At Least Biden's Lackadasically-Planned Kick-Off Rally In Pittsburgh Monday Won't Be As Fake As Trump's Was

Writing for the Payday Report yesterday, union activist Mike Elk mentioned that, after a fat-cat Philly fundraiser-in-a-mansion con-sponsored by superrich union buster attorney Steven Cozen to kick off his campaign on Thursday, Status Quo Joe is going to demonstrate how down with the Rust Belt's white working class he is by showing up at a quasi-Potemkin Village version of a rally in Pittsburgh.

In October of 2016 there was a different kind of rally for white working class guys in Pittsburgh-- and that was no "quasi" about the Potemkin-ness of it! A few days ago, Mark Gruenberg had an interesting tidbit from the Mueller report to share: a fake "Miners For Trump" rally in Pittsburgh... organized by Kremlin-paid election saboteurs.

From the redacted Mueller Report

“MINERS FOR TRUMP” it read in green capital letters. “BRING BACK OUR JOBS” it added in white capitals. After some printing that’s illegible, it declared “Help Mr. Trump fix it!” and ended with “#TrumpPence2016.”

The message was a fake, and there are no details on how many people showed up for the rally.

But that Russian fake, and others, may have helped GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump win the electoral votes of the key states-- Pennsylvania among them-- that swung the 2016 election.

The accompanying text in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Trump, the Russians, and the 2016 campaign disruption says the rally in Steel Plaza in Pittsburgh and another in “Marcony Plaza” in Philadelphia were two of three Pennsylvania events Russian internet operatives staged for Trump in the closing days of the drive. There were three others in New York and “a series in Florida,” including one in Miami that drew the campaign’s attention.

All were arranged by Russian agents rather than by any actual Trump-supporting miners, according to the redacted copy of Mueller’s report on the Trump campaign, the Russians, and the ties-- or lack of them, the report says-- between the two.

By the way, the face of the miner wasn't a Russian. The St. Petersburg troll farm run by the Internet Research Agency somehow wound up with a photo of Lee Hipshire, an American coal miner who can't complain-- because he died of black lung disease. His son, Ronnie Hipshire, a retired coal miner in West Virginia, did complain... to NPR. "What I didn't like about seeing this on the Mueller report is them stealing my dad's picture and putting it on a Trump campaign rally," Hipshire said in his interview with All Things Considered. "My dad was one of the most staunch Democrats that you'll ever see in your life, and he never would have even thought about putting his face on something like that. It just was beyond me to see it."

Stealing intellectual property-- photographer Earl Dotter owns the rights to that image of Lee Hipshire-- is a hallmark of Republican Party election campaigns. I guess Russian ones too-- or at least the Russian election campaigns they do in the U.S.