Back In The USSR Timeline Part 24 — Russian Hacking, Spying and Manipulation
Russia successfully attacked the 2016 election by hacking information and manipulating social media. They have been undermining our electoral system since 2014, possibly sooner. They got lucky with Trump. They were able to take their operation that was already well underway and use the Trump campaign as the vehicle for their plan. Russia hacked information about Hillary and her campaign and gave that stolen information to WikiLeaks who turned it over to Trump’s campaign. Russia bought ads and created fake social media accounts to support Trump’s campaign and smear Hillary. Trump’s campaign retweeted Russian tweets and shared Russian posts. They knew when WikiLeaks dumps were coming and coordinated their campaign around them. Robert Mueller called it Information Warfare — Russia attacked us.
Hacking
On the first day of the Democratic National Convention, the DNC found out that Russia had hacked their emails. They released some. They hacked the RNC too, but never released anything. That started the ball rolling with the Russians having the Republicans by the balls. They had dirt on a bunch of them. On top of that, they had them by the short hairs because they had given them rubles. Lots and lots of rubles.
Among the Republicans who were personally hacked was Lindsey Graham……..
It is known that the Russians started hacking the US back in 2015 but most likely it was as far back as 2012. Their mission was to attack US voting systems to benefit Russia. Republicans knew it. They wanted Trump to win because he’s such an idiot and could be tricked in to doing just about anything. He has been in debt to Russia for decades so he owes them big time plus they have been spying on him for decades and have all kinds of dirt on him. Bribing Trump is a breeze.
Nobody could believe Trump won. Not even Trump. He never wanted to win. He just wanted all of the attention and publicity to increase his brand value.
Obama put sanctions on Russia for interfering with the election. Mike Flynn called Russia to tell them not to worry because Trump had their back. Hours later Trump congratulated Putin on his “good move” in a tweet.
Once he became president, Trump never acknowledged that Russia hacked America. He blamed the Democrats for getting hacked and bragged that the Republicans were better equipped to fend off hackers (nobody knows for sure that it was Russia — it could have been anybody — it could have been Ukraine or a some fat guy living in his mom’s basement.) “We had much better defenses. I think the DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked.”
At first the Republicans down played the hacking of the DNC. Then they tried to blame it on Ukraine. The media didn’t refer to the hacking as an attack, they called it “meddling” as if it was something harmless and mischievous.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told everybody that Trump brought up accusations of Russian hacking when they met behind closed doors in the Oval Office. They both agreed that Russia and the US would work together to find out who did it by setting up a joint working group on cyber security. That’s how stupid Trump is.
After the Mueller Report, Trump campaign officials tried to pin the 2016 DNC hack on Ukraine instead of Russia. Rudy tried to get Ukraine to say that they hacked the DNC. US senators were briefed about it but instead of doing anything about it, Republicans started using Putin’s talking points.
Trump eventually called the hack a Democratic hoax. When Russia hacked the 2020 election he called that a hoax, too.
The cyber attack on the US by Russia was an act of war.
It wasn’t Ukraine, it was Russia. And they didn’t “meddle,” they invaded. The president aided and abetted the enemy by denying it ever happened. That’s treason and according to the Constitution, it is punishable by death.
The Russians didn’t just hack emails. They tried hacking into voting machines too. They infiltrated 39 out of 50 state voting systems. They hacked state databases, affecting 500,000 voters. 70,000 votes threw the electoral college to Trump. Before that, Trump only had a 25% chance of winning.
Russian hackers attacked conservative US think tanks, hospitals, a dozen power plants, and the US Treasury and Commerce Department. Trump made it easier for them by firing Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They were invited in.
Spying
Two weeks after the inauguration, Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General, went to the White House to tell Trump that Mike Flynn was a Russian spy. He fired her.
Meanwhile in Russia, Russian state TV broadcasted that Russian communications facilities had been installed in the White House and were tested by US specialists. “The direct line of Washington-Moscow is carried out with the help of Russian means of communication, which are installed in the official residence of the US President.” They also called Trump a Moscow agent and joked about him needing to flee the country after leaving office.
It was easy to spy on Trump. Russia and China both did it. They tapped his phone — his PERSONAL phone that he was on all the time. He refused to use the government issued phone that was protected. He was warned over and over again that his cellphone was a huge security threat but he didn’t care.
Trump tweeted: The New York Times has a new Fake Story that now the Russians and Chinese (glad they finally added China) are listening to all of my calls on cellphones. Except that I rarely use a cellphone, & when I do it’s government authorized. I like Hard Lines. Just more made up Fake News!” So now what? Is he claiming to be the first to tweet from a landline?
There were 150 Russian spies operating inside America during the Trump administration and they all got visas without any problems because Trump never punished Russia for attacking us.
Elena Branson was a Russian spy who ran a Russian cultural center in New York. She used the Russian heritage social group known as “KSORS” to get and distribute information much like Maria Butina did with the NRA. The group passed out Russian propaganda as psychological warfare. She arranged for fraudulent visas and put Russians together with Republicans. She did it for 10 years without ever registering with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) which requires that agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities register with the DOJ and report regularly on what they do. She fled to Russia in October of 2020 and won’t be coming back.
Manipulation
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie admitted to coming up with the idea to harvest the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target and manipulate the US electorate for Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm and Russian intelligence source created by Steve Bannon and funded by the billionaire and Republican donor, Robert Mercer. The idea was to use Facebook data and social media as a military methodology to get people to vote for Trump. They also duped people into giving up personal information by inviting them to take personality surveys. As a result, 50 million people, mostly swing voters and gullible idiots, saw fake news show up in their newsfeeds and believed it.
The Russians created fake Facebook groups to organize protests and rallies. Politicians would unwittingly share their posts on Facebook and Twitter. During the 2016 election, Facebook had 470 Russian controlled accounts that made 80,000 posts, and 126 million people saw them. Instagram had 170 Russian accounts that posted 120,000 times. Twitter had 3,814 Russian accounts with a reach of 1.4 million.
The Russians also bought a ton of social media ads.
The Russians created fake accounts for Black Lives Matters, Muslims, immigrant haters, etc, as well as pages for fake people whose views and posts gathered hundreds of thousands of followers who shared their content which got people so worked up they’d start fighting with each other online. Right wing media had a strong hold on Republican voters so all they needed to do was amplify their lies. What they really needed to do was divide Democrats to tear votes away from Hilary so Trump would win. They started #walkaway and #abolishice to get liberals fighting with each other. One of the accounts favored Bernie Sanders to get his voters to hate Hillary. They wanted Bernie to win the Democratic primary because they thought Trump could beat him because the Republicans would spin him as a dangerous socialist.
In October of 2021 whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress that Facebook designs it algorithms around hate to get the most engagement. It amplifies misinformation which foreign adversaries use to exploit and brainwash millions of people to get them to hate each other and believe out-right lies.
Facebook accepted money from Russia to run fake ads to influence people to vote for Trump and hate on Hillary. Accepting foreign money to influence an election is a crime.
