Among the “evidence” given in the report was this picture of Jesus wearing a Trump campaign hat.
Do you think that this meme would influence anyone to change their vote in the 2016 election?
The report also claimed seven Facebook pages were used to affect the outcome of the US elections. The only one of these pages that is still in existence is a page called Friends of Russia. Here is an image of their Facebook page in October 2016:
There were no posts on this page about either Trump or Clinton. The only post was from someone named Parth Yadav who wrote “Hello Sir.” This post could not have possibly affected the outcome of the US election.
The Senate report went on to list all of the 61,483 Facebook posts that were in their database. None of these posts were actually published in the Senate report. But the report did note that only 2.9 percent of these posts even mentioned Clinton and only 4.2 percent of the posts mentioned Trump. Here is a screen shot from the report.
It is true that there were 800 more posts for Trump in the Senate Database than their were for Clinton. But keep in mind that half of these 61,483 posts occurred AFTER the election was over. Also keep in mind that Facebook has billions of posts every day. So even 62,000 posts is much less than one tenth of one percent of all Facebook posts. Could 400 posts swing an election?
False Allegations Against a Single Black Website
Surprisingly, most of the 101 page Senate Report was spent claiming that the Russians spent most of their efforts trying to convince black voters to not vote for Hillary Clinton. Here is a quote from the Senate Russia Report:
“The most prolific IRA (Russian spy group) efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted Black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets.”
The Senate “Russian” report repeatedly claimed that the main weapon used by the Russians to suppress the turn out of black voters was a website called blackmattersus.com – a website that is still in existence.
Here is a portion of the table in the Senate report indicating that this website was responsible for swinging the US election to Donald Trump:
There was 1219 posts to the blackmattersus.com Facebook page either during or after the 2016 US Presidential election. Their Facebook page has been conveniently removed. So there is no way of verifying what any of these posts may have said. However, their website still exists. If you visit this website, and I hope you will, you will see that the site is run by four black reporters who live in the US and who are concerned mainly about police assaulting black people.
Thinking that perhaps the content of the website was different during the 2016 election, I used the Wayback Machine to see what their content looked like during October 2016. I was shocked to find that there was not a single article about either Clinton or Trump anytime between August 2016 and November 2016 – the period of time that the Senate report claimed this site was being used to suppress the black vote. Here is a screen shot of what the home page for this website looked like in October 2016:
One section of the Senate report provided a breakdown of the general topics in the Blackmattersus posts to their Facebook page.
It is hard to see how any of these topics had any influence on black voters or any other voters in the 2016 election. I then reviewed all of the other websites listed in the Senate Report. I could find almost no mention of Clinton or Trump on any of them.
Some websites had no posts at all on any subject during the 2016 election. In short, this Senate report was a fraudulent report. I therefore decided to look closer at who wrote this report.
In turns out that the Senate “Russian” Report was was written by a little known group of former US military and current Democratic party operatives who call themselves “New Knowledge.” The co-founder of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, had previously worked for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the US military’s group of spooks known for their diabolical ideas on how to control public opinion through brain washing and mind control. Morgan’s partner in crime, Ryan Fox, is a veteran of the NSA (National Security Agency) – a group of US spies whose motto is “Collect Everything.”
See this link for an 85 page report I wrote in 2017 confirming that past “Russian Hacker” reports were actually the result of NSA hacking operations – who planted Russian finger prints on documents that were actually transmitted by NSA servers. https://turningpointnews.org/hack-everything-special-report
Recognizing that the Senate Russia report was simply another NSA attempt at mind control, I decided to look into where New Knowledge was getting their money. It turns out that New Knowledge was given $11 million from Chinese Vulture Capitalists. The name of the Chinese Vulture Capitalist group is GGV Capital. Here is a link to the GGV Capital home page: https://www.ggvc.com/
Why are Chinese Vulture Capitalists funding a group of NSA spies that are falsely accusing Black people of being Russian Spies???
The answer is that some wealthy people in China do not like Trump and his Trade War against China. Funding New Knowledge is their way of helping to keep the Trump Russia hysteria going. I want to make it clear that I am not in favor of the Trade War or Trump – but I am also not in favor of allowing the Chinese to interfere in US elections by paying off a group of US spies to write a fake report about Russian spies.
A New Level of Evil is Exposed… New Knowledge Crimes in Alabama
While I was working on this story to expose this Senate Russia Report scam, something even more shocking happened. One day after the Senate Russia report was published, on December 19, the New York Times published a story confirming that New Knowledge had created a fake army of thousands of Russian bots (fake personalities), thousands of fake Twitter accounts and several fake Facebook groups, in order to use false allegations to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama’s 2017 special election for the US Senate. This time the funding for New Knowledge came from a California billionaire, Reid Hoffman. The billionaire said he was not aware his donation had been used to create a fake Russian army and he apologized for having paid for these diabolical deeds. Here is a link to the NY Times story exposing the role of New Knowledge in deceiving the voters in Alabama. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html
New Knowledge leaders responded to the NY Times article by admitting they had created the army of fake Russian spies. But they went on to claim that they were only conducting “an experiment” and were not attempting to affect the outcome of the December 2017 Senate election in Alabama.
This claim of innocence by New Knowledge has since been exposed to be simply one more big lie in a long series of big lies. The NY Times article was based on an internal report - written by the staff at New Knowledge - that was leaked to the NY Times. This leaked internal report has since been released to the public. Here is a link where you can read this report.
https://medium.com/@jeffgiesea/breaking-heres-the-after-action-report-from-the-alabama-senate-disinformation-campaign-e3edd854f17d
In the internal report, New Knowledge staff boasted that they had “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. They specifically took credit for defeating Roy Moore in the Alabama election. The New York Times failed to mention this crucial fact in their original story.
Here are some quotes from the leaked New Knowledge internal report:
“In September to December 2017, we ran a digital messaging operation to influence the outcome of the Alabama senate race. We targeted specific Alabama districts to radicalize Democrats, suppress unpersuadable Republicans and faction moderate Republicans by advocating (that they vote) for write-in candidates. Our goal was to move 50,000 votes.”
“We targeted 650,000 likely Alabama voters with a combination of (fake) persona accounts, astroturfing (using fake advocacy groups), automated social media amplification and targeted advertising… (The result was) a 5% drop in voter turn out in hard Republican districts and 22,819 write in votes which combined with 30,000 fewer Republican votes moved enough votes to result in a Doug Jones (Democratic Party) victory.”
“We performed rapid, repetitive and sustained targeting of a select group of 650,000 likely Alabama voters on Facebook resulting in 6 million impressions to Alabamians over the course of the campaign (not counting an additional organic reach of an estimated 5 million impressions).”
“We aggressively targeted evangelical Republicans with messages meant to suppress turn out. According to NY Times exit poll analysis, turn out in hard Republican districts was down 5% from previous Alabama Congressional elections and down 45% from the 2016 Presidential election… In total, we manufactured 45,000 Twitter followers, 350,000 Retweets, 370,000 Tweet Favorites, 6,000 Facebook Comments, 10,000 Facebook reactions, 300,000 image upvotes and 10,000 Reddit upvotes – all of which forced the targeted communities to interact with (and be manipulated by our false) narrative.”
"Our targeting of these likely voters had enormous effect on [Republican] turnout in these counties. The [Republican] depression in these counties was measurably higher compared to the rest of the State… Our campaign was cheap and anonymous. We spent $100,000. In spite of our impact in the press and in voting outcomes, not a single story about our activities appeared in any press outlet.”
Red Flags about Sexual Allegations
The internal leaked report also made several references to their successful social media promotion of sexual allegations against the Republican candidate. About one month before the December 12, 2017 election, the Washington Post reported that four women had accused Roy Moore of engaging in sexual conduct with them when they were teenagers. Roy Moore immediately denied the allegations.
Even without the recent admissions of wrong doing from New Knowledge, there were several “red flags” about the allegations. First, it is known that the Washington Post is the CIA and NSA “paper of record.” The Washington Post has been caught many times in recent years publishing false stories at the request of US spy agencies.
Second, the timing of the story was extremely suspicious. The allegations were made only one month before the election – at a point where it would be too late for the Republican party to take Roy Moore’s name off of the ballot. An important question is why these allegations were not made before the Republican primary – giving the voters a chance to vote for a different Republican. For that matter, why weren’t these allegations made years earlier when Roy Moore ran for the Alabama Supreme Court.
Third, why weren’t the allegations first published in a newspaper inside of Alabama? While the internal report did not come out and say they were responsible for the sexual allegations against Roy Moore, they implied that they somehow anticipated and prepared for these sexual allegations by laying the groundwork for promoting these sexual allegations in September 2017 – two months before the allegations were actually made.
Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore by a margin of 21,924 votes - 673,896 to 651,972. Voter turnout was only 40.5% of Alabama's 3,326,812 registered voters.
Comparing the 2016 National Social Media Fraud to the 2017 Alabama Social Media Fraud
New Knowledge claims that they spent $100,000 on the 2017 Alabama race by running fake Facebook posts targeting 650,000 Alabama voters. We have no way of knowing if this amount of money is accurate as the billionaire who supplied the funding actually provided $750,000. What we do know is that the amount of money they spent came to less than one dollar per voter. Could this small amount of money affect the outcome of the Alabama 2017 election? The answer is almost certainly yes. Our evidence is that Republican voters out number Democrat voters in Alabama by a margin of about two to one. Republican voter turn out was clearly suppressed either by the claim that Roy Moore was supported by Russians or that he assaulted under age girls.
The amount of money spent by Russians in the 2016 US election is much less clear. Unlike the case of New Knowledge, where they admitted to spending $100,000 in Alabama from September to December 2017, the Russians have repeatedly denied spending any money on the 2016 US election. We are left with the unsupported claims by Facebook and Google executives to guess how much was spent by either the Russians or someone pretending to be Russians in the 2016 US Presidential election.
For example, the head of Google claimed during a Congressional hearing that their research found two Youtube accounts “linked to Russia.” These two accounts spent a total of $5,000 on Youtube ads during the 2016 election. This amount claimed to be spent by someone with links to Russia came to $100 per state – one thousand times LESS than the total spent by New Nation in Alabama in 2017. Facebook claims that they found $100,000 spent on Facebook ads in 2016. Since half of this amount was spent AFTER the 2016 election was over, the amount actually spent on Facebook during the 2016 election was only $50,000. This comes to only $1,000 per state. This is 100 times LESS than what New Knowledge spent in Alabama in 2017. Could such a small amount of money per state affect the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election?
Does the truth even matter anymore?
The difference between these elections was not merely that 100 to 1000 times more was spent in Alabama per voter in 2017 compared to the US 2016 election. It was also that the allegation against Roy Moore have never been proven. What has been proven is that New Knowledge admitted to subjecting his campaign to a series of false allegations.
By contrast, the allegations made against Hillary Clinton were proven beyond any doubt by Wikileaks publishing of thousands of verified emails from Clinton staff members. These emails confirmed that the Clinton campaign colluded with the corporate media to give her several advantages over the Sanders campaign. The Podesta and DNC emails also confirmed that Clinton gave speeches to Wall Street admitting that she had two different positions on issues – one for Wall Street and another for the American voters.
Add to this Clinton’s own verified actions in the Saudi Arms Deal, the Russian Uranium deal and the wars in Iraq and Libya and putting all of these things together, these facts likely did affect the 2016 Presidential election. But all of these were facts – not merely allegations.
To be sure, Roy Moore also did and said a bunch of dumb things that may have influenced voters in Alabama in 2017. But these dumb things should have influenced voters equally in every part of Alabama. Instead, according to the New Knowledge leaked report, the results were different in the parts of Alabama targeted by the New Knowledge campaign of lies than they were in the parts of Alabama not targeted by the New Knowledge campaign.
Conclusion
I am not a fan of Roy Moore or his political views. But I am a fan of the truth. The truth is that the false allegations of New Knowledge did have an affect on the outcome of the 2017 Alabama election. However, no evidence has ever been provided by anyone that Russia had any effect on the 2016 US Presidential election. Instead, the evidence that has been presented has in EVERY CASE turned out to be fake evidence. Instead, it was the actual actions of Hillary Clinton that led to her loss of the 2016 Presidential election.
We as voters are the real losers of the diabolical deeds of New Knowledge. Their ability to use false allegations to alter the outcome of the 2017 Alabama Senate election, led to the conclusion that we no longer have elections here in the US. Instead, we have bidding wars filled with lies and financed by billionaires. In the case of the Alabama race, a billionaire who does not even live in Alabama was legally allowed to spent nearly one million dollars affecting the outcome of the Alabama election.
These are just a few questions this new level of evil bring to mind:
Should secret hidden groups be allowed to knowingly lie to the voters and commit massive fraud in order to win an election?
Should millions of dollars of out of state – and even out of our nation - money be allowed to mislead instate voters?
When does an election cease to represent the will of the people and instead turn into a bidding war done through disinformation campaigns paid for by billionaires?
At what point do wave after wave of false allegations become an attack on our democracy?
What we need more than anything is real election reform here in the US. We must remove billionaires and their corrupting money influence over our local, state and national elections.