Bipartisan Intel. Senators Just Revealed How Russia Hacked The Election
A shocking new development has arisen in the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the Russia hacking scandal. Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) appeared at a press conference today to announce the startling findings.
The Committee has discovered through their investigation that Russia hired 1000 people to write fake news stories aimed at attacking Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The news was targeted against key states in the election.
Warner said in a statement:
We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports – and we’ve got to get to the bottom of this – that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas.
It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.
An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hi-jack the most critical democratic process, the election of a President, and in that process, decided to favor one candidate over another.
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were all key states that narrowly fell to Donald Trump. The committee will begin to examine whether Trump’s campaign team coordinated with the Russians in these states using this method of propaganda.
The senators suggested that the committee had already spoken to disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Both senators were also keen to portray unity in the investigation to stave off reports of infighting along party lines.
This finding will confirm the suspicions of many Americans that Russia influenced the election in some way. A recent CBS poll showed that 57 percent of Americans believe that Russia interfered in some way.
New Yorker journalist Adam Chen has been investigating this phenomenon for a while and claimed that during the election and in the weeks and months afterward a significant number of Russian trolls were churning out pro-Trump propaganda on Twitter and elsewhere:
I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff.
Alt-right memes, fake news articles, and blatant pro-Trump propaganda were an integral part of the Trump campaign’s online strategy. By creating small tidbits of fake news and spreading them across the internet they reached millions of voters, who would then see the same stories elsewhere and begin believing they were true.
If it turns out that these efforts were financed and led by the Russian Government then we will finally have real proof that Russia did in fact influence the election in favor of Trump.
