Russian To Judgment, Con't

I love how Trump supporters are acting like the entire Russian disinformation campaign over the last five years was somehow a ghost story when the evidence is overwhelming (and I've documented a hell of a lot of it on this very blog) and the fact that the Russians are currently trying to use the Trump regime to spread disinformation against Joe Biden right now, as we speak, through Rudy Giuliani and his ridiculous Russian handlers.

US authorities are investigating whether recently published emails that purport to detail the business dealings of Joe Biden's son in Ukraine and China are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort targeting the former vice president's campaign, a US official and a congressional source briefed on the matter said. 

The conservative-leaning New York Post claimed in a series of articles this week that it obtained "smoking-gun" emails about Hunter Biden and his dealings in Ukraine. CNN has not determined the authenticity of the emails. 

President Donald Trump and his allies have used this topic to smear the Bidens over the past year and seized on the recent articles to attack Biden in the final weeks of the presidential election. The specific new allegations touch on the same topics as the Kremlin's ongoing disinformation campaign against the Bidens, which the US intelligence community said this summer was intended to weaken Biden's candidacy against Trump. 

The FBI is leading the investigation, the official and congressional source said. NBC was first to report the inquiry. 

The probe is part of a larger investigation into Russian disinformation that dates back to before the impeachment inquiry last fall. The alleged disinformation campaign is aimed at tying the former vice president to his son's dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, according to US officials familiar with the matter. 

The New York Post says it obtained the emails through two Trump confidants: His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. 

Giuliani has openly coordinated with a known Russian agent to promote disinformation about the Bidens. The Washington Post reported Thursday the White House, and Trump personally, were warned in 2019 that Giuliani "was being used to feed Russian misinformation" to the President. Separately, Bannon was recently charged by the Justice Department with orchestrating a million-dollar fraud scheme and accused of deceiving thousands of donors to his nonprofit. 

In a Fox News interview Friday, Giuliani said Trump never mentioned the warning to him and that he hasn't been told by US intelligence officials that he is peddling Russian disinformation. 

Several experts on foreign disinformation quickly warned that there were major red flags about the articles published by the New York Post, including Giuliani's involvement, the changing stories about how the emails were obtained, and the digital metadata of images posted by the newspaper. 

The US government announced last month that one of Giuliani's Ukrainian allies is an "active Russian agent" who has targeted Western media with "false and unsubstantiated narratives" about alleged "corruption" by the Bidens. 

Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps Wednesday to slow the spread of the articles, triggering a wave of outrage from Trump and Republicans.

 

Like I said, by my count this is post two-hundred sixty one of the Russian To Judgment series of posts since July 2016, and I expect I'll be continuing to write about the subject for some time to come. We're going to be dealing with the fallout from having the Russians completely compromise the US government over the last four years (and in some cases, far longer, thanks Ed Snowden!) for decades to come.