Minnesota’s Clark, Castile cases were used in Russian-made Facebook posts

The following article by Libor Jany and Matt DeLong was posted on the StarTribune website May 14, 2018:

Campaign used police shootings of Castile, Clark to deepen Minnesota’s racial divide.

A post decrying the police shooting of Philando Castile was targeted to people within 50 miles of Minneapolis. Credit: House Intelligence Committee

Thousands of newly disclosed fake Facebook posts and ads show for the first time how Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 election directly targeted Minnesotans with divisive, racially charged messages.

Among the scores of often incendiary ads released last week by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, about a dozen referenced Minnesota events, including the police shootings of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile, a Star Tribune analysis shows. Dozens more mentioned controversies elsewhere, but were funneled to Facebook users in Minnesota.

The ads appeared to be part of what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as a sophisticated Russian campaign meant to use the social media giant’s platforms to sow discord in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Continue reading “Minnesota’s Clark, Castile cases were used in Russian-made Facebook posts”

Trump Tries to Shift Blame to Obama for Not Countering Russian Meddling

The following article by Mark Landler was posted on the New York Times website February 20, 2018:

President Trump said his administration was “much tougher” on Russia than the Obama administration, even though in his 13 months in office, he has done little to confront the threat of election interference. Credit: Tom Brenner, The New York Times</em

WASHINGTON — President Trump, who spent months belittling charges that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, has managed to revive questions about how his predecessor, President Barack Obama, handled suspicions about Russia in the months before the election.

Some former Obama officials now confess to misgivings about Mr. Obama’s reluctance to act, or speak out more forcefully, even as the evidence piled up during the spring and summer of 2016 that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee and were behind the leak of damaging emails about Hillary Clinton. Continue reading “Trump Tries to Shift Blame to Obama for Not Countering Russian Meddling”

Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now

The following commentary by Thomas L. Friedman was posted on the New York Times website February 18, 2018:

Credit: Steve Sack, Star Tribune

Our democracy is in serious danger.

President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.

That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs. Continue reading “Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now”

McCain: Nothing ‘America First’ about believing Putin on election meddling

The following article by Josh Delk was posted on the Hill website November 11, 2017:

© Getty Images

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Saturday that there is “nothing ‘America First’ ” about trusting the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin, following President Trump’s meeting with the leader and subsequent comments on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

“There’s nothing ‘America First’ about taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community,” McCain said in a statement, after Trump said he believed Putin when he denied Russia sought to interfere in the election.  Continue reading “McCain: Nothing ‘America First’ about believing Putin on election meddling”