This article appears in the February 23, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Mueller Indictments of
Russian Social Media Trolls
Scam the American People

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this article]

Feb. 18—In the first two weeks of February, things looked really bad for the coup being run against the President of the United States. Congress, in the form of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that it would be publishing a series of three memos exposing how the coup was fomented. If the first memo—which was published on Feb. 2, concerning a deliberate fraud on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and others—is any guide, criminal investigation of the Obama White House is on the agenda.

The House Intelligence Committee, backed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has announced that two upcoming memos will expose the role of key State Department personnel and Obama’s intelligence chiefs, respectively, in the coup. The track being followed by Congressional investigators is centered on the use of a very dirty dossier about Donald Trump produced by British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, as part of a full-spectrum British/Obama information warfare operation designed to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Failing that, the British and Obama set out to poison Trump’s presidency and impeach him.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham had already referred Steele to the U.S. Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. Therefore, something, obviously had to be done to turn the tables or, at least, slow the charge against the coup plotters. Something had to be done to take the focus away from the actual British criminals and their U.S. co-conspirators, and refurbish the increasingly discredited “Russiagate” myth. Enter the ever-dutiful Robert Mueller III and his flimsy Feb. 16 indictment of 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies which allegedly conspired to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.

A few things of note are already visible right on the surface of this case. The indictment, written and formulated like a press release rather than a legal document, will never have its factual basis challenged in court. Mueller knows this. The U.S.A. has no extradition treaty with Russia, and the Russian constitution bars extradition of Russian citizens. According to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Russians fooled the Trump campaign by pretending to be Americans, by using stolen identities. There is no allegation of “collusion” with the Trump campaign. There is no claim that this operation affected the vote in the Presidential election, nor could there be, as the expenditures alleged for this amateurish hit-or-miss social media operation were completely dwarfed—by huge orders of magnitude—by the expenditures made by Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders, and associated PACs and organizations.

But, oh those evil Russian “bad actors” who “meddled” in an American election, as even the President initially tweeted. As we have repeatedly demonstrated, the strategic context of the coup against Trump is an all-out effort to preserve the Anglo-American order against what is perceived to be the rising power of China, now allied with Russia. China has constantly and persistently invited the United States to join its Belt and Road Initiative, the largest infrastructure development project ever undertaken in world history. President Trump’s reasoned approach to both Russia and China is seen as an existential threat to the continued Anglo-American partnership, which has dominated the world since Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

Russiagate’s initial narrative, that Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s email accounts to damage the Clinton campaign and elect Donald Trump, has been discredited by the work of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William Binney of the VIPS, who is a former technical director of the NSA, states that if such Russian hacking occurred, the NSA would have the evidence, and would have found a way to produce it. The VIPS also conducted a scientific experiment demonstrating that the source of the Wikileaks DNC emails was a leak, not a hack. Now, the emphasis has shifted to another claim in the January 2017, evidence-free “assessment,” of supposed Russian interference by three of Obama’s intelligence chiefs—this assessment claims that the Russians ran a social media campaign designed to support Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and later to roil the existing divisions in American society. This social media campaign was allegedly run from an entity called the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to the 2017 Obama intelligence assessment and Mueller’s indictment.

Mueller claims that from 2014 forward, the IRA, financed by two companies owned by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, planned and implemented a campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections as part of a project named “translator.” According to Mueller, the campaign involved phony Facebook groups, and phony Twitter, Instagram, and email accounts, all run by Russians from the IRA who had stolen six U.S. identities to facilitate the operation. They used Facebook’s paid advertising feature, according to Mueller, to boost their posts; two IRA employees visited the U.S. under false pretenses to gather intelligence; contacts were made with the Trump campaign’s state offices and field organizations to coordinate social media, and set up rallies in Washington D.C., New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Allegedly, the IRA sought to suppress the black vote by bogus social media posts, and also claimed that the election was “rigged” on Clinton’s behalf. After the election, the IRA engaged in the same social media and rally activities to both support Trump and to support the “Resist” movement seeking Trump’s impeachment.

I will leave it to others to document the obvious U.S. hypocrisy concerning the premise of Russiagate. The United States has intervened in elections all over the world, repeatedly, and, as former CIA Director James Woolsey recently said on Fox News, for the “good of those nations.” When someone is elected whom we don’t like, like Victor Yanukovych in Ukraine, we simply launch a coup using such native assets as neo-Nazi shock troops (Ukraine) or Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists (Syria). Obama’s White House, in the form of the National Security Council’s Ben Rhodes, claimed that it conducted information warfare operations with finesse, setting up, for example, a media echo-chamber to sell the Iran nuclear deal based on the fact that most reporters were “27-year-old kids who knew nothing.”

The indictment’s own overblown allegations should subject it to ridicule. How do we know that Yevgeniy Prigozhin is the boss of this operation? According to Mueller, an IRA employee took a picture of himself in front of the White House on Prigozhin’s birthday with the sign, “Happy Birthday, Boss.” The amazing Russian sleuths found out the startling fact—from one their American social media contacts—that they should concentrate on “purple states.” And the indictment contains an email from one of the allegedly savvy conspirators stating, “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with colleagues . . . I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.” Despite the IRA’s allegedly broad mandate to disrupt American politics, the only U.S. political campaign they attempted to directly contact and compromise appears to be the campaign of Donald Trump.

Rewarmed British Gruel Behind the Indictment

The story of how the IRA came to be an infamous “Putin-controlled troll farm” in the narratives of Western intelligence is an old and long one. We can say, definitively, that it is rewarmed British gruel, a British lie as poisonous as Christopher Steele’s dirty dossier.

At the beginning of 2014, an anti-Russian group of hackers, initially called “The Anonymous International,” and later, “Shaltay-Boltay,” claimed that the building at Saint Petersburg, Savushkina 55, housed a troll farm run by the Kremlin.¹ Since then, this building has been photographed and highlighted endlessly by MI6, all of the British press and tabloids, the CIA, the FBI, NATO, the BBC, the State Department’s propaganda departments and NGOs, CNN, and most of the rest of the mainstream American media. Infiltration operations have been run and publicized by the same people. Actions against the alleged IRA have been filed by infiltrators in the Russian courts. Any intelligent observer would ask the first obvious question: Why, if this building and the alleged company occupying it has been so repeatedly targeted by Western intelligence, would Putin be stupid enough to run an influence operation from that location targeting the 2016 elections? The answer should be obvious—he did not.

The allegation made by “Anonymous International” was immediately picked up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an anti-Putin oligarch who collaborates in multiple ways with both British and U.S. intelligence. His Institute for Modern Russia is a major conduit of U.S. information warfare operations into Russia. The “Anonymous International” allegations were also immediately leaked to BuzzFeed, the same publication used thereafter to make the dirty British Steele dossier against Donald Trump a very public document.

A major escalation of British and U.S. information warfare operations against Russia occurred in 2014. According to Politico magazine, Hillary Clinton threw a fit at that time about the inadequacy of Anglo-American information-war operations selling the Ukraine coup. The British, Obama and his CIA and State Department, and their Kiev regime allies, were equally adamant about the necessity for heightened operations on this front. The joint British-Obama Administration-NATO initiative known as the Strategic Communications Service, based in Latvia, was activated to counter any Russian version of events. The St. Petersburg social media troll farm at the center of Mueller’s indictment has been a staple of this campaign, endlessly photographed, infiltrated, and written about by Western information warriors from 2014 onward.

A huge and well-funded anti-Putin “information warfare” industry now operates in Washington, D.C., featuring the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, where none other than Dmitri Alperovich (author of the “Russia hacked the DNC” hoax) is a fellow; the Alliance for the Defense of Democracy; the German Marshall Fund; the Information Warfare Initiative of the Washington Center for Policy Analysis; the National Endowment for Democracy; and the State Department’s propaganda arms, Radio Free Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Generous funding has been provided by the likes of Khodorkovsky and George Soros. As the result of the National Defense Authorization Act signed by Obama in 2016, millions of dollars are now flowing into this U.S. information warfare initiative.² All of these entities have been integral to the coup against President Trump.

According to “The Saker” blog’s Russian account of the IRA,³ the company itself does not exist. It is a fiction created by Shaltay-Boltay, the successor to “Anonymous International” in conjunction with western intelligence agencies. Shaltay-Boltay, Russian for “Humpty-Dumpty,” conducted a systematic campaign of hacking, leaking, and extortion against Russian officials, according to accounts of its own activities published in the Guardian. Members of Shaltay-Boltay were arrested in November 2016 together with rogue Russian FSB officers said to control their activities. All were charged with treason by the Russian government, specifically some form of collaboration with the U.S.A. The British account of this affair, produced in the Feb. 9, 2017 Guardian, claims that the treason charges were based on the hackers and rogue FSB officials having confessed their trolling crimes to the CIA. According to a November 2017, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article, the FSB “cyber” division where the arrested officers worked, had been in collaboration with U.S. law enforcement agencies for years.

While So-Called Democrats Impose Censorship in the U.S.A.

The final ironic twist I will cite concerning Mueller’s indictment, is the fact that the pre-packaged information it has imported from British intelligence has been and is being used to support wholesale censorship in the United States. On Nov. 30, 2016, an anonymous group called ”Prop or Not,” in conjunction with the Washington Post, published a list of U.S. publications it accused of being Russian propaganda fronts. The list included practically any publication which had doubted the “official” version of events concerning September 11, 2001, the ensuing Iraq war, or the Russiagate myth created by the Clinton Campaign and the Obama Administration. “Prop or Not” is traceable to the same information war specialists behind the Russian Troll Farm story at the center of Mueller’s indictment.⁴ Facebook, Twitter, and all the social media platforms, are now on the lookout to censor dissenting views right out of their platforms, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States be damned.

This is a product of the McCarthyite hysteria infecting our Congress and literally destroying the mental capacities of many. It is endlessly stoked by the national news media—a phenomenon far more dangerous to the national security of the United States than any ham-handed Russian operation to “meddle” in our elections. It is that hysteria and madness which now mistakes Russian puppy postings on Facebook for an attempt to steal the American mind. The late Robert Parry wrote passionately about this in his last days and warned us. It would be a fitting tribute both to him and ourselves if we moved now to finally end this insane British coup.⁵