Take a look at what Trump campaign collusion with Russia looks like
The good folks over at The Daily Beast —Betsy Woodruff, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman — found some really interesting tweets on the Twitter timelines of game show host Donald J. Trump and Cryptkeeper look-alike Kellyanne Conway:
Some of the Trump campaign’s most prominent names and supporters, including Trump’s campaign manager, digital director and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign.
The Twitter account @Ten_GOP, which called itself the “Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,” was operated from the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” or Internet Research Agency, a source familiar with the account confirmed with The Daily Beast.
The account’s origins in the Internet Research Agency were originally reported by the independent Russian news outlet RBC. @Ten_GOP was created on November 19, 2015, and accumulated over 100 thousand followers before Twitter shut it down. The Daily Beast independently confirmed the reasons for @Ten_GOP’s account termination.
The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment, “for privacy and security reasons.”
Two days before election day, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted a post by @Ten_GOP regarding Hillary Clinton’s email.
“Mother of jailed sailor: ‘Hold Hillary to same standards as my son on Classified info’ #hillarysemail #WeinerGate” the tweet reads.
Kellyanne might think the coast is clear now that Twitter terminated the account and disappeared the tweets… wait… WHAT? The Interwebs forget nothing (click for full-size version):
And (yes, slightly off-topic) look who else was retweeting professional gremlins from the Kremlin!
The Beast article also reports
Fox News cited @Ten_GOP as its sole example of a “Trump fan” in an article titled “Trump fans call for Kellogg’s boycott after brand pulls Breitbart ads” last December.
Former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, who testified to the Senate
Intelligence Committee on Russian cyberattacks, told The Daily Beast that this is “exactly what I was talking about” in his testimony in March.“If what you said is true, I’d say, ‘My job is done,’” said Watts. “If this account is definitely an [Internet Research Agency] account, it proved Russian Active Measures (like the 2016 propaganda campaign) works, because Americans will use it against other Americans.”
That was also the goal of the Steve Bannon-managed Trump campaign.
Team Trump and Russian faux American Tweeps — comrades of a feather flock (and troll) together.
