Ex-FBI agent: Trump got elected, thanks to Russia
David Knowles,Yahoo News •August 1, 2018
“Yes. I think just alone the hacking, particularly of the DNC and the time to release by WikiLeaks and DCLeaks and others of hacked materials offset the media narrative,” Watts, who has been an outspoken critic of the current president, told “Bots & Ballots” host Grant Burningham.
For many agents in the FBI, Watts said it became clear that the biggest goal for “active measures” was advancing Trump’s presidential bid, in part by utilizing vulnerable social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
“By the time 2016 came around, it was very clear that they had four campaign messages that they wanted to push. The first one was very anti-Hillary Clinton, and that was from the beginning. The second one was very pro-Trump,” Watts said. “The third one was when the hacking kicked in, which was that Bernie Sanders got a raw deal from the DNC, and you can see that in these hacked emails. That’s really when we started to see that hacking was starting to power influence. And the last one, which was very minor, was that you still need to show up for Jill Stein. So, the equation was quite clear, it was how do we elevate Trump to the top spot and sort of suppress Clinton turnout and people wanting to support her.”
In “Messing With the Enemy,” his new book on modern cyberwarfare campaigns, Watts said that the election results in traditionally Democratic states like Michigan and Wisconsin prove just how effective the Russian campaign was. Still, Watts notes that because of incomplete social media data and notoriously inaccurate polling, that it’s “almost impossible to prove one way or another whether Russia won the election” for Trump. What is clear is that Trump’s election was itself a victory for Moscow.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-fbi-agent-trump-got-elected-thanks-russia-090006587.html
