Russia planted story about Bible burning in U.S.
WASHINGTON
For some of President Donald Trump’s loudest cheerleaders, it was a story too good to check out: Black Lives Matters protesters in Portland, Oregon, had burned a stack of Bibles, and then topped off the fire with American flags. There was even a video to prove it.
The story was a nearperfect fit for a central Trump campaign talking point — that with liberals and Democrats comes godless disorder — and it went viral among Republicans within hours of appearing this month. The New York Post wrote about it, as did The Federalist, saying that the protesters had shown “their true colors.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said of the protesters, “This is who they are.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted that antifa had moved to “the book burning phase.”
The truth was far more mundane. A few protesters among the many thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second — for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.
Yet in the rush to paint all the protesters as Bibleburning zealots, few of the politicians or commentators who weighed in on the incident took the time to look into the story’s veracity, or to figure out that it had originated with a Kremlin-backed video news agency. And now, days later, the Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign.
With Election Day drawing closer, the Russian efforts to influence the vote appear to be well underway. U.S. intelligence officials said last week that Russia was using various techniques to denigrate Democrats and their presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden. And late last month, intelligence officials briefed Congress on Russian efforts — both covert and overt — to stoke anger over the nationwide racial-justice protests.
Russian officials have aggressively sought to refute the allegations. But U.S. officials are growing increasingly confident in their assessment and say the Russian tactics are evolving. Moscow, they say, has shifted away from the fake social-media accounts and bots used by the Internet Research Agency and other groups to amplify false articles before the 2016 vote. Instead, the Russians are relying increasingly on Englishlanguage news sites to push out incendiary stories that can be picked up and spread by Americans, many of whom have proved as eager as foreign powers to stoke partisan divisions inside the United States.
The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering. Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.