In the Election Task Force presser at which DOJ also rolled out two operations against Russian foreign malign influence last week, Merrick Garland described that the investigation into RT’s efforts to hide its efforts in the US was ongoing. “The charges unsealed this morning do not represent the end of the investigation. It remains active and ongoing.”

Indeed, last week, Tim Pool (believed to be Commentator-2 in the RT indictment) revealed that he would assist in the investigation (presumably meaning he’ll sit for the interview the FBI requested).

The language Pool used — the emphasis on a voluntary interview, one echoed by Benny Johnson’s more equivocal statement about his response to a similar FBI invitation — suggests DOJ is treating Pool, and so presumably most of the other commentators described in the indictment, as media under DOJ’s recently updated media guidelines.

Not so Lauren Chen herself — or at least, not Tenet Media. After all, the indictment describes several Discord servers — a general one, one focused on “funders,” another on “producers,” and another for one of the commentators — that all seem to be part of Tenet’s overarching Discord server run by Chen. To get legal process on that, as they clearly did, prosecutors would have had to convince DOJ’s National Security Division head, Matt Olsen, that Tenet or Chen either aren’t media or fit into one of the designated exceptions to the media rule.

Prosecutors might do that through Chen’s (or her spouse, Liam Donovan’s) past work with RT, after such time as it had registered as an agent of Russia in 2017. Or, if DOJ could prove that Chen knew the Russians she was working for were just an extension of her pre-existing RT contract, that might also satisfy the exception for “a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.” But even Chen’s acceptance of US-bound payments via wire from “Turkish Shell Entity-1” described as, “BUYING GOODS-INV.013-IPHONE 15 PRO MAX 512GB” would likely reach an aid-and-abet standard for RT’s alleged money laundering.

According to the indictment, the many cut-outs via which she (and by association, the podcasters) were being paid, were visible to her. None were in France, where the fictional funder of the project purportedly lived. She was witting to the money laundering alleged in the indictment, which probably qualifies her for an exception to the media guidelines. Charging that money laundering may be one step in justifying a broader investigation into Chen, including one that extends into her other roles in the far right network at Glenn Beck’s show and on Turning Point USA.

This post, which I started last week, was going to be a post laying out how all of last week’s activities seem to be an attempt to move beyond DOJ’s prior approach of name-and-shaming foreign hackers, to a name-and-disrupt approach. Lawfare did such a post earlier this week, and Alex Finley did one focused on RT and Doppelganger.

But I’m going to post the part of that larger post focused on RT now, because State just rolled out the next step of this name-and-disrupt operation: sharing intelligence showing how RT has become a front for Russia’s broader intelligence operations.

The State Department revealed declassified US intelligence findings that suggest RT is fully integrated into Russia’s intelligence operations around the world and announced it is launching a diplomatic campaign to provide countries with information about the risks associated with RT activities.

“Thanks to new information, much of which originates from RT employees, we know that RT possessed cyber capabilities and engaged in covert information and influence operations and military procurement,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday.

A key finding from the new US intelligence is that, for more than a year, the Russian government has quietly embedded an intelligence-gathering unit within RT that is focused on influence operations globally. That activity has been part of US officials described as a big expansion of RT’s role as an arm and mouthpiece of the Kremlin abroad. The activity goes beyond propaganda and covert influence operations to even include military procurement, according to US officials.

The flyer from State laying this out lists cover operations in Germany, France, and Argentina.

DOJ presumably timed last week’s indictment to beat the 60-day prohibition on announcements that might effect an election. But it was presumably also coordinated with Anthony Blinken’s trip to Eastern Europe, whence he just returned.

It appears that rolling out the indictment did two things. First, it laid out how this works, how a persona sets up an allegedly witting front, like Lauren Chen, to effectively recruit useful idiots on Russia’s behalf.

But by unrolling the indictment last week, DOJ likely facilitated further investigation of the Tenet operation.

It’s likely, for example, that DOJ needs cooperation from the podcasters like Benny and Pool to pursue an investigation into Chen any further. At the very least, prosecutors would have to lock them into statements that they had no idea they were working for RT. Those statements might not be entirely persuasive, mind you, but such statements would be crucial to showing that Chen was part of the RT deception, part of an effort by an agent of Russia to spread their propaganda via unwitting cut-outs.

By rolling out the indictment in the way they did, DOJ gave all the podcasters an incentive to immediately claim ignorance, if for no other reason than to preserve their own brand. As NBC curated, several of the podcasters did claim they were victims, within a day.

Pool said, in part, in a lengthy statement on X: “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.”

[Benny] Johnson, also on X, said: “A year ago, a media startup pitched my company to provide content as an independent contractor. Our lawyers negotiated a standard, arms length deal, which was later terminated. We are disturbed by the allegations in today’s indictment, which make clear that myself and other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme. My lawyers will handle anyone who states or suggests otherwise.”

[Tayler] Hansen said, in part, on X: “These allegations come as a complete shock to me and the other hosts at TENET Media. I want to be as clear as possible, I was never directed to report on any topic and had complete freedom and control over my reporting at all times. I would never agree to any arrangement where I am not the sole person in charge of the stories I cover and content I create.”

[Dave] Rubin said, in part, on X:” These allegations clearly show that I and other commentators were the victims of this scheme. I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

[Matt] Christiansen said, in part, on X: “At no point has anyone ever directed me what to say or not to say, and I would never agree to anything otherwise. My videos and streams for Tenet are exactly the same as my videos and streams on my personal channels. Every word is from me and me alone.” [my emphasis]

And after they did claim to be victims, the FBI called them up and said, “how would you like to sit for a voluntary interview … you know, as a victim?”

This is why I’m way more sympathetic to Pool and Benny’s claims they’re victims than others, who rightly argue they had to have known something sketchy was going on: not because I believe they were that stupid (both could have been, but Pool, who hired Cassandra Fairbanks after she was already tainted as a Sputnik persona, has been swimming in these waters for years). But because DOJ set this up to highly motivate them to position themselves, publicly, as victims and then capitalized on that to take further investigative steps.

But this operation also served to disrupt Russian support of propaganda, which is one of the reasons I view the efforts rolled out last week as an attempt to disrupt ongoing efforts, rather than just an attempt to name-and-shame.

After all, the podcasters (Rubin and Benny had already moved on; the others had not) are out of a hefty paycheck. Tim Pool will either have to find some right wing billionaire to pay wildly inflated rates for his apology for Russia from here on out, or he’ll have to scale back. It might take some weeks to do that. He might even have to give up politicizing the local skateboard park.

By sanctioning RT, among others, upon release of this indictment, not just the Tenet podcasters, but anyone else in the US knowingly on the RT grift, has to drop their gig immediately.

Presumably, a number of other people are doing quietly what former weapons inspector Scott Ritter did quite boisterously last week. Ritter — who, last month, had his house searched — posted that the sanctions on RT meant he had to immediately drop his RT gigs.

Per his claims in a Substack post released since then, Ritter was getting nothing close to what the podcasters were.

Amidst revelations of multi-million dollar deals where influencers were paid $100,000 a week to produce video content, and on-air hosts given million dollar salaries along with other perks, my relationship with Russian state-owned media pales into insignificance, contracted as an outside contributor compensated with what now, by comparison, seems a paltry $250-280 per item published, with the total amount received amounting to less than 7% of my total annual income.

Apparently, my negotiating skills are lacking—rather than insisting that I would not consider any offer under $5 million, I was content with compensation that matched the industry “norm” of between $150-300 per item published. Earlier this year, when RT thought that my interest in contributing had waned, they offered to double the price paid per article; I declined, insisting that we adhere to the letter of our agreement.

And now having done that — having forced people who were being supported by RT to drop their gigs — partners around the world can turn to unpacking similar operations in their own countries.

There are, undoubtedly, other nodes like the Tenet one, both in the US and around the world. This one may have been particularly important to disrupt before the election, because of Chen’s involvement with Turning Point, which will have a key role in Trump’s GOTV.

But whatever she was doing, TPA has cut her off.

As I’ve alluded to a few times, I was sent what I believe to be three of the files Iran puportedly stole from Trump’s team. I received them after I explained why I thought this hack-and-leak was different than the Hillary one in ways that should influence considerations about publishing:

• Trump doesn’t compartment his campaign from his crimes, meaning Iran could be — could have been trying, could have succeeded in — stealing information about the Iran-related documents Trump took when he left the White House. The report that Susie Wiles was the intended target of the hack confirms that risk. In addition to running Trump’s campaign, Wiles decided who would be provided defense attorneys paid by the campaign. Aside from the classified information Trump shared with her, she should never have had anything implicating classified discovery and the classified discovery itself should never have left the SCIFs in which it was provided to defense attorneys. But she is likely to know some of what — for example — witnesses like Kash Patel said about classified information.
• In addition to the hack, Iran allegedly was also trying to solicit a hit squad to kill Trump (indeed, the alleged recruiter, Asif Merchant, was just indicted on Wednesday). That makes the possibility of Iran exploiting internal information from Trump’s campaign (such as travel details) far more dangerous.

I had decided it wasn’t worth participating. And then I got sent files I believe to be those vetting files.

In the last few days, Google has slapped a phishing warning on the files I got sent.

Even though I offered that explanation a month ago, I still get questions from people about why I, and why other outlets, haven’t published the documents.

Don’t get me wrong, other outlets are, without a doubt, exercising a double standard in choosing not to publish these documents, or at least reviewing whether the JD Vance vetting document includes some of the really damning videos surfaced since Trump picked him. It’s not just the Hillary emails in 2016. Every single outlet known to have received these files has also chased the Hunter Biden laptop, even though they never succeeded in implicating Joe Biden in anything found in the laptop. The dick pics were enough to sustain many outlets for a year (and longer, in the case of the NYPost).

But there’s one other big, big difference — one that I think explains the entire difference.

As far as I know, no one in the Kamala Harris campaign is goading journalists to post the documents.

Compare that to 2016, where Trump’s top people were strategizing how to maximize attention on John Podesta’s risotto recipe. Somebody who may be Don Jr was getting all his trolls to push hashtags so “liberal news forced to cover it.” Or 2020, when Trump’s personal lawyer flew around the world, even meeting with known Russian spies, looking for dirt on Joe Biden’s kid. And when a laptop of dick pics dropped in Rudy Giuliani’s lap, like magic, the far right demanded that private social media companies let those dick pics disseminate like wild, because — they claimed — the dissemination of distractions about Hunter Biden was absolutely crucial to Trump’s election strategy.

If I’m right that Kamala Harris has never encouraged journalists to post these documents, there would be a very good reason why not, even beyond the considerable national security risks of encouraging hack-and-leak operations from hostile intelligence services.

Kamala has just 107 days to win an election. And she has a story that she is very very busy telling.

Hack-and-leak operations are about attention, about distraction. If she focused on these stolen documents, she would distract from her own campaign, from the story she is busy telling.

In 2016, Trump used the documents Russia stole to suck up media attention, which served to distract from his own corruption. That’s what he tried in 2020, too. And media outlets have, quite literally, argued that they could avoid accusations of liberal bias by printing error-riddled stories about Hunter Biden, still sucking on that dick pic, three years later.

Hack-and-leak operations help someone like Donald Trump, because too much scrutiny of his own actions might sink his campaign.

But Harris is doing something different than Trump. She’s trying to convince voters that government can improve their lives. She’s trying to convince voters that she cares about their issues and plans to [try to] address them. She needs to sustain their attention long enough to tell that story.

She doesn’t have the time to chase distraction with documents stolen from Trump.

Besides, the press has barely scratched the surface of the corruption or right wing extremism of Trump and his running mate, just sitting in plain sight, such as JD’s claim that we’re still fighting the Civil War and he’s fighting on the side of the south, or Trump rolling out another effort to cash in on his campaign, just weeks before the election.

There’s no shortage of dirt on Donald Trump. Nothing Iran has offered, thus far, at all compares to the stuff sitting out in plain sight.

There is, however, a shortage of time. And wasting time on stolen emails would squander what little time there is.

In the first half of her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris raised $361 million in a month and another $47 million in a day.

In the first half of her campaign, Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris and encouraged 400,000 people to register to vote.

In the first half of her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris pantsed Donald Trump in a debate, out-TVing a TV pro.

I’ve been tracking the weird timing of this race. Sunday begins the 22nd month that Trump has been running. Because his damn campaign has been going on forever, he’s been plodding through the 92% mark of his campaign for days, stuck in slow-motion.

Today marks the 54th day of Harris’ campaign, with 53 left. Thus begins the second half of her campaign.

There are still things that could unsettle the race. Less than a month ago I listed six things that might yet do so:

• Kamala avoided any violent protests at the DNC (though her campaign also refused to grant a speaking slot to anyone supporting Palestinians, something that could affect her Michigan support).
• There’s no sign of a ceasefire in Israel, and Joe Biden has done little to forestall Israeli actions as they move to the West Bank.
• The debate did turn out to be pretty tumultuous, and it seems to have given Harris a slight boost in the polls — but thus far, it’s not clear how much.
• Between that and a particularly bad outing in New York last week, there is finally increased focus on how unhinged the former President is.
• His attack on immigrants in Springfield has led to political violence; I fear there will be more as Trump gets more desperate.
• Trump won’t be sentenced before the election (which could have helped as much as hurt him), but a superseding indictment will provide prosecutors a way to lay out his alleged crimes two weeks from now, on September 26.

On top of bad campaign news, Trump’s financial plight may begin to dominate headlines. In apparent response to Trump’s debate, his social media company crashed harder than it already was.

Unless the stock crashes some more, Trump can start unloading his Truth Social stock on Thursday. Devin Nunes seems more intent on using it to engage in diplomatic discussions with small Balkan nations.

On Monday, Trump and his failsons (including Barron) will unveil their next grift, a cryptocurrency. As Truth Social was, this is largely an effort to cash in on Trump’s popularity — but doing so significantly depends on winning the election and installing a captive SEC Chair.

If nothing else, the focus on Trump’s grift might finally get the press to focus on how much Trump defrauds his rubes.

Meanwhile, the House GOP is doing what the House GOP does: struggling to keep the government open. There’s a non-zero chance their incompetence, long hidden by supine journalists, will become visible to voters in an epic way in the next few weeks. Trump is rooting for a shutdown in the same way he made the GOP kill the border bill.

Against that background, the things that happen in the last 7.5 weeks of a campaign will happen like they normally do: volunteers will continue to call potential voters, try to get them to commit to voting for Harris, and then start encouraging voters to vote early. Harris will have extra help from unions this year to get out the vote, but she’ll need extra support from lawyers to fight back against Trump’s fuckery.

But even as that’s happening, Harris is still reaching out to new voting groups, which is one reason I’m obsessed about the timing.

The accelerated timeline shrinks the time between the moment something — perhaps an endorsement from some disgusted Republican or seeing Harris’ stature in the debate — leads a voter to first consider the possibility of voting for her and the moment they have to decide. The endorsement by the Cheneys is about creating a permission structure for Republicans to do so — to help them believe they can be patriots even if voting for a Democrat. Swift’s endorsement makes it more likely younger women will make more effort that twenty-somethings normally do to turn out. With more time, the Vice President might convert more voters, might get more voters to decide to show up.

Trump is doing everything he can to help, though, spreading neo-Nazi lies about Haitian immigrants, bringing 9/11 denier Laura Loomer to the 9/11 memorial, and hosting events with Hitler fans who attacked the Capitol at his golf resort.

But at the halfway mark, this race is still neck-and-neck.

Donald Trump is making it more clear what a vote for him would mean. But there are still far too many American voters who want the con he’s selling.

According to Marc Caputo, the cat-eating screech that was one of the most disastrous moments of Donald Trump’s debate was supposed to be a planned bit.

DONALD TRUMP HAD A PLAN FOR Tuesday night’s presidential debate. But then the cat, neither abducted nor consumed, got his tongue and talking points.

If the moderators hit him for spreading a baseless urban legend about Haitian immigrants eating cats in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, the ex-president was supposed to execute a classic rope-a-dope strategy: He would dodge the punch and place the blame for the story on town locals; then he’d pivot to attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and the media over the toll of rampant immigration on housing, healthcare, and crime in Springfield.

It was all strategized in advance. There was just one problem: It required Trump to execute it.

But when the topic of immigration came up, the former president got sidetracked by taking umbrage with Harris’s insistence that he had uninspiring rallies. He then mentioned the possibility of World War III. Only after that did he launch into the rumors of pet-eating, and then without preparing viewers about the backstory.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

This explanation — that Trump was only supposed to raise this if moderators dinged him for spreading a racist hoax — doesn’t make sense on several levels.

That’s true, most of all, because Trump himself raised the hoaxes he’s been spreading about Springfield and Aurora in his very first response, which was supposed to be about the economy.

On top of that, we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they’re coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions. Unions are going to be affected very soon. And you see what’s happening. You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast. I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country. I’ll do it again and even better.

DAVID MUIR: We are going to get to immigration and border security during this debate. [my emphasis]

Debate first responses at any debate reflect a campaign’s primary focus and should be fresh from debate prep (though Trump invited Laura Loomer to fly to the debate with him, which is whom Mike Allen and Jim “Pool Boy” VandeHei blame for the meltdown). And Harris hadn’t yet started the process of beating Trump to a quivering mess yet, so that can’t explain why Trump raised it unbidden.

Trump repeated his immigration attack (this time not mentioning Aurora and Springfield) in response to Harris’ accusation that Trump exported chip technology to China.

But when you look at what she’s done to our country and when you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly where it’s I believe 21 million people, not the 15 that people say, and I think it’s a lot higher than the 21. That’s bigger than New York state. Pouring in. And just look at what they’re doing to our country. They’re criminals. Many of these people coming in are criminals. And that’s bad for our economy too. You mentioned before, we’ll talk about immigration later.

Well, bad immigration is the worst thing that can happen to our economy. They have and she has destroyed our country with policy that’s insane. Almost policy that you’d say they have to hate our country.

His cat screech came not in response to a question to him about the hoax he had already raised (what Caputo claimed it was supposed to be), but as a follow-up to Harris’ response to Muir’s question about why the Biden Administration had waited so long to implement executive orders.

DAVID MUIR: But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: So I’m the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings. And let me say that the United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported. And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States. I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the surge of fentanyl in our country. That bill would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking in guns, drugs and human beings. But you know what happened to that bill? Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress, and said kill the bill. And you know why? Because he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And understand, this comes at a time where the people of our country actually need a leader who engages in solutions, who actually addresses the problems at hand. But what we have in the former president is someone who would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And I’ll tell you something, he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it’s not the subject that is being raised. And I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your, your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first. And I pledge to you that I will.

DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, thank you. President Trump, on that point I want to get your response.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I would like to respond.

DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far — the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It’s a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She’s destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.

DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community —

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’ve seen people on television

DAVID MUIR: Let me just say here this …

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.

DAVID MUIR: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.

DAVID MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’ll find out

DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, I’ll let you respond to the rest of what you heard.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Talk about extreme.

There’s little doubt that the psychic damage Harris did by calling his rallies “bor[ing]” rattled his response, leading him to first defend the virility of his rallies and only then to deliver the purportedly prepackaged Springfield comment, delivered as screech.

But what happened next is significant, given the retconning that Caputo got fed.

Trump’s meltdown might not have been so damaging were it not for Muir’s fact check, one of just three from the entire debate, but nevertheless the one that has led right wing trolls to offer bounties to try to create a less pathetic explanation than, “the people on my TV say.”

The timeline shows that Trump raised Springfield, what Caputo calls, “a baseless urban legend,” himself, when he was still fresh and unsullied by Harris’ attacks. Then he had his screech. And then Muir offered a fact check that — let’s face it — right wingers didn’t expect (which therefore Trump’s debate preppers likely didn’t either).

No one expected the push back that Muir actually gave after the fact, yet it is central to the effort to retcon the screech.

As an interlude, make sure you seek out the various versions of Trump’s screech set to music, which I first saw from this guy.

A few more things happened, though, between Harris’ pummeling of Trump, his screech, and the time when people started  retconning it with Caputo: Stephen “Discount Goebbels” Miller similarly got pummeled, in that case by a Venezuelan journalist, José del Pino, asking why Miller — and by extension, Trump — have this ridiculous belief that Nicolas Maduro brought down crime by exporting criminals to the United States.

So before someone tried to retcon Trump’s meltdown with Caputo, both Trump and Miller had had humiliating meltdowns.

And before that, Miller had spent most of the two days leading up to the debate disseminating these same false claims, RTing at least ten tweets dehumanizing Haitians, especially in Springfield.

The retconning fed to Caputo lets not just Miller off the hook for spreading what Caputo calls “a baseless urban legend.” It lets JD Vance off too.

After all, Ohio Senator Vance was a key vector in the pet-eating story.

Even after people explained there was no evidence for it, even as he acknowledge that “these rumors [may] turn out to be false,” JD nevertheless encouraged other trolls to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

Caputo credulously accepts that JD’s explanation to Kaitlan Collins in the spin room (in an interview given around the same time that Miller was melting down when called on the fact that he was parroting Maduro’s false stats) that meming was just a way to highlight the underlying tensions in a small city with an influx of new residents, of whatever race and national origin.

It was left to his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, to play cleanup and showcase the campaign’s strategy during an appearance on CNN 45 minutes after the debate had ended.

“This town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in . . . This is what Kamala Harris’s border policies have done,” Vance said. “The media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats . . . If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on doing it because the media should care about what’s going on.”

The primary cleanup here was Caputo’s.

Caputo doesn’t mention Collins’ comparison of this hoax to Bigfoot. He doesn’t mention how Vance bulldozed through Collins’ point that Trump raised this even though officials have no evidence.

If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot. You have a sense of responsibility as a running mate, he certainly does as the candidate to not promote false information, right?

Similarly, Caputo cleaned up what he describes Jason Miller’s attempt to “polish” this conspiracy.

In a CNN interview Wednesday morning, Miller also tried to polish Trump’s immigration remarks from the night before. He insisted the story of pet-eating Haitians wasn’t far-fetched by boosting a story from the conservative website the Federalist about a Springfield resident who recently called 911 to report four Haitians each carrying a goose (but the story didn’t mention cats, dogs, or pets).

Miller complained about the bias of the moderators for failing to fact-check Harris on issues like fracking and said they should have talked about the Biden-Harris administration’s “airlifts” of Haitian migrants into the United States.

[snip]

Later that morning on Truth Social, Trump posted an image of the police report as well as video of a woman in the city of Canton, Ohio (which is 173 miles away from Springfield) who was arrested for eating a cat. The woman is a U.S. citizen and not of Haitian descent, according to press reports.

Yes, Caputo noted how ridiculous it was for Miller and others to point to Haitians carrying geese (or a troubled non-immigrant woman 100 miles away who did eat a pet) to claim their Haitian hoax was defensible.

He didn’t note that Miller was on CNN falsely claiming the Haitians in Springfield are illegal (or that they were brought in deliberately). That is, Caputo cleaned up the false premise here: that Trump and his team are calling legal immigrants illegals, and on that basis fearmongering about someone eating your pet kitty.

This is the real issue, both in the dissemination and Caputo’s willingness to repackage it.

All the evidence suggests this is not “a baseless urban legend.” Rather, it is a packaged neo-Nazi attack designed to sow violence against migrant communities.

According to a local leader in the Haitian community, while there were tensions, none of that boiled up until a car accident involving a legal Haitian ended up killing a school boy.

What were things like over the course of the first couple of years that you were living in Springfield? Was the community welcoming?

We were just here working peacefully and caring about our family and all of this. The community was okay. There was still a group of people in Springfield who saw the coming of the Haitians as a threat. But normally, generally, the community was so open with us. We had so many people working with us and things like this. Until the recent incident of the recent bus accident and people have been building up on that just to tell bad news about us.

So you think the bus accident was when things really started to change?

Yeah, it triggered it. There was some tension before but not like it came after the bus accident.

A neo-Nazi group responded to that by organizing a march in the town. And then one of them created a conflict at a local city commission.

Late last month, a neo-Nazi group called Blood Ties organized a march outside the Springfield Jazz and Blues Festival. At the Aug. 26 city commission meeting, Drake R. Berentz took credit for organizing that march while introducing himself via an anti-Black pseudonym. He was promptly removed from the hearing after stating, “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”

A national far right network with intimate ties to Trump’s team start magnifying disinformation from Springfield.

Shortly after, racist claims aimed at the state’s Haitian community began to surge online, boosted by known disinformation outlets and eventually echoed by GOP officials.

The unfounded narrative that Haitian immigrants were eating pets reached national attention after being repeated this week first by Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance (the junior senator from Ohio) and then his running mate Donald Trump at the latter’s debate with Kamala Harris.

The origins of the conspiracy theory remain largely unknown, but a New Lines investigation has identified several points of amplification from known spreaders of disinformation. Its fairly rapid spread reveals how extremist narratives travel from the fringes of the internet into the mouths of politicians, seemingly overnight.

Less than a week earlier, End Wokeness, an account on X (formally Twitter) that has been connected in the past to the white nationalist Jack Posobiec, shared a Facebook post alleging that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. The claim was quickly repeated by the political commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, during his broadcast hosted on Steve Bannon’s media network.

Kirk commented that this brought the United States “one step closer to the great replacement,” referring to a white nationalist narrative that claims non-white immigrants are replacing white people in the U.S. The narrative was originally obscure but has been increasingly embraced by the GOP mainstream in recent years.

Kirk is a close associate of Posobiec. Both his claims and the End Wokeness account’s tweet reference a single anonymous post on a private Facebook group as proof of their claims.

This was followed up on Sept. 8, when the End Wokeness account tweeted a video from a Springfield City Commission meeting where an influencer and podcaster named Anthony Harris claimed Haitian immigrants were eating ducks in the parks. This seemingly spawned from a repurposed image of a man holding a dead Canada goose in Columbus, Ohio, taken a month before.

This entire story, then, is about creating false stories in order to stoke far right violence against immigrants. It’s not an urban legend. It is deliberate propaganda.

It is already having real effects on the Haitians in Springfield.

And as such, it’s little different from the deliberate disinformation used to stoke the Dublin or Southport riots. Indeed, the networks behind all of them have very significant overlaps.

What is different here is that Trump is running to regain the presidency on such a platform of such disinformation. Trump’s team is riddled with participants in this transnational effort to stoke fascism with viral disinformation targeting immigrants; some of them aren’t even serving prison terms in Danbury FCI for covering up January 6! And Elon Musk has been all too happy to encourage it on Xitter.

Because of this — because of the way Trump’s team participates in this — Trump’s meltdown calls for far more than embarrassed retconning.

I don’t doubt that this was an orchestrated, intentional smear, one that Trump flubbed because Kamala Harris first made Trump insecure and then because Muir came ready with a fact-check. The fact that Trump’s handlers are trying to excuse it away as — in the Axios version — a matter of the fascist conspiracists he has admitted into his old man bubble, is a tell, but also an opportunity.

1. He’s haunted. He can’t stand being seen as a loser. So it’s impossible to fully admit he didn’t win in 2020. He looks to distractions like crowd size and adoring coverage for solace. So, seemingly silly taunts — like Harris’ “people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom” — hit deep.
2. He falls for fake news. For a guy who made “fake news” a household term, he falls for it often and easily. It wasn’t hard to learn that the allegations of Haitians eating pet dogs and cats were silly and wrong. But far-right activist Laura Loomer was on the plane ride to the debate with him, egging him on.
3. He’s old. A wise man told us three types of people never change: Old guys. Rich guys. Guys with their names on the building. So the chances that Trump — a 78-year-old, self-proclaimed billionaire with his name on buildings, bottles and golf courses — will change are, um, nil.
4. His bubble lies to him. All politicians live in self-protective bubbles. But Trump’s, which extends from his social media cocoon to his Mar-a-Lago luxury, is almost impossible to penetrate with hard truths. There’s always a Loomer to tell Trump he’s winning … even when he’s not.

Usually, this far right disinformation is supposed to be a little smoother than this — like JD delivered it, rather than the screech with which Trump did.

But, in spite of the excuses fed to Bulwark and Axios, the screech is the real thing. It is who Trump is. It is the ugliness with which this is all intended.

And rather than accepting excuses because the former President’s delivery made the ugliness readily visible in front of millions, we need to be clear that these memes are not, in fact, an effort to focus attention on the growing pains of a town with booming population.

Rather, they are a deliberate attempt to dehumanize people to either sow fear among voters — Trump even targeted this at union voters! — or violence if that fails.

After Kamala Harris rattled his ego, Trump showed himself for who he and his extended network really are. When people show you who they really are, believe them.

Update: Paul Waldman notes the intentionality of all this as well.

Shortly before the debate started (I watched it after it was over, after getting some sleep), I tweeted that I wasn’t sure if journalists would even notice if Kamala Harris’ obvious efforts to get under Trump’s skin didn’t work.

There are so few journos who seem to understand (or be interested in) VP’s efforts to get under Trump’s skin, I’m not sure we’ll see a piece abt what happens if that effort fails.

The tweet is most interesting, in retrospect, as a record of my shock that so few experts understood Kamala Harris’ plan.

I first laid it out two weeks earlier. “I don’t think that even the outlets that recognize the troll are giving the Kamala Harris campaign enough credit for the jujitsu they’re engaged in with the debate,” I said in a post on how the Vice President’s campaign was deliberately pushing on Trump’s impulse control problems. My preview yesterday attempted to correct the misimpression that Harris was asking for open mics out of some sense of insecurity, before I noted that releasing a video of Trump’s top aides calling him unfit and another video mocking his obsession with crowd sizes made her plan clear.

There has been far less focus — or just as often, outright misunderstanding — on Harris’ efforts to make a Trump meltdown more likely. I’ve argued that was one purpose of Brian Fallon’s very public effort to get ABC to allow live mics. Even though the effort failed, it sets up a focus on the worries from Trump’s own handlers that he’ll lose his cool.

And yesterday and today, Harris has taken steps to make that more likely.

I’m not entirely sure what ABC did with the mics, because you could hear both at various times. Indeed, one of Trump’s biggest zingers, a preplanned one, came when he repeated her line back to her, “I’m speaking now.”

But the Vice President did with her animated, often mocking facial expressions what she might have done with an open mic in any case. She kept the camera on her, the entire time. And more often than not, even her facial expressions conveyed far more than Trump’s rants did.

Nate Silver and Frank Luntz both claimed that Harris failed the visuals, but here’s a good Bulwark post laying out how she beat Trump at his own TV game, and NYT framed the way she dismantled Trump’s ego in terms of her expressions. Something important Harris’ team did was force ABC to provide a podium sized to her height, limiting the visual impact of the ten inch difference in their height (though that’s one thing Nate said he didn’t like).

One of the more honest previews of the debate, from Hugo Lowell, described that Trump’s handlers were worried about whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde would show up.

Donald Trump’s campaign is most concerned going into the debate against Kamala Harris with the former president’s mood, afraid that the mercurial Trump could engage in the kind of self-sabotage that turned off voters in the 2020 presidential election, according to people familiar with the situation.

The campaign’s internal refrain is whether they get “happy Trump” or “angry Trump”, the people said, as they count down the days to perhaps the final presidential debate this cycle.

Kamala Harris had absolutely no intention of leaving that choice to Trump.

She took every opportunity she could, from an initial handshake that turned that common gesture of courtesy into a remapping of the stage space for her own benefit, to get in his skin. (Presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminded that Ronald Reagan similarly surprised Jimmy Carter with such a handshake.)

And yes, she even mocked him about crowd size. If he weren’t already at the party by that point, Mr. Hyde arrived to stay.

WaPo said she “baited him.” So did CNN. BBC called it “goading.” And while it took NYT a few tries before they could come up with a headline that described reality (as is their wont), they described that the Vice President “burrow[ed] under his skin.” A WSJ editorial described:

She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set the trap so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years.

Chris Christie critiqued, “she laid traps, and he chased every rabbit down every hole.”

There was little doubt what happened last night, after the fact. A dramatic success, CNN judged.

Harris came onstage with a clear plan: Throw Trump off his game.

It was, by any measure, a dramatic success.

Even at Fox News, there was little doubt what happened: both Bret Baier and Brit Hume saw what Kamala had done.

But beforehand, the press conceived the debate almost exclusively about what Harris had to do, not what she could or planned to do. Would she be up for it, journalists seemed to doubt, most buying into Trump’s hype that even Tulsi Gabbard could “eviscerate” Harris.

Journalists missed the Vice President’s clear intent because they treated Donald Trump as the protagonist of this story.

I don’t know how much the debate will affect the direction of the race. Though she struck blow after blow, it was still the 60/40-40/60 result I also predicted. The debate itself is most likely to have an effect for the way it gives Brian Fallon another opportunity to suggest Trump is too weak to take Harris on in a second debate. It might even lead some Trump cultists to wonder — to merely begin the process — of asking whether he really is the loser that Kamala Harris said he is.

But it may do something more important, indirectly.

In August, the press treated Kamala as the story largely because Trump was huddled in his mansions. But they still treated him as the protagonist. Every time he gave the order, they scurried to attend things billed as press conferences which were little different from his rambling rally speeches. He made them props in a fantasy that he had shared more about what he plans to do as President than Kamala Harris, and they were happy to play the role he demanded.

Yesterday, the press got their first chance — likely their only chance — to see the two candidates side-by-side.

And they left with the certainty that Vice President Kamala Harris was the protagonist of that story. Of this story.

Last night’s debate may not, directly, persuade many voters. But if it cures the press of their addiction to the Donald Trump con, it may have a dramatic effect on the race.

Update: Added the WSJ editorial. Noted that Fox News did too recognize what happened.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

ABC News network hosts a presidential debate this evening beginning at 9:00 p.m. ET. It’s the first time Kamala Harris meets Donald Trump but it’s Trump’s second presidential debate. Will he do any more than Gish gallop like he did against Joe Biden?

Major news outlets don’t seem to care how badly Trump did last time. They were far too focused on their “But Biden is Old” agenda to focus on Trump’s bullshit. All his lies should have been noted in real time for the benefit of the public but apparently informing the public is not the job of corporate-owned major news outlets.

Marcy’s already spelled out the case: at 92% of the election season, Trump has used up most of his campaign already. Harris is less than half way and has plenty of room to run circles around a stultifying campaign dependent on outrage cycles and old ratfucking tricks.

And in spite of Trump having burned so much of his campaign promulgating crap which does nothing to lift the American public and everything to save his ass from prosecution and jail if he should win, major news media outlets insist on putting all the pressure on the seated vice president who has already been engaged in much of the work she’d do if elected. They’re pretending she’s wet behind the ears.

Here’s what I see from out here in the cheap seats: Donald Trump lost already.

He lost my dad.

My 90-year-old dad, a veteran who lives in Florida, has always voted Republican. ALWAYS. He has already told us several weeks ago he’s going to vote for Harris

When asked why he explained in his usual economic fashion: “I can’t vote for a felon.”

This decision has been an evolution. You see, two years ago when the FBI served a warrant on Mar-a-Lago for the presidential records including classified materials, I asked my dad what he thought.

He tsk-tsked, shook his head and said, “Sloppy. He’s sloppy.”

Last year dad wouldn’t talk about Trump at all, just shook his head.

This year he’s blunt about it. Trump is a felon.

The doubt began for my father with the presidential records scandal in no small part because Dad worked SIGINT in the Navy. We’ve had a few interesting discussions about intelligence but even now, though more than 65 years has passed, my dad is still closed mouthed about what he did. He took an oath and he’s kept it.

Donald Trump did not.

Furthermore, he cheated in 2016 to get elected. All his bullshit claiming Democrats are cheating is projection, because he cheated on his wife and then he cheated the state of New York and the American public to hide that he cheated in order to win the election.

It took my pops a while to break through the lifelong conditioning that he should vote for a Republican for president.

It only took Trump being outed as a felonious cheating loser.

He remains one no matter what happens tonight.

~ ~ ~

This thread is dedicated to this evening’s debate. Please stay on topic, thanks.

As you watch the torrent of news obsessing about the debate tonight, remember this stat:

Trump’s campaign is 92% done (665 of 721 days).

Kamala Harris’ campaign is not quite half done (48%, or 51 of 107 days).

Lots can and likely will still happen in this race, but Trump is almost done and the Vice President is only halfway there.

The debate coverage is almost entirely focused on what Kamala Harris can do with it (though Peter Baker finally wrote a story — one published above the fold in the dead tree version — that Trump might look old). Polls show that almost a third of voters will look to the debate to learn more about what Harris stands for — which likely is code for “feels.” But pundits are focused on whether Harris can define her policy agenda, or whether Trump can succeed in branding her with policy failures on immigration, inflation, and the Afghan withdrawal.

There has been far less focus — or just as often, outright misunderstanding — on Harris’ efforts to make a Trump meltdown more likely. I’ve argued that was one purpose of Brian Fallon’s very public effort to get ABC to allow live mics. Even though the effort failed, it sets up a focus on the worries from Trump’s own handlers that he’ll lose his cool.

And yesterday and today, Harris has taken steps to make that more likely. Today, she released an ad based on President Obama’s mockery of Trump’s obsession with [cough] crowd sizes.

I’m not a fan of the ad. The glimpse of Trump’s very small hand is over the top.

I’m also not the audience for this ad.

Trump is.

Seeing a Black former President mocking his masculinity is the kind of thing that Trump is often unable to shake without a lot of babysitting.

I’m more fond of yesterday’s ad, which makes a far more substantial point: That none of the “best people” who used to work for Trump support him this time.

It, too, is designed to get under Trump’s skin. Anything involving Mark Milley gets under Trump’s skin! And Harris released it with enough lead time that ABC might even ask Trump about the ad, one of those stupid questions about the campaign that horserace journalists can’t resist. Perhaps the ad will lead ABC to ask a far more substantive question about why Trump is the first former president in history whose former VP refuses to back him.

So Harris is doing what she can to raise the chances that a man with no impulse control will act like a whiny baby in front of the whole country today. He’ll probably avoid saying the N-word (though I don’t rule it out). But there’s a decent chance he’ll say or do something that will display his insecurities about facing a very smart Black woman for all the world to see.

My point about the timing, though, is that the most likely outcome is that this won’t matter. The most likely outcome of tonight’s debate is that whatever happens, pundits will review the debate and decide, 60-40, that one of these candidates won the debate. Focus groups will tell pollsters, 40-60, that the other candidate won the debate.

If that’s the outcome, if Kamala can’t immediately win over a chunk of new supporters, if Trump can’t brand the Vice President as a communist, then it is unlikely to significantly affect the race.

Tomorrow morning, we’re most likely to be where we are today: with a tie race, only with 55 days left instead of 56. Trump will still be 92% done and Harris will be 49% done.

The reason I keep harping on that timing, though, is that most campaign journalists are not accounting for the fact that Harris did in the last 51 days what Trump did (or was supposed to do, but the Guardian reports he has not) in the last twenty months: lay a foundation for the rest of the campaign: Set up offices, recruit volunteers, identify likely voters, prepare a voter persuasion and mobilization plan.

While pundits were focused on crowd sizes, Harris used those huge rallies for a very specific purpose: to very quickly recruit a ton of volunteers who would find and turn out every possible vote. Tim and Gwen Walz and Doug Emhoff are swooping into campaign offices and randomly getting on phone calls that volunteers are already placing to identify and persuade voters, something that wows the voters, but also inspires volunteers that their efforts are not isolated from the larger whole.

But Harris has done something else in the last 51 days that has largely been measured only in terms of enthusiasm, if at all. She has:

• Provided a permission structure (most recently with the Liz and Dick Cheney endorsements) for Republicans to support her
• Elevated reproductive rights from one of many issues to the most important issue for many voters
• Gotten a whole lot of younger voters of color, especially women, to register to vote

All three of those things are a foundation. Only the first one — a permission structure via which self-identified Republicans first consider and then, maybe, vote for Harris — will play a very important role tonight. If she succeeds in presenting herself as the better national security candidate (which should be child’s play) and if she succeeds in allaying concerns about her liberal record, it may advance that permission structure, little by little. Even that won’t immediately show up in the polls.

But the rest of that foundation — the new voters, the newly central reproductive rights as campaign issue — may not show up in polls at all. It’s not even clear which pollsters are using up-to-date registration lists to do their polling. It’s definitely unclear what the likely voter model will look like.

No one knows.

No one knows, in part, because Kamala Harris is only halfway through her campaign.

It’s certainly possible that one or the other campaign will do something that dramatically alters the shape of this race tonight. Though for all the bluster about Trump’s gish galloping debate prowess, if he looks old or melts down, the flood of lies may not be enough, this time.

But if that doesn’t happen — if neither candidate manages to disrupt the tied race with their debate performance — than that other detail becomes important again.

Donald Trump is more than nine-tenths of the way through this race.

Kamala Harris still has half the race to build on the foundation she has laid in the last 51 days.

Today, the former President tweeted that his failing social media company, “IS GREAT. THE REAL VOICE OF AMERICA.”

A number of people suggested he was doing so in an effort to preserve value before he can start dumping the stock.

If it was, though, it seemed to come just as an early morning spike in the stock price started to collapse, even as other Truth Social executives have started unloading their stock before Trump can do so later this month.

But I was interested in the post for another reason.

The most interesting details from the Doppelganger dossier released with a takedown request last week pertain to how the Russian trolls described efforts by social media companies to police inauthentic content.

A media plan proposed targeting Ukrainian audiences on Facebook and Xitter — the administrators of which, the plan claimed, “have a pro-Ukrainian position” that leads them to “subject communities promotion pro-Russian narratives to strict moderation rules” — by spending at least four months building a following before expressing pro-Russian views.

They’re effectively building sleeper cells of trolling accounts to evade moderation of inauthentic content.

But other Russian trolls were undaunted.

The Good Old USA project would target Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Xitter, and Reddit precisely because those channels were, “free from ‘democratic censorship’” (in scare quotes).

As Yael Roth testified to Congress last year, the efforts to build an election integrity function at social media companies in response to Russia’s 2016 influence operation were “fundamentally bipartisan.” But now, Russian trolls aiming to tamper in the 2024 refer to such moderation efforts as “democratic censorship.”

But even Mark Zuckerberg’s company was viewed with some suspicion. A different document described that Xitter was the only mass US social media platform which Russia could use, because Meta “actively collaborates with the National Security Agency.”

Xitter, the document predicted, would start policing content more closely as the November election approached.

By far the most interesting observation about which social media platforms were appropriate for Russian propaganda campaigns, however, is this one, which appears in a Guerrilla Media campaign to exacerbate polarization in the US, in part by complaining about the cost of supporting Ukraine. As other plans did, this one described ways to bypass the moderation on Facebook, Xitter, and YouTube, in this case, by making perishable accounts. It also described the limits on YouTube, which tends to scrutinize accounts once they accrue 100,000 subscribers (which may explain why Russia was so interested in paying Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, because they organically have ten times that).

But then there’s a redacted comment about “Candidate A,” the substitution used to refer to Trump throughout this dossier.

Except it’s not a comment about Trump. By context, it’s obviously a comment about his social media site.

Helpfully, the reference to Truth Social is not redacted in the affidavit itself.

SDA documents include a proposal for another campaign focused on influencing the United States, titled “The Guerrilla Media Campaign in the United States.” See Exhibit 9. 18 The Guerilla Media Campaign focused on exploiting the perceived polarization of U.S. society by focusing on eight “Campaign Topics.” As reflected in the proposal, SDA anticipated using social media profiles on Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube, and Truth Social but noted that with “Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we need to create multiple ‘perishable’ accounts, primarily for the work with comments.” [my emphasis]

By context, the affidavit explains what distinguishes the social media platform of Candidate A, Truth Social: Unlike Facebook, Xitter, and YouTube, Truth Social doesn’t require perishable accounts to evade censorship.

Whenever Russian trolls wrote this, then, they perceived that Truth Social did not exercise the kind of moderation of obvious Russian propaganda as Truth Social’s bigger rivals.

Mind you, the other references to American social media platforms suggest that these Russian trolls don’t consider Truth Social to have the mass reach that Meta platforms and Xitter have. Maybe Truth Social wouldn’t be a failing social media platform if it were less friendly to Russian trolls pretending to be Americans.

“TRUTH SOCIAL IS GREAT. THE REAL VOICE OF AMERICA!,” Trump tweeted out the week after a report on how Russia exploits US social media platforms to spread propaganda.

Only, certain discerning Russian trolls find Truth Social to be particularly welcoming to Russian voices, even those only pretending to be American voices.

Donald Trump’s batshit crazypants answer regarding childcare was the part of his address to the New York Economic Club that deservedly attracted the most attention last week.

But I was interested in a response Trump gave to Sullivan & Cromwell Rodge Cohen regarding whether he would alter the sanctions against Russia.

H. RODGIN COHEN: Thank you, Bob, and thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. I would like to ask about the United States economic sanctions programs. These programs have been used, as you well know, to advance our national security interests, our foreign policy objectives, but they also have economic implications. And the most recent was the program against Russia in response to the Ukrainian – their invasion of Ukraine, where, for once, we got the support of all our allies. So my specific question is, would you strengthen or modify any of these economic sanctions programs, particularly Russia, including the pipeline you mentioned?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, it’s a great question. The problem with what we have with sanctions – and I was a user of sanctions, but I put them on and take them off as quickly as possible because, ultimately, it kills your dollar and it kills everything the dollar represents, and we have to continue to have that be the world currency. I think it’s important. I think it would be losing a war. If we lost – if we lost the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war.

That would make us a third-world country, and we can’t let it happen. So I use sanctions very powerfully against countries that deserve it, and then I take them off. Because look, you’re losing Iran, you’re losing Russia, China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency, as you know better than anybody. All of these things are happening.

You’re losing so many countries because there’s so much conflict with all of these countries that you’re going to lose that, and we can’t lose that. So I want to use sanctions as little as possible. One of the things that we have with tariffs is that I’ll say to them, you don’t honor the dollar as your world currency. Is that right?

You’re not going to do it? No, we’re not. I said, that’s okay. I’m going to put tariffs all over your product, and they’re going to say, sir, we’d love to honor the dollar as the world currency.

You know, tariffs, in addition to monetary and the money that we’ll take in, which will be bigger than you’ve ever seen in this country before, gives you tremendous political power for something like that, as an example. I stopped wars with the threat of tariffs. I stopped wars with two countries that mattered a lot. A lot of people would have been killed. [my emphasis]

Cohen asked only about Russia. But Trump’s answer included Iran (and wildly misrepresented what he did with sanctions on Iran, which Biden rescinded a month after becoming President). Trump seemed to suggest that sanctions, including those against Iran, had to be limited, or targeted countries would abandon the dollar.

I’ll leave it to economic experts to address whether his plan to enforce adherence to the dollar using tariffs could have the same effect.

I’m interested in the response, generally, because if there was a quo that Trump was supposed to provide after Russia helped Trump win in 2016, it was sanctions relief. Trump went to some effort — with an attempt to script Steve Bannon’s HPSCI testimony, Don Jr’s refusal to testify before a grand jury, Trump’s complete blow-off of a sanctions question from Mueller, and the attempt to reverse the Mike Flynn prosecution — to prevent Mueller from substantiating that Trump had taken steps to deliver that quo before the Russian investigation became overt.

Yet here he is again, suggesting he’ll end sanctions on Russia during the election.

But I’m particularly interested in Trump’s affirmative inclusion of Iran in the comment.

Sure, his inclusion of Iran in this discussion might reflect his belief that Jared’s effort to spread Trumpism around the Middle East will bring Iran into the fold — or perhaps it reflects the efforts of his Russian buddies to view Iran as an ally.

But I found it interesting given that Iran not only targeted his rat-fucker and his campaign manager for hacking, but also allegedly tried to hire hitmen to assassinate him.

All the more so given how Trump lied about DOJ’s focus on Iran when he responded to DOJ’s exposure of the RT influence laundering last week at his equally batshit appearance in Mosinee, WI.

Did you see? Three days ago, it started again. The Justice Department said Russia may be involved in our elections again. You see that, Mr. Congressman, great Congressman from Texas? You see that Russia — it’s Russia. And you know? The whole world laughed at him this time, 2.5 years, not a phone call made to Russia, not anything to do with Russia but stopping their pipeline and lots of other things that people approved. And they said just the other day, the Attorney General, we are looking at Russia, and I said, oh no. It’s Russia Russia Russia all over again. But they don’t look at China and they don’t look at Iran. They look at Russia. I don’t know what it is with poor Russia. This is very, very. But you know what? Russia would have never happened if I were President, attacking Ukraine would never have happened. I knew Putin. I knew him well. And you know, he endorsed — I don’t know if you saw the other day? He endorsed Ka-Mala. He endorsed Ka-Mala. I was very offended by that. I wonder why he endorsed Ka-Mala. Now, he’s a chess player. I endorse Ka-Mala. Should I be congressman, should I be upset about that? Now, it was done with a smile — Ron? Was it done with a smile? I think it was done. Maybe with a smile. I don’t know who the hell knows. Nobody is going to figure out. There are about 19 steps ahead of us but this whole Russian thing, nobody, was tougher on Russia in history than Trump and the person that knows that better than anyone is President Vladimir Putin.

Trump acknowledged the hack at his Bedminster presser — where he also predicted “we will be friendly with Iran.”

I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.

Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?

I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.

Does there need to be a government response?

Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.

Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.

We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.

But last week, he lied about it. He lied and suggested that DOJ would never look at Iran’s influence operations, even though the Deep State has twice done what they did last week with Russia, attribute Iran’s effort to interfere in the election, in that case by harming Trump, and do so before the Trump campaign alerted the FBI to the hack.

Trump was targeted for hacking (and, allegedly, assassination) by Iran. And yet he’s hiding that when he dismisses DOJ’s similar focus on Russian influence operations.

As noted, I plan to do a more substantive piece on DOJ’s effort to disrupt Russian efforts to influence the election, but first want to debunk a few claims people are making about last week’s releases.

In this post, I debunked the claim that Lauren Chen is likely to have been targeted under FISA; FBI wouldn’t have needed FISA, when criminal process is easier to get.

There’s an even bigger error regarding something about the Doppelgänger materials released last week, traceable in significant part to this post and the screen cap from it, disseminated by others:

The screen cap comes from this passage of the affidavit supporting the take-down of a bunch of sites used by Russia’s Doppelgänger project. Gilbert and others have screen-capped primarily the part describing influencers (italicized below), without the part that directly followed, describing that Russia has a similar list of people who don’t support Russia, much less the part (bold below) describing that these were accounts were monitored to track public opinion.

66. SDA documents further reveal that SDA extensively monitors and collects information about a large number of media organizations and social media influencers. One document revealed a list of more than 2,800 people on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Telegram, spanning 81 countries, that SDA identified as influencers, including television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians. When referring to politicians, the list often mentioned which U.S. state and/or political party they represent and the position they hold in Congress. The U.S.-based influencers accounted for approximately 21% of the accounts being monitored by SDA. On another list of over 1,900 “anti-influencers”14 from 52 countries, the U.S.- based accounts comprised 26% of the total accounts being monitored by SDA. I assess that “anti-influencer” indicates that the account posts content that SDA views as contrary to Russian objectives. Based on my review of other records obtained during this investigation, I know that SDA adds information captured through its monitoring efforts to dashboards. These dashboards analyze trends in public opinion and thereby measure the effectiveness of the malign foreign influence campaign based on its impact on public opinion. SDA’s content varies from project to project; however, it can include videos, memes, cartoons, social media posts, and/or articles. SDA’s content delivery also varies each campaign, but often relies heavily on social media posts driving targeted audiences to domains SDA controls, like the SUBJECT DOMAINS. [my emphasis]

In his story on the releases, Gilbert extrapolates from a different document that primarily focuses on using targeted advertising to attract social media users to Russian-made content, to suggest this list of 2,800 influencers might constitute those envisioned in a small section of the document as “collaborators,” though that section of the document doesn’t use the term, “collaborators.”

According to the Good Old USA project document, the Kremlin was seeking to work with influencers who are “proponents of traditional values, who stand up for ending the war in Ukraine and peaceful relations between the US and Russia, and who are ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

Among the types of influencers listed as possible collaborators are actors, politicians, media representatives, activists, and clergymen.

The affidavit references one document maintained by the Social Design Agency, which is not included in the unsealed court documents, that contains a list of more than 2,800 people identified as influencers. While this list is global, US-based influencers account for around 20 percent of the accounts being monitored, including many US lawmakers, according to an analysis of the list by the FBI.

That is, in my opinion, a wild misreading of the material, not least because the document envisioning “working with influencers” includes passive ways to exploit pro-Russian voices, including the “rollout of real comments” from them.

Other even more inflammatory tweets have highlighted the same passage to claim that Russia is paying 2,800 people.

While it’s not clear that the FBI knows precisely what the Social Design Agency is doing with these lists, all it claims that they’re going is tracking these accounts — both pro and anti-Russian social media accounts — to “analyze trends in public opinion and thereby measure the effectiveness of the malign foreign influence campaign based on its impact on public opinion.”

There’s no claim the 2,800 people on the list are being paid.

Even if SDA were doing more, it would in no way signal full “collaboration.” An earlier report on Doppelgänger’s work (one I’m still looking for, to link), for example, described how Doppelgänger would exploit the way Elon Musk uses his Xitter account to piggyback on his visibility to magnify pro-Russian content with no involvement from him. Elmo is so predictable and so stupid with his Xitter account it requires no payment or even witting involvement to be exploited in such a way.

Similarly, there are any number of right wing members of Congress who oppose Ukrainian funding in significant part because Trump told them to; while some of them might be on the Russian payroll, the overwhelming majority are not, but they nevertheless produce social media content that is of enormous use to Russia. JK Rowling’s transphobic content similarly attracts the kind of engagement that could be usefully exploited for Russia.

The inclusion of anti-influencers on this list is a big tell that those on the influencer list are not all recruited. Indeed, my own Xitter account could be big enough and — because Musk has forced a virtual blue check on my account, increasing my visibility in algorithms — to be included on an anti-influencer account; Asha Rangappa, Tom Nichols, and Anne Applebaum are all people with credentialed anti-Russian views with more Xitter followers than me who are even more likely candidates. It often happens that trolls with their own blue checks will attempt to hijack my timeline to stir up fights; it takes aggressive blocking to prevent it.

In other words, it doesn’t take recruitment to exploit readily apparent algorithmic patterns. Even overt opposition can be harnessed, if such efforts are not aggressively combatted.

And there’s nothing in the affidavit, describing an effort to monitor public opinion, to suggest Russia is doing even that.