October 11, 2016

Donald Trump’s Kremlin Connection Comes Through Again

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Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald reports on the latest from Donald Trump:

At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal….”This just came out a little while ago,” Trump said….”He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,” Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago”

Ah, Sidney Blumenthal, the unkillable Rasputin of the Clinton family. Conservatives sure do have a way of somehow putting him at the center of every scandal. This time, though, Blumenthal has an ironclad alibi: he never said this. He did email a Newsweek article to John Podesta—which was hacked and released by WikiLeaks a few days ago—but that’s all. It was Kurt Eichenwald himself who said this stuff, not Blumenthal.

So how did Trump make this mistake? According to Eichenwald, the only news organization that reported this was Sputnik, a Russian controlled news agency:

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?

Who indeed?

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Managing an independent, nonprofit newsroom is staggeringly hard. There’s no cushion in our budget—no backup revenue, no corporate safety net. We can’t afford to fall short, and we can’t rely on corporations or deep-pocketed interests to fund the fierce, investigative journalism Mother Jones exists to do. That’s why we need you right now. Please chip in to help close the gap.

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