Jon Levine of the New York Post does a good job explaining a massive fraud uncovered by Matt Taibbi that spread disinformation (as the progs like to call it) claiming that Russian bots were pushing stories that the progs didn’t like.  

A left-wing think tank erroneously claiming to track Russian online activity was responsible for thousands of bogus stories asserting the nation’s influence in US politics, according to the latest batch of Twitter Files.

The Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was the brainchild of former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts and operated under the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank founded in 2017 — shortly after former President Trump took office.  

The ASD Advisory Council included such figures as top Clinton ally John Podesta, Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former conservative activist Bill Kristol.

The latest Twitter Files disclosure, the 15th so far, revealed how Hamilton 68’s Russian bot dashboard repeatedly insisted there was widespread and deep Russian penetration of social media and unveiled that Twitter executives frequently challenged those claims internally.

Shamefully, even though the Twitter execs knew that Hamilton 68 was a fraud, they didn’t publicly attack it as such.

“I think we need to just call this out on the bulls–t is,” Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote in an October 2017 email. “Hamilton dashboard falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots,” he added in January 2018. (snip)

While Roth wanted to publicly push back against Hamilton 68, he was warned against taking on the politically connected group by Twitter’s then-head of global policy communication, Emily Horne.

“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote.

Why did Twitter have to be careful pushing back? Were there threats from the FBI? From John Podesta? Inquiring minds want to know.

The reason Hamilton 68 matters is that it became the source for hundreds of media stories pushing the narrative that Russia was behind Trump.

Matt Taibbi explained this to Brian Kilmeade on his Fox News show yesterday:

Taibbi also addressed his media critics, accusing some of them of “professional jealousy.”

It's time for all the media that published stories based on Hamilton 68 frauds to publish corrections and retractions.

Photo credit: Grabien video screengrab