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“I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”—Fmr President Jimmy Carter, June 28, 2019
It should have mattered that a former United States president believed that Donald Trump lost the 2016 election. Jimmy Carter stated that a full investigation would reveal Trump “was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
His statement should have mattered. Instead of pounding that point repeatedly home - that Russia successfully attacked the US - we got culture wars. We got Kellyanne Conway, “alternative facts,” hate against transgender people and those who bent knees to oppose racial injustice.
We got anything but justice.
America was attacked by the Russian military on multiple fronts to influence the outcome of a US presidential election, and we just moved on.
And here we are, a decade later, behaving as violent and corrupt “West Russia,” a prediction I made in 2024, in the hopes I would be wrong.
As UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirms Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, I feel compelled to review my reporting from the last decade, because I know there will come a moment where Americans will finally acknowledge collectively that Russia waged war on us in 2016, exploiting our vulnerabilities and delivering us a Kremlin proxy as they have done in so many other countries. We were not unique. Just a bigger prize.
In my 2016 Election Attack Series: The Greatest Crime In American History, Parts 1 - 5, I began Part 1 with a deep dive into the remains of Twitter 2016, looking for forensic evidence to show how the attack on the US was delivered through social media.
What I found went beyond US borders, delivering me right back to Brexit.
Here is a excerpt from Part 1, written on 6 January 2024, four years after the Insurrection:
The Crime Scene
Twitter 2016 is a crime scene. The chalk outline around the decaying corpse is an ominous warning — metaphorical yellow tape serves as an attempt to keep people out. But I go in — probing the bombed out traces of memetic warfare. And navigating my way between the mounds of deleted tweets and suspended accounts, I forensically piece together the carcass of 2016 — an election stolen by Kremlin-sponsored attacks facilitated by misogynistic white nationalists — superspreaders of GRU lies.
I start pulling at threads, one at a time, because criminal propagandists reveal their crimes through projection. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones’ InfoWars, Dinesh D’Souza, Don Jr. and Glenn Greenwald are each defending Douglass Mackey, a convicted felon just sentenced to seven-months in prison for his role in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election. He targeted people of color to vote for Hillary Clinton with ‘vote by text’ memes — and thousands of people contacted the line.
Voting by text isn’t a thing, but election interference is.
According to the FBI, Douglass Mackey, who went by the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn” in multiple accounts, was previously convicted of the charge of Conspiracy Against Rights at trial by a federal jury in Brooklyn.
I had reported on Douglass Mackey, superspreader of Russian-intelligence lies during the run up to the 2016 election and beyond. In threads and investigations, I noted how he was a prolific tweeter of GRU propaganda from Prigozhin’s troll farm, and he wasn’t alone — Mike Flynn and Don Jr. also tweeted Russian state-sponsored lies from the St. Petersburg operation — Ten_GOP.
But the cabal of Russian fanboys simping for Mackey is a loud confession. They are trying to make the MAGA cult members believe that Mackey is going to prison for making Hillary memes.
Number one, that shows an overt downplaying of memetic warfare — trolling is a cheap way to destroy people and countries.
It’s guerrilla warfare in cyberspace and memes are the weapons.
Number two, why are they so worried? What are they trying to hide?
And here is a data point about Brexit:
According to court documents, Mackey was told to style a ‘vote by text’ meme after one created for Brexit to encourage those who wanted to remain in the EU to vote for the referendum by posting on Facebook or Twitter. I could smell that as a Russian psyop from a mile away, and sure enough, the origin story begins in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In a Brexit post-mortem, researchers found more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted tens of thousands of messages in English to leave the European Union in the days before the referendum. These tools of the Kremlin were turned over to Congressional investigators, and here is an example from the Russia-state sponsored operation targeting US voters:
‘We see this really clear line between Brexit, Trump, and Russia’
Now that PM Burnham has confirmed Russia’s attack on the UK, NAFO founding member Matthew Pearce told Bette Dangerous: “Publicly acknowledging Russia’s role in Brexit allows us to start to understand what they have done and are doing and sharing that information with other governments under attack by Russia and Iran.”
Critically, investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr is revisiting and sharing her archives.
This morning, she posted:
“It’s not just the government that covered up Russian interference in Brexit. The press also played its part. This is one of the only times I was ever interviewed on the subject... by US media.”
She then posted a clip of her 2022 CNN interview from 11 March, where she was asked “for the first time ever - about Brexit-Trump-Russia.”
Here is her response:
Reporter: Is there a connection between Russian influence, not just on social media, but trying to influence the direction of that vote in the UK?
Carole Cadwalladr: It’s become such a contested issue in Britai, that you can’t even have a discussion around this in public. It became such a contested political issue that ‘Brexit must be done at all costs’, and that made us blind to the bigger political, geopolitical forces which are going on.
I began investigating this subject in November 2016. And we broke the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. But all the way through this reporting, we see this really clear line between Brexit, Trump, and Russia. And there is a triangulation there. There is a straight and clear line, through multiple individuals and organizations, and via the tech platforms.
In Britain, we see our politics through this very narrow lens of what’s going on in Westminster, in Parliament. And I think the same happens in America too. The Mueller Report got bogged down into this question of, ‘did Trump collude with Russia?’ And actually, the big takeaway from the Mueller Report should have been, ‘Russia attacked America. It successfully attacked America. This was a military attack, and it got away with it. And that same attack was across the information systems which we all use.
And in that year 2016, they were completely unprotected, and that is where in Britain, we’ve been blind to waking up to that. You’ve had this massive investigation by the FBI, and these congressional committees. In Britain, we have had not one single investigation. There was one report, and Boris Johnson personally tried to suppress that, the so-called Russia Report. And MPs stood up and said, ‘We don’t know if there was any evidence of Russian interference, because nobody looked. The intelligence services were told not to look.’
So we are in a terrible, terrible position in this country, in that these vital questions of national security have been interpreted as ones of politics, and it’s not about politics at all. It’s about power, and it’s about Putin.—Carole Cadwalladr, on CNN, 11 March 2022
… It’s about power, and it’s about Putin…
I have been calling it a Russian military attack since 9 November 2016, when the St. Petersburg trolls slept in, and Twitter was quiet and calm.
But it’s important for Americans to hear it from a reporter further over the waves:
“The big takeaway from the Mueller Report should have been, ‘Russia attacked America. It successfully attacked America. This was a military attack, and it got away with it.”—Carole Cadwalladr
And Byline Times co-founder Peter Jukes is also taking his much deserved victory lap, posting this cover story from his work with Carole in 2018:
It’s a fascinating week of developments in awareness-raising on Russia’s 2016 military attacks on the West, which were duplicated in France for the 2017 election. French media had the sense to ignore the attacks on Macron, and he emerged the winner.
It is my prayer that these critical new developments will not get overshadowed by more culture wars, or black swan events, or whatever violent, deviant actions the Putin-Trump-Techligarchs may be plotting.
It is a very big deal that a UK Prime Minister not only confirms Russia interfered with the Brexit referendum, but that he also formed a new UK agency to fight information warfare. With the National Centre for Information Defence, Burnham wants to stem the “poisonous tide” of disinformation and deepfakes.
According to a recent Guardian report:
Burnham said the country would have to go into the next decade “eyes wide open” about “insidious” campaigns, many of which had been orchestrated by Russia, which “twisted” what people at home felt about their own country and community.
In eye-catching remarks, the prime minister suggested that Britons who were struggling with the cost of living and young people not in education, training or employment may be particularly susceptible to foreign influence online, underlining how inequality further undermined society.
Both of Burnham’s recent moves - to admit Russian attacks and to then do something about it - are actions my colleagues and I begged Joe Biden to take during his tenure. It could have made all the difference.
I often post a meme of Russian generals standing in a data center filled with phones. It is clear that Russia and its patron China are quite good at manipulating the minds of the West through social media.
So as further evidence of Ukraine fighting not only for its own sovereignty but for the remaining free world, the Ukrainian military has forced Yandex to pause its operations on Sunday at a data center in Moscow after drone strikes. It’s the third attack on the company, often referred to as “Russia’s Google.”
An interesting side effect to the attacks on Russian data centers: evidence of a significant reduction in Russian bot traffic impersonating Western accounts?
As security researcher Jeremy Fowler queried:
According to Cloudflare Data Explorer the amount of Russian bot traffic has dropped to 49% after Ukraine struck a Yandex data center. Could this disrupt the midterm elections in the US?
For a decade, we have asked the wrong question.
Both in the UK and the US, we asked: “Did Russian interference affect the outcome of the election?”
The question should have been: “Why did we not respond to what was clearly an act of war?”
I knew something had gone terribly wrong a decade ago, and I am among the investigative reporters to have offered my services to gather and present the evidence.
In 2017, I wrote a petition signed by hundreds of people throughout the world to force the Trump 2016 campaign, Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica to reveal the dark ads used to target Americans to promote Donald Trump and suppress the vote against Hillary Clinton. According to people within the Trump campaign, the ads were designed to suppress the vote against Hillary Clinton in communities of color and at millennials and in rural areas. I wanted to see the overlap between the memes created by the Internet Research Agency out of Russia. I knew if we could see all the ads we could compare them to the Russian subversion operation in St. Petersburg, and we would find crossover. The Trump campaign was retweeting Russian propaganda accounts. Mike Flynn and his son were retweeting Russian propaganda accounts. We deserved to know the truth.
The truth was being subverted. Hillary Clinton was the first politician who was virtually assassinated. We needed to gather the evidence. I believe it was all a Russian military operation-collaboration with key American billionaires, which I later proved in my 2016 Election Attack series.
I knew when I wrote that 2017 MoveOn petition that we were the target nation of a Russian military attack that resulted in an illegitimate presidency.
That petition from spring of 2017 reads like a Mark Twain manifesto, and among the hundreds of signatures, a man from the UK posted this note:
“This is about transparency in democracy, political integrity and the future direction of our world and society. A political electoral system that is maintained by lies and misinformation to retain power without having the courage to stand up to scrutiny regarding its claims is an abhorrence which must be nipped in the bud. You have here an opportunity to make a stand for ethics and a set of values in defence of a non totalitarian or repressive regime. You have this power at this juncture. Please use it wisely as eventually your decision will be judged by history as long as we are still permitted to think for ourselves.”
Those powerful words still resonate today. I became allies with that gentleman. He was the first person who told me the same thing had happened in the UK with Brexit. A subversion operation, same players involved.
He was the first to introduce me to Carole Cadwalladr, who famously wrote on 13 July 2018:
“Polite reminder: Trump & Brexit are not 2 different things. They are the same thing. Same companies. Same data. Same Facebook. Same Russians. Same Cambridge Analytica. Same Robert Mercer. Same Steve Bannon. Same Breitbart. Same Alexander Nix. Same Donald Trump. Same Nigel Farage.”
I was just months away from understanding that Putin was trying to break up NATO by subverting global democracies, forcing us to destroy our countries for him. I began to document how our freedoms were exploited by a country with no freedom.
I am happy to report through my work at Byline Times, I had the honor of meeting Carole Cadwalladr and Andy Burnham in the same weekend.
The future does not have to be dark.
Putin and Trump will work hard to keep the cameras on them, and through their proxies, they want you to believe the world is all violence, darkness, and shadows.
They don’t want you to look at what Andy Burnham is doing.
They don’t want you to remember that Elon Musk is under investigation in France, and that Paris authorities raided X headquarters.
They don’t want you to hear the Pope’s pleas for moral clarity.
And they absolutely do not want you to know that a former leader is about to stand trial in The Hague at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Just this week, Rodrigo Duterte was once again found fit to stand trial, which begins 30 November, despite Trump accelerating attempts to destroy the ICC. As I note in this report, Trump’s boat killings parallel Duterte’s murders in his so-called war on drugs.
The important thing is we have leaders who are offering truth and moral clarity.
We have one emerging in the UK, we have one in the Vatican, we see the bravery in the ICC and Estonia, and we have myriad women leaders from Europe who are effectively the true leaders of the free world.
We do not have to accept the algorithms telling us to fear, or listen to the influencers, bots, and trolls ginning up ancient hatreds so we ignore the criminal billionaires stealing everything from our world — money, resources, dignity, empathy.
Here’s to the bombing of more Russian data centers and a demand for the immediate liberation of our minds.
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