Officials want action on Russian trolls’ meddling
Walker, Baldwin, others call for federal response
Bipartisan leaders from former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker called Friday for a federal response to news that Russian Twitter trolls sought to stoke racial division in the wake of the August 2016 unrest in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Thursday that Russia-linked accounts got thousands of retweets for their racially charged posts made only hours after the chaos in the Sherman Park neighborhood and less than three months before the 2016 presidential election won by President Donald Trump.
After a Madison campaign visit Friday on behalf of state Supreme Court candidate Rebecca Dallet, Holder said Congress should hold hearings on the Russian interference in Milwaukee and said the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office should investigate, as well.
“If you have the connection between that kind of effort and a foreign government, yeah, that’s the basis for a federal investigation,” said Holder, who served under President Barack Obama. “I think it’s incumbent upon people both at the
state level and the federal level to hold hearings, to find exactly who was behind that and what was the impact of that effort.”
Walker spokeswoman Amy Hasenberg said that the Republican governor also wants a federal review.
“We believe it is outrageous that any foreign interests would try to cause disruption in our communities and hope the federal government will spend time looking into this interference,” Hasenberg said.
The Journal Sentinel found Russian-linked Twitter accounts also sought to help the Trump campaign in Wisconsin and a primary challenger to U.S. Speaker Paul Ryan, a Janesville Republican.
The trolls tried to pit Americans against one another. After a police shooting in Milwaukee, a fake conservative account tweeted out a false rumor that black activists were planning attacks while a fake liberal account used an Ohio police shooting to spread a false report that the suspect had been shot in the back.
The meddling in Wisconsin included many of the tactics and one of the Twitter accounts that were detailed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment last month of 13 Russian nationals for election interference. A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Matthew Krueger in Milwaukee declined comment on any potential review.
State Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee), who lives in Sherman Park, said she’s furious about the meddling and wants more federal action to ensure her community is protected.
“We were trying to help keep the peace in the community ... while these fools were sowing seeds of racism and hatred,” Johnson said of the Russian-linked accounts. “Now we’re talking two years later and we’re still vulnerable to these tactics.”
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in a statement that Russian President Vladimir Putin “directed an attack on our democracy.” She said Congress should pass legislation to offer federal cyber-security grants to state election agencies.
“This cannot be dismissed or ignored,” Baldwin said. “It’s time for the president and Congress to act on legislation that I support to combat this foreign interference in our elections.”
On Thursday, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on some of the Russian nationals named in the Mueller indictment, making the first use of a new law intended to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election campaign. The sanctions aren’t expected to hurt the overall Russian economy but have symbolic importance since the Trump administration is acknowledging the Russian interference.
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, has not held hearings on that meddling. Spokesman Ben Voelkel said Friday that Johnson believes the Senate Intelligence Committee is better placed to look into the issue.
The Democratic members of Johnson’s committee have disagreed, arguing in a February 2017 letter to him that hearings by their panel would help ensure the federal Department of Homeland Security provided states with appropriate cyber-security help.
Voelkel said Johnson was attending to a family funeral Friday and unable to comment on the Milwaukee findings but pointed out Johnson’s statements to the Journal Sentinel last year that Putin is a “menace who needs to be handled with a great deal of strength and resolve.”
State Attorney General Brad Schimel, a Republican, has not responded to requests for comment.
For its Thursday report, the Journal Sentinel used an NBC News database of tweets made by accounts with ties to the Russian Internet Research Agency, a shadowy St. Petersburg group targeted by Mueller.
One Russian Twitter account in Mueller’s indictment, @TEN_GOP, billed itself as “Tennessee GOP,” leading some to mistake it for that state’s official Republican Party.
The Tennessee GOP account was active in the hours after an Aug. 13, 2016, police shooting in Milwaukee that led to unrest, fires and gunshots in the Sherman Park neighborhood. The account tweeted, for instance, that Black Lives Matter activists were posting about murdering National Guard troops, even though troops were never actually deployed to Milwaukee.
After a police shooting in Milwaukee, a fake conservative account tweeted out a false rumor that black activists were planning attacks ...
“This cannot be dismissed or ignored. It’s time for the president and Congress to act on legislation that I support to combat this foreign interference in our elections.”
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.)
“We were trying to help keep the peace in the community ... while these fools were sowing seeds of racism and hatred. Now we’re talking two years later and we’re still vulnerable to these tactics.”
State Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee)
After the Milwaukee shooting, the @TEN_GOP account also tweeted a quote made the previous month by former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr.
“Sheriff Clarke: ‘Obama’s Set This Whole Country on Fire With His Race Politics’ #Milwaukee,” the post reads. Tennessee GOP tweeted this same phrase with different hashtags in reference to three separate September 2016 police shootings in Oklahoma, Ohio and North Carolina.
After the Sept. 14, 2016, shooting of Columbus, Ohio, teenager Tyre King, @TEN_GOP tweeted out support for police and criticism for “racist” Black Lives Matter activists.
But another Russian-linked account, @BleepThePolice, tweeted that King’s autopsy proved he was “SHOT IN THE BACK 3 times.” In fact, The Columbus Dispatch later reported that the autopsy showed that he was shot in the left temple, upper left chest and upper left abdomen.
LaTonya Johnson, the state senator from Milwaukee, said she was worried that Russian accounts will disrupt other communities affected by police shootings.
“It’s like when we were at our lowest point, these evildoers were at their highest,” Johnson said. “It’s unacceptable and it’s a damn shame.”