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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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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