By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 6, 2020
Even as its own unprecedented wrongdoing since 2016 is ever-so-slowly coming to light, the FBI is peddling warnings about what Russia might possibly do in the 2020 US elections. Buckle up, here we go again.
This time it’s a memo compiled by the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) way back in February, but published Monday by the Associated Press, which sounds all sorts of warning about hypothetical Russian meddling. It is literally titled “Possible Russian Tactics Ahead of 2020 US Election” – not likely, or observed, or documented. Possible.
The novel claim pushed to the forefront by AP is that the Kremlin might advise some candidates and campaigns directly, based on claims that Russia did so in Africa last year. This appears to be based on a report by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) from October 2019, describing a “social media operation in multiple African countries,” attributed to entities “linked” to Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin.
As AP helpfully points out, Prigozhin “was among the Russians indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation for his role in a furtive social media campaign aimed at sowing discord among Americans ahead of the 2016 US election.”
Left unsaid in this assertion masquerading as fact, however, is that charges against Prigozhin and his company were dropped in March, because his company actually contested them in US court. This caused federal judges to repeatedly rebuke prosecutors who apparently thought they could get away with assertions instead of evidence. Oops.
So the sensational AP claim about a new Russian menace is based on a FBI memo, citing a Stanford report, about what someone “linked” to a Russian businessman may have done in Africa, and therefore the 2020 US elections are in danger?
Things become a lot clearer when one looks into who is involved with SIO – namely one Renee DiResta, who proudly boasts of past work advising the Senate Intelligence Committee and working at New Knowledge.
If that latter name sounds familiar, it’s the company that got outed – by the New York Times, no less – for literally organizing a social media false flag operation during the 2017 special election for the US Senate in Alabama. Funded by big tech Democrat donors, NK created fake Russian accounts that pretended to support the Republican candidate, then got the media to cover the story, eventually contributing to having a Democrat elected there for the first time in decades.
With how much wailing and gnashing of the teeth there has been about social media threats to “our democracy,” one would think that this revelation would have resulted in New Knowledge alums becoming unemployable pariahs and all their product considered tainted garbage. Not so, as DiResta’s failing upward to Stanford clearly demonstrates.
New Knowledge has since quietly rebranded and stayed in the same exact line of work. The Senate Intelligence committee never renounced their reports, but instead doubled down on its Russiagate claims, even as its chair apparently did some insider trading to profit from the pandemic. That’s another rabbit hole, though, for another time.
The reason I bring this all up is that all these cries about ‘Russian menace’ tend to come from the same group of people, and are amplified by the same media outlets, who were behind the original ‘Russiagate’ story that spectacularly disintegrated before everyone’s eyes just last year. The fabled Mueller report failed to substantiate any actual Russian meddling, simply asserting it as fact based on their indictments, and moreover failed to find any “collusion” with President Donald Trump’s campaign.
Meanwhile, a veritable mountain of evidence has emerged that the FBI leadership actually conspired to stop Trump from getting elected, then implemented an “insurance policy” to frame his national security adviser and former top military spy General Michael Flynn, to cover up their efforts after they failed. The Bureau also spied on the Trump campaign using the fraudulent, Democrat-funded dossier invented from whole cloth by a British spy and connecting Trump to Russia.
That’s not based on hearsay, assessments, linkages, assertions, or fanciful attributions – but on actual facts, hard evidence provided to a federal judge and actually examined by the Justice Department in what amounts to much-belated oversight of a rogue agency. In short, nothing like the Russiagate nonsense we’ve been hearing nonstop for years, from the mainstream media and social media conspiracists alike.
Attempts to blame Russia for Hillary Clinton’s failure to win in 2016 have actually proven to be more destructive to American democracy and trust in US institutions – media, politicians, law enforcement, take your pick – than anything Moscow’s been baselessly accused of. Much like the calls in that movie trope, the real threats to US elections have been coming from inside the house all along.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic