How Trump and his allies ran with Russian propaganda – Mother Jones

The concept is straight from the Soviet playbook: Plant false information and use it to influence the attitudes of the people and the government of another country. This “active measures” The Cold War-era technique appears to have been resurrected with alarming success by the Kremlin in its attack on the 2016 presidential election — and has been echoed in tactics used by President Donald Trump and his associates, according to Clint Wattsa senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“Part of the reason that active measures worked in this US election is that the commander in chief used Russian active measures at times against his opponents,” Watts, a former FBI agent, recently. witnessed to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Key to this equation have been RT and Sputnik International, two state-sponsored Russian media outlets. Both only reach a relatively small audience in the United States (RT is estimated to arrive about 8 million people via cable television), but its impact has been greatly magnified online, with its stories republished on what Watts calls “gray” conspiracy sites like Breitbart News and InfoWars. Twitter bots and other social accounts also amplify stories. And in many cases, Trump or his associates have directly cited fake Russian propaganda in a speech or interview. Here are some examples:

A false report of a terrorist attack on a NATO base in Turkey: Last July, RT and Sputnik each reported a fire at the Incirlik base, framing it as potential sabotage. Pro-Russian and pro-Trump Twitter accounts spread and magnified the false reports, but mainstream news organizations didn’t pick up on the report because it wasn’t true, as Watts explained. in a piece for the Daily Beast. However, in mid-August, Paul Manafort – Trump’s campaign chairman at the time – escalated the story to a terrorist attack, he complains on CNN that the US media did not cover it well. Politics leaked Manafort’s claims, noting that the Turkish authorities have reported small and peaceful demonstrations outside the base, but not an actual assault on the base.

The case of the fake Benghazi email: On October 10, Wikileaks released a series of hacked emails from campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account. Around 5 pm ET that day, Sputnik News published a story on leaked Clinton campaign emails with the headline “Hillary confident: Benghazi was ‘preventable’; State Department negligent.” About an hour later, Trump told supporters at a rally in Pennsylvania that the Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal had called the Benghazi attack “almost certainly preventable.” “That was just a while ago,” Trump said it wasn’t really Blumenthal and Sputnik later removed the story – but by then the headline had spread far and wide.

False claims of pervasive voter fraud: RT has been trying to delegitimize the American electoral process since 2012 by calling the US voting system fraudulent, according to the declassified version of the report that the Director of National Intelligence published this past January. In his Senate testimony, Watts called this the “number one issue” pushed by Russian outlets. In October 2016, a Kremlin-controlled think tank circulated a strategy paper that said Russia should end its pro-Trump propaganda “and instead step up its messaging on voter fraud to undermine legitimacy of the US electoral system and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine his presidency,” according to a Reuters investigation.

That same month, Trump pushed hard on the issue that the election was rigged; on October 17. Trump he tweeted “Of course there is large-scale voter fraud that happens on Election Day.” The sources that his campaign pointed to have all been cleared Political factwho noted that Trump had also tweeted in 2012 about dead voters delivering Obama’s victory.

The Swedish attack that was not: Trump’s strategy of running with false information did not stop when he won the election – and it is not limited to Russian media properties: he also used Fox News reports in a similar way. In February, Trump appeared involved in a rally in Florida that a terrorist attack had occurred the previous night in Sweden. Sweden itself had no idea what he meant and the Swedish embassy reached out to ask for clarification. Twitter users, including many Swedes, ridiculed Trump’s statement, with references ranging from IKEA to the Swedish chef character from the “Muppets.” Trump later said he was referring to a Fox News story about alleged violence perpetrated by refugees. That report, which aired the night before Trump’s rally, did not mention a specific terror attack; has focused on reports that rape and gun violence have increased since Sweden began taking in record numbers of refugees in 2015.

Wiretap claims pushed by a Fox News personality: In March, even though Trump’s claims about the wiretapping of Obama at Trump Tower had been directly denied by top US intelligence officials, the president took a baseless dig. Fox News analyst statement Andrew Napolitano that British spies had intercepted Trump at the request of former President Obama. Fox News later denied Napolitano’s claim. Trump continued he reiterated his belief that he had been interceptedalthough American and British intelligence officials insist there is no basis for the claims.

The assassination of DNC staffer Seth Rich: Trump’s allies recently pushed another story that started as a conspiracy theory online and was fed by the Russian media. Fox’s Sean Hannity aired several segments focusing on the unsubstantiated claim that Rich was behind the Clinton campaign email leaks and then murdered for his actions, even though police said that he was probably killed in a robbery attempt. When the claims were completely denied, Fox retracted the story from his website – but not before he had been spread by Trump’s ally and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Even after Fox pulled the story, Gingrich he told the Washington Post“I think it’s worth watching.”

In his Senate testimony, Watts noted that Trump is vulnerable to further manipulation by the Russians: He warned that Twitter accounts linked to Russia are actively trying to implicate the president by sending him conspiracy theories. “Until we get a solid foundation on fact and fiction in our country, get some agreement on the facts,” Watts said, “we have a big problem.”