The ongoing Black PSYOP by the President, his Congressional defenders, his surrogates, and his supporters is set to enter its next phase: using the defense of the President in the Senate trial of his impeachment to launder the Russian misinformation and agitprop about Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden, and the conspiracy theory that the Clinton 2016 campaign and Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 presidential election not the Russians through the Senate into mainstream reporting and to the American people.

From The Washington Post:

White House lawyers are gearing up for a scorched-earth defense of President Trump in the impeachment trial, mounting a politically charged case aimed more at swaying American voters than GOP senators — and damaging Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, Joe Biden.

Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, plan to use their time in the trial to target the former vice president and his son, Hunter, according to multiple GOP officials familiar with the strategy. Trump’s allies believe that if they can argue that the president had a plausible reason for requesting the Biden investigation in Ukraine, they can both defend him against the impeachment charges and gain the bonus of undercutting a political adversary.

The repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory the Clinton campaign conspired with Ukraine to steal the 2016 presidential election and frame the Russia and the President now appears to have been established by Russia as early as 2015.

Three weeks after Election Day 2016, the Kremlin officially floated a theory that would ultimately lead to only the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

“Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump’s election by planting information” aimed at damaging his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry told reporters on Nov. 30, 2016, accusing the Ukrainian government of scheming to help elect Hillary Clinton.

Russian officials offered no evidence—on that day or on any other day—that it was really Kyiv and not Moscow that meddled in the 2016 election. Nor have U.S. intelligence agencies backed off on their collective finding that the Kremlin orchestrated a major effort to help Trump win office.

Zakharova’s claims seemed easy enough to shrug off at the time. It was not surprising that the Kremlin, highly skilled in the dark arts of dezinformatsiya, would try to shift blame to its adversaries in Kyiv.

But that effort to shift blame may have started months earlier. A review of Russian state media reports from the time and interviews with a dozen current and former officials and experts in Kyiv and Washington paint a more sinister picture: that Zakharova’s seemingly throwaway accusation was actually the culmination of a year-long effort to frame Ukraine for a Russian attack, ultimately leading to parallel efforts by Moscow and President Donald Trump to try to game the 2020 election by seeking dirt on former vice president Joe Biden.

Cindy Otis, a former political and military analyst at the CIA who now leads the disinformation analysis program at Nisos, a cyber security firm, says that Moscow may even have planted the seeds even earlier than Zakharova’s news conference.

“There’s been an evolution of the main narrative” tying Ukraine to the 2016 election, Otis said. She pointed to a March 2015 article in the Kremlin-funded outlet Russia Today that tried to connect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the future Democratic presidential nominee, to the popular uprising against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013.

“The Russian narrative in 2015-2016 was that Clinton interfered in Ukraine, and that her campaign was being directed or driven by Ukrainian oligarchs,” Otis said.

As is typical of Russia’s disinformation operations, it hinged on a kernel of truth—the reports cited donations her charity had received from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk beginning in 2008, which were initially reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“They really seized on that Wall Street Journal article,” Otis said, pointing to a chart included in the article listing “Ukraine” as the Clinton Foundation’s top donor that was widely shared by suspected Russian trolls and the far-right on social media.

But it wasn’t just isolated accounts accusing Ukraine of manipulating the 2016 election; lawmakers say they’ve seen signs of an organized, top-down effort directed by the Kremlin to create a false narrative and exonerate Russia.

Russia’s disinformation and agitprop campaign was laundered through the usual sources starting with Russia’s state backed news media platforms designed to propagandize Americans, such as RT, and from their through a variety of far right and alt-right sources until it hit places like Brietbart, The Gateway Pundit, and then, ultimately, John Solomon at The Hill.

This phase of the Black PSYOP will be wrapped within faux righteous indignation that the Democrats are simply continuing the conspiracy against the President, by using the impeachment to finish the job delineated in Russia’s conspiracy theory about the election, to remove him from office, overturn the 2016 presidential election results, and fix the 2020 election by doing so, as well as a lack of burden sharing by the EU in support of Ukraine. None of this is true! Approximately 2/3rds of the aid that Ukraine receives is from European Union member states. The Ukrainians are forbidden from using the Javelin missiles we’ve sold them, and which his defenders constantly reference as something the President did for Ukraine when no one else – not Obama, nor the EU leaders – would, because the President doesn’t want to upset the Russians, so they’re stored across the country from where the Ukrainians are actually fighting a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russians are the ones who actually conspired with and interfered in the 2016 elections on behalf of the President, not the Ukrainians conspiring with the Clinton campaign. If the Senate were to vote to convict the President during the trial phase of his impeachment it does not overturn the 2016 election, it simply removes him from office and bars him from running again at the Federal level. VP Pence would become president if this were to happen, which is not overturning the 2016 election. Overturning the 2016 elections would make Secretary Clinton president, which isn’t even in the realm of the possible. Finally, the President has repeatedly indicated that he would welcome foreign assistance in his reelection campaign or solicited it – on camera, to reporters!

The Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative country club, is just another front in the Black PSYOP campaign to fix the 2020 presidential election and absolve Russia of responsibility for the unconventional war it has been waging on the US so that sanctions against Russia can be lifted.

We are off the looking glass and through the map!

Open thread.

The Black PSYOP Part VI: The President’s Defense in the SenatePost + Comments (121)