In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in November 2016, Americans were treated to waves of stories making claims that Russia was responsible for the president’s victory and that Trump and Vladimir Putin had secretly worked together to undermine Clinton’s campaign to “steal” the election.
In particular, we were told, Russian troll farms deployed bots aimed at “meddling” in the election via a massive influence operation designed to push fake news and sway opinions on key candidate positions.
But it turns out that, while meddling certainly did occur, those behind the operation were not Russians. They had no ties whatsoever to the Kremlin, in fact.
They were Americans.
As reported by Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist nearly a year ago, a ‘tool’ ostensibly used to track Russian bots on Twitter and other social media called “Hamilton68” — after No. 68 of the Federalist Papers, which was written by Alexander Hamilton — was devised by The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a group whose advisory council that includes #NeverTrump stalwarts like “conservative” Bill Kristol and a gaggle of other neocons and veterans of the Obama administration such as John Podesta, who ran Hillary’s campaign.
Hemingway noted at the time that Hamilton68’s success in tracking bots is “impossible to assess,” but leading Democrats like the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, nevertheless used the project’s ‘findings’ to form the basis of their claims that Russian bots helped POTUS Trump defeat Clinton.
Democrats’ uncorroborated claims, likely fabricated by the Hamilton68 project, also formed the basis of numerous stories in the establishment media uncritically echoing claims by Schiff and others -- and always without verifying the information that they were referencing.
Deep State establishmentarians are behind the Russian bot hoax
One journalist who was critical, however, and remains so, is Glenn Greenwald of Edward Snowden fame. Though a liberal, he has been a consistent critic of Democratic claims of Russian election interference because so few of them have ever been corroborated. The U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the Kremlin tried to interfere in the 2016 election is essentially meaningless as well, given that Russia has been conducting influence operations in America for decades.
“Less than a year ago, Bill Kristol joined with ex-CIA officials, Marco Rubio's top aide & a few Dem hawks, and created a new group purporting to track Russian Twitter activity based on secret designations. It now dominates every headline, every pronouncement uncritically accepted,” he tweeted on Feb. 19, 2018.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/965634068237967360
As SHTFPlan reported further, Greenwald also referenced Hemingway’s piece in a separate tweet a few days later, noting that Hamilton68 “is probably the single most successful media fraud & US propaganda campaign I’ve seen…It’s truly shocking.”
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/966680423874138112
There’s more.
Just a week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that was highly critical of Russia, accusing Moscow of suppressing Democratic voter turnout by targeting blacks on social media. The report was written by members of a small technology firm, New Knowledge. As The New York Times reported Dec. 19, the firm’s CEO and co-founder, Jonathon Morgan, and his staff ran a ‘Russian bot’ operation of their own — in Alabama during a special election to replace then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That race pitted GOP candidate Roy Moore against Democrat Doug Jones; the latter won a narrow victory. (Related: Did ‘Russian-style’ meddling in Alabama election by Dem operatives hand victory to Doug Jones?)
So the same firm that wrote the Senate report critical of Russian bot interference in 2016 then ran a Russian bot interference campaign in the Alabama race, calling it an “experiment.”
The point is, the entire “Russian bot” narrative was created out of whole cloth by Deep State establishmentarians and then echoed dutifully by a compliant media. It was never a Moscow operation, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has repeatedly said.
Read more about this Russian election meddling hoax at Hoax.news.
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