The latest Twitter Files “Extra” connected the dots on how corrupt Democrats promoted the Russiagate conspiracy theory that Washington elites attempted to tie to three Trump nominees.
Journalist Matt Taibbi explained in his latest Twitter Files installment that Trump’s cabinet nominees Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were all falsely accused of having ties to a Russian interference effort by members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees during the first Trump administration.
Take Patel, for instance. In January 2018, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee submitted a classified memo debunking the infamous Steele Dossier, which perpetuated the Russian election interference narrative. Patel, then a senior counsel for the committee, was reportedly one of the memo’s authors, Taibbi noted.
When #releasethememo subsequently began trending on Twitter, Democrat members of Congress—then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)—complained to Twitter that the hashtag “gained instant attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), not to be outdone by his colleagues, alleged in another letter that “Russian agents” were propagandizing Americans.
From the fall of 2017 through 2018 Twitter repeatedly, both privately and publicly, reiterated that it found no evidence to support these senator’s claims of coordinated widespread Russian influence campaigns. However, again and again, Democrats insisted that Twitter was not looking hard enough.
Blumenthal, Feinstein and Schiff based their unfounded claims on the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which supposedly monitored 600 Russian-linked accounts on Twitter. The website was created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts and researchers involved with the since-defunct organization New Knowledge.
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Notably, Watts, Hamilton 68 and New Knowledge then became sources for news articles, including media campaigns against disfavored Democrat presidential candidates who became too popular. This reportedly happened to Gabbard during her presidential bid in 2020.
In the recent Twitter Files Extra, Taibbi referred to a February 2019 NBC article that cited New Knowledge claiming that links related to Gabbard were shared by “social media accounts affiliated with known and suspected Russian propaganda operations.”
Taibbi further added, “These accusations continued throughout Gabbard's run. In November of that year, NBC's Ken Dilanian essentially re-wrote the first Gabbard piece, quoting [Hamilton 68 creator Clint] Watts and mentioning Hamilton 68. As usual, no mention of connections between sources.”
Taibbi also reported that similar tactics were used against Kennedy Jr. and even Sen. Bernie Sanders when they ran for president in 2024 and 2020, respectively. He clarified that the “only difference with Kennedy is the accusations now flowed from other sources (i.e.
@bellingcat) as opposed to Hamilton/New Knowledge, by now discredited.”
Tellingly, Taibbi noted that the “stories about Gabbard and Patel's ‘links’ to Russia never stopped,” citing 2024 headlines like NBC News’s “Would Tulsi Gabbard bring a pro-Russian bias to intelligence reporting?” and Mother Jones’s “How Kash Patel Became a Useful Idiot for Vladamir Putin.”
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