PREZ RIPS FOCUS OF ‘FAKE MEDIA’
Notes Russia group preceded his run
President Trump took to Twitter yesterday to slam the way the “Fake News Media” has covered the indictment Friday of 13 Russians accused of disrupting the 2016 presidential election and blast reporters for failing to focus on the fact that the group formed long before he decided to run for the Oval Office.
“Funny how the Fake News Media doesn’t want to say that the Russian group was formed in 2014, long before my run for President,” Trump wrote yesterday afternoon. “Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I didn’t know!”
Trump also tweeted a comment Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made during a press conference announcing the charges, “There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.”
Trump, who quickly claimed vindication after special counsel Robert Mueller accused 13 Russian nationals and three organizations of taking part in a wideranging social media propaganda campaign aimed at helping him defeat his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, also shared tweets from Facebook’s vice president of ads.
“The Fake News Media never fails. Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!” Trump wrote in a post that included a link to Goldman’s tweet, which read, “The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Trump and the election.”
In a statement Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was “glad to see the special counsel’s investigation further indicates — that there were NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia,” though the indictment didn’t ultimately resolve the collusion question.
U.S. intelligence agencies have previously said the Russian government interfered to benefit Trump, including by orchestrating the hacking of Democratic emails, and Mueller has been assessing whether the campaign coordinated with the Kremlin. The latest indictment doesn’t focus on the hacking but instead centers on a social media propaganda effort that began in 2014 and continued past the election, with the goal of producing distrust in the American political process.
Investigators say the campaign was organized by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm that the indictment says sought to conduct “information warfare against the United States of America.” The company, among three Russian entities named in the indictment, had a multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of workers divided by specialties and assigned to day and night shifts. According to prosecutors, the company was funded by companies controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the wealthy Russian who has been dubbed “Putin’s chef ” because his restaurants and catering businesses have hosted the Kremlin leader’s dinners with foreign dignitaries.