“Russian influence operations are a joke,” says former Intercept writer Ken Klippenstein. The Justice Department task force that’s supposed to root out foreign interference in U.S. elections “at no point claimed that Moscow’s efforts have had any impact on the election. Ever.”
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In the 1940s and early ’50s, the CIA was pretty good at election meddling. When Communists looked like they were going to win the I948 Italian election, the CIA went to work in earnest to tilt the election against them. The spooks took measures that “ranged from covert financial support to public statements by U.S. officials, linking American economic aid to an electoral defeat of the Popular Front [Communists],” according to the Wilson Center.
The CIA also interfered in elections in Brazil, Venezuela, Honduras, and Nicaragua, among other interventions in Latin America. The methods used varied from actual ballot-box stuffing to intimidation campaigns against the socialist opposition. The CIA got pretty good at swinging elections.
Comparatively, the Russians are clowns.
The Justice Department just made a couple of arrests in what they claim was a “Russian influence campaign.”
“Many of the videos published by U.S. Company-I contain commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy,” the feds claim in the indictment. “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”
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How widespread was this “influence” operation, and who was targeted?
Based on details in the indictment, Company-1 has been identified as Tenet Media (since shuttered), which managed a stable of right-wing pundits including Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Taylor Hansen, Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson. The company promoted, the indictment says, “nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.”
Very nefarious, right? Well, maybe not. While Tenet founder Lauren Chen has gone quiet and lost her gig with Blaze TV and channels on YouTube, Tenet’s contributors seem baffled by the whole thing.
“The Culture War Podcast was licensed by Tenet Media, it existed well before any license agreement with Tenet and it will continue to exist after any such agreement expires,” insists Tim Pool. “Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show.”
Benny Johnson also says, “I am the only person who ever had editorial control of my program.”
The Justice Department claims the hosts were duped by Russian propaganda. What’s more, the product of this “disinformation” would influence the 2024 election.
The indictment specified that the defendants “have deployed nearly $10 million, laundered through a network of foreign shell entities, to covertly fund and direct U.S. Company-I [which] publishes English-language videos on multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube.” The indictment also claimed that there were more than 2,000 of the videos on YouTube.
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So the Russians spent $10 million and got 2,000 YouTube videos seen by 16 million people for their rubles. About 140 million people will vote in the 2024 election, and the candidates will spend upwards of $1.5 billion.
The Justice Department’s job is to keep foreigners from influencing our elections, no matter how insignificant that interference is. So why is the left getting their panties in a twist about Russians influencing the election?
The bottom line is that they think you’re too stupid to think for yourself and weed out Russian disinformation (which is mostly painfully obvious) from actual news and opinion. Only the left, with their superior (to you) intellect and keen insight, can tell the difference between disinformation and reality.
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Klippenstein notes that Michael van Landingham, a former CIA analyst who authored the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, shares his skepticism about the success of Russian influence operations.
Van Landingham raises an interesting point you won’t find in the tsunami of hysterical media coverage — that Moscow sees such theatrics from the Justice Department as an affirmation that their influence campaigns must be working.
That’s the basic problem. High-profile responses to foreign influence operations create the aura that Russia and other countries are having an impact on American public opinion, that their operations are working. The paradox of the government’s very public obsession with election security is that the more attention paid to these supposed threats, the more likely people are to question the legitimacy of the outcome. In fact, this is an effect foreign adversaries undertaking influence operations hope for.
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How do the Justice Department, the left, and the Biden-Harris administration feel about doing the Russians’ bidding?