Trump reiterates Russian propaganda about Biden

By Zachary Cohen and Marshall Cohen | CNN

President Donald Trump on Sunday night retweeted Russian propaganda about former Vice President Joe Biden that the U.S. intelligence community recently announced was part of Moscow’s ongoing effort to “denigrate” the Democrat for the November election.

Last Sunday, Trump amplified a tweet containing audiotapes of a 2016 conversation between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko – material released earlier this year by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker named by the U.S. intelligence community in its August 7 statement on Russia’s disinformation campaign against Biden. U.S. authorities label Derkach’s efforts as disinformation because they were deliberately designed to spread false or misleading information about Biden.

By retweeting material that the US government has already cited as propaganda – and doing so with the Democratic National Convention of Monday from 2020 – Trump once again proved that he is ready to capitalize in foreign elections through his own political gain.

There is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Biden and Poroshenko. But Trump and his allies, as well as Kremlin-controlled media, have used the tapes to endure conspiracies over Biden’s dealings with Ukraine.

‘A willing mouthpiece’

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, responded to Trump’s retweet Monday by calling on the president to step up Russian disinformation.

“The president of the United States should never be a willing mouthpiece for Russian propaganda,” Warner wrote in a tweet of his own.

Trump’s amplification of this disinformation comes as Biden is set to accept the Democratic presidential nomination this week, and it poses a major challenge to U.S. officials and national security officials tasked with protecting the 2020 election from foreign interference. .

Although relevant US agencies have adopted a very governmental approach, opposing foreign disinformation and trying to inform the American public about such efforts, there does not seem to be a plan to tackle false information that comes from ‘ the president himself.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions about the president’s tweets to the White House. The White House responded to CNN’s request for comment by direct requests to the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign has not responded to CNN’s request.

After this story was published, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN in a statement that Trump “used to attack the sovereignty of the US election” and said that the president “has shown his true colors once again” by retweeting Russian propaganda .

Top U.S. intelligence officials, however, made it clear in the August 7 statement on interference in foreign elections that Derkach was part of Russia’s disinformation campaign aimed at undermining Biden’s candidacy.

“We believe that Russia is using a variety of measures to first denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russian establishment. This is in line with Moscow’s public criticism of him when he was vice-president for his role in the Obama administration’s policy on Ukraine and its support for the anti-Putin opposition in Russia, ”William R Evanina, director of the National Center for Security and Safety Services, said in a statement earlier this month when updating the landscape for election threats in the November election.

“For example, pro-Russia Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach is spreading allegations of corruption – including through the disclosure of leaked phone calls – to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party,” Evanina said.

Derkach denies working for the Kremlin.

The anti-bidding content provided by Trump prior to this week’s Democratic National Convention was posted by an account named “Walt Kowalski,” Clint Eastwood’s character in the 2008 film “Gran Torino.”

The account was created in September 2019, about the same time that the anti-Biden disinformation campaign went up, along with the investigation into impeachment to the president. The account has only a few hundred followers, and the user’s biography section is for anti-bidding information only.

Kremlin connections

Derkach is among a small group of Ukrainian political figures who have pushed themselves into the US presidential election in 2020 in recent months through engagement and promotion of Biden’s supposed audiotapes. Some of these figures are linked to Kremlin interests as well as to Russian intelligence agencies, according to experts and the intelligence community, who say they are part of a Russian-backed misinformation campaign.

The recordings are from Biden’s dealings with Poroshenko, the former Ukrainian president, and appear to be authentic. But the material reinforces Biden’s claims that he promoted American interests and did nothing indecent in Ukraine. There is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the band, and the Biden campaign maintains that these releases are blatant Russian interference against the former vice president.

Trump’s willingness to capitalize on Russian mediation in the 2020 elections is a similar tactic to that which fueled Trump’s campaign in 2016, as Trump advisers strategized to facilitate WikiLeaks revelations that were facilitated. by Russia, according to special advice Robert Mueller.

Four years ago, the first WikiLeaks releases came on the eve of the Democratic convention in July 2016, and Trump used the stolen emails to burn divisions within the Democratic Party, tweeting, “The Wikileaks email release today was so bad for Sanders that it will make it impossible for him to support her. Mueller’s investigation later revealed that this intra-party tension was exactly what the Russians were hoping to provoke.

The big difference is that this time the American intelligence community has publicly informed Trump and the whole world of what the Russians are doing.