Conservative columnist: Trump likely needed Russian help to win election

Aldous J Pennyfarthing 
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Tuesday July 24, 2018 · 10:11 PM EDT

Whenever Donald Trump insists — in those rare moments he can bring himself to acknowledge Russian election interference before walking his mushy statement back — that no votes were changed because of the Kremlin’s attack on our democracy, I instantly think, “How the f*ck do you know?”

Counterfactuals are fun to puzzle over, but so many moving parts contribute to any real-world outcome — especially one as complex as an election result — that it’s almost impossible to know “what might have been.”

But we can make educated guesses about uneducated assheads, right?

Max Boot thinks so. The conservative Washington Post contributor is putting his chips on the table, claiming in a new column that were it not for Russia’s interference in our last presidential election, Hillary Clinton would now be president.

To buttress his claim, he cites former FBI agent Clint Watts’ new book Messing With the Enemy:

While the intelligence agencies are silent on the impact of Russia’s attack, outside experts who have examined the Kremlin campaign — which included stealing and sharing Democratic Party emails, spreading propaganda online and hacking state voter rolls — have concluded that it did affect an extremely close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, writes in his recent book, “Messing with the Enemy,” that “Russia absolutely influenced the U.S. presidential election,” especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin was less than 1 percent in each state.

We still don’t know the full extent of the Russian interference, but we know its propaganda reached 126 million people via Facebook alone. A BuzzFeed analysis found that fake news stories on Facebook generated more social engagement in the last three months of the campaign than did legitimate articles: The “20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.” Almost all of this “fake news” was either started or spread by Russian bots, including claims that the pope had endorsed Trump and that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State.

Elsewhere on social media, tens of thousands of Russian bots spread pro-Trump messages on Twitter, which has already notified about 1.4 million users that they interacted with Russian accounts. The Russian disinformation, propagating hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison and #MAGA, reflected what the Trump campaign was saying. The Russian bots even claimed after every presidential debate that Trump had won, whereas objective viewers gave each one to Clinton.

And by no means was that the end of it. The Russians famously funneled some of their best oppo research through Wikileaks, helping to create a rift between Hillary and Bernie backers just as the Democratic National Convention was set to kick off.

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/24/1783278/-Conservative-columnist-Trump-likely-needed-Russian-help-to-win-election