Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway amplified a tweet about Clinton's email. Brad Parscale pushed a tweet about biased media. Donald Trump Jr. asked followers to retweet fake news about Florida voter fraud.
The Daily Beast reports these are just some of the fabricated stories created by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, a troll factory in St. Petersburg, that top Trump campaign staffers promoted in the run-up to the 2016 election. Donald Trump Jr. reportedly followed the fake @Ten_GOP account until it was suspended in August.
@Ten_GOP frequently turned up as a source cited by Breitbart News, The Gateway Pundit, InfoWars, Sputnik and RT, and even Fox News.
Clint Watts, former FBI counterterrorism agent and CIR Advisory Board member tells The Daily Beast:
“If you take rumors, false information, plants, and just repeat them, you’re doing the job of a foreign country. They are seeding out information or narratives they know candidates or partisans will use. They were so effective, they had the very top people in the campaign using it.
Basically, Russia loaded the gun. The Trump team fired.”
Read the full article: Trump Campaign Staffers Pushed Russian Propaganda Days Before the Election (Daily Beast)