Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Fresh from the Troll Farm: Russiagate Sausage

The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to persuade American officials to allow its functionaries to act as observers in polling places. A Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities was queued. Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate.
This story makes it sound like The Atlantic has special knowledge of what was to be official Russian policy.  I've seen no evidence for this claim whatsoever, which seems like a brand new conspiracy theory, impossible to prove false.  It just seems very very unlikely.

The implication is that Putin and the Kremlin (per "Russian diplomats") were planning to officially reject the outcome, were Hillary to win, pulling something like a "Juan Guaidó is the true prez of Venezuela".

I don't believe Putin / Kremlin / Officialdom in Russia planned anything that seriously dumb. They expected Hillary to win by a landslide or at least to win (says The Atlantic). 

That their plan was to take to the world stage announcing they didn't accept the verdict of the American people would have been a laughable mistake. Russians aren't that nuts.

The whole Guccifer story put together by Crowdstrike also deserves skepticism (which I've lavished on the story in my U2oob channel).

The author cites no sources for this conspiracy theory linking official diplomats to some queued Twitter campaign that never materialized.

Here's another unsubstantiated gem:
For their part, the IRA’s minions immodestly credited themselves with having tilted the trajectory of history. The U.S. government obtained an email from an IRA employee describing the scene at the St. Petersburg office on Election Night: “When around 8 a.m. the most important result of our work arrived, we uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne … took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes … We uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great.’
Why should I believe this stuff? What email where from whom, obtained how?

This is just trolling.  I'm adding The Atlantic to my list of highly suspect fake news outlets, along with Business Insider.