So a Blackwater lawyer whose dad was a RWNJ wanted to find dirt on HRC in 2016, and there was that concurrent Russian involvement via Roger Stone, Julian Assange… et al. So much for more evidence of corrupt intent in the Trump campaign.
Joseph Schmitz approached the FBI and other government agencies about material a client of his had discovered that Schmitz believed might have been Clinton's missing 30,000 emails from her private e-mail server, sources say. The material was never verified, and sources say they ultimately believed it was fake.
His push is the latest example of Trump advisers who were mixed up in efforts to find dirt on Clinton during the presidential campaign. Schmitz was one of the first people Trump named to his campaign's national security and foreign policy team. The team, showcased in a March 2016 photo, was thrown together early in Trump's successful run as he faced mounting pressure to prove his ability to pull in high-level advisers who could help prepare him for the White House.
[...]
Schmitz's connection to the multi-faceted effort to expose damaging information about Clinton has not been previously reported. His status as a former Pentagon inspector general afforded him access to the agencies and a sophisticated understanding of the government bureaucracy. He was relentless, sources say, and truly believed his client had found important, sensitive material. He did not hesitate in his pursuit even though the material on the dark web -- a part of the Internet not easily accessible or traceable -- was questionable and many experts already believed the Russians had stolen Clinton's emails.
en.wikipedia.org/...
What kind of world was the Trump campaign and why would they resort to so much that was undemocratic. “The illusion of certain progress and certain doom are traps. We have to see ourselves right where we are.”
Active measures (Russian: активные мероприятия) is a Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it.[1]
Active measures range "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically.
They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration into churches, and persecution of political dissidents.[1]
President Donald Trump claims he coined the phrase “fake news.” (He didn’t.) But the actual art of “fake news” was pioneered by the Russians in the 1990s and 2000s, and they used it to try to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
This is the argument Yale historian Timothy Snyder makes in his new book, The Road to Unfreedom. According to Snyder, it was Russian leaders who first mastered “fake news” in the digital era, and they did it as part of a broader strategy to disorient their own society.
That strategy goes something like this: Use the internet and TV to flood society with misinformation, demonize the institutions charged with uncovering facts, and then exploit the confusion that results.
This, Snyder argues, is how Russian oligarchs in the Putin era control citizens: They cultivate enough chaos so people become cynical about public life and, eventually, about truth itself. In the 2010s, Russia began to deploy these techniques abroad as a means of destabilizing Western countries.
In Trump, they found a particularly useful tool, someone they could use to stoke America’s internal divisions and subvert democracy.
www.vox.com/…
What matters is that America is dominated by celebrity culture, and that’s a weakness the Russians could — and did — exploit.