The following is an excerpt from the new book “Disappearing The President” by Lee Smith, (October, 2024, Encounter Books)
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The Counterinsurgents
Many of the analysts obsessed with Russian information warfare played crucial roles in Russiagate, like Hamilton 68 founder Clint Watts. “I was talking to him at the time and quoting him in stuff I was writing because I thought what he said made sense,” says Siegel. “And some of what he said didn’t make sense. People lose track of reality when they talk about information warfare.”
A West Point graduate, Watts joined the FBI after leaving the Army, and in 2011 he joined a think-tank based in Philadelphia, the Foreign Policy Research Institute. During the 2016 election cycle, he was a go-to talking head on Russian information warfare. “Regardless of the extent of Trump’s direct knowledge about Russia’s intelligence activities, active measures [by Russian intelligence] have achieved enormous success on the back of his presidential campaign,” he wrote in a 2016 article that supported the collusion narrative. “Russia sees Trump as a tool to undermine its American adversaries. In that regard, they’ve already achieved their goal and possess the potential to exceed their expectations.” (7)
The name of Watts’ organization, Hamilton 68, refers to the 68th essay from The Federalist Papers, in which Alexander Hamilton discusses the presidency and foreign influence: “These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” (8)
The reference was clear: Trump had been raised by a foreign power. Thus, the purpose of Watts’ organization was not to track Russian “disinformation” and influence operations on social media, but was rather to add another branch to the counterinsurgents’ propaganda campaign vilifying the chief magistracy of the Union—Trump—as a Russian agent.
Jacket design by Steve Cooley. Encounter Books.
Watts was supported by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a project of the German Marshall Fund, a Washington, D.C. based think-tank funded by private donors; government agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development; foreign governments like Norway, Sweden, and Belgium; Big Tech oligarchies Google, Microsoft, and Amazon; and major Democratic Party donor George Soros, a Shadow Network giant.
ASD was founded in 2017 by a left-right coalition of anti-Trump activists who had supported and promoted Russiagate. Its board of advisors included:
- John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign
- Jake Sullivan, a longtime Clinton aide and now Biden’s national security advisor
- Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia
- David Kramer, aide to Senator John McCain. Kramer gave a copy of the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed, which published it in January 2017.
- Bill Kristol, anti-Trump editor of the now-defunct magazine, the Weekly Standard
- Michael Morrell, former acting CIA director and longtime deputy director under President Obama
Morrell explained the ASD’s purpose as it was getting off the ground in July 2017. “In a perfect world, we would have a national commission that would be looking into exactly what happened, exactly what did the Russians do and what can we do as a nation to defend ourselves going forward and deter Putin from ever doing this again,” Morell told a journalist. “We all know this is not going to happen, so things like the GMF [German Marshall Fund] effort are hugely important to fill the gap.” (9)
In reality, ASD and Hamilton 68 were partners in the FBI’s ongoing anti-Trump operation, which had been off-boarded to Robert Mueller’s team when the special counsel investigation began in May 2017.
When the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag appeared, Hamilton 68 reported that it was being spread by Russian bots. (10) Schiff and Feinstein’s letter on the hashtag relied exclusively on Hamilton 68’s data.
Even as the corporate media dutifully reported Hamilton 68’s declarations as fact, however, the Big Tech platforms were becoming increasingly wary of Watts’ analyses.
The Daily Beast offered a glimpse of this skepticism with a January 23, 2018 story reporting that Twitter analysts had determined the #ReleasetheMemo hashtag was spread by legitimate American accounts, not by Russian bots. (11)
Behind the scenes, Twitter officials were coming to believe that Hamilton 68 was a fraud. Twitter’s trust and safety head Yoel Roth told colleagues that a secret list of around 600 Russian bot accounts that Hamilton 68 monitored was “weird and self-selecting. They’re so unwilling to be transparent and defend their selection that I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” (12)
Twitter identified the 600 accounts tracked by Hamilton 68 and found they were neither Russian nor bots. Rather, Roth wrote to colleagues, “they appear to strongly preference pro-Trump accounts, which [Hamilton 68] use to assert that Russia is expressing a preference for Trump.” Roth wanted to confront Hamilton 68 publicly. “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum,” he wrote, “you release the list or we do.”
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Some Twitter employees were worried about taking on an organization that represented a powerful consortium of political and intelligence officials. Others represented those same interests inside the company. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” wrote Emily Horne, who later landed a job in the Biden White House. Another Twitter executive, Carlos Monje, wrote, “I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here.” Monje later became a senior advisor to Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Twitter lawyers drafted a careful response to Schiff and Feinstein explaining that the company’s initial inquiry regarding #ReleaseTheMemo had “not identified any significant activity connected to Russia.” Twitter wrote that “because the Hamilton Dashboard’s account list is not available to the public, we are unable to offer any specific context on the accounts it includes. …We have offered to review the list of accounts contained in the Dashboard and this offer remains open.” (13)
Facebook responded simply by noting that Hamilton 68’s allegations concerned content on Twitter, not Facebook. (14)
Those responses were not good enough for the California Democrats. On January 31, Schiff and Feinstein sent another letter demanding that Twitter and Facebook try harder. “It is unclear from your responses whether you believe any of the Russian-linked accounts involved in this influence campaign violated your respective user policies,” the duo warned. “We reiterate our request that you immediately take necessary steps to expose and deactivate such accounts if you determine that they violate your respective user policies.” The letter continued, “Twitter inexplicably…neglected to answer the question of whether Russian sources were actively engaged in promoting the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, as illuminated by the Hamilton 68 dashboard of the German Marshall Fund.” (15)
In other words, You must find a way to tie pro-Trump accounts to Russian bots and then censor them—or else.
“In the end, Schiff, Feinstein, and the Dems just beat Twitter down,” says Langer, the Nunes aide. “They were threatening to take all kinds of retaliatory action if the platforms didn’t produce the right results. And eventually, Twitter found a way to connect #ReleaseThe Memo to Russian bots, even though there was no evidence for it and they knew Hamilton 68’s findings were fraudulent.”
The following January, Twitter released a report detailing its research into a new batch of 418 accounts that “appeared to originate in Russia.” The company admitted it could not determine if they actually were Russian bot accounts, but claimed they behaved similarly to Russian bots. Of the top three hashtags employed by these 400 accounts, number two was #ReleaseTheMemo, which was included in approximately 38,000 Tweets. (16) Thus, based on a few hundred accounts that may or may not have been Russian, Twitter insinuated that a grassroots campaign among American conservatives might really be a Russian influence operation.
“These possible Russian bot accounts comprised less than one-half of one percent of activity on the hashtag,” says Langer. “That’s a drop in the ocean. It’s statistically irrelevant. But Twitter left that out of the report.”
The release of the Nunes memo on February 2, 2018, exposed Russiagate as an instrument of information warfare, paid for by the Clinton campaign and directed by Obama’s spy chiefs. It was the Shadow Network’s counterinsurgency campaign targeting Trump, his allies, and supporters.
“What we’re now experiencing is what countless other countries around the world have experienced since the start of the Cold War,” says Benz. “When the U.S. government controls your information eco-systems, controls your political leadership, censors you, spies on you, and propagandizes you. People in Boston are now experiencing what people in Baghdad did. This is what it feels like when the U.S. government deploys its military, its intelligence, and civil society partners and media in a whole-of-society campaign to re-engineer your country.”
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Lee Smith is the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Plot Against the President.” His other books include “The Permanent Coup” and “The Strong Horse.” A veteran journalist and regular contributor to Tablet Magazine, Smith lives with his wife and son in Charleston, SC.
This excerpt is published by permission from Encounter Books. “Disappearing The President” by Lee Smith, (October, 2024, Encounter Books). Copyright 2024 by Lee Smith. Jacket design by Steve Cooley.
The views expressed in this book excerpt do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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NOTES:
Chapter Three: The Counterinsurgents
7. Andrew Weisburd, Clint Watts, and Jim Berger, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy,” War on the Rocks, November 6, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy/.
8. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp
9. Josh Rogin, “National Security Figures Launch Project to Counter Russian Mischief,” Washington Post, July 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/07/11/national-security-figures-launch-project-to-counter-russian-mischief/.
10. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/right-wing-demand-releasethememo-endorsed-russian-bots-trolls-n839141
11. Spencer Ackerman, “Source: Twitter Pins #ReleaseTheMemo on Republicans, Not Russia,” Daily Beast, January 23, 2018, https://www. thedailybeast.com/source-twitter-pins-releasethememo-on-republicans-not- russia#:~:text=The%20online%20groundswell%20urging%20the,widely%20 since%20late%20last%20week.
12. Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi), “1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15 MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD,” X, January 27, 2023, 12:49 p.m., https://x.com/mtaibbi/ status/1619029772977455105.
13. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter General Counsel letter to The Honorable Dianne Feinstein and The Honorable Adam Schiff, January 26, 2018, https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/twitter_response_jan_26.pdf.
14. https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/6/4/64bd3267-fdc9-46fb-b265-589dc5d08eff/8DBC13B7F818DA79F0E8C614A8F8159D.facebook-response-to-feinstein-schiff-1.26.18.pdf
15. “Feinstein, Schiff Send Follow Up Letter to Twitter and Facebook on #ReleaseTheMemo Campaign,” U.S. Senate Committee on The Judiciary, January 31, 2018, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/dem/releases/feinstein-schiff-send-follow-up-letter-to-twitter-and-facebook-on-releasethememo-campaign.
16. Twitter, “Retrospective Review: Twitter, Inc. and the 2018 Midterm Elections in the United States,” January 31, 2019 (updated February 4, 2019), https:// cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter/official/en_us/ company/2019/2018-retrospective-review.pdf.