“They”, of course, being Trump and the GOP. All I can hope is that there are hundreds of Woodward and Bernstein 2.0s out there, hunting this thing down.
Via Media Matters, from an interview on Harbdball with Malcom Nance, Terrorism expert for MSNBC.
CHRIS MATTHEWS (HOST): During the campaign, American security agencies suspected Russia and Vladimir Putin himself of orchestrating a breathtaking cyberattack into undermining U.S. democracy. In October, the U.S. formally accused the Kremlin of directing hacks of the Democratic National Committee, and last Friday, The Washington Post reported that Russia helped spread fake news in an effort to damage democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
[...]
Tell us about the other part of their mischief making here, this fake news, this attempt to create propaganda that gets into the hearts and minds of voters here.
MALCOLM NANCE: Well, it's been very, very well documented over the last three to four months that Russia has -- and we've always known this because as you said a little earlier, people running around chasing the KGB and the Soviet Union. The country may have changed its political leadership, but they have not changed their propaganda and intelligence operations machinery. And they applied every aspect of that against this U.S. election including highly detailed propaganda organizations and using their state organ Sputnik,Russia Today, and paid trolls who operated -- The New York Times identified them operating out of St. Petersburg, the trolls of Alinka who created thousands of pro-Trump organizations and Twitter feeds and Facebook feeds and spread propaganda on a massive scale.
[...]
[W]hat I can attest to is that they broke through the entirety of the alternative media world that guided all of the Trump campaign, tweets coming from Donald Trump and tweets going throughout their entire constellation of pro-Trump organizations. Russia practically ran that. I myself have been attacked by pro-Trump trolls and featured in Sputnik once it came out that we had identified their intelligence operation.
MATTHEWS: What do you think their primary goal, if they have one? Was it to get Trump elected or it was to diminish the worldwide respect for our democracy?
NANCE: … [T]he process was so deliberate, an organizational operation like this would have taken hundreds of operators who would have had to have watched carefully the machinery of the United States on a minute-to-minute basis with regards to hacking and leaking the information in the way that they did. To do that that means that they were -- and obviously they only favored one candidate, and that candidate was elected.
The idea that all this activity was not at the behest of the Trump Campaign is impossible to believe.
Calling all Deep Throat 2.0s out there: step up and serve your country.