Dear Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, I Am Not Sidney Blumenthal
http://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-sidney-blumenthal-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-benghazi-sputnik-508635
By Kurt Eichenwald On 10/10/16 at 7:45 PM
Updated | I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putinand, somehow, Donald Trumpseem to believe. And that should raise concerns not only about Moscows attempts to manipulate this election, but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.
An email from Blumenthala confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theoriesturned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putins government. But now that I have been brought into the whole messand transformed into Blumenthalthere is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.
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This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putins mouthpiece?
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This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?
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