Russia exploited ‘racist, sexist, anti-Semitic’ US to divide people, tweets ‘insane’ Kamala Harris
A California senator and media-appointed frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination has finally managed to unravel the conundrum of so-called Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 election — it’s so simple you won’t believe it.
Tweeting out her discovery, Kamala Harris explained that Russia was “able to influence” the last presidential election because it “figured out” that “racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and transphobia are America’s Achilles heel.”
Armed with this top secret information, Russia was “able” to turn Americans against each other in a way never before seen in history (if you conveniently forget most of history, that is).
Now, you might be thinking, if it was that easy for the Russians to take a glimpse at the various domestic tensions plaguing the US in 2016 and then use the information to (allegedly) throw an election, why didn’t the Kremlin act before now? Surely, if it was so simple, Russia could have been choosing US presidents for decades?
Harris’s tweet was hailed as “important” and insightful commentary from some of her supporters and Russia-obsessed journalists, but was instantly mocked by more skeptically-minded individuals, some of whom took issue with the premise that Russia had affected the 2016 election at all.
Others joked that they thought hatred and prejudice had never existed in the US prior to Russia’s “intervention.” Some also suggested that the focus on Russia was a way to distract from the fact that Democrats lost the last election because Hillary Clinton ran a flawed campaign, rather than because of anything to do with Russia.
Somehow Russian influence didn’t matter “until Hillary lost,” another said.
Some people also took offence, as Harris’s comment appeared to be insulting Americans, implying that they are so “stupid” that “a bunch of Russians” can easily manipulate them on social media.
However, one tweet suggested that the real Achilles Heel was the fact that over 60,000 people read Harris’s tweet and hit the ‘like’ button.
Mind of Maddow: Fantasizes About Russia Killing U.S. Power Grid During Polar Vortex
By Pam Key
Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow pondered what Americans would do if Russia attacked the United States’ power grid during the polar vortex, an event which has resulted in plunging temperatures to historic lows.
Maddow said, “Before that hearing in the Senate yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats put out this report—it’s 42 pages long—it’s the intelligence community’s worldwide threat assessment, and I just want to direct your attention to the real doozy that starts on the bottom of page five: quote, ‘China has the ability to launch cyber attacks that cause localized temporary disruptive effects on American critical infrastructure, such as disruption of a natural gas pipeline for days to weeks in the United States.’ Oh, and it’s not just China. Go to page 6. Quote, ‘Russia has the ability to execute cyber attacks in the United States that generate localized temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure, such as disrupting an electrical distribution network for at least a few hours.’ So China could shut off the natural gas pipelines. Russia can just shut off the electricity. They have that ability now.”
She continued, “There have been rumbles for a while that hostile foreign government hackers had burrowed their way into American critical infrastructure, and particularly, the power networks. The Wall Street Journal has done the best reporting on this front in the country, laying out exactly how that scenario could play out here, how foreign countries have been laying the groundwork to one day flip the off switch on an entire swath of the U.S. power grid if they want to. But the intelligence chief rings a whole new kind of alarm bell. This is no longer just a thing that they might be planning for that could conceivably happen one day. This is the director of national intelligence, telling us all in unclassified form, in black and white, China and Russia can do this now, today, whenever they want to.”
‘CNN doesn’t cover Mueller, they work for him’: Tucker Carlson on Roger Stone’s arrest
Fox host Tucker Carlson offered his take on CNN filming a surprise FBI raid on Roger Stone’s house, saying the channel has turned into the “PR arm” of Robert Mueller, “the single most powerful” – and unelected – man in the US.
In his latest monologue, the Fox anchor said it’s crucial to raise some questions before the arrest of Roger Stone – an associate of Donald Trump – fades from the headlines. Notably, it was almost entirely devoted to a CNN crew being conveniently present at the early-morning FBI raid on Stone’s Fort Lauderdale house.
“How did CNN know about a raid that was supposed to be a secret? Did they learn from [Robert] Mueller’s team?” Carlson asked. Shortly after the raid, which Carlson likened to “a military assault,” speculation began to spread that the network had an inside track with the FBI or Mueller’s team.
“CNN acted as the public relations arm of the Mueller investigation, as they have before,” Fox’s political commentator suggested. “The network is no longer covering [Mueller]; they’re working with [Mueller]. And you should know that as you watch it.”
Carlson was not the only one to comment on Stone’s arrest, and the way it was executed. The Feds sent more armed men to arrest the 66-year-old unarmed man than it did to kill Bin Laden in 2011, he noted.
Mueller, who is leading the Russiagate probe, “can send armed men to your home to roust you from bed at gunpoint just because he feels like it, and there’s nothing you, or anyone else, can do about it,” said Carlson.
He branded the FBI special counsel “the single most powerful person in America,” and yet “nobody voted for him… Nobody in Washington catches the irony in any of this. Mueller himself is the threat to our democracy. The most powerful man, elected by nobody.”
During Trump’s campaign, Stone boasted about having connections with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, but later said it wasn’t a direct link. Instead, he said that he relied on New York radio host Randy Credico (referred to as “Person 2”in Thursday’s indictment) as a “go-between.”
The indictment says Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee about his alleged contacts with WikiLeaks, and tried to convince another person to give false testimony.
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US media intensify pretext for ousting Trump
By Finian Cunningham
It’s no secret that since his election in 2016, powerful elements in the US political and media establishment have been running a non-stop campaign to remove Trump from the White House. Lately, the stakes have been raised.
Spearheading the media effort to defenestrate Trump are the New York Times and Washington Post. Both have been prominent purveyors of the “Russiagate” narrative over the past two years, claiming that Republican candidate colluded with Russian state intelligence, or at least was a beneficiary of alleged Russian interference, to win the presidency against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Congressional investigations and a probe by a Special Counsel Robert Mueller, along with relentless media innuendo, have failed to produce any evidence to support the Russiagate narrative.
Now, the anti-Trump media in alliance with the Democratic leadership, the foreign policy establishment and senior ranks of the state intelligence agencies appear to have come up with a new angle on President Trump – he is a national security risk.
Ingeniously, the latest media effort lessens the burden of proof required against Trump. No longer has it to be proven that he deliberately collaborated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump could have done it “unwittingly,” the media are now claiming, because he is a buffoon and reckless. But the upshot, for them, is he’s still a national security risk. The only conclusion, therefore, is that he should be removed from office. In short, a coup.
Over the past couple of weeks, the supposed media bastions have been full of it against Trump. An op-ed in the New York Times on January 5 by David Leonhardt could not have made more plain the absolute disdain. “He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?”
Follow-up editorials and reports have piled on the pressure. The Times reported how the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the state’s internal security agency – opened a counterintelligence file on Trump back in 2017 out of concern that he was “working for Russia against US interests.”
That unprecedented move was prompted partly because of Trump’s comments during the election campaign in 2016 when he jokingly called on Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s incriminating emails. Never mind the fact that Russian hackers were not the culprits for Clinton’s email breach.
Then the Washington Post reported former US officials were concerned about what they said was Trump’s “extraordinary lengths” to keep secret his private conversations with Russia’s Putin when the pair met on the sidelines of conferences or during their one-on-one summit in Helsinki last July.
The Post claimed that Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter after one meeting with Putin, allegedly admonishing the aide to not tell other officials in the administration about the notes being sequestered. The inference is Trump was allegedly in cahoots with the Kremlin.
This week, in response to the media speculation, Trump was obliged to strenuously deny such claims, saying: “I have never worked for Russia… it’s a big fat hoax.”
What’s going on here is a staggering abuse of power by the US’ top internal state intelligence agency to fatally undermine a sitting president based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Moreover, the nation’s most prominent news media outlets – supposedly the Fourth Estate defenders of democracy – are complacently giving their assent, indeed encouragement, to this abuse of power.
The Times in the above report admitted, in a buried one-line disclaimer, that there was no evidence linking Trump to Russia.
Nevertheless, the media campaign doubled down to paint Trump as a national security risk.
The Times reported on January 14 about deep “concerns” among Pentagon officials over Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw the US from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The reporting portrays Trump as incompetent, ignorant of policy details and habitually rude to American allies. His capricious temper tantrums could result in the US walking away from NATO at any time, the newspaper contends.
Such a move would collapse the transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe which has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” claimed the Times.
The paper quotes US Admiral James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, calling Trump’s withdrawal whims “a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion.”
“Even discussing the idea of leaving NATO — let alone actually doing so — would be the gift of the century for Putin,” added Stavridis.
The Times goes on to divulge the media campaign coordination when it editorialized: “Now, the president’s repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr Putin secret from even his own aides, and an FBI investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.”
Still another Times report this week reinforced the theme of Trump being a national security risk when it claimed that the president’s Middle East policy of pulling troops out of Syria was “losing leverage” in the region. It again quoted Pentagon officials “voicing deepening fears” that Trump and his hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran”.
That’s a bit hard to stomach: the Pentagon being presented as a voice of sanity and peace, keeping vigilance over a wrecking-ball president and his administration.
READ MORE: Twitter erupts after NYT reveals FBI probe into Trump-Russia links that lead… nowhere
But the New York Times, Washington Post and other anti-Trump corporate media have long been extolling the military generals who were formerly in the administration as “the adults in the room.”
Generals H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, John Kelly, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, and James Mattis, the former defense secretary until he was elbowed out last month by the president, were continually valorized in the US media as being a constraining force on Trump’s infantile and impetuous behavior.
The absence of “the adults” seems to have prompted the US media to intensify their efforts to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.
A new House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party has also invigorated calls for impeachment of Trump over a range of unsubstantiated accusations, Russian collusion being prime among them. But any impeachment process promises to be long and uncertain of success, according to several US legal and political authorities.
Such a tactic is fraught with risk of failing, no doubt due to the lack of evidence against Trump’s alleged wrongdoing. A failed impeachment effort could backfire politically, increase his popularity, and return him to the White House in 2020.
Given the uncertainty of impeaching Trump, his political enemies, including large sections of the media establishment, seem to be opting for the tactic of characterizing him as a danger to national security, primarily regarding Russia. Trump doesn’t have to be a proven agent of the Kremlin – a preposterous idea. Repeated portrayal of him as an incompetent unwitting president is calculated to be sufficient grounds for his ouster.
When the Washington Post editorial board urges a state of emergency to be invoked because of “Russian meddling in US elections”, then the national mood is being fomented to accept a coup against Trump. The media’s fawning over the Pentagon and state intelligence agencies as some kind of virtuous bastion of democracy is a sinister signal for a military-police state.
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Irony alert: Firm that warned Americans of Russian bots…was running an army of fake Russian bots
By Danielle Ryan
The co-founders of cybersecurity firm New Knowledge warned Americans in November to “remain vigilant” in the face of “Russian efforts” to meddle in US elections. This month, they have been exposed for doing just that themselves.
Ryan Fox and Jonathan Morgan, who run the New Knowledge cybersecurity company which claims to “monitor disinformation” online, penned a foreboding op-ed in the New York Times on November 6, about “the Russians” and their nefarious efforts to influence American elections.
At the time, it struck me that Fox and Morgan’s reasoning seemed a little far-fetched. For example, one of the pieces of evidence presented to prove that Russia had targeted American elections was that lots of people had posted links to RT’s content online. Hardly a smoking gun worthy of a Times oped.
ALSO ON RT.COMThe only ‘Russian bots’ to meddle in US elections belonged to Democrat-linked ‘experts’Morgan and Fox, intrepid cyber sleuths that they are, claimed in the article they had detected more “overall activity” from ongoing Russian influence campaigns than social media companies like Facebook and Twitter had yet revealed — or that other researchers had been able to identify.
The New Knowledge guys even authored a Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s alleged efforts to mess with American democracy. They called it a “propaganda war against American citizens.” Impressive stuff. They must be really good at their job, right?
This week, however, we learned that New Knowledge was running its own disinformation campaign (or “propaganda war against Americans,”you could say), complete with fake Russian bots designed to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore as a Russia-preferred candidate when he was running for the US senate in Alabama in 2017.
The scheme was exposed by the New York Times — the paper that just over a month earlier published that aforementioned oped, in which Fox and Morgan pontificated about Russian interference online.
New Knowledge created a mini-army of fake Russian bots and fake Facebook groups. The accounts, which had Russian names, were made to follow Moore. An internal company memo boasted that New Knowledge had “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”
Moore lost the race by 1.5 percent. To be fair, accusations published by the Washington Post that he pursued underage girls back in the 1980s may have had something to do with it as well, but that’s a different story.
Of course, New Knowledge and even the New York Times, which blew the lid of the operation, are trying to spin this as some kind of “small experiment” during which they “imitated Russian tactics” online to see how they worked. Just for research, of course. They have also both claimed that the scheme, dubbed ‘Project Birmingham’ had almost no effect on the outcome of the race.
The money for the so-called research project came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who contributed $750,000 to American Engagement Technologies (AET), which then spent $100,000 on the New Knowledge experiment. After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman offered a public apology, saying he didn’t know exactly how the money had been used and admitting that the tactics were “highly disturbing.”
ALSO ON RT.COMLinkedIn billionaire ‘sorry’ for funding ‘Russian bot’ disinformation campaign against Roy MooreIf people like Fox and Morgan actually cared about so-called Russian meddling or the integrity of American elections, they would not have run the deceptive campaign against Moore, no matter how undesirable he was as a candidate. Their sneaky and deceitful methods are in total contrast to the public profile they have cultivated for themselves as a firm fighting the good fight for the public good. But is it really that much of a surprise?
You would think that a newspaper like the New York Times would have cottoned on to the fact that guys like Fox and Morgan, with their histories in the US military and intelligence agencies, have clear agendas and are not exactly squeaky clean or the most credible sources of information when it comes to anything to do with Russia. But that kind of insight or circumspection might be too much to ask for in the age of Russiagate.
Facebook removed Morgan’s account on Saturday for “engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior” around the Alabama election. Three days after publishing its initial article on the scandal (the one in which it played down the effects of New Knowledge’s disinfo campaign), the New York Times published a follow-up piece about the Facebook removal, in which it admitted that the controversy would be a “stinging embarrassment” for the social media researcher, noting that he had been a “leading voice” against supposed Russian disinformation campaigns.
In Fox and Morgan’s original NYT oped, they warned of the ubiquitous “Russia-linked social media accounts” and estimated that “at least hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions” of US citizens had engaged with them online. One must now wonder, were they including their own fake Russian bots in that count, or were they leaving those ones out?
It’s nearly two years into the Trump presidency and still we have no solid evidence that the Russian “collusion” theory is anything more than a fantasy concocted by Democrats desperate to provide a more palatable reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss than the fact that she simply ran a bad campaign.
In fact, at this point, we actually have more solid and irrefutable evidence of election meddling from the likes of dodgy American and British companies like Cambridge Analytica and New Knowledge than we do of any meddling orchestrated by Russia.
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Democratic operative who bragged about Russian bot ‘false flag’ issues contradiction-filled denial
JONATHON MORGAN
The Democratic operative who boasted about orchestrating a “false flag” operation that used fake Russian bots to swing a US Senate race has issued a farcical denial in which he backpedals on his own publicly available statements.
Jonathon Morgan, CEO, and co-founder of “Democratic-leaning” private intelligence firm New Knowledge, was reportedly part of a secretive campaign to discredit Republican candidate, Roy Moore, during the Alabama election. According to an internal report obtained by the New York Times, Morgan and his accomplices boasted about how they had “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.” Moore ended up losing the race by a hair to his Democratic opponent Doug Jones – who became the first Democrat in 25 years to serve Alabama in the Senate.
READ MORE: The only ‘Russian bots’ to meddle in US elections belonged to Democrat-linked ‘experts’
Morgan adamantly denied these accusations in a statement posted on New Knowledge’s blog, insisting that his company used the election to conduct “research” and “did not engage or operate a botnet.” In fact, according to Morgan, New Knowledge believed from the beginning that the “Russian bots” purportedly aligned with Moore were fake. The hundreds of Cyrillic-sporting accounts that followed Moore on Twitter “seemed to us to be the work of internet trolls, not Russian activity,” Morgan wrote. He acknowledged that the media presented the bots as a genuine Russian influence campaign, but asserted that “to this day, we have no idea where these followers came from or what their purpose was.”
Morgan, it appears, felt differently during the actual election. Citing his much-admired “Russian bot” dashboard, Hamilton 68, Morgan tweeted in November 2017 that Moore was conspicuously popular among “Russian trolls.”
In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore’s campaign. A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating a self-described “false flag” operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea what their purpose was. Did he think no one would notice?
Tellingly, Morgan publicized during the election that New Knowledge had invested time and resources into unmasking the owner of a pro-Moore Twitter account. True to form, Morgan suggested that the Twitter user was a Russian bot – an accusation that was found to be baseless after the Daily Beast conducted a thorough investigation into the matter.
This is just one of several painfully apparent inconsistencies with Morgan’s “research” story. He insists that his company’s activities were limited to the creation of a benign Facebook page aimed at Alabama conservatives, which was used to gauge how political audiences responded to “mainstream, moderate” journalism.
None of this adds up. According to the New York Times, which broke the story, Morgan “acknowledged his role in the secret Alabama operation on Facebook and Twitter.” Why is he now denying any role – and why is there no mention of Twitter activities in his statement? Morgan’s obstinate denial insists that he was only involved in setting up a harmless Facebook page.
Morgan ends his statement by declaring that New Knowledge “is in the integrity business.” This is why, as the Times reported, the company “intended to help Mr. Jones and hurt Mr. Moore and that its operators believed it had succeeded in doing so.”
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