The Twitter Files are up to their 15th batch of disclosures and this one has the name John Podesta in it. Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman ended up at the ASD Advisory Council. That’s a left-leaning think-tank. They’re accused of “erroneously claiming to track Russian online activity.” They ended up “responsible for thousands of bogus stories asserting the nation’s influence in U.S. politics.” It’s amazing what a Python script “bot” can do. This one seems to have helped rigged an election.
John Podesta and friends
John Podesta isn’t the only big name coming out of the latest batch of Twitter Files. Former special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts came up with the idea for The Hamilton 68 “dashboard.”
It “operated under the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank founded in 2017.” New York Post notes that was “shortly after former President Trump took office.” Hillary was supposed to win in 2016 but managed to lose an election arguably tilted in her favor.
Podesta was in charge of that and still had steam coming out of his ears. He brought in “Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former conservative activist Bill Kristol.”
6.The “dashboard” was headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). pic.twitter.com/XW4JXfAlGM
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
It didn’t take long for them to have a bot coded up. “Hamilton 68’s Russian bot dashboard repeatedly insisted there was widespread and deep Russian penetration of social media.” Twitter executives weren’t buying it but censored un-mercilessly anyway.
Even Yoel Roth was gagging on the Kool-Aid. “I think we need to just call this out on the bulls–t is,” he wrote in an October 2017 email. By January, he added, “Hamilton dashboard falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.”
Podesta was grinning from ear-to-ear. “Twitter’s own internal audits repeatedly showed that accounts flagged by Hamilton 68 were not Russian bots.”
Nothing but a scam
It’s no surprise that something John Podesta is involved with would be a questionable proposition. Even “Yoel Roth Roth wanted to publicly push back against Hamilton 68.” Matt Taibbi goes a little further than that in his analysis.
“It was a scam. Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.”
“Hamilton 68’s pronouncements were used to allege a hidden Russian hand in US politics from hundreds, and possibly thousands, of news stories during the Trump years.” Podesta would have loved to have it running in 2015.
18.Yoel Roth wanted a confrontation. “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote.
However, there were internal concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy. pic.twitter.com/Ejg1VcH73R
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
When Roth wanted to go public, he was squashed by then-head of global policy communication, Emily Horne. Internal messages show how he was “warned against taking on the politically connected group.”
“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she cautioned. After all. Podesta could have him “Clintoned.” He wasn’t feeling suicidal, so kept censoring.
As Taibbi points out, “the private sector Russia-baiting followed a similar approach from the United States government, which repeatedly demanded the company find Russian influence which its internal audits consistently revealed to be nonexistent.” That was proved a few batches ago.