behalf—the campaign leadership was in on it!

McConnell won’t do a damn thing now to try to stop Russia, so Democrats in the Senate are going over his head, or attempting to. Sens. Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, and Sherrod Brown are demanding that the Trump administration impose sanctions on Russia, an action that does not require Senate approval under existing authority. They’ve written to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asking them “to immediately and forcefully impose sanctions on Russia’s government, any Russian actors determined to be responsible for such interference, and those acting on their behalf or providing material or financial support for these election interference efforts.”

The three write that “it is long past time for the administration to send a direct, powerful and unmistakable message to President Putin: the US will respond immediately and forcefully to continuing election interference by the government of the Russian Federation and its surrogates, to punish, deter and substantially increase the economic and political costs of such interference.”

The lawmakers declare, ”We urge you to immediately draw upon the reported conclusions of the Intelligence Community to identify and target for sanctions all those determined to be responsible for ongoing elections interference, including President Putin, the government of the Russian Federation, any Russian actors determined to be directly responsible, and those acting on their behalf or providing material or financial support for their efforts. Doing anything less would be an abdication of your responsibility to protect and defend the US from this serious threat to our national security, and to the integrity of our electoral process.”

The administration could do this without any further action from Congress under the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. It’s clear that McConnell won’t take up any of the legislation the House has passed to protect the election. It’s also pretty damned unlikely that the administration is going to turn away Vladimir Putin’s help in re-electing Trump, but it’s important to keep up that pressure. It should be amplified, maybe with some hearings in the House, with Pompeo and Mnuchin grilled about it with the cameras running.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/top-election-security-official-who-briefed-lawmakers-on-latest-russian-meddling-targeted-for-ouster-by-trump-white-house

no lnx

Top election security official who briefed lawmakers on latest Russian meddling targeted for ouster by Trump White House

Image via Screengrab.

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story February 23, 2020

During a discussion on the war on the intelligence community being waged by the Donald Trump’s White House, CNN host Victor Blackwell stated that sources speaking with the network stated that the intel official who briefed lawmakers for both parties on new efforts by Russia to meddle in U.S. elections could be on the way out.

Speaking with contributor Lynn Sweet, Blackwell asked about the so-called “purge” being conducted by the White House.

“It sends the signal once again that President Trump is not a respecter of the United States intelligence services with the bigger issue that a permanent director has not been in that office since last summer when Dan Coates was forced out,” Sweet explained. “This is a key position, subject to Senate confirmation and Trump hasn’t seen fit to have a permanent director for months now.”

“Now, post-impeachment, you also have the issue of whether or not part of his [Richard Grenell’s] role there it is to oversee a purge of people who are not seen as Trump loyalists,” she continued. “All of which goes to the heart of United States intelligence mission which is to get and gather information in a nonpartisan way to brief partisan officials to base their policy decisions on.”

“That’s exactly what Shelby Pierson was doing,” Blackwell said, describing the official who briefed the lawmakers on new Russian overtures. “She is the — this position was just created, she’s the person to oversee election security, going to brief members on the House Intelligence Committee about their assessment that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election. That they have a preference for President Trump.”

“What we’ve learned from sources is that inside the office of the Director of National Intelligence is she could be next to be pushed out of the office,” he added. “What’s the impact of getting rid of that person as we’re about eight months out from elections?”

“It is two levels of answers here, Victor,” Sweet replied. “One, you’re getting rid of a seasoned professional in what would seem like a retaliatory act for putting forth intelligence you don’t like. Again, it goes to the core of what intelligence is for: just to get unvarnished information. If, indeed, she’s presiding over election security issues, that’s the intelligence community needs to be on top of if she does leave. Will the mission still be carried out when election security is a top priority of the United States?”

Watch below:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/russia-is-interfering-on-trumps-behalf-again-and-hes-enraged-that-congress-now-knows-it-report/

no lnx

Russia is interfering on Trump’s behalf again — and he’s enraged that Congress now knows it: report

Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos February 20, 2020

There’s a bit more clarity now to the story of the briefing to the House Intelligence Committee that may or may not have contributed to acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire’s departure from the Trump administration. According to The New York Times, the mysterious briefing that Republicans and impeached President Donald Trump so objected to was about Russia interfering in this election, the 2020 one.

Five people familiar with the matter told the Times that the Feb. 13 briefing included a warning to lawmakers that Russia was interfering to get Trump reelected, a “disclosure that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him,” as opposed to using it to try to secure the election and prevent Russia from mucking about in it again. The Times reports that the next day, Trump “berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place” and the fact that Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, was present to hear it was “a particular irritant.”

It’s not too much of stretch to figure out who filled Trump in on all the details of the briefing, as a committee official said that ” members of both parties attended, including Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the committee” and that it was indeed about the “integrity of our upcoming elections.” In what’s really not good news for the upcoming election, the Times reports that “Some intelligence officials viewed the briefing as a tactical error, saying that had official who delivered the conclusion spoken less pointedly or left it out, they would have avoided angering the Republicans.”

Not angering Republicans should not be the intelligence community’s concern at all. Not when they have credible information saying that this election is in jeopardy of Russian interference on behalf of the man who has already been impeached for trying to get another country to do the same

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-intelligence-community-erupts-as-trump-purges-everyone-opposed-to-russian-election-interference/

The intelligence community erupts as Trump purges everyone opposed to Russian election interference

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-names-right-wing-troll-to-lead-intelligence-agencies/

no lnx

Trump names right-wing troll to lead intelligence agencies

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon February 21, 2020

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has had a long career in politics, and I’m sure she has many accomplishments that she’s proud of. But I’m afraid she’s going to be remembered for one thing and one thing only: Her declaration that President Trump had “learned his lesson” after his impeachment trial in the Senate. That would have been a ridiculous rationale for voting to acquit any president on the evidence in that case, but saying it about Trump was downright laughable. He has proved that every single day since the trial ended.

Right out of the box he vowed revenge. He attacked Sen. Mitt Romney, the one Republican who voted to convict him in the Senate trial, and then immediately set about firing witnesses who had testified against him, including the twin brother of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, for no apparent reason.

Trump has pushed the Senate Republican majority and the Department of Justice to help him exact his vengeance by investigating professionals who were involved in the Russia and Ukraine investigation. His apparent collusion with Attorney General Bill Barr to interfere in criminal cases has caused a near-insurrection within the Department of Justice.

This week Trump went on a pardon spree, freeing a list of people who had been convicted of corruption, sending yet another obvious message to those inside and outside the justice system that he is unencumbered by the rule of law. It remains to be seen if he will pardon his old pal Roger Stone, now that he’s been sentenced to 40 months in prison. But if he has any fear that Stone has information to trade, you can be sure he’ll do it.

That’s just a partial list of “lessons” Trump has learned since the Senate failed to do its duty, and I’m sure I’m leaving some out. But the announcement on Thursday that Trump will name his ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as the new acting director of national security may be the most shocking action of recent weeks.

Grenell is one of the most odious Trump toadies in the administration, and that’s really saying something. Like so many others, he came to Trump’s attention as a sharp-tongued Fox News personality. It’s likely that Trump didn’t know much about him other than the fact he was a big fan. That’s all it takes. Truthfully, if he’d known Grenell’s whole story he would like him even more.

Grenell held a few PR flak jobs in the government, working for the likes of John Bolton at the UN, where he was universally reviled.But he is best known as a Twitter troll, just like the president. He quit Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, where he’d been hired as a foreign policy spokesman, after his Twitter feed was revealed to be full of nasty comments. During the 2016 campaign, he got back in the game and really made a name for himself as a crude and vicious Trump supporter.

Needless to say, Trump loved it and gave him the plum job of U.S. ambassador to Berlin, where he immediately alienated everyone in sight. On his very first day on the job, referencing the fact that Trump had withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, Grenell tweeted that “Germans doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” Obviously he had no authority to dictate any such thing, and people in Germany were not amused, to say the least. Leaders of two German political parties have called him a “brat” and a “failure” and requested that he be withdrawn. No such luck.

Grenell has gone on to cultivate the far right in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, particularly Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the “boyish face” of his country’s far-right government. Grenell told Breitbart that he wanted to “empower” Kurz and others like him in Europe, which exceeds the job description of ambassador just a wee bit.

Most recently, he was implicated in the baroque Ukraine scandal, and particularly in the side plot involving Lev Parnas and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Parnas was reportedly instructed (perhaps by Rudy Giuliani) to ask Grenell for a heads-up if the Department of Justice decided to seek Firtash’s extradition to the U.S. Grenell apparently agreed to do it, which was probably illegal.

Grenell’s name has been floating all over the Trump administration for a while, mentioned as a possible national security adviser after Bolton’s departure or a potential secretary of state if Mike Pompeo quits. He has no qualifications for any such posts, other than his personal fealty to Donald Trump.

The professionals in the intelligence community are reportedly very alarmed by Grenell’s appointment, as they should be. The DNI oversees all the U.S. intelligence services and has access to all the most important capabilities and secrets. It is unclear whether Grenell even has a top-level security clearance or could qualify for one.

This appointment was announced as yet another “acting” assignment, which seems odd since an acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, was already in place. (He has filled the job since last August, when Dan Coats departed.) Administration sources have said that Grenell will only serve until Trump nominates someone for the permanent position, which would require Senate confirmation, and won’t resign his position in Germany. So why put in another placeholder?

Late on Thursday, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported the answer: Trump wanted Maguire out immediately because his department had briefed the House Intelligence Committee last week and told members that the Russian government is once again interfering in the presidential campaign on Trump’s behalf. As usual, Trump is livid that members of his administration actually performed their legal and constitutional duties, and is determined to punish those who did. He was especially angry that Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a major villain in Trump World, was given this information.

Aside from Maguire, the second-ranking official in the DNI’s office, longtime intelligence professional Andrew Hallman, also announced his departure, leaving the top echelon without experienced leadership. But never fear, another Trumpian hack is on the way. According to Politico, hyper-partisan henchman Kash Patel, the former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.,who played an important role in House Republicans’ attempts to discredit the Russia investigation, will come on board as “senior adviser” to Grenell.

It’s clear that Trump has moved his most dedicated disciples into the DNI’s office in order to prevent any more briefings on Russian interference on his behalf and to ensure that the intelligence community is brought to heel. Between this and Bill Barr’s unlimited mandate to investigate the intelligence on election interference from 2016, one can assume that the purge of anyone Trump considers a threat within the intelligence agencies or the Justice Department is now in full effect.

So in a sense Susan Collins was right. Trump has learned his lesson: Only proven Trump loyalists will run national security and federal law enforcement from now on. What could possibly go wrong?

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/relentless-corruption-and-sheer-madness-are-donald-trumps-super-powers/

no lnx

random 220 what fresh hell

Relentless corruption and sheer madness are Donald Trump’s super powers

President Donald J. Trump delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020, in the House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

Written by Joshua Holland / Raw Story February 16, 2020

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Seven days after he took office, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13769 which barred migrants from a handful of Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Hundreds of travelers were detained as they arrived here and tens of thousands of people had their visas suddenly revoked. For many Americans, it was clearly a bridge too far. Some had hoped that he would grow into the job, or that his bigoted campaign rhetoric would give way to a more responsible tone after he won, and the Muslim ban was evidence that those hopes had been misplaced as Trump moved to codify xenophobia.

With minimal organizing, thousands of people took to the nation’s airports to protest the policy.

Today, three years and three weeks later, Trump is crowing on Twitter about a New York Times story detailing how he’s basing his re-election campaign on his simmering resentments and paranoia. He is using customs and immigration enforcement to openly extort New York state into dropping investigations into his personal businesses. He’s brazenly retaliating against his own regime officials for testifying in his impeachment hearings. Meanwhile, his Attorney General, hand-picked after writing a brief arguing that it’s kosher for a president to exercise his or her powers toward corrupt purposes, is overruling career prosecutors to grant leniency to Trump’s henchmen when their crimes are unearthed. While federal investigators look at potential crimes committed by Trump’s personal attorney as he sought to fabricate a scandal about one of Trump’s Democratic foes, others within the agency are simultaneously colluding with that very attorney to advance that effort. Our nation’s top law enforcement agency has adopted a relentless focus on finding support for the president’s* unhinged conspiracy theories.

As Trump rants and raves, there are no crowds gathering spontaneously outside of US Attorney’s offices around the country to protest Bill Barr’s unprecedented corruption of the Department of Justice, . We may be outraged, but we seem to run out of gas. Trump’s behavior is so consistently venal and outrageous that we’ve become inured to it. Abuses of power that would be huge scandals under any other president of either party elicit ritualistic condemnations, but are ultimately just Trump being Trump.

:{

}:

Overwhelming our sense of decency with a constant stream of outrageous comportment is Trump’s super-power. It’s impossible to even keep up.

:{

}:

:{

}:

David Axelrod

@davidaxelrod

In this crazy world, almost nothing is said about the fact that @realDonaldTrump is rehiring his 29-yr-old former body man, forced from the WH earlier for failing a vet & with no personnel background, to direct hiring ACROSS THE ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!https://www.axios.com/johnny-mcentee-white-house-d1c29eee-8b0a-4c4d-8ba4-9355f3c27f4f.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top …

Johnny McEntee

Ex-Trump aide John McEntee to lead White House office of personnel - Axios

He's been hand selected by Trump, who sees him as the ultimately loyalist.

axios.com

9,798

4:49 AM - Feb 14, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

6,101 people are talking about this

*****

Speaking of the DOJ, an agency “anti-human trafficking grant program is facing internal complaints, after two nonprofits were denied funding in favor of two less established groups whose applications were not recommended by career DOJ officials.” According to Reuters, “the awarding of more than $1 million total to the two groups, Hookers for Jesus in Nevada and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation in South Carolina, has triggered a whistleblower complaint filed by the Justice Department’s employee union to the department’s Inspector General.”

*****

In related news, the FBI is revamping its efforts to curb homegrown terrorism after years of criticism that it downplayed or turned a blind eye to violent right-wing extremism. As part of those efforts, reports The Daily Beast, the FBI will now focus on “abortion violent extremism.” But they mean terrorists on “both sides” of the debate, despite the fact that the FBI could point “to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism—one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.”

*****

It’s hard to say whether these people are just trolling us at this point…

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps.

The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov’s own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo’s aides also did not provide any readout after the meeting ended.

Russian journalists traveling with Lavrov were aware of the meeting in advance, and wrote about it afterward.

*****

Probably not…

Something strange happened in mid-December involving Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch.

Late last year, the U.S. government signaled that it was about to level a new round of sanctions targeting people and entities linked to Deripaska, according to two Western officials with knowledge of the communication. Back in April 2018, the U.S. sanctioned the oligarch, who once lent millions of dollars to convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as part of a decades-long relationship between the two men. Over the following months, Deripaska’s allies made a deal with Treasury to limit Deripaska’s control over the companies in exchange for sanctions relief…. In the year since then, it’s been all quiet on the Deripaska sanctions front.

Until December, that is. What’s strange is that despite the signal, Treasury didn’t follow through and the sanctions—which would have targeted the unnamed people and entities because of their proximity to Deripaska—didn’t materialize. It’s been two months since the U.S. indicated that the new sanctions were about to come out, and there’s been no movement from Treasury on the oligarch. The two months of inaction has stirred suspicions of political interference in the sanctions process.

*****

Return on investment…

:{

}:

“Trump has proposed a 25 percent cut to the signature military fund designed to offset Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, according to the Defense Department’s budget documents unveiled Monday.”

Rep. Val Demings

@RepValDemings

Today Senate Republicans blocked THREE election security bills.

Two would require that illegal foreign election interference be reported to the authorities.

:{

}:

The other would make voting machines harder to hack.

All blocked.

52.5K

11:15 AM - Feb 11, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

34.9K people are talking about this

*****

We are fortunate that these malignant and corrupt ideologues aren’t more competent…

Caitlin McCoy

@CaitlinMcCoy_

The final rule that went to OMB last month is "...sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked 'text forthcoming.' The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain." YIKES.https://twitter.com/CoralMDavenport/status/1228065396554653696 …

Coral Davenport

@CoralMDavenport

The Trump administration has rolled back nearly 100 environmental rules. But Trump's attempt to take down his top regulatory target,the US's largest #climate change rule, are in meltdown. "They look like they’re headed to a legal train wreck."https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/climate/trump-fuel-economy-rollback.html …

9

2:29 PM - Feb 13, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Caitlin McCoy's other Tweets

*****

Type Investigations has an important story about how the Bureau of Land Management has, “over the past several years, ignored longstanding requirements that stem from the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act; approved mines and drilling without adequate review, turning the region into a ‘clearinghouse for federal permits’; and taken personnel off mining inspections in order to expedite development.”

*****

This will disappear down the memory hole in short order….

“A White House memo justifying the U.S. strike that killed Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January makes no mention of an imminent threat, which was President Trump’s rationale for the attack.

*****

Children aren’t born into this world harboring bigotry.

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

*****

Last week, we mentioned that a 65-degree temperature recorded at Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula set a new record for the continent.

That record appears to have held up for four days. This week, “a weather research station on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula registered a temperature of 69.3 degrees (20.75 Celsius) on Feb. 9.”

*****

And we leave you this week with a couple of pieces of good news, via the courts…

Washington Monthly

@monthly

#BREAKING:The D.C. Circuit Court just shot down Trump’s Medicaid work requirement. Last week, @r_m_larochelle & @lsdeprez wrote about this move as part of the administration's war on the social safety net. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/07/donald-trumps-assault-on-the-social-safety-set/ …

Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s Assault on the Social Safety Net

It's a policy of death by a thousand cuts.

washingtonmonthly.com

27

9:11 AM - Feb 14, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

16 people are talking about this

Stephen Wolf

?

@PoliticsWolf

Whoa, this is a major win for Native American voting rights in North Dakota.The GOP passed a voter ID law that blatantly excluded most tribal-issued IDs, but the backlash against it helped activists raise money to provide free IDs in 2018 & Native turnout hit historic highs https://twitter.com/kira_lerner/status/1227989452838010880 …

Kira Lerner

?

@kira_lerner

New: The North Dakota secretary of state settled two lawsuits brought by Native American tribes over the state’s strict voter ID law. The state agreed to accept tribal IDs and allow people who don’t have a residential address to vote https://campaignlegal.org/press-releases/secretary-state-agrees-settle-voter-id-lawsuits-entering-consent-decree-north-dakota …

ransomware

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/feds-reviewing-previously-unreported-cyber-attack-on-florida-elections-office/

==

Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Russian-Inspired Accounts

ADAM RAWNSLEY,

CASEY MICHEL

===

https://www.thedailybeast.com/instagram-wont-pull-these-racist-violent-russian-inspired-accounts?ref=home

no lnx pix many

Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Violent, Russian-Inspired Accounts

HATEFEST

Neo-Confederates are posting murderous scenes and racist memes—when they’re not reusing material from Kremlin trolls. But Instagram says the accounts don’t violate its rules.

Adam Rawnsley

Casey Michel

Published Dec. 16, 2019 5:12AM ET

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

American racists are reusing some of the ugliest elements of Russia’s election interference operation.

Memes published by some of the worst Kremlin-backed trolls of the 2016 campaign are being echoed online by American neo-Confederates. The Russian accounts, overseen by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have since been taken down. But American parrot accounts running some of the same racist crap—and worse—are still live on Instagram, an investigation by The Daily Beast and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. At least one of these live accounts claims to belong to a Russian network persona.

The accounts—which hail the Confederate flag as “Protecting Us From Tyranny Since 1861” and claim that “The Civil War was not about slavery”—highlight the blurry and politically charged boundaries between domestic and foreign trolling. The American racists didn’t need Russia’s help to hate, of course. But the Kremlin supplied a well of ready-made memes for lazy neo-Confederates to post online.

“I think the similarities between these accounts and those of the IRA highlights how complex the IRA operations around elections have been. It is possible that memes originally created by the IRA have found new or renewed life on social media,” Kanishk Karan, a research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Daily Beast. “The way they camouflaged within the political conversations is also a fascinating detail: We’ve reached a point where it is harder to verify whether an online social or political movement is astroturfed or from grassroots participants.”

When Russian trolls went hunting for targets and content during the 2016 election, race was their “preferred target,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee study.

Instagram

South United, a Russian Facebook and Instagram persona that featured in the IRA’s 2016 meddling campaign, took this theme and ran with it, plastering followers with all kinds of racist, bigoted appeals to the Confederacy.

During the 2016 election, South United was one of the “10 most active IRA-administered Facebook pages,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. It was also undoubtedly Russian. The ads that South United ran were paid for in rubles using a Russian payment processor, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller cited the page as the work of the IRA in a 2018 indictment of 13 IRA employees and officials.

Some of the images published by South United included racist memes of former President Obama dressed as a Nazi with the caption “Don’t support illegals, support own people.” One meme published by the IRA’s account showed a picture of Black Lives Matter protesters next to the question “Black lives or black thugs?” These memes can still be found on active Instagram accounts that pose as state chapters of the original South United page.

The accounts also published the same racist and neo-Confederate images originally published by Russian trolls, such as one with a Confederate flag middle finger bidding viewers to "Say hi to the Yanks” and another wondering, “How many likes can this battle flag get?” The IRA’s South United watermark can still be viewed on these posts.

It’s unclear when the IRA’s South United Facebook and Instagram accounts were first created, but Twitter users were reposting material from the accounts as early as November 2015. Facebook ad data shows that the IRA’s @South_United Instagram page started running ads that same month. By contrast, the earliest post from among the dozen American-run echo-chamber mimic accounts was in May 2016.

In August of that year, the operators of some of these state chapter Instagram accounts also promoted a Russian-organized pro-Trump rally. As The Daily Beast first reported, the IRA announced a “patriotic state-wide flash mob” in support of Trump’s candidacy on a separate Facebook page it ran called “Being Patriotic” using an image of Hillary Clinton in a prison cell. Two of the state chapter Instagram accounts, @south_united_fl and @south_united_il, promoted the rally using the Hillary image taken from an IRA-run Facebook page.

The accounts still live on Instagram also share considerable overlap with the original Russian page in other ways. All of the accounts, for instance, claim to be state chapters of the original South United page, with names like “South United Iowa” and “South United Tennessee.” They all use a similar logo to the IRA Facebook account, and some posts even use memes with stilted phrases like “History is written By victor...” and “Can it be any simple?”—language reminiscent of the non-native English used in some IRA propaganda memes.

Some of the accounts on Instagram even claim to be directly related to the original Russian page. “South United Louisiana” says it’s “the South United page for the state of Louisiana,” while the “South United Georgia” page says it’s the “@south_united page made for the great people of Georgia.” (The latter was taken down at some point prior to The Daily Beast’s discovery, although the Louisiana page remains live.)

The parrot accounts used not just IRA memes but other inflammatory content from outside the South United network. The accounts reposted a variety of memes along the same lines of Southern political and cultural resentments, including pro-Confederacy, pro-gun, anti-Islam, and anti-Hillary Clinton content. In one particularly egregious example, the @south_united_florida account posted an image of four bodies with gunshot wounds to the heads and the words “King Barrak, Queen Michelle, Usurper Hillary, George Soros” above each corpse.

The Daily Beast made repeated attempts to contact the owners of the Instagram accounts still up but received no reply.

Nathan Gleicher—head of security policy at Facebook, which owns Instagram—said the accounts, for now, haven’t violated company policies aimed at helping users distinguish between “inauthentic behavior and authentic speech.” So they're staying online.

“When we take down influence operations, we take action based on the behavior we see on our platforms, not the content they post,” Gleicher told The Daily Beast. “We’ve seen these manipulation campaigns reuse content created by innocent people.Most of the content shared by coordinated manipulation campaigns isn’t provably false, and would in fact be acceptable political discourse if shared by real people. That’s why content alone is not a strong signal for identifying these operations.” To disinformation researchers at the DFRLab, the Instagram accounts that are still live show signs of being dedicated to amplifying IRA material.

DFRLab researchers found evidence that someone may have used engagement-for-hire services to interact with the American Instagram amplification accounts.A few accounts with defunct jewelry and crystal storefronts posted generic comments on the state chapter network accounts’ images.

Not that the IRA needed much help in amplifying its neo-Confederate content. The IRA’s South United Facebook page reached a height of 138,000 followers and harvested a total of 1.5 million likes and 2.3 million shares before it was shut down in 2017. Of the dozen American state chapter Instagram accounts, none have more than 1,000 followers and most have just a few dozen.

Facebook told The Daily Beast that the parrot network accounts appeared to be authentically American. "It appears that these accounts belong to real people in the United States whose content was likely mimicked by these operations we removed in the past," Gleicher told The Daily Beast.

Instagram

DFRLab researchers found some evidence that the IRA’s neo-Confederate persona may have copied organic memes created by authentic American bigots outside the state chapter network. The IRA’s South United Instagram account published a picture of a Confederate stick person attacking an LGBT pride flag stick person in late 2016—a meme copied from an unrelated American Instagram account posted in 2015.

In other words, the Russians copied the American racists. And the racists copied the Russians. It’s a circle of hate.

During 2016, the Kremlin’s sophisticated understanding of the United States led its propaganda to amplifyit. They invented memes to exploit racism, secure in the knowledge that the memes would find wide purchase in America. But while the larger social-media firms purged the accounts that promoted them, the memes have achieved exactly what the Russians wanted: persistence.

And sadly, material aimed squarely at Confederate sympathizers apparently remains a popular topic for Russian trolls: Facebook announced just two months ago that it had removed dozens of Instagram accounts that originated in Russia, some of which published pro-Confederate material targeted at American audiences.

==

mickey huff oct 22 h club talk US interfere w/ other 130x? over --yrs?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/whats-behind-the-gops-disinformation-machine/

no lnx

What’s behind the GOP’s disinformation machine?

Written by Washington Monthly December 13, 2019

I got into a heated debate with a Russian intelligence officer years ago over America’s political system and society. I left with my head spinning. At the time, I was a diplomat posted overseas. Reagan was president and the Soviet Union was showing signs of intense stress, a lumbering oppressive empire on its last legs. Still, the Soviets were highly skilled spin artists, whose dezinformatsiya (disinformation) ops fooled millions, including some Americans.

Let’s call this gentleman Karimov; he’s still serving, so I won’t unmask him. He was a military intelligenceor GRU, officer under diplomatic cover. We chatted over coffee. A multilingual lawyer and graduate of Moscow’s prestigious diplomatic training academy, the thickset spy spun a very sophisticated line depicting the United States as a failing nation riven by endemic racism, corruption, and cut-throat capitalism. Unlike Radio Moscow’s simplistic propaganda, Karimov applied his intellect to weave together a picture that, I sensed, could be believed by many “low information” citizens.

Fast forward to today. We see a vastly transformed environment in which the digital age has become a multiplying force for disinformation. And too many Americans, I’m sad to say, really are falling for it.

The most gullible, ironically, are those on the right—traditionally hardline opponents of Moscow. From 2014 to 2018, Russia’s favorable rating among Republicans soared 22 points, according to a Gallup poll, forty percent of whom said Russia was an ally or friendly. By contrast, 25 percent of Democrats viewed Russia favorably.

Most worrisome, however are Republican politicians who wittingly, or not, put our national security at risk by falling for the obvious tricks of Vladimir Putin and his minions.

“I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” GOP Senator John Kennedy said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Every elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton,” declared Senator Richard Burr, the GOP chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Is that very different than the Russians being for Donald Trump?”

As former NSC official and Russia expert Fiona Hill told congressmen at the impeachment hearings, “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian Security Services themselves.” Why, then, are so many Republican politicians pushing the discredited line that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, despite the conclusion of the entire U.S. intelligence community that it was Moscow?

Former CIA director John Brennan doesn’t think it’s because they are stupid. Kennedy, a lawyer with degrees from Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, and Oxford, knows better: “He’s not being duped, he knows he’s being dishonest, he knows he’s trying to defend and protect Donald Trump at all costs, and so he’s not going to be honest with the American people.”

Other prominent Republicans who publicly regurgitate the Kremlin line include Congressmen David Nunes and Jim Jordan and Senators Ron Johnson, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and Mark Meadows. Are they afflicted with Fever Swamp Syndrome, or is it something perhaps even more insidious?

I’m no disinformation specialist, but I’ve participated in government task forces to counter Russian deception operations. Here’s what I believe.

Politicians who slavishly parrot Russian propaganda fall into three categories: the Cynical (those who know better but peddle the lies anyway); Useful Idiots (those who are easily manipulated); and the Compromised (those who are actual Russian assets who do Moscow’s bidding because they were recruited one way or another).

The third category—being compromised by a foreign power—is the most sensitive. I therefore asked three intelligence veterans their views on the chances of some members of Congress being under direct Russian control.

First, I spoke with Jack Barsky, an East German recruited and trained by the KGB to serve as a “sleeper agent” in the U.S. for a decade. Eventually, Barsky turned on his masters and helped the FBI. He is now a U.S. citizen. He told me, “I do believe that politicians as a class are some of the most vulnerable targets for foreign intelligence. I believe that the damage done by the ‘useful idiots’ is far greater than that done by one or two active assets.” The chances of there being Russian controlled actors among members of Congress, he said, are “low but not zero.”

Second, I reached out to a former CIA senior officer with nearly three decades working primarily on Russia operations.  The ex-official said, “I‘ve long worried about the existence of ‘controlled sources.’ Russian intelligence doctrine on active measures makes clear that the most important part of any campaign is recruited and controlled sources. I have no way of knowing if there are people in the Republican Party or Congress who are controlled sources but I’d bet my home that there are some high-level sources that have helped the Russians. If there aren’t any, it would be the first time ever.”

Then, I talked with a retired FBI special agent who led counterintelligence activities. He said he sees possible linkages involving the activities investigated by Mueller, prosecutors, and Congress, with Putin’s oligarchs as the common denominator. What stands out for him, though, is the large number of unreported Russian contacts among those in Trump’s circle. A seasoned FBI veteran, he believes Trump falls into the category of “useful idiot,” but can’t rule out his being a controlled asset. “What if there is a Russian agent among the few who can still whisper in Trump’s ear and get him to respond?” he speculated.

Are news pundits succumbing to near hysteria on Russian interference in our politics? To paraphrase a Cold War adage: Are we seeing a Russian under every bed?

Turns out, we may be overplaying Moscow’s dezinformatsiya prowess. At least, that’s the view of two disinformation experts.

Indeed, as former CIA analyst Cindy Otis wrote in USA Today, “Russia determined it did not need to be the driver of disinformation campaigns in most E.U. countries and primarily looked to amplify false content already being publicized by far-right groups.”She added, “If anything, domestic actors are poised to be the bigger information threat.”

This analysis is echoed by Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, who wrote in The Atlantic that the “fictional narrative about Ukraine was concocted and propagated first and foremost by American conspiracy theorists, not Russian disinformation puppeteers.” The Russians, he went on “did not ‘concoct” this version of the theory; they parroted the American far right.”

Once again, Moscow is using shrewd techniques to exaggerate its powers of influence, all as a means to keep its adversaries off balance.

But it has gotten an unprecedented boost from the maelstrom of lies being spouted by Republican leaders. To quote a once popular cartoon character, Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

And yet, the external threat is very real. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, is unmoved. He’s currently blocking legislation that would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to individual states to beef up election security to prevent a repeat of 2016.

The sad truth may be that changing the warped mindset of Republicans regarding Trump is a more urgent national security need than taking on Russian propaganda.

Until that happens, you can count on American democracy to keep unraveling.

James Bruno is a writer and former U.S. diplomat. Read his blog, DIPLO DENIZEN, and follow him on Twitter @JamesLBruno. The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.

===

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/

no lnx

POLITICS

POLITICS FEATURES

NOVEMBER 25, 2019 9:02AM ET

That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It

Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda.

By DARREN LINVILL & PATRICK WARREN

Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.

Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.

On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.

The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary. We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.

We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation. Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.

These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends.Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”

The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.

While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.

...

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/russian-operatives-are-back-for-the-2020-election-and-they-have-a-dangerous-new-strategy/

Russian operatives are back for the 2020 election — and they have a dangerous new strategy

Written by Bob Cesca / Salon November 26, 2019

We don’t hear this too often so it bears repeating: The ongoing Russian attack against the United States would’ve ultimately failed were it not for millions of unwitting American foot soldiers who helped it succeed. As accomplices, way too many of us were easily — willingly, in many cases — hoodwinked into sharing and retweeting propaganda designed to elect Donald Trump and, amid the chaos, undermine Western democracy.

In that respect, Russia’s active measures carried Vladimir Putin’s mission up to our doorsteps, but we were the ones who opened our virtual doors, welcoming in all the riffraff, treating the enemy like house guests, while suggesting all of our friends do the same. Putin and his operatives recognized a significant weakness here — the semi-distracted, drive-by gullibility of American social media users. As much as it pains me to say it, Putin was right. We might even be more gullible than he forecasted.

We’re a nation of suckers. Not everyone, of course, but enough of us to matter. And by the way, it’s not just rank-and-file American voters occupying the sucker demographic. The president, half of Congress, and the Red Hat entertainment complex are either deliberately or unknowingly marketing Russian agitprop in the form of the bogus Russia-didn’t-do-it gambit, the Ukraine-is-the-real-attacker nonsense, which, according to testimony by Fiona Hill, absolutely originated with Putin, not to mention Paul Manafort’s “man in Kyiv,” GRU trainee Konstantin Kilimnik, way back in 2016.

The Kremlin has successfully tapped into the thinking of millions of Americans, and it’s already looking like the 2020 sequel will be even trickier to navigate.

Two professors at Clemson University, Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, just published a mind-blowing article for Rolling Stone about the next generation of active measures emerging from the ashes of the Robert Mueller-indicted Internet Research Agency (IRA).

:{

As soon as Mueller squished the previous iteration of the IRA, it sprang to life again, even before the Mueller Report hit bookshelves earlier this year. At some point following the 2016 election, the IRA was folded into the Federal News Agency in Russia, which, like the IRA, is reportedly financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s chef.” And, naturally, the Kremlin’s active measures continue today under that barely disguised shingle.

}:

One of the IRA’s newer social media tactics uncovered during Linvill and Warren’s two year submersion in the underworld of professional Russian troll farms is a version of the classic bait-and-switch trick — simple enough if you know it’s coming, but just clever enough to outwit those of us who are most susceptible. For example, a Twitter account known as @IamTyraJackson posted a thing about NFL athlete Warrick Dunn’s charity work. The goal here was to build a massive audience for the account by tweeting something innocent yet irresistible. And irresistible it was, accumulating a colossal 290,000 likes.

The @IamTyraJacksonaccount was gratefully suspended, but not before the IRA gained all kinds of new followers for the short lifespan of the account, subsequently hammering those followers with disinformation — again, baiting followers with something sweet and cuddly, then bludgeoning them with “messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt,” as Linvill and Warren write.

Another IRA front, known as @PoliteMelanie, was given a very specific yet nefarious mission. Unlike other accounts intended to directly promote Trump, or to stir up a furious debate among users, Melanie’s mission was literally to sell “disgust.” Linvill and Warren reported that Russia is well aware of the power of this particular emotion: “Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.”

Driving apart the United States is exactly the point.

In this case, the Melanie account tweeted the results of a fake poll aimed at “educated, urban, left-wing Americans.” In the end, the account managed to build a following of 20,000 people, aided by the poll and its 300,000 likes. The fake poll, by the way, suggested that 55 percent of conservatives believed “homo sapiens” (sic) should be disowned by their family. And yes, apparently well-educated liberals were duped.

On top of everything else, the tweets and statuses by trolls across social media include simple opinions meant to foment insufferably endless threads in which users scream past each other, while other posts weaponize real news and legitimate issues for a similar purpose. The active measures are working because the enemy kinda’ looks and tweets like us now. Guerrilla trolling. This upgraded line of attack has achieved a seamless integration of trolls into the mix of normal people, not unlike money laundering where illegally acquired cash is slowly dropped into a legal income stream so auditors can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake.

So how do we know?

The only way to outflank the attack is to stop doing what the IRA wants us to do. If you were a Twitter user reading tweets by either of the aforementioned Russian trolls, there was no real way of knowing they were Russians. No lengthy strings of numerals in the handles, no glaringly choppy English, none of the usual red flags to speak of — except one.

More than 90,000 people retweeted Melanie’s fake poll without having any idea who Melanie was or whether she was on the level. 90,000 people willingly and foolishly swapped virtual body fluids with a total stranger who happened to be a Russian operative. While the social media platforms themselves continue to devise new ways of weeding out the trolls, we all have to stop doing “stupid shit,” to borrow Barack Obama’s mantra about foreign entanglements. A little bit of thoughtfulness and self-control will go a long way toward repelling the attacks.

Linvill and Warren suggest a little civility, too, which can’t hurt.

The problem, however, with becoming more educated and significantly more cautious about how we use social media is that a significant cross-section of us don’t even believe we’re being attacked through these platforms in the first place, so they’re unwilling to be more cautious, while others, namely American political operatives, aka “ratf**kers,” are happy to retweet Russian agitprop because it supports their chaotic agenda. Trump’s Red Hat army is entirely on board with Putin’s narrative about Ukraine as the real attackers, while many Americans on the far left who identify with journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are, at best, skeptical of the Russian attack. Ironically, skepticism and outright disbelief about the very existence of the attack is obviously a key component of the attack itself, and in many cases, the IRA didn’t necessarily have to lift a finger to manufacture that skepticism.

Again, the social media front of the Russian attack would have failed if we had just exercised better social media habits. But knowing the IRA’s @IamTyraJackson account was still active as recently as August 2019 suggests we still haven’t learned this awful lesson, even after years of pain and the slow disassembling of our republic under our noses, institution by institution. But there’s almost a year to go before Election Day 2020, and we still have enough altitude to pull up before the whole thing smashes into the ground. Let’s hope we wise up and grab the stick with both hands in time.

==

no lnx

Facebook: Russian trolls are back. And they're here to meddle with 2020

Donie O'Sullivan

By Donie O'Sullivan, CNN Business

Updated 5:24 AM ET, Tue October 22, 2019

New York (CNN Business)People linked to the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed troll group indicted by the United States for its alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election, are laying the groundwork to do the same in 2020, new information released by Facebook on Monday suggests.

Profiles originating in Russia had since the beginning of this year been building a network of accounts on Instagram designed to look like groups in swing states, the company said. Instagram is owned by Facebook (FB).

Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts. The Russian trolls who used social media to interfere in the 2016 election employed a similar tactic, going after Hillary Clinton from the right and also trying to spread a perception on the left that Clinton was not liberal enough and that liberals and African Americans especially shouldn't bother voting for her.

The accounts Facebook revealed Monday, 50 of which were on Instagram and one of which was on Facebook, were designed to look like they were advocating on a broad range of issues across American life.

A fake Bernie Sanders' supporters page posted an image attacking the candidacy of Vice President Joe Biden

A fake Bernie Sanders' supporters page posted an image attacking the candidacy of Vice President Joe Biden

Accounts with usernames like @black.queen.chloe and @michigan_black_community_ looked like they were run by black activists. There were also pro and anti-Trump accounts, and accounts posing as feminists, LGBTQ rights advocates, and environmentalists. Other account names included @stop.trump2020, @bernie.2020__, @iowa.patriot, and @feminist_agenda_, according to Graphika.

Facebook said the accounts combined had more than 250,000 followers, more than half of which were based in the U.S. Facebook did not disclose how many of those followers were real and how many might have been fake or bot accounts designed to make the main accounts look more legitimate. Facebook says it has removed the accounts.

"It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides," Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo, who analyzed the accounts, told CNN Business.

In a statement responding to the news, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said, "We applaud Facebook for disclosing the existence of these fake accounts and shutting them down. ... [But] Donald Trump continues to benefit from spreading false information, all the while Facebook profits from amplifying his lies and debunked conspiracy theories on their platform. If Facebook is truly committed to protecting the integrity of our elections, they would immediately take down Trump's ads that attempt to gaslight the American people."

Nimmo also observed attacks on other candidates, including Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but said those attacks seemed more the result of "character building" in which the accounts were sharing content to bolster their respective personas -- for instance, liberal-looking accounts attacked Trump, while conservative-looking accounts posted negative content about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Her son was killed — then came the Russian trolls

Her son was killed — then came the Russian trolls

"Among the accounts focused on black activism, there was strong support for Bernie Sanders along with a moderate amount of content opposing Kamala Harris," Graphika said in its analysis. "Education reform and student debt relief were two of the most commonly mentioned reasons for supporting Sanders, while Harris's record as a California DA was mentioned as a reason to oppose her candidacy. Mixed in with these was a small amount of content attacking Joe Biden, primarily due to gaffes related to his previous handling of racial issues."

Nimmo said the accounts sent just under 75,000 posts, the majority of which were not directly related to the 2020 election, but to broader political and social issues in the US.

Facebook said Monday those behind the operation had taken steps to conceal their identities and locations. The company did not publicly say how it had determined the accounts were linked to the Internet Research Agency but said it had shared details with law enforcement.

The campaign mostly recycled existing memes and posts from real American news organizations and political groups.

"This wasn't Russians targeting Americans with Russian content, this was Russians targeting Americans with American content," Nimmo said.

The decision to recycle existing content, rather than create new material, might have been part of the campaign's strategy to conceal its Russian links, Nimmo said. However, errors in some of the accounts' posts suggested the accounts weren't run by native English speakers.

"What the future for their children will be?" the caption read on one post apparently criticizing Americans who don't remember the Confederacy fondly. Another account posted "What a bullsh**."

From Russia with Love? Mystery Facebook account sent New York activist a bunch of roses

From Russia with Love? Mystery Facebook account sent New York activist a bunch of roses

Nathaniel Gleicher, who leads Facebook's team investigating foreign influence operations, said the company had caught the operation in its early stages and that the Russian group had been focusing on audience building. Gleicher said the accounts were "trying to make themselves look like ordinary citizens" in a way that could later have lent credibility to their posts.

Facebook has taken extensive steps to crack down on foreign disinformation on its platforms since the 2016 election, including hiring former intelligence officials to root out campaigns like those run from Russia. Gleicher said that the steps Facebook had taken appeared to make it difficult for the Russian accounts "to build the following among authentic communities."

"People in Russia are still trying this," Nimmo told CNN Business on Monday. But, he said, they are finding it a lot harder because the social media companies "are hunting them."

"In 2016, you could have set up an account posing as a Tennessee Republican and have it registered to a Russian phone number," he noted.

Facebook also announced Monday that it had removed several networks of Iranian accounts, some of which targeted Americans. One of the accounts directed audiences to content about Black Lives Matter -- a tactic that was very popular among the Russian trolls in 2016. The network had a relatively small following of more than 7,000 accounts.

While most of the focus on online foreign interference in the US has been devoted to Russia, over the past 12 months, Facebook has detected multiple Iranian campaigns targeting the United States.

CNN's Sarah Mucha contributed reporting.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/gop-sens-ron-johnson-and-marsha-blackburn-are-tied-to-russian-money-and-trump-conspiracy-theories-theyre-not-alone/

no lnx

GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn are tied to Russian money and Trump conspiracy theories. They’re not alone

Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon October 30, 2019

Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will finally hold a formal vote dictating the rules for the impeachment inquiry, six weeks after it was launched by a whistleblower’s complaint mysteriously withheld from Congress. And on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman backed up both the initial whistleblower and U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor by testifying that he too was concerned about the Trump administration’s push to use congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine to coerce an investigation into Joe Biden.

Congressional Republicans have long since stopped defending Trump on the merits since shortly after the White House released a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they’ve sought refuge in increasingly meaningless process arguments. So of course Pelosi agreeing to a formal vote on the rules of impeachment hasn’t stopped Republican complaints about the process. The goalposts will shift once again. No matter what the Democrats agree to, Republicans will complain about procedural unfairness and also refuse to concede the inquiry is legitimate. But how much of Republicans’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his self-dealing is because they’re in on it?

On Monday the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian diplomat who claimed to have met with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., this summer to discuss the baseless conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump that Ukrainian officials had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Johnson reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenkofor at least 30 minutes on Capitol Hill in July, and Telizhenko then met with Johnson’s Senate staff for five additional hours. According to the report, “the discussions focused in part on ‘the DNC issue’ — a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to gather incriminating information about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Telizhenko said he could not recall the date of the meeting, but a review of his Facebook page revealed a photo of him and Johnson posted on July 11.”

Johnson is a vocal Trump defender who has hounded the inspector general of the intelligence community about investigating media leaks regarding the Ukraine call. He has previously admitted that he was told by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that Ukraine needed to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016” in order to receive military aid.

As Johnson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, after Sondland told him that, he was assured “if President Trump has that confidence” that the Ukrainians would do his bidding, “then he’ll release the military spending.” Now, as the Post points out, Johnson’s “knowledge of key events” in the case may “complicate his role as a juror in a trial by the Senate.”

Recall that when Johnson was asked about his defense of Trump’s actions, he snapped at the simple question from NBC News’ Chuck Todd and spun out the same deep state conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Beyond his apparent involvement in Trump’s Ukraine dealings, Johnson is alleged to have benefited from campaign money illegally funneled from Russia via shell corporations owned by the National Rifle Association, which helped him win his tight 2016 race in Wisconsin.

Political action committees for Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham reportedly accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election. McConnell and Graham are co-sponsors of a new resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. At least 50 Senate Republicans, several of whom have refused to publicly comment on the growing Ukraine scandal — citing a need to remain impartial for a likely Senate impeachment trial — have already signed onto that bill. The resolution is currently paused in the Senate Rules Committee until the House votes on impeachment rules later this week.

As House Democrats’ investigation has rapidly unveiled ever more damaging material regarding Trump’s Ukraine scandal, public support for impeachment has shot up. Reportedly nervous about his wall of defense in the Senate crumbling, the president recently hosted several GOP senators at the White House, including top Johnson, Graham, John Thune of South Dakota and John Kennedy of Louisiana, last week. A day earlier, Thune and Kennedy, had blocked a Democratic bill to provide funding for states to shore up election security. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., quietly blocked three election-security bills for the second time this year.

“You know, it’s not a good sign if you’re doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” Blackburn said on the Senate floor late last week. She is among the Republican senators with close ties to a U.S.-sanctioned Russian politician who is accused of illegally channeling Russian funds through the NRA. Under Senate rules, any individual senator can block a vote on a bill.

When Senate Republicans are not prematurely dismissing an impeachment inquiry on which they will probably have to render judgment, they continue to protect Trump’s refusal to clamp down on potential election interference. If Republican charges of a “kangaroo court” are anything, they are a classic case of projection: How can Senate Republicans possibly serve as impartial jurors in a trial of the president, when they are implicated in the same pattern of political malfeasance?

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

==

i have not been able to figure her TG out; many ads on AN

no lnx

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that she thinks Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, is being “groomed” by Russia to run as a third-party candidate in 2020.

Clinton made the allegations during an interview with David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager. During the interview, Clinton alleged that Russia used 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein as an “asset” and suggested that Gabbard would play a similar role in the upcoming election without mentioning her name.

“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

Clinton went on to label Stein a “Russian asset.”

“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”...

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-duplicitous-trolls-are-using-tulsi-gabbards-candidacy-to-foment-disruption-and-chaos/

nolnx

ous trolls are using Tulsi Gabbard’s candidacy to foment disruption and chaos

Written byNancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 23, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. At this point, her polling average at Real Clear Politics is 1.4%. Nevertheless, conservative media celebrated the fact that Gabbard won the online poll sponsored by Drudge Report after the first round of debates. Similarly, Gabbard won polls from both Breitbart and Drudge after her performance in the second debate. Those results were not replicated by any reputable polling firm.

Not long after the first debate, we learned what had prompted Gabbard’s success in those online polls.

Users from pro-Trump communities on 4chan and Reddit implored fellow members to vote for lower-polling candidates in online polls, specifically Tulsi Gabbard and Bill de Blasio, in the hours after Wednesday’s Democratic debate — a sign that digital manipulation efforts related to U.S. politics and elections remain very much alive....

==

omg this could finish djt? 10/18/19

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/how-conservative-writer-john-solomon-served-conduit-rudy-giulianis-ukraine-conspiracy

At the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump lies a disinformation campaign led by his personal attorneyRudy Giuliani that was aided and abetted by conservative writer John Solomon. Through Solomon, Giuliani injected his disinformation campaign straight into the heart of conservative media -- Fox News -- with seemingly full knowledge of at least some at Fox. And eventually, Solomon landed a job at the network.

It is now known that Trump blessed Giuliani to run a shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, in which he sought information that would undermine the intelligence community's findings that Russia interfered in our 2016 election to benefit Trump. Giuliani was also trying to dig up dirt to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.

Much attention has focused on Giuliani’s actions and the shady cast of characters he worked with, but less has been paid to the right-wing media figures who colluded with the president’s lawyer to make his smear campaign public -- a plan that came dangerously close to succeeding.

What follows is a case study in how right-wing media work hand in hand with Trump cronies to smear his enemies, undermine democracy, and defend the president at all costs.

Here’s how it went down.

Key Takeaways

• Rudy Giuliani, working with con men and Trump cronies, pursued an “investigation” in Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son.
• In March, Giuliani sent the results of his investigation to the State Department to be investigated and to conservative columnist John Solomon.
• The same month, Solomon began publishing a series of columns that mirrored the sourcing and claims Giuliani made in his State Department dossier.
• Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine.
• During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times.
• Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that deep state elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump.
• On October 5, John Solomon landed a job at Fox.

Key players

Rudy Giuliani -- the president’s personal attorney who has traveled around the globe attempting to dig up dirt on Democrats and discredit the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman -- two Soviet-born con men with ties to Ukraine who worked with Giuliani to concoct the disinformation campaign and to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired, reportedly in the hopes of advancing their business interests in the country. The two have since been arrested for campaign finance violations related to making allegedly illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, as well as a pro-Trump super PAC. They also reportedly worked for Dmitry Firtash.

Dmitry Firtash -- a Ukrainian pro-Russian oligarch and former businessassociate of Paul Manafort who is in Austria fighting extradition to the United States to face charges related to a bribery conspiracy. At the same time Parnas and Fruman were working with Giuliani, the two were reportedly also working on Firtash’s behalf to push for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as part of a plan to install new leadership at Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas company. Part of this plan reportedly would have included Naftogaz paying “Firtash a debt of more than $200 million that Firtash believes he is owed by the company.” NBC reported that while this was happening, Firtash “was playing a key role in the effort by Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Donald Trump's political opponents in Ukraine.”

Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova -- two attorneys closely tied to Trump who also worked with Giuliani to support his efforts in Ukraine. The duo are known for their role in bolstering conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and at one point were considered to join Trump’s personal legal team. The two quietly represent Dmitry Firtash in fighting his extradition to the United States. They hired Parnas as an “interpreter” to work with them on the Firtash case while Parnas was also working with Giuliani.

John Solomon -- a conservative columnist who until recently was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon was the conduit through which Giuliani, Parnas, Toensing and diGenova planted their stories in order to spread their coordinated disinformation campaign through the media.

Sean Hannity -- Fox News host who is close to Trump and worked with Giuliani to make his show an integral part of their media strategy, providing a place where they could sow the seeds of the smear campaign against Biden. Giuliani and Hannity discussed this strategy in January, and Solomon became a staple on Hannity’s prime-time programming.

The plan

According to Parnas, his friendship with Giuliani began two years ago as they were running in similar political circles and attending the same events. In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman began connecting Giuliani to a network of disgraced former and current Ukrainian officials and prosecutors to dig up dirt on Biden and the 2016 election.

The conspiracy theory they concocted went like this: Ukrainian officials worked with Democrats to find dirt on Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort in order to damage Trump. They did so, Giuliani claimed, by fabricating the “black ledger” that showed that Manafort had received millions of dollars from the former pro-Russia Ukrainian ruling party that had been recently overthrown. The revelation of this ledger helped force Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign, and Manafort was eventually prosecuted and convicted of a wide range of crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference in the 2016 election.

In addition, according to Giuliani’s conspiracy theory, the Ukrainian Embassy was working with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and in return, the American Embassy and the Obama administration actively blocked investigations in Ukraine that Giuliani claims targeted Democrats’ political allies. As with most conspiracy theories on the right, George Soros is involved in this one too. The theory posits that a Ukrainian good governance, anti-corruption group -- the Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) -- was involved in framing Manafort and was corruptly tied to an FBI agent who was investigating Manafort. Giuliani also claims that an investigation into the group was shut down due to U.S. pressure and that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine provided Ukrainian officials with a “do not prosecute” list that included people linked to AntAC. As a bonus, through the “investigation,” Giuliani claims to have been presented with evidence that then-Vice President Biden acted corruptly by withholding U.S. aid to force the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son.

Nothing about this conspiracy theory is true. First, there’s no evidence that the infamous “black ledger” was fraudulent, and several payments listed in the document have been confirmed to be accurate. The Intercept reported: “Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and reformist member of parliament who helped publicize the off-the-books payments” said that “Giuliani ‘is a liar’ for saying that the black ledger was a forgery. ‘It is a real document, with real signatures,’ Leshchenko said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts.” Giuliani seems to have adopted the false claim about the ledger from Manafort, whose legal team has embraced it since 2017 and whom Guiliani has been meeting with to discuss the materials.

As for Giuliani’s claims that investigations into AntAC were dropped due to political pressure,  the State Department has called claims of a so-called “do not prosecute” list “complete poppycock.” And an investigation into the group’s handling of foreign aid money was widely believed to be politically motivated retaliation for the group’s anti-corruption work. Finally, while Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was roundly criticized for blocking corruption investigations, there’s no evidence that he did so to benefit his son. In reality, the push to get the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, fired was a part of an anti-corruption effort by advocates and international supporters of Ukraine. The United States’ well-established position was that ousting Shokin was a critical aspect of anti-corruption measures. The investigation into the energy company whose board included Hunter Biden was long dormant, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of the investigation.

Nonetheless, Giuliani says he completed his “investigation” in March and sent his findings to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the understanding that Pompeo would investigate. (NBCNews.com, however, reported: “A source with knowledge of the events said ... that Pompeo never promised Rudy Giuliani that he would investigate the contents of the envelope or anything related to Ukraine.”) Giuliani also sent the materials to Solomon.

NBCNews.com obtained a copy of the documents that Giuliani sent to the State Department in March and reported that they contained “a glimpse of an intricate media strategy to spread the story including segments being placed on Fox News.” NBC said the “documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer John Solomon’s columns in The Hill, attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” The materials Giuliani sent included interview notes from interviews he conducted with then-current and former Ukrainian prosecutors that “paint the picture of the narrative that Giuliani has been pushing involving the Bidens.”

The media strategy

Giuliani and associates feed story to Solomon

Around the same time Giuliani sent his packet of materials to the State Department, he also sent the materials to Solomon, who began reporting on its contents through the opinion pages of The Hill without identifying the materials as having originated with Giuliani. Solomon’s writing for some time had focused heavily around trying to discredit the Mueller investigation and the notion that Russia meddled into the 2016 elections to help Trump. On March 20, he published the first of many scoops specifically related to Ukraine’s involvement in this effort. Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which primarily focused on Ukraine.

In his reporting, Solomon spelled out Giuliani’s conspiracy theory in detail. For instance:

• He reported that Ukrainian officials claimed to have “evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes,” at least some of it related to Biden.
• Solomon reported that these officials tried to “deliver their evidence to Washington” but were unable because the American ambassador (Yovanovitch) “blocked” them “from obtaining a visa” to the U.S.
• He weaved an elaborate story about Americans working with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Trump’s one-time 2016 campaign manager Manafort, in order to damage Trump.
• He claimed that the infamous “black ledger” that showed Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian officials was fabricated andreleased to damage Trump. He also suggested that in January 2016, Obama’s Department of Justice pressured Ukraine to help the department investigate Manafort in response to Trump’s rise in popularity in the Republican primary race (Manafort did not join the Trump campaign until March 2016).
• He strongly suggested that the Obama State Department pressured Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into a Ukrainian good governance group linked to Soros because Soros backed Clinton.
• He also claimed the U.S. ambassador’s “do not prosecute” list included people related to this organization, and he strained to link the group to the Manafort investigation by claiming that an FBI agent involved in the investigation is tied to the same group.
• And, of course, he claimedthat Biden withheld a billion dollars worth of U.S. aid to shut down an investigation into Burisma Holdings and Biden’s son Hunter through his position on the company’s board.

Solomon’s reporting relies heavily on the sources Giuliani fed him. In an interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani named three current and former Ukrainian prosecutors as persons he interviewed, specifically former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, and Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Giuliani is also known to have met with a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andrii Telizhenko and is linked to Kostiantyn Kulyk -- Lutsenko’s deputy who was indicted on corruption charges in 2016. Eight of the twelve columns Solomon wrote on the topic featured at least one of these five sources.

At least three of Solomon’s columns feature information meant to undermine the validity of the Russia investigation that may have been leaked from the Ukrainian pro-Russia oligarch Dmitry Firtash’s legal team, which included diGenova and Toensing. Toensing and diGenova have been working with Firtash since at least July -- and indeed Solomon published an entire column in July based exclusively off material and anonymous sources from Firtash’s legal team. They appear to have been involved with his case much earlier than July, though. 

Included in the material Giuliani sent to the State Department is a March 26 email from Solomon -- titled “Fwd: Outline of Soros reporting, including embedded documents” -- in which Solomon forwarded a draft of his article before it was published to the same three people working with Giuliani who are also known to have been working with Firtash -- Parnas, Toensing, and diGenova. The column was the first of three that mentioned Firtash, and it attempted to tie AntAC -- and through it Soros -- “to highly visible U.S. actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros group, and Manafort.” Solomon repeated the suggestion in his August 7 column on Soros’ “secret 2016 access” to State Department officials. In a fourth column, Solomon reported on an affidavit of a former Ukrainian prosecutor that he exclusively received. The affidavit was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.”

Solomon brings the conspiracy theory to Fox

The next stage in the plan involved Solomon taking his “scoop” to Fox News, specifically to SeanHannity. From March 20 -- when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory -- through October 2, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that “deep state” elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump. Giuliani also appeared on those networks frequently, clocking in at least 64 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business during that time period. Toensing and diGenova appeared over 75 times on the two networks during this period. 

The fact that they were working together on these stories, or -- in the case of Toensing and diGenova -- that they were legally representing Firtash, was certainly not transparent to viewers. In perhaps the most egregious example, on the September 26 episode of Hannity, Hannity hosted Solomon to report on an affidavit he obtained from the disgraced prosecutor Shokin, who claimed he was forced to resign to stop the investigation into the company connected to  Hunter Biden. Hannity then hosted diGenova and Toensing to discuss it, and the two hailed the affidavit as proof of their conspiracy theory and declared it would “shoot a hole in” Biden’s defense.

However, the affidavit states that it was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.” In other words, diGenova and Toensing were part of the legal team that produced the affidavit that Solomon later exclusively obtained, wrote up, and then took to Hannity -- a fact not mentioned by any of them. Giuliani has since repeatedly referenced this affidavit in numerous media appearances to support his claims about Biden’s alleged corruption.

Hannity repeatedly gave clues suggesting he knew the full range of stories Solomon would be reporting. For instance, despite the fact that Solomon’s March 20 column did not mention Biden or corruption, Hannity teased on his radio show that day that “I just happen to have a little birdie telling me in my ear that, well, Joe Biden may have an issue here that is bigger than anything ever alleged about Donald Trump.” On September 23, Hannity and Giuliani admitted to having talked about the Biden Ukraine story as early as January.

The payoff

Giuliani repeatedly touted and praised Solomon’s “blockbuster” reporting. He has at least twice opined that Solomon should “get a Pulitzer Prize” and has taken to Twitter to sing Solomon’s praises:

Hannity, too, repeatedly praised Solomon’s “great reporting” as he hyped Solomon’s columns. He regularly described Solomon as a “friend” of the program and declared that mainstream news outlets, like The New York Times, “peddled lies, conspiracy theories and hoax[es]” about the Russia investigation whereas Solomon “was right” all along. On April 25, Hannity asked Trump about Solomon’s and others' reporting around the Russia investigation, and the president replied: “These are great reporters. … These are people that should be getting Pulitzers.” Trump added, “These are the ones that should be winning. It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine.”

Solomon’s efforts paid off. On October 5, Fox News confirmed that John Solomon had joined the network as a contributor. During his first appearance on Hannity as an official Fox News employee, Hannity said: “John Solomon, welcome to the family. It’s been a long time coming, sir.”

==

==

forged docs macron le pen

https://twitter.com/Nico_VanderB/status/859892235005022209?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2F2017%2F05%2F04%2Fpro-trump-fake-news-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen%2F

https://twitter.com/Nico_VanderB

Nicolas Vanderbiest

:{:{Verified account:(style="text-align:left;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important;height:1px !important;overflow:hidden !important;padding:0px !important;position:absolute !important;width:1px !important"):}::(style="background:transparent;display:inline-block;vertical-align:baseline;position:relative;margin-right:4px"):}:

:{@ Nico_VanderB:(style="unicode-bidi:embed;direction:ltr !important"):}:

:{

Director of Operations @ SaperVedereEU - Blogger / Chronicler on Crises, Influences and Social Media

Brussels - Paris

reputatiolab.com

Joined September 2011

Born January 04

}:

==

(Reuters) - A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [https://en.riss.ru/], after the election.

The institute is run by retired senior Russian foreign intelligence officials appointed by Putin’s office.

The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.

RELATED COVERAGE

• :{Russia denies Reuters report think tank drew up plan to sway U.S. election:(style="text-align:left;box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;max-width:500px;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;display:inline-block"):}:

It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

**A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election**

. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

The current and former U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the Russian documents’ classified status. They declined to discuss how the United States obtained them. U.S. intelligence agencies also declined to comment on them.

Putin has denied interfering in the U.S. election. Putin’s spokesman and the Russian institute did not respond to requests for comment.

The documents were central to the Obama administration’s conclusion that Russia mounted a “fake news” campaign and launched cyber attacks against Democratic Party groups and Clinton’s campaign, the current and former officials said.

“Putin had the objective in mind all along, and he asked the institute to draw him a road map,” said one of the sources, a former senior U.S. intelligence official.

Trump has said Russia’s activities had no impact on the outcome of the race. Ongoing congressional and FBI investigations into Russian interference have so far produced no public evidence that Trump associates colluded with the Russian effort to change the outcome of the election.

Four of the officials said the approach outlined in the June strategy paper was a broadening of an effort the Putin administration launched in March 2016. That month the Kremlin instructed state-backed media outlets, including international platforms Russia Today and Sputnik news agency, to start producing positive reports on Trump’s quest for the U.S. presidency, the officials said.

:{Russia Today did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Sputnik dismissed the assertions by the U.S. officials that it participated in a Kremlin campaign as an “absolute pack of lies.”:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: “And by the way, it’s not the first pack of lies we’re hearing from ‘sources in U.S. official circles’,” the spokesperson said in an email.

PRO-KREMLIN BLOGGERS

**Russia Today and Sputnik published anti-Clinton stories while pro-Kremlin bloggers prepared a Twitter campaign calling into question the fairness of an anticipated Clinton victory**

, according to a report by U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the election made public in January. [

http://bit.ly/2kMiKSA:{]}:

Russia Today’s most popular Clinton video - “How 100% of the 2015 Clintons’ ‘charity’ went to ... themselves” - accumulated 9 millions views on social media, according to the January report. [http://bit.ly/2os8wIt]

The report said Russia Today and Sputnik “consistently cast president elect-Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional media outlets.”

The report said the agencies did not assess whether Moscow’s effort had swung the outcome of the race in Trump’s favor, because American intelligence agencies do not “analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion.” [http://bit.ly/2kMiKSA]

CYBER ATTACKS

Neither of the Russian institute documents mentioned the release of hacked Democratic Party emails to interfere with the U.S. election, according to four of the officials. The officials said the hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin.

The overt propaganda and covert hacking efforts reinforced each other, according to the officials. Both Russia Today and Sputnik heavily promoted the release of the hacked Democratic Party emails, which often contained embarrassing details.

Five of the U.S. officials described the institute as the Kremlin’s in-house foreign policy think tank.

The institute’s director when the documents were written, Leonid Reshetnikov, rose to the rank of lieutenant general during a 33-year-career in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, according to the institute’s website [http://bit.ly/2oVhiCF]. After Reshetnikov retired from the institute in January, Putin named as his replacement Mikhail Fradkov. The institute says he served as the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service from 2007 to 2016. [http://bit.ly/2os4tvz]

Reuters was unable to determine if either man was directly involved in the drafting of the documents. Reshetnikov’s office referred questions to the Russian institute.

On its website, the Russian institute describes itself as providing “expert appraisals,” “recommendations,” and “analytical materials” to the Russian president’s office, cabinet, National Security Council, ministries and parliament. [http://bit.ly/2pCBGpR]

On Jan. 31, the websites of Putin’s office [http://bit.ly/2os9wMr] and the institute [http://bit.ly/2oLn9Kd] posted a picture and transcript ofReshetnikov and his successor Fradkov meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. Putin thanked Reshetnikov for his service and told Fradkov he wanted the institute to provide objective information and analysis.

“We did our best for nearly eight years to implement your foreign policy concept,” Reshetnikov told Putin. “The policy of Russia and the policy of the President of Russia have been the cornerstone of our operation.”

additional reporting by Warren Strobel and Arshad Mohammed

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/russia-government-carried-out-shocking-breach-of-the-actual-substance-of-fbi-communications-in-2016-report/

no lnx

Russia government carried out shocking breach of ‘the actual substance of FBI communications’ in 2016: report

Written by Alex Henderson September 16, 2019

In 2016, the Russian government not only interfered in the United States’ presidential election — a fact that has been well-documented in the Mueller report — it also spied on U.S. intelligence within the United States. And according to an investigative report by Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor for Yahoo News, Russian operatives “targeted FBI communications” and successfully “hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil.”

One of the sources for Yahoo News’ report, a former senior official for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), asserted, “It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations.”

On December 29, 2016, the outgoing Obama Administration gave almost three dozen Russian diplomats only 72 hours to leave the U.S. and seized two rural estates owned by the Russian government. At the time, Russian officials insisted that those estates were merely vacation spots. But according to Yahoo News’ report, the estates were used for spying — and that spying was so comprehensive that it underscores “U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

Security compromises in the U.S., according to Yahoo News, “gave Russian spies in American cities — including Washington, New York and San Francisco — key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications.”

Former U.S. officials told Yahoo News adds that Russian spies successfully cracked some types of encryption used by U.S. intelligence. A former U.S. national security official, interviewed anonymously, told Yahoo News, “Any time you find out that an adversary has these capabilities, it sets off a ripple effect. The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given technology…. They are singularly dangerous in this area.”

Russian spies, according to Yahoo News’ report, also compromised the FBI’s backup communications systems. “This was something we took extremely seriously,” a former senior counterintelligence official told Yahoo News.”

Yahoo News’ report also quotes a former senior counterintelligence official as saying, “The intel reporting was they did break our codes or got their hands on a radio and figured it out. Either way, they decrypted our comms.”

Joel Brenner, who headed U.S. counterintelligence from 2006-2009, told Yahoo News, “When I was in office, the counterintelligence business was.… focused entirely on its core concern, which is insider threats, and in particular mole hunting. This is, in fact, the core risk, and it’s right that it should be the focus. But we were neither organized nor resourced to deal with counterintelligence in networks, technical networks, electronic networks.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/disinformation-could-sway-the-2020-election-and-were-not-ready/

no lnx

Disinformation could sway the 2020 election — and we’re not ready

Written by The Conversation September 9, 2019

Paul M. Barrett, New York University

In 2016, Russian operatives used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to sow division among American voters and boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

What the Russians used to accomplish this is called “disinformation,” which is false or misleading content intended to deceive or promote discord. Now, with the first presidential primary vote only five months away, the public should be aware of the sources and types of online disinformation likely to surface during the 2020 election.

First, the Russians will be back. Don’t be reassured by the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency’s relatively negligible presence during last year’s midterm elections. The agency might have been keeping its powder dry in anticipation of the 2020 presidential race. And it helped that U.S. Cyber Command, an arm of the military, reportedly blocked the agency’s internet access for a few days right before the election in November 2018.

Temporarily shutting down the Internet Research Agency won’t be enough to stop the flow of harmful content. Lee Foster, who leads the disinformation team at the cybersecurity firm FireEye, told me in an interview that the agency is “a small component of the overall Russian operation,” which also includes Moscow’s military intelligence service and possibly other organizations. Over time, Foster said, “All of these actors rework their approaches and tactics.”

And there’s more to fear than just the Russians. I’m the author of a new report on disinformation and the 2020 election published by the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. In the report, I predict that the Russians won’t be alone in spreading disinformation in 2020. Their most likely imitator will be Iran, especially if hostility between Tehran and Washington continues to mount.

Disinformation isn’t just Russian

In May, acting on a tip from FireEye, Facebook took down nearly 100 Iranian-related accounts, pages and groups. The Iranian network had used fake American identities to espouse both conservative and liberal political views, while also promoting extremely divisive anti-Saudi, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian themes.

As Senate Intelligence Committee co-chair Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, has said, “The Iranians are now following the Kremlin’s playbook.”

While foreign election interference has dominated discussion of disinformation, most intentionally false content targeting U.S. social media is generated by domestic sources.

I believe that will continue to be the case in 2020. President Trump often uses Twitter to circulate conspiracy theories and cast his foes as corrupt. One story line he pushes is that Facebook, Twitter and Google are colluding with Democrats to undermine him. Introducing a right-wing “social media summit” at the White House in July, he tweeted about the “tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination, and suppression practiced by certain companies.”

Supporters of Democrats also have trafficked in disinformation. In December 2017, a group of liberal activists created fake Facebook pages designed to mislead conservative voters in a special U.S. Senate race in Alabama. Matt Osborne, who has acknowledged being involved in the Alabama scheme, told me that in 2020, “you’re going to see a movement toward [political spending from undisclosed sources] on digital campaigns in the closing days of the race.” He suggests there could be an effort to discourage Republicans from voting with “an image of a red wave with a triumphal statement that imbues them with a sense of inevitable victory: ‘No need to bother voting. Trump has got it in the bag.’”

Spreading fake videos

Also likely to surface next year: “deepfake” videos. This technique produces highly convincing – but false – images and audio. In a recent letter to the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, wrote: “A timely, convincing deepfake video of a candidate” that goes viral on a platform “could hijack a race – and even alter the course of history. … The consequences for our democracy could be devastating.”

Just one example of a deepfake video.

Instagram could be a vehicle for deepfakes. Owned by Facebook, the photo and video platform played a much bigger role in Russia’s manipulation of the 2016 U.S. election than most people realize, and it could be exploited again in 2020. The Russian Internet Research Agency enjoyed more user engagement on Instagram than it did on any other platform, according to a December 2018 report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis,” the report added.

Companies could step up

The social media companies are responding to the problem of disinformation by improving their artificial intelligence filters and hiring thousands of additional employees devoted to safety and security. “The companies are getting much better at detection and removal of fake accounts,” Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Platform Accountability Project, told me.

But the companies do not completely remove much of the content they pinpoint as false; they merely reduce how often it appears for users, and sometimes post a message noting that it’s false.

In my view, provably false material should be eliminated from feeds and recommendations, with a copy retained in a cordoned-off archive available for research purposes to scholars, journalists and others.

Another problem is that responsibility for content decisions now tends to be scattered among different teams within each of the social media companies. Our report recommends that to streamline and centralize, each company should hire a senior official who reports to the CEO and is responsible for overseeing the fight against disinformation. Such executives could marshal resources more easily within each company and more effectively coordinate efforts across social media companies.

Finally, the platforms could also cooperate more than they currently do to stamp out disinformation. They’ve collaborated effectively to root out child pornography and terrorist incitement. I believe they now have a collective responsibility to rid the coming election of as much disinformation as possible. An electorate that has been fed lies about candidates and issues can’t make informed decisions. Votes will be based on falsehoods. And that means the future of American democracy – in 2020 and beyond – depends on dealing effectively with disinformation.

]The Conversation

Paul M. Barrett, Deputy Director, Center for Business and Human Rights, Stern School of Business; Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

==

new 819

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-biggest-facebook-supporter-is-a-chinese-cult-hoping-for-the-apocalypse/

no lnx

Trump’s biggest Facebook supporter is a Chinese cult hoping for the apocalypse

Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos August 20, 2019

This is not the death cult you expected. While Donald Trump may regularly count on the support of people who believe that supporting Israel means making sure that every Jewish citizen of that state is handy to be either converted or slaughtered in the any-day-now End Times, this is another group of religious fanatics counting on Trump to fulfill their world (and atheist) -destroying dreams. Until recently, the contents of website The Epoch Times have been so out there, so beyond the pizzagate conspiracy theories of Gateway Pundit and the black helicopter lizard men of Infowars, that it’s been regarded as too odd to be considered part of the right-wing “mainstream.” No more. Under Trump, all bets are off. And a group that’s willing to top the online spending of Democratic candidates to express its support for Trump is definitely welcome in the fold … even if they do want him for his finger on the nuclear trigger.

It’s easy to understand why any group looking for an apocalypse might look to Trump as just the man for the job. But not every cult manages to spend more on Facebook than presidential campaigns. The leaders of the group that is counting on Trump to begin the “Last Havoc” have now spent more than $1.5 million to buy 11,000 pro-Trump spots on social media.In April alone, those ads netted 3 billion views, making this foreign-backed group one of the top video creators on the Internet and a major player in American politics.

As NBC News reports, The Epoch Times may look like just another online conspiracy site belonging to another small cult of slavish Trump followers itchin’ for some good old-fashioned smiting from above. But this “small New York-based nonprofit” is actually controlled by Falun Gong, a Chinese religious group aiming to both bring down Beijing and democracy while cheering for the end of all things. If on the surface they look like another fundamentalist site attacking science, reason, and “humanists,” it’s because they are.

==

if russia basically has no economy, at least exports except oil, why is it not more involved in denial?]

https://www.c-span.org/video/?461371-2/fall-books-2019-preview-author-discussion

my new book. which is called blowout.some of you may know, i have this t.v. show where i get to -- you guys still have tvs! [laughter] for most of you very soon it will be a phone show. but right now it's a t.v. show where i get to cover the news in my own way and is my choice as to which stories i cover and how and at what length. for that show, i read several thousand words a day. and as long as there are no swearwords among them and as long as i abide by nbc news rules and standards are pretty much can say all the words i write on my own terms on t.v. every night. which means i have the greatest job on earth. but that may also make you wonder why on top of that, i would be so greedy as to want an additional outlet. yet to further express myself and give my take on what i think is going on in the world. in the abstract, i don't. but in 2012 and i wrote my first book, drift, and this past year when i started working on blowout, i really felt like i ended up book rating almost despite myself because in the course of my day job, i found myself repeatedly getting stuck. just  in doing my regular work trying to explain the days news, trying to make sense of larger dynamic in which the new cycle was unfolding. both in 2012 and this past year.

i kept feeling like i was getting caught in an intellectual bottleneck. there was this process that i could see at work in the world. a dynamic that came to think was pretty important for explaining the news on any given day. but it is an idea that's a couple of hundred pages long idea.

although i took incessantly a couple of hundred page long idea does not fit into my daily work. it is the same thing for me that happens in 2012. if any of you remember drift also the book when it came out it was about the use of american military power becoming unmoored from democratic decision-making. wars that never end and that the public never notices. and congress never votes on. i felt compelled to write drift because i felt that it was a tellable story about where it all came from. a fairly recent story and i felt it was a way to point out over a couple hundred pages why it didn't have to be that way forever. that was my first book.

my new book, blowout, came from a realization i had that sort of had me in the same way. which is that there is a fairly simple that i think uniquely destructive dynamic at work behind a bunch of news that we are living through right now. and it has to do with the oil and gas industry. it is a couple hundred pages long so it had to be a book. but the basic idea is that the democratic system of government and competent governance overall, both at home and abroad, they have a really potent and unrelenting enemy and not one industry. and oil and gas industry is a rich and dangerous sector of the business world but i think it also ought to be recognized as a political entity. 

one has a track record of gobbling down even seemingly strong government and spitting out the bumps. part of the books subtitle is the phrase, rogue state russia. you may know that in my day job i have spent a -- amount of time on the russian attack on the 2016 election and its implications and aftermath. this book is not a book about that attack per se. but it does let me get off my chest a thing that i hope americans could better understand about why russia would have wanted to do a thing like that. and why they chose those weird methods. i think russia mounted the attack on our election from a position of profound economic and strategic weakness. for me, coming to understand that has been revelatory in terms of thinking about what they did but also what they've done since the attack and why and what makes for success in their own eyes when they mount these kinds of operations.

just one last point. i recognize that the oil and gas industry is a big bold committed thing. it is made up of many companies that are run by many executives that have many employees and many shareholders. each of whom is a person like who came from a mother. it is very nice. [laughter] i don't think the oil and gas industry is bad because it is made up of bad people. i think the story here is that it is a uniquely destructive entity particularly to our democracy and democracies abroad because of its inherent purpose and because of the profoundly cynical but rational expectations that industry has built for itself in terms of the way it does business. as you know, when used as directed, this is an industry whose products are in the process of ending the world. and sooner than we were really say expecting. but even before we get to the climate apocalypse, that's a ministry in the meantime really is doing its best to undermine our ability to govern ourselves effectively. and to make good group decisions about how to handle all of our challenges, including the ones that we get from them. so, i know, cheery, right?

there's a lot of oklahoma city, there are some siberia and equatorial guinea. there's a very talented -- there seats in hell -- there is a little bit of xena the warrior princess. some radioactive milk, and a comically terribly failed spy ring it up of terrible, terrible spies. and i know the cover, under the covers a little apocalyptic. actually briefly lobbied for the statute -- the statue of liberty to have a clown nose. my mother told me based on the cover she is afraid to read it. i will admit it is sort of about the end of the world. but i also think it is kind of a funny story. [laughter] so, in any case i hope that you like it. i want to thank you for this time. i want to thank you in advance. free interest, as i say it comes out on october 1.

AN

no lnx vid

‘Visibly livid’ Mitch McConnell lashes out on the Senate floor over accusations he’s a ‘Russian asset’

C-SPAN

Written by Cody Fenwick July 30, 2019

It looks like the “Moscow Mitch” taunts actually got under that skin of Senate Majority Leader McConnell.

In a speech described by one observer as “visibly livid,” the Kentucky Republican took to the Senate floor Monday to lash out at his critics. McConnell had come under fire in recent days for blocking a series of election security bills, including a measure passed by the House of Representatives that would provide $600 million for the states to upgrade their voting systems. And yet the majority leader refuses to allow the bills to be brought up for debate.

As both the former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee sounded the alarms last week about the seriousness of the Russian threat to elections, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank declared McConnell a “Russian asset.”

He wrote:

This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation. Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.

00:01

00:33

Let’s call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding.

These accusations and others like them clearly bothered McConnell.

But when he fought back against the criticisms on Monday, his response displayed a laughable amount of hypocrisy. Everything he accused his opponents of, President Donald Trump is guilty of ten times over, yet McConnell offers little pushback to the cyberbully in chief.

“Among other things, keeping our republic means we can’t let modern-day McCarthyism win,” he said. “No matter how much they lie, no matter how much they bully, I will not be intimidated.”

Report Advertisement

Trump’s lying and bullying are plain to see, but he is also a direct descendant of McCarthyism. Trump was close to Roy Cohn, a top ally of Sen. Joe McCarthy during the Republican’s hunt for communists in the U.S. government. To this day, Trump still expresses admiration for Cohn and even repeatedly shared his desire to have an attorney general who would act as “my Roy Cohn.” And it’s Trump, not Democratic critics of Russia’s actual election interference and espionage, who invokes the spirit of McCarthyism as he stirs up baseless attacks on his perceived opponents as “communists.”

To defend against criticism, McConnell claimed that his record shows a history of standing up to Russia. And that may be true, but that makes it all the more baffling why he’s slow-walking election security bills now and refusing to bring up measures for the Senate to actually debate. Given his defense of Trump’s clear desire to work with Russia to win interfere in 2016 and 2020, the Republican Senate majority leader should take the issue much more seriously if he wants to distinguish himself from this conduct.

“Facts matter. Details matter. History matters. And if our nation is losing its ability to debate public policy without screaming about treason, that really matters,” McConnell declared.

But again, if McConnell really wanted to debate the “details” and “facts” of election interference, he could be moving bills through the Senate process. Instead, he’s blocking them.

Milbank detailed the legislation he has blocked without debate:

A bipartisan bill requiring Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to disclose purchasers of political ads, to identify foreign influence.

A bipartisan bill to ease cooperation between state election officials and federal intelligence agencies.

A bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on any entity that attacks a U.S. election.

A bipartisan bill with severe new sanctions on Russia for its cybercrimes.

McConnell has prevented them all from being considered — over and over again.

And of course, all this is even more egregious because, as much as Republicans like to blame President Barack Obama for Russia’s 2016 interference, it was McConnell who threatened to undermine the White House if it took aggressive public steps to counter the Kremlin propaganda.

Moreover, if McConnell is truly concerned about overly incautious accusations of “treason,” he should cast a glance toward the Oval Office:[trmp twt treason]...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/this-is-what-moscow-mitch-really-wants/

...The  truth about what really happened in 2016 has been a slow drip, to put it mildly. Since Nov. 8, 2016, the extent of Russian infiltration of the American democratic process has been routinely and frustratingly underestimated and lowballed, with details gradually expanding from nothing to a few states to 39 states and now, with the 2020 election 15 months away, we’ve reached a full 50 states and, according to the Senate report, “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure.”

With every horrifying new revelation, investigators keep saying there’s no evidence any votes were changed — no evidence yet — but given how our knowledge of the attack’s extent is growing broader, I’m expecting such news to drop eventually. The trendline is surely moving in that direction, though proof that votes were changed isn’t entirely necessary to prove a catastrophic, election-altering invasion by the Russians.

The social media agitprop front of the attack alone clearly changed the minds of American voters long before ballots were cast. Likewise, the Senate report determined that “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data.” In other words, it might be a red herring to look for votes that were artificially flipped from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, or, for that matter, in down-ballot races. If Russia could change enough minds via thousands of trolls equipped with marching orders that micro-targeted Facebook users ripe for being duped, combined with perhaps altered or eliminated voter registrations, then it’s totally unnecessary to actually change votes.

==

racist memes 2016 IRA

https://www.thedailybeast.com/30-batsht-crazy-mostly-racist-facebook-memes-the-russians-used-to-corrupt-your-mind

==

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/new-senate-report-reveals-russias-targeting-of-the-2016-voting-process-was-more-expansive-than-we-knew/

New Senate report reveals Russia’s targeting of the 2016 voting process was more expansive than we knew

Written by Cody Fenwick July 25, 2019

Just a day after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House of Representatives, the Senate Intelligence Committee has released its own much-anticipated report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The report is the first of five volumes set to be released. It is centered around Russia’s targeting of American election infrastructure.

And while the report makes clear that it found no evidence to suggest that any actual vote tallies were changed in a way that would affect the outcome of the 2016 election, it details a more expansive foreign effort to “intrude” into the election system than has previously been revealed.

:{

}:

“The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level,” the report said as its topline finding. “Election infrastructure” here is designated quite broadly, referring to “storage facilities, polling places, and centralized vote tabulation locations […] registration databases, voting machines, and other systems.”

“The Committee has seen no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated,” it added.

Much of the report is redacted.

According to the committee, it is not entirely clear what Russia’s intent was in targeting election infrastructure given that it does not appear to have actually intervened in this way to influence the result.

“Russia may have been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later,” the committee wrote. “Alternatively, Moscow may have sought to undermine confidence in the 2016 U.S. elections simply through the discovery of their activity.”

In June of 2016, the report noted, Russian actors breached Illinois’ voter registration database. While the hackers don’t appear to have made any alterations — alterations which could, theoretically, completely distort who is allowed to vote in crucial elections — the report said that “Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data.” It’s possible that, while the Russia government could have taken this step, it feared that the potential retaliation for doing so would have been extreme.

Previous reporting had revealed that the Russian government had apparently targeted U.S. election infrastructure, but the number of states that were actually subject to these cyber attacks was unclear, as LA Times reporter Chris Megerian noted. Some reports had suggested that as many as 21 states were targeted. (Mueller reported that the FBI concluded the GRU, a Russia intelligence agency, had successfully accessed the “network of at least one Florida county government.”)

But Michael Daniel, a former assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator, told the committee “by late August 2016, he had already personally concluded that the Russians had attempted to intrude in all 50 states, based on the extent of the activity and the apparent randomness of the attempts.”

“My professional judgment was we have to work under the assumption that they’ve tried to go everywhere, because they’re thorough, they’re competent, they’re good,” he said.

The committee added: “Intelligence developed later in 2018 bolstered Mr. Daniel’s assessment that all 50 states were targeted.”

So how safe should Americans consider their election systems? The committee concluded that, while the Department of Homeland Security has made strides to address the problem, significant vulnerabilities remain:

In the face of this threat and these security gaps, DHS has redoubled its efforts to build trust with states and deploy resources to assist in securing elections. Since 2016, DHS has made great strides in learning how election procedures vary across states and how federal entities can be of most help to states. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), and other groups have helped DHS in this effort. DHS’s work to bolster states’ cybersecurity has likely been effective, in particular for those states that have leveraged DHS’s cybersecurity assessments for election infrastructure, but much more needs to be done to coordinate state, local, and federal knowledge and efforts in order to harden states’ electoral infrastructure against foreign meddling.

There’s another troubling aspect of the report. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) issued his own minority opinion, meaning that it was not shared with the rest of the committee, which urged that federal action is needed to secure elections and that local governments cannot be left to fend for themselves:

If there was ever a moment when Congress needed to exercise its clear constitutional authorities to regulate elections, this is it. America is facing a direct assault on the heart of our democracy by a determined adversary. We would not ask a local sheriff to go to war against the missiles, planes and tanks of the Russian Army. We shouldn’t ask a county election IT employee to fight a war against the full capabilities and vast resources of Russia’s cyber army. That approach failed in 2016 and it will fail again. The federal government’s response to this ongoing crisis cannot be limited offers to provide resources and information, the acceptance of which is voluntary. If the country’s elections are to be defended. Congress must also establish mandatory, nation-wide cybersecurity requirements.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/new-study-finds-states-need-more-funding-to-protect-elections-%e2%81%a0-funding-mcconnell-wont-allow/

New study finds states need more funding to protect elections ?— funding McConnell won’t allow

Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos July 22, 2019

A report released last week from the Brennan Center for Justice, the R Street Institute, the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy sounds an alarm about the urgent need for federal funding to secure state elections systems ahead of the 2020 election.

Choosing Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania as key states representing different regions, with varied population sizes to extrapolate from, the authors find that federal intervention is critical. “Elections are the pillar of American democracy, and, as we saw in 2016 and 2018, foreign governments will continue to target them,” the authors write. “States cannot counter these adversaries alone, nor should they have to. But at a time when free and fair elections are increasingly under attack, they can, with additional federal funding, safeguard them.” They say that while they “have limited their review to a sampling of six states, it is clear that the other 44 states and the District of Columbia have similar unfunded needs.”

Four of the states said they need funding to replace old equipment that’s vulnerable to cyber attacks, while several others require funds for training election officials in cybersecurity. Oklahoma needs funding for post-election audits to make sure their tallies are correct, and Pennsylvania identified a need for regular assessments of the security of its counties’ systems.

In 2018, Congress passed $380 million in grants through Help America Vote Act funding specifically for election security. The Elections Assistance Commission has estimated that 85% of these funds will be spent ahead of the 2020 election “to strengthen election cybersecurity, purchase new voting equipment, and improve postelection audits,” but this study’s authors find that it’s not stretching to the full need just in the six states they surveyed.

“Unfortunately, given the myriad security challenges faced by these states, the $380 million is not enough to address the needs of state and local offices,” they write, and “many have substantial election security needs that likely will not be met absent additional federal support.” That federal support is only going to happen if Mitch McConnell lets it. He’s blocked a very significant elections protection bill this year, and has made it clear that he won’t let one through.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-disinformation-hurricane-is-coming-in-2020-as-other-adversaries-emulate-russias-model/

no lnx

A ‘disinformation hurricane’ is coming in 2020 as other adversaries emulate Russia’s model

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

Written by Matt Osborne July 16, 2019

Shortly after the first debate between Democratic presidential contenders, trolls from the message board 4Chan boosted Tulsi Gabbard to the top of some online polls, earning credulous press attention with this sudden surge of support. At the same time, real and fake Andrew Yang supporters complained of supposed unfairness to their candidate, trending #LetYangSpeak on Twitter. While this is unlikely to make either longshot candidate the nominee, anyone looking to disrupt the Democratic Party has two new potential wedges.

After the 2016 primaries were decided, Russia exploited discontent among Bernie Sanders’ supporters to divide and distract Democrats.In 2020, there are several failing candidates whose supporters can be targeted with memes and fake news promoting conspiracy theories about party apparatchiks secretly conspiring against them. The potential scale of the spoiler problem is therefore much bigger and more fractured this time around. Gabbard is already a clear Kremlin favorite for this strategy, as her foreign policy leanings are quite friendly to Russia’s interests, but why stop at just one foil to the eventual nominee? Why not turn Joe Biden supporters against Elizabeth Warren, or Warren supporters against Sanders?

As the experts predicted months ago, adversaries are already hard at work attacking the 2020 election, and this time it won’t only be Russia that we have to worry about. The early signs of interference are already visible, and as we get deeper into the campaign, these threats are almost certainly going to come from new directions. Having seen Russia intervene in 2016, and win, and then get away with it,everyone from North Korea to China to Saudi Arabia will want to shape American electoral politics to their liking.

China has clearly ramped up their electioneering capabilities. In Taiwan, celebrity businessman Han Kuo-yu was elected mayor of Kaohsiung last year with help from Facebook groups “created, managed, and nurtured by what looks very much like a professional cybergroup from [mainland] China,” according to reporter Paul Huang at Foreign Policy. Now a favorite to run for Taiwan’s presidency in 2020, Han Kuo-yu is everything that Beijing could want in a Taiwanese politician. Would they hesitate to insert themselves in an American election in the midst of a high-stakes trade-war?

It is likely that these new players will attack from both sides of an issue the way Russia did in 2016 when, for example, Americans saw “separate ads, launched simultaneously, [that] would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.” About half of all the Facebook material put out by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, in 2016 was aimed at stoking racial animus this way. Then after the election, the IRA tried to organize simultaneous pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City. This is a standard element of all information warfare doctrine: always pit both sides against the middle.

We can also expect to see an even higher level of Twitter bot activity than ever before, as every new player will have their own army of fake accounts. They will do this because the evidence shows that these tactics are effective. A new study released earlier this month found that Russian bot activity had a greater impact than Trump’s own tweets in 2016, driving up his support among undecided voters in the last, critical days of the race. It is important to note that these activities did not reduce support for Clinton. Instead, they drove negative partisanship among potential Trump voters, appealing to baser emotions and stirring antagonism towards the Democrat in order to boost his turnout.

This is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of what Russia’s Internet Research Agency did in 2016.Much of the material uncovered by congressional investigators wasnot explicitly political; instead of calls to vote, there was a lot of symbolism—eagles and flags and patriotic quotes. Yet there was an insidious program at work in those seemingly non-partisan materials. By promoting memes designed to appeal to right wing voters, the IRA created large echo chambers that amplified their messages on Facebook. Rather than change minds, they wanted people to ‘dig in’ and get whipped into a fury, making them more likely to turn out and vote.

Some have a hard time understanding that individual persuasion, while possible, is rarely an effective communications strategy. It’s much easier to turn out your own voters than convince new ones, and studies show that social media pressure is even more effective at firing up your base than organized canvassing or other traditional, in-person techniques. It is also far cheaper, and because social media incentivizes negative partisanship, such messages are much more “viral” than the positive messaging that Democrats prefer. Psychologists have long observed that people tend to be more responsive to bad news than good — they call it “negativity bias.”

The Clinton campaign made an error in 2016 by trying to persuade moderate Republicans rather than focusing on turning out her base.We’ve seen other examples of it since then. For example, when Beto O’Rourke challenged Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm elections, his Facebook ad targeting was simplistic, and designed mainly to maximize views and clicks instead of drawing anyone into a community. Cruz, on the other hand, used Facebook ads to radicalize his base with disinformation and build on a set of shared values contrary to O’Rourke’s liberal message. Whereas O’Rourke disdained the Clinton campaign model of “triangulation and data-driven microtargeting,” he fell into the exact same trap of emphasizing positivity and “going high” in a medium that simply does not reward this type of material. Beto may have captured Democratic hearts but the Cruz campaign, which has always had a sophisticated digital GOTV machine, eked out a narrow victory thanks to high conservative turnout.

Russia has also played a major role in the Texas disinformation game. One secessionist Facebook group, Heart of Texas, reportedly received 4.8 million shares by November 2016—the most of any IRA account–through precision targeting and by emphasizing negative partisanship. The IRA is just one of a dozen The Kremlin’s campaign to influence US elections, known as ‘Project Lakhta,’ has been operational since 2014and Texas is a favorite target. Between these foreign and domestic disinformation schemes, there’s little hope for anyone to win a major election with a purely-positive, issues-based campaign on social media.

Unfortunately, we can’t expect Facebook or Twitter to take any effective actions to stop the flow of divisive content. Such measures as they have already taken are unlikely to stop anyone from abusing their platforms in new ways, or with new variations of the same techniques used in 2016. According to Robert Mueller’s indictments, more than a dozen Russian disinformation agents broke the law by purchasing identities to use within the United States. Now that there are Trump supporters who understand what happened and fully approve of the outcome there is nothing to stop the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, or anyone else from laundering their social media activity through willing, paid accomplices found in the United States.

And as The New York Times reported last year, during the 2018 midterms there was “a shift in the flow of online disinformation [and] falsehoods meant to mislead and inflame,” with more homegrown American groups emulating the model Russia demonstrated in 2016.

Neither Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg nor Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will detect or prevent this activity because it is not in their interest to be proactive. The Federal Elections Commission will not get ahead of it either, defanged as they are by decades of Republican regulatory capture. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has systematically quashed all attempts to shore up American cyberdefenses, and Donald Trump is openly hostile toward any mention of beefing up our election security. Because there is no one in Washington tasked with this enforcement job, it simply will not happen. Multiple players will seek new avenues to hit Americans from all sides with the objective of reelecting Trump and keeping the Senate in Republican hands and there will be few cops on the beat to stop them.

Democrats are not ready to weather this storm. There are some free counter-disinformation tools available out there, but campaigns are too afraid of potential campaign finance violations to use them. The paid tools available are often unproven, inspiring little confidence that they will work. Vendors who offer to build up counter-disinformation capacities tell me that their proposals are often misconstrued as voter suppression, which of course is anathema to Democrats. So in the face of what is sure to be a disinformation hurricane in 2020, they seem resigned to their fate.