Scandal: For more than a year, Democrats have been pushing the story that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. But the evidence keeps piling up indicating that it was Democrats, wittingly or not, who've been helping Russia achieve its real meddling goals. The latest comes from the indictments issued Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against 13 Russians accused of illegally meddling in the U.S. political system. This has been taken by Trump critics as proof that Russia did, indeed, conspire to meddle in the election. But if you read the indictments, look at the Facebook ads, the Trump "dossier" and other evidence, it becomes clear that the goal of this meddling wasn't to elect Trump, but to create anger, hostility, bitterness, and discord in the U.S. Mueller Indictment Consider what's quoted in the indictment as the goals of these Russians: The Organization's stated goal was "spread(ing) distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general." Specialists were directed to create "politician intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with (the) social and economic situation and oppositional social movements." The Organization controlled Facebook pages that "addressed a range of issues, including immigration (with group names including "Secured Borders"); the Black Lives Matter movement (with group names including "Blacktivist"); religion (with group names including "United Muslims of America" and "Army of Jesus"); and certain geographic regions. In June 2016, the Russians used the Facebook group "United Muslims of America" to promote a rally called "Support Hillary. Save American Muslims." Although not in the indictment itself, it's already been reported that in May 2016, two Russian-backed groups — "Heart of Texas" and "United Muslims of America" — organized both pro- and anti-Muslim rallies outside an Islamic center in Houston, where the two rallies squared off. Notice what's missing here? Any mention of electing Trump president. Over and over again, the stated goal of these groups, according to Mueller's indictment, wasn't to get Trump elected, but to set Americans at each other's throats. Facebook and Social Media The indictment makes much of the ads these Russians bought on Facebook, and it suggests that these efforts were designed to disparage Clinton and support Trump. But the Facebook VP of Ad Product Rob Goldman reviewed every ad in question, and noted in a series of tweets over the weekend that " I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal." Most of the ads didn't mention the election or any candidate. A quarter of them weren't seen by anybody. And, as Goldman notes, "The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election." How does this point to a Russian effort to elect Trump? It doesn't. But as Goldman notes with apparent frustration, nobody wants to hear that. "We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump (sic) and the election." We noted in this space last October that other examples of Russia's "meddling" didn't support the Democrats claims, either. One campaign was called "Don't Shoot Us." Among other things, tried to encourage those playing the augmented reality game Pokémon Go to find and train Pokémon near locations where alleged incidents of police brutality had taken place, and name their Pokémon after the victims. In case anyone has forgotten, police brutality and social justice reform were Democrat issues. Anti-Trump Rallies The Mueller indictment also points out that the Russians organized rallies in favor of Trump. But they also organized at least two anti-Trump rallies after the election. The Russians "organized a rally in New York called 'Trump is NOT my President' held on or about November 12, 2016." They "organized a rally entitled 'Charlotte Against Trump' in Charlotte, North Carolina, held on or about November 19, 2016." It's worth noting that the New York rally received extensive coverage from the mainstream press, who were apparently uninterested in the rally's sponsorship. Trump Dossier Even the much-ballyhooed Trump dossier fails to support a claim that Russia was bent on getting Trump elected. If that were the case, why would top Russian officials have been feeding dirt to Christopher Steele, who then tried to peddle it to the press before the election? "If any part of the Steele dossier is accurate, Russia was playing both sides of the fence," noted Real Clear Politics Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon. Election Polls The Mueller indictment does allege that these Russian operations were "primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump." But think about this for a moment. No one in the U.S. or around the world thought Trump had any chance of winning the election. On the day of the election itself, the highly cited poll analysis group FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 28.6% chance of winning the election. When the Russian efforts were supposedly going on in earnest, FiveThirtyEight put Trump's odds in the teens. (In the end, the IBD/TIPP poll was one of the only national polls to show a Trump victory.) It's more likely that those anti-Hillary efforts weren't designed to help defeat her, but to weaken her presidency after she got elected, just as the Russian-informed Trump "dossier" has weakened Trump's presidency. The Real Co-Conspirators So, to sum up: There's been no credible evidence presented so far — none — of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to sway the November election, despite more than a year-and-a-half of relentless FBI and media investigations. But there is growing evidence that, as Facebook's Goldman put it: "The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us. It has stoked fear and hatred amongst Americans. It is working incredibly well. We are quite divided as a nation." Indeed it has worked incredibly well. The problem is that Democrats and the mainstream press will never admit any of this, because if they did, they'd also be admitting that they were co-conspirators in this nefarious Russian campaign to undermine America's democratic institutions. During the Cold War, there was a label for Americans who unwittingly did Russia's bidding — "useful idiots." Perhaps it's time to resurrect this label. https://www.investors.com/politics/...gation-13-indictments-trump-russia-collusion/
Well done Comrade Poindexter, you certainly are a useful idiot all over again. Now fuck off back to Russia boy.
How The Media Enable Rep. Adam Schiff’s Russian Bot Conspiracy Theories For more than a year, Adam Schiff has been hopping to all the TV stations claiming, without benefit of specifics, the existence of a vast conspiracy between President Trump and Russia. Last week, Lawrence Tribe suggested, without evidence, that a plane crash in Russia was related to fallout from the Russian dossier operation orchestrated and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Tribe is a Harvard Law professor, a passionate critic of President Donald Trump, and a known Russia conspiracy theorist. So it should have been surprising that the same day he was tweeting out plane crash conspiracy theories, he also argued in a “facially absurd” op-ed in The New York Times that Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., should be charged with obstruction of justice — no, really — for performing congressional oversight of the FBI. Then again, it was only last May that The New York Times published another Russia conspiracy theorist named Louise Mensch talking about Russian hacking. Yes, the same Louise Mensch who believes that the “Marshal of the Supreme Court” told Trump about his impeachment and that Steve Bannon faces the death penalty for espionage. (Forget it, she’s rolling.) When it comes to the Russia-Trump collusion theory, a bit more journalistic rigor is in order. One of the most enthusiastic promulgators of a Russia-Trump collusion theory is Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member on Nunes’ House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. For more than a year, Schiff has been hopping around all the TV stations claiming, without benefit of specifics, the existence of a vast conspiracy between Trump and Russia. Leaks from his committee that advance this theory frequently get published, even if they fail to hold up under scrutiny. But even his public actions shouldn’t be accepted so uncritically. Experts Refute The Russia Charge On January 23, public interest in the memo from the majority of the intelligence committee had been high, as evidenced by the demand to #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag on Twitter and Facebook. When the hashtag went viral, Schiff had a theory that it wasn’t the American public that was interested in abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Nope, it was Russians! Secret Russian bots were trying to make it look like Americans were interested in FISA abuse against a Trump campaign affiliate. Schiff put out a press release pressuring private companies to investigate whether Russians using their platform were behind the spread of the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag. The letter demanded that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg perform an “in-depth forensic examination” on the “ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process.” The Daily Beast quickly put out a story with an anonymous Twitter source denying that Russian bots were behind the spread of the hashtag. The story said the theory was bunk, according to “an early in-house analysis” that concluded the hashtag was mostly pushed by eager Americans: The online groundswell urging the release of House Republicans’ attacks on the Federal Bureau of Investigation appears thus far to be organically American—not Russian propaganda, a source familiar with Twitter’s internal analysis told The Daily Beast. But that was just an anonymous source at Twitter. Twitter itself publicly responded on January 26 with a letter saying an investigation “has not identified any significant activity connected to Russia with respect to Tweets posting original content to this hashtag.” The letter went on to note that #ReleaseTheMemo “was also used by several prominent, verified U.S. accounts on the evening of Thursday, January 18. Typically, hashtag use by high-profile accounts, including those with high numbers of followers, plays a role in driving conversations around a hashtag on Twitter.” Facebook responded with a letter that said this was a Twitter hashtag, not a Facebook one, and added that the company would continue to update Congress on any Russian interference. Schiff went back and asked for more information and pressured social media companies for more action. Facebook slapped it down again, saying, “To date, our internal Information Security team has not become aware of information or activity of a sort that would prompt further review.” Facebook explained that it monitors and assesses thousands of detailed account attributes such as location information and connections to others on the platform, and it hadn’t detected any significant Kremlin activity. Read more at: http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/21...adam-schiffs-russian-bot-conspiracy-theories/