President Trump's new National Security Advisor John Bolton ran an anti-Muslim think tank that published fake news promoted and amplified by Russian media and the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency troll factory.
From 2013 until last month, Bolton was chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a New York-based advocacy group that warns of a looming “jihadist takeover” of Europe leading to a “Great White Death.”
The group has published numerous stories and headlines on its website with similar themes. “Germany Confiscating Homes to Use for Migrants,” warned one from May 2017, about a single apartment rental property in Hamburg that had gone into temporary trusteeship. Another from February 2015 claimed the immigrants, for instance Somalis, in Sweden were turning that country into the “Rape Capital of the West.”
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Alina Polyakova, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies far-right populism and disinformation campaigns in the European Union, said Gatestone is “putting out content that was clearly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and was echoing some of the Russian disinformation propaganda” being spread by internet trolls and on social media.
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Bolton formally started as national security adviser in early April. He has continued to meet with White House attorneys over possible conflicts of interest, including his political action committee, and his affiliation with Gatestone is a potential focus.
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NBC News found at least four instances of known Russian trolls directly re-tweeting from the Gatestone account, according to an NBC News database of deleted tweets sent by Russian trolls.
One of the retweeted stories claimed that 500 churches in London have closed while 423 new mosques have opened, which went viral and was picked up by numerous websites including Breitbart News. The fact-checking website Snopes.com said Gatestone used “shoddy research and cherry-picked data” for the story.
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Gatestone’s scholars have appeared in Russian media — including Sputnik and RT News (formerly Russia Today) — criticizing mainstream European leaders including France's Macron.
Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Party for Freedom and a prominent critic of Islam who is listed as a Gatestone author, was on an RT broadcast last month saying Europe lacks strong political leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Trump. In a May 2017 post on Medium, Gatestone contributor Yves Mamou called Macron France’s “useful idiot of Islamism.”
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“It suits the Kremlin propaganda outlets to portray Western democracies as a failure that have been flooded by migrants and whose societies are breaking down, because then it will make it (democracy) less attractive to Russians,” said [senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s digital forensic research Ben] Nimmo.
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Gatestone has also received financial backing from Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire father-daughter team who have supported conservative candidates in the U.S. including Cruz and Trump. The Mercers also co-founded Cambridge Analytica, the data company being scrutinized by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia.
Full story: John Bolton presided over anti-Muslim think tank (NBC News)