[ad_1]
Late Sunday, Trump amplified a tweet containing audio tapes of a 2016 conversation between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko – material released earlier this year by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker appointed by the intelligence community American in its August 7 statement. about Russia’s disinformation campaign against Biden. U.S. officials have called Derkach’s efforts disinformation because they are intentionally designed to spread false or misleading information about Biden.
By retweeting material that the US government has already called propaganda – and in doing so with the start of the 2020 Democratic National Convention on Monday – Trump has once again demonstrated that he is ready to capitalize on foreign electoral interference to his own political gain.
There is no evidence of wrongdoing on the Biden and Poroshenko gangs. But Trump and his allies, as well as the Kremlin-controlled media, have used the tapes to foment plots over Biden’s relationship with Ukraine.
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded to Trump’s retweet on Monday by calling the president for amplifying Russian disinformation.
“The President of the United States should never be a willing spokesperson for Russian propaganda,” Warner wrote in his own tweet.
Trump’s amplification of this misinformation comes as Biden is set to accept the Democratic presidential nomination this week, and it poses a significant challenge to U.S. intelligence and national security officials tasked with protecting the 2020 election. against foreign interference.
A Twitter spokesperson told CNN on Monday that the account Trump retweeted had been suspended “for violating Twitter’s rules on platform manipulation and spam.” The original post, which contained excerpts from the Biden tapes, had not been online as of Monday evening.
“I think this mainly shows how widespread Russian talking points have become,” said Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who follows Russian disinformation, who added that the account appears to be based in the United States. United but spreading conspiracies supported by the Kremlin. .
While relevant US agencies have taken a whole-of-government approach focused on countering foreign disinformation and seek to educate the American public about these efforts, there does not appear to be a plan in place to deal with false information from the president himself. even.
The office of the director of national intelligence returned questions about the president’s tweets to the White House. The White House responded to CNN’s request for comment by directing the inquiries to the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign did not respond to CNN’s request.
After the story was published, Biden’s campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN in a statement that Trump “usually attacks US election sovereignty” and said the president has “once again shown his true colors “by retweeting Russian propaganda.
“We believe that Russia is using a series of measures primarily to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it considers an anti-Russian ‘establishment’. This is consistent with Moscow’s public criticism of him when he was vice president for his role in the Obama administration’s policy on Ukraine and his support for the anti-Putin opposition in Russia “, William R Evanina, director of the National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center, said in a statement earlier this month updating the landscape of electoral threats ahead of the November elections.
“For example, pro-Russian Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading allegations of corruption – including publishing leaked phone calls – to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party,” Evanina said.
Derkach denies that he works for the Kremlin.
The anti-Biden content retweeted by Trump ahead of this week’s Democratic National Convention was posted by an account with the name “Walt Kowalski,” the character of Clint Eastwood in the 2008 film “Gran Torino.”
The account was created in September 2019, around the time the anti-Biden disinformation campaign escalated, coinciding with the president’s impeachment inquiry. The account only has a few hundred subscribers, and the user bio section focuses solely on anti-Biden misinformation.
Kremlin connections
Derkach is one of a small group of Ukrainian politicians who in recent months injected themselves into the 2020 US presidential election by posting and promoting alleged soundtracks of Biden. Some of these figures are linked to Kremlin interests or Russian intelligence agencies, according to experts and the intelligence community, which claims to be part of a Russian-backed disinformation campaign.
The tapes focus on Biden’s relationship with Poroshenko, the former Ukrainian president, and they appear genuine. But the material reinforces Biden’s claims that he promoted American interests and did nothing wrong in Ukraine. There is no evidence of wrongdoing on the tapes, and the Biden campaign maintains that the posts are blatant Russian interference against the former vice president.
Trump’s willingness to capitalize on Russian meddling in the 2020 election is a tactic similar to that which Trump’s campaign adopted in 2016, as Trump’s advisers strategized around WikiLeaks disclosures that were facilitated by Russia, according to special advocate Robert Mueller.
Four years ago, the first versions of WikiLeaks arrived on the eve of the Democratic convention in July 2016, and Trump used the stolen emails to ignite divisions within the Democratic Party, tweeting: “The publication of” Wikileaks email today was so bad for Sanders that it will be impossible for him to support it. “Mueller’s investigation later revealed that this intra-party tension was exactly what the Russians hoped to stir up.
The main difference is that this time around the U.S. intelligence community publicly briefed Trump and the world from the start on what the Russians are doing.
Still, some Republicans and right-wing media outlets have embraced the baseless claims of these controversial Ukrainian figures, some of whom, including Derkach, worked closely with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Many of the false narratives promoted by Derkach and others, and now amplified by the president, played a central role in his impeachment process. At that time, Fiona Hill, who was Trump’s main adviser on Russia, testified that some Republicans were promoting a “fictional narrative” concocted by Russian intelligence agencies and thus peddling “politically derived lies. which clearly advance Russian interests ”.
This story was updated with comments from a Twitter spokesperson.
[ad_2]
Source link