Is The Kremlin Working To Turn Out An Audience For Trump And Strange In Alabama This Week?

Friday or Saturday (depending on if you're paying attention to Trumpanzee's tweets or to Luther Strange's campaign announcements], Trumpanzee is traipsing off to Huntsville to campaign for appointed incumbent Republican Senator Luther Strange, who is currently running several points behind far right psychopath Roy Moore (Bannon's candidate). Tuesday is the Republican primary runoff. Moore led in the first round and the 3rd place candidate, Mo Brooks, endorsed Moore last week.

Tuesday, Breitbart reported that the White House political department is flipping out in the fear that Trump won't draw a big enough crowd to satisfy his ego (and that he'll fire someone-- as he did after the debacle in Phoenix, where Bernie drew 4 times as many people as he did).

They already took down the size of the venue, from the Madison City Stadium, where Trump last stopped in Huntsville to the Von Braun Center's Propst Arena, which only holds 9,000 people. [Bretibart's reporting, as usual, is screwy on this since the Madison City Stadium is actually the slightly smaller venue.] The poorly-written report claims that "White House aides" told then that "they were worried about turning out a large crowd size for Trump, given they know the president has already given his endorsement and that he and the Vice President Mike Pence are campaigning for the establishment candidate against the presumed anti-establishment candidate."].

“It doesn’t look good to have them [Trump and Pence] stumping for the guy who is going to lose,” one White House official said.

Pence is slated to campaign in Birmingham on Monday for Strange.

Another, who wished not to be quoted, told Breitbart News that many people in the White House are concerned that Trump will be unimpressed with crowd size because Alabamians do not think highly of Strange given his lobbyist history.

“We have concerns that there may not be a high amount of turnout at the rallies for Strange and we are concerned that some of those that may show up may be there to shout pro-Roy Moore slogans–or that they just want to see the president and vice president but still plan to vote for Roy Moore,” a third White House aide told Breitbart News. “Translating this into votes for Luther Strange is going to be very difficult, if not impossible.”

After the February 2016 rally in nearby Madison, Trump told attendees the crowd was upwards of 30,000.

What they forgot to mention is that Trump is a congenital liar and that the Madison City Stadium only holds 7,000 people, not 30,000. But Trump demands that all sycophants around him accept his alternative reality as fact. Breitbart did report that "Law enforcement the day after that event put the figure much lower. Maj. Jim Cooke of the Madison Police Department told AL.com at the time the estimate was between 12,000-15,000 people in attendance, which is still significantly higher than the Von Braun Center’s capacity," more than double the capacity. There is some speculation that the Trump team has been frantically moving the date of the rally so as not to have to compete with football games which are very popular, as opposed to Trump's stale shtik, which no one is that interested in hearing any longer.

Still, the obvious way to go to solve this problem would be for the White House to go back to campaign mode when they had Russians manipulating Facebook to turn out audiences for Trump rallies-- a long way from when Trump was actually paying actors to pretend to be audience members.

The Kremlin-paid propagandists turned out audiences for Trump for about a dozen rallies in Florida during the campaign (which is illegal since foreign governments aren't allowed to give candidates in U.S. elections anything of value, even though defining a Trump fan as "something of value" might not hold up in a court of law).

The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations-- Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs-- were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.

“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald!”

The Florida flash mob was one of at least four pro-Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton demonstrations conceived and organized over a Facebook page called “Being Patriotic,” and a related Twitter account called “march_for_trump.”  (The Daily Beast identified the accounts in a software-assisted review of politically themed social-media profiles.)

Being Patriotic had 200,000 followers and the strongest activist bent of any of the suspected Russian Facebook election pages that have so far emerged. Events promoted by the page last year included a July “Down With Hillary!” protest outside Clinton’s New York campaign headquarters, a September 11 pro-Trump demonstration in Manhattan, simultaneous “Miners for Trump” demonstrations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in October, and a pro-Trump rally outside Trump Tower last November, after his election victory.

The Being Patriotic Facebook page was closed in August 2017—right when Facebook purged accounts secretly operated by a notorious St. Petersburg troll factory called Internet Research Agency. According to a public report by U.S. intelligence agencies (PDF), Internet Research Agency is financed by “a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.” Being Patriotic’s posts included scores of pro-Trump or anti-Clinton memes framed and watermarked in the same style as those found on the Heart of Texas and Secured Borders Facebook pages previously identified as Russian operations.

The Being Patriotic Twitter account was suspended at around the same time.

A Facebook spokesman told the Daily Beast the company was “not able to confirm any of the details here,” in response to a question about the Russian origin of Being Patriotic, but did not challenge the Daily Beast’s reporting.

On Sept. 6, Facebook acknowledged for the first time that inauthentic accounts from 2015 to 2017 promoted what the company’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, characterized as “divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum.” But Stamos said that most of the fraudulent activity it found-- some 3,000 ads connected to 470 now-shuttered accounts linked to Russian troll farms-- “didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting, or a particular candidate.”

After the Daily Beast found known Russian accounts that used Facebook’s Events tool to promote rallies inside the United States, the company said that it was not well positioned to determine “if something like coordination occurred” between the Trump campaign and Russia-- something investigators and security researchers doubt because of the social network’s massive trove of information on its customers.

But the discovery of the Being Patriotic rallies suggests that the fraudulent activity on Facebook did indeed involve messaging on behalf of Trump, did prompt at least some Americans to rally on Trump’s behalf, and did result in the Trump campaign volunteers subsequently sharing material from those events.

The pro-Trump events represent “the next level” of suspected Russian influence operations, said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who has testified about those operations to a Senate committee investigating them.

“This would be a direct effort that they attempted that’s more than online promotion,” Watts told the Daily Beast. “‘Let’s organize and try to get people to move to events in a proactive way around a candidate. Again, if it traces back to Russia, you can’t deny that’s foreign influence in an election.”

The page earned such a large following, a known Macedonian fake news distributor, Nikola Tanevski, purchased BeingPatriotic.com this year, but the page is currently dormant. Tanevski runs popular, pro-Trump fake news factories USATwentyFour.com and TheAmericanBacon.com. Attempts to reach Tanevski did not receive a response.

The layers of deception went beyond Facebook posts and manufactured rallies. When it wasn’t organizing events, Being Patriotic encouraged violence against minorities in incendiary posts. “Arrest and shoot every shithead taking part in burning our flag! #BLM vs #USA,” Being Patriotic’s Twitter account posted in April 2016, using the hashtag for the Black Lives Matter protest movement.

The account also advertised a toll-free “Being Patriotic Hotline” to report instances of voter fraud on Election Day.

“Detected a voter fraud? Tell us about it! Call 888-486-8102 or take photo/video and send it to us,” the account wrote on Nov. 8. Being Patriotic’s sister account, @March_for_Trump, plugged the same phone number, as well as a hotline for the “Trump Lawyer Team.” The number is now disconnected.

Not just Stone, Bannon & Palin... even Louie Gohmert is bucking Trump on this

When asked for comment, the White House referred the Daily Beast to the Trump campaign, which, in turn, did not respond to emailed questions. But Susie Wiles, who served as Trump’s campaign manager in Florida, told the Daily Beast that the Broward County portion of the flash mob “was not an official campaign event.”

That’s despite the fact that the event was promoted on “Official Donald J. Trump for President Campaign Facebook Page for Broward County, Florida.” Photos and videos of the demonstration were posted there afterward.

When emailed the link to the Facebook posting, Wiles told the Daily Beast: “There are groups such as this across the state-- and maybe other places, too. Groups of people get together and establish a presence such as this but it is unaffiliated with the campaign, per se. The photos ring no bells with me.”

Wiles also said that the Trump campaign’s purported Broward County Facebook page, which markets itself as being “official,” was not set up by the campaign.

“The Donald Trump campaign did not set these Facebook pages up,” she told the Daily Beast. “Rather, supporters (like the lady registered as the contact) set them up to support the campaign and subsequently the president.”

The “lady” registered as the contact is Dolly Trevino Rump, the Trump campaign’s chairwoman for Broward County who, until this April, was also the secretary of the local Republican Party. The Miami Herald described her as “perhaps Broward’s most famous Donald Trump fan.” Rump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast. Neither did the chairman of the Broward County Republican Party.

I wonder if they checked with Rupert Ditsworth/Tarsey, a major Tumpanzee supporter and Secretary of the Broward County Republican Party. I bet he knows what the Russians were up to. Or maybe Dana Rohrabacher? Matt Taibbi summed this all up earlier today at the Rolling Stone: "So McConnell has sold out to Trump, and Trump has sold out to McConnell, and it's Steve Bannon, who just weeks ago was kicked out of the White House, who is now playing the role of kingmaker in the Republican Party. The spectacle will achieve peak gruesomeness Thursday evening, when Sarah Palin and the also recently ousted Dr. Sebastian Gorka will campaign for Moore in Alabama. The event is sponsored by something called the MAGA Coalition, a new group not officially connected to Trump. (Charles Manson and the ghost of Heinrich Himmler were not available.) Having these two freak shows back-to-back-- Palin-Gorka Thursday, Trump-Strange Friday-- will offer the national media and the Republican electorate a reality-show-style standoff, cartoonizing the new divisions within the party... What a glorious disaster this is, all the way around. McConnell and company disgrace themselves totally by clinging to Trump's ankles. Trump betrays his own constituents and may soon represent the same 'swamp' he campaigned against. If the world is just, they will roast together for all eternity in the same boiling hell-cauldron."

Dana