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<\/a>\u00a9 Global Look Press<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
The only \u2018Russian bots\u2019 to meddle in US elections belonged to Democrat-linked \u2018experts\u2019<\/h2>\n
RT.com<\/p>\n
US cyber-security experts have blamed Russia for meddling in American elections since 2016. Now it has emerged that authors of a Senate report on \u2018Russian\u2019 meddling actually ran a \u201cfalse flag\u201d meddling operation themselves.<\/p>\n
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.<\/p>\n
Described by the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0as a group of\u00a0\u201ctech specialists who lean Democratic,\u201d<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military’s advanced research agency. His partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone.<\/p>\n ALSO ON RT.COM<\/span>Racist \u2018Russians\u2019 targeted African-Americans in 2016 election ploy, reports claim<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Morgan and Fox have struck gold in the\u00a0\u201cRussiagate\u201d<\/em>\u00a0racket, which sprung into being after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump\u2019s presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. The dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy \u2013 a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO and USAID.<\/p>\n It is worth noting that the 600\u00a0\u201cRussia-linked\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Twitter accounts monitored by the dashboard are not disclosed to the public, making it impossible to verify its claims. This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry journalists, however.<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/ggreenwald\/status\/966680423874138112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E966680423874138112&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F447619-new-knowledge-russia-bots-scandal%2F<\/p>\n New Knowledge\u2019s victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a\u00a0New York Times story<\/a>\u00a0revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama’s 2017 special election for the US Senate.<\/p>\n Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead.<\/p>\n In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had\u00a0\u201corchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by\u00a0Mother Jones<\/a>, which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan’s other dubious creation, Hamilton 68.<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/jonathonmorgan\/status\/929091799422967808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E929091799422967808&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F447619-new-knowledge-russia-bots-scandal%2F<\/p>\n Ultimately, Moore ended up losing the race by a miniscule 1.5 percentage points \u2013 making his opponent Doug Jones the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the US Senate in over 25 years.<\/p>\n Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Times piece, had known about the meddling for months, because he spoke at an event where the organizers boasted about it!<\/p>\n Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama\u2019s former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge\u2019s campaign to suppress Republican votes, \u201cenrage\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a\u00a0\u201cfalse flag\u201d<\/em>\u00a0to hurt Moore. He dubbed it\u00a0\u201cProject Birmingham.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ScottShaneNYT<\/a>, who broke the Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https:\/\/t.co\/gIAytOh2yy<\/a><\/p>\n — Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) December 28, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nTroll hunters or bot farm?<\/h2>\n
Money trail and weak apologies<\/h2>\n
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