Wikileaks, Trump get punk’d: ‘Blumenthal’ turns out to be Kurt Eichenwald
Well, this is embarrassing. Yesterday, the right wing blogosphere and even Donald Trump himself – at last night’s rally in Wilkes-Barre, PA – went bonkers over a new Wikileaks revelation, involving an e-mail to Clinton concerning ‘Benghazi!!1!’, supposedly written by Sidney Blumenthal, who seems as big a bogeyman to the conspiracy-obsessed right as George Soros.
Turns out the message wasn’t from Sidney, as Newsweek‘s Kurt Eichenwald explains:
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I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe. And that should raise concerns not only about Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election, but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.
An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.
The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya. …
The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.
A big question remains:
This might be seen as just an opportunity to laugh at the incompetence of the Russian hackers and government press—once they realized their error, Sputnik took the article down. But then things got even more bizarre.
This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?
Lemme see… could it be… Steve “Shirley Sherrod” Bannon?
Team Trump needs to explain.
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