This one is almost unbelievable.
The Russian government news agency Sputnik put out a bogus email in a news report which cited words written by Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek as having been said by Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton’s confidante. The report, which called the information an October surprise that would damage Clinton, got pulled down, apparently not long after it went up. It only appeared on the Russian agency news site.
Somehow, this disinformation campaign made it into Trump’s hands in a matter of hours. In front of a crowd of supporters at a Pennsylvania rally, he recited the Russian disinformation as fact, reading it off of a document.
Eichenwald writes:
I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe. And that should raise concerns not only about Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election, but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.
An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.
The article lays out the manipulations used by the Russians, and then gets to the killer issue:
This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?
(Here it summarizes Trump reading the bogus information)
This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?
The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them—falsifying them—in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election. The big question, of course, is why are the Russians working so hard to damage Clinton and, in the process, aid Donald Trump?
I dont think I have ever seen clearer evidence of a link between Putin and Trump. That son of a bitch is selling Russian lies to American voters. He is a traitor.