Where is Tad Devine? Looks like he has some explaining to do:
At Thursday afternoon's meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Retired Gen. Keith Alexander — former director of the National Security Agency — said that Russian operatives targeted both liberal and conservative voters in its disinformation campaigns during the 2016 election.
Dr. Thomas Rid of Kings College London's Department of War Studies explained that polarization makes societies vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation campaigns.
Russia, Rid explained, according to CBS News, likes to use "unwitting agents" to carry out its work. WikiLeaks, Twitter, and "overeager journalists" all contributed to Russia's efforts to destabilize the U.S. by disrupting its 2016 election.
Democratic committee co-chair Sen. Mark Warner (VA) asked the panel if they had any doubt that Russia had attempted to interfere in some aspects of the 2016 election. Alexander said not only did he have no doubt, he could get very specific.
"Senator, I think what they were trying to do was drive a wedge within the Democratic Party between the Clinton group and the Sanders group," said Alexander. "And then in our nation between Republicans and Democrats."
Supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) reported earlier this month that during the 2016 election, their social media feeds and pro-Sanders Facebook groups were inundated with what they now believe were Russian bots spewing anti-Hillary memes including fake news stories about Clinton using a body double and murdering her ideological opponents.
Tad Devine was the chief strategist for the Sanders campaign. He's had a long and checkered career, having had top roles in several failed Democratic presidential races; after the Kerry campaign in 2004, Devine found it all but impossible to get any high-level roles in any American political campaigns, and wound up taking various paying gigs overseas.
Gigs like this one:
I have surprised many a Sanders supporter by informing them that Sanders' chief strategist Tad Devine worked in collaboration with Paul Manafort for pro-Putin former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych. And kept working for him even after his rival, Viktor Yushchenko, barely survived a poisoning attempt, obliging him to "campaign with his face half paralysed and a catheter inserted into his back to inject painkillers into his spine."
As Mueller's crew probes Manafort ever deeper, they're going to be getting to find lots of interesting things. Like this.
Both Devine and Paul Manafort worked on the Presidential campaign of Viktor Yanukovych. It was well-known that Yanukovych was a puppet of the Kremlin. In a Huffington Post article they include a few more details: “During national elections in 2004, Yanukovych ran for president and was initially declared the winner of the vote. The results were quickly contested, however, as widespread allegations of fraud and vote tampering brought tens of thousands of people into the street in protest. This so-called Orange Revolution led to the country’s supreme court [sic] nullifying the result and ordering a rerun of the election. Yanukovych was defeated in the second vote and the pro-western Viktor Yushchenko became president.
Yushchenko is the fellow who nearly died from a dose of the Georgi Markov treatment.