As if their traitorous allies from Fox News and the NRA weren’t enough, we now know the Russian Federation directly targeted the Special Counsel’s investigation into their puppet Donald Trump’s criminality and theft of the 2016 American election. From the Washington Post:
Months after President Trump took office, Russia’s disinformation teams trained their sites on a new target: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there.
Much ink has been spilled raising the basic question: what would the Republicans have done if the election of Barack Obama had been tainted to this degree by Russian interference? Does anyone seriously think he would have been permitted to remain in office?
The answer doesn’t even need to be spoken.
The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies. One post on Instagram — which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal — claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with “radical Islamic groups.”
The cascade of revelations pointing to Russia’s zealous participation in the election of Donald Trump, and its extensive efforts to shield him from the damning evidence that he knew of that participation, has now become overwhelming and irrefutable.
The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday.
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The emergence of Mueller as a significant target also highlights the adaptability of the Russian campaign. He was appointed in May 2017 as special counsel to investigate allegations of Russian influence on the Trump campaign. In that role, he has indicted the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked troll farm behind the disinformation campaign, and others affiliated with the disinformation campaign on criminal charges.
As pointed out by Michelle Goldberg in Monday's New York Times, the 2016 election was “decided by a rounding error—[with] fewer than 80,000 votes spread over three states.” Russia’s massive, targeted propaganda campaign reached approximately 126 million people, with at least 1.4 million Twitter users “engaging" with the Internet Research Agency, 20 million users “engaging” on Instagram and 76.5 million engagements on Facebook.
The import of this relentless, continuous barrage of disinformation is obvious. Had the Russians not interfered, we would almost certainly be two years into a Democratic Presidency right now. There would be no Justice Kavanaugh. There would be no Justice Gorsuch. Health care for tens of millions of Americans would not be hanging solely on a whim of a right-wing District judge in Texas. Our federal agencies would be working to preserve the environment, rather than destroy it. Children would not be kidnapped and forcibly removed from their parents at our border, in order to placate white nationalist fantasies about racial "purity." We would be cementing our relationships with longtime allies, instead of cuddling up to murderous dictators. The stock market would not be gyrating wildly, seemingly poised on a daily basis to deliver a death blow to millions of retirees.
And we would not be waking up each morning to the unhinged rantings of a sociopath.
The researchers analyzed more than 10 million posts and messages on every major social media platform to understand how the Russians used American technology to build a sprawling online disinformation machine, with each piece playing a designated role while supporting the others with links and other connections.
The reports also underscore the difficulty of defeating Russian disinformation as operatives moved easily from platform to platform, making the process of detecting and deleting misleading posts impossible for any company on its own to manage.
The impact of the Russian effort was as staggering as it was effective in its execution.
Pages generated by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency elicited nearly 40 million likes and more than 30 million shares on Facebook alone, reeling in susceptible users with provocative advertisements and then giving them propaganda to spread far and wide. The aim was not to toss the country into tumult, but to put the preferred candidate of a foreign adversary in the Oval Office. All the while, Americans were entirely unaware of what was happening...[.]
Donald Trump not only knew this, he encouraged, aided and abetted it.
He is an illegitimate President. He should be impeached.