дезинформация? безусловно не *

Now that 13 Russians are under indictment related to US vote manipulation accusations, we are either at the start of a protracted process, or about to see a team of investigators deposed.

As I've previously noted, much of the material about these matters has been circulating for many months.

The clever move has been to denounce much of what is out there as 'Fake News' or, as the Russians would prefer to think of it, as дезинформация / dezinformatsiya. Brilliantly, they have had their own troll farms to pump out whatever stories they liked for many years. It's pretty much the continuation of the systems started during the Cold War.

There's also a US embarrassment, because even after the FBI's NorthernLights operation to track some of the disinformation providers prior to the US election, there was a senior US belief that it was impregnable to such influence capers.

Brrrp.


So a small team of Russians in a company owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin -ahem- "Putin's cook" and originally described as the Internet Research Agency (nowadays Glavset) could inexpensively create mayhem via well-targeted messaging. Yes, that's billionaire Yevgeny serving Vladimir a salad.

Meanwhile the US was less concerned about countermeasures instead fumbling to create its own equivalence.

It also makes the whole Trump involvement question quite slippery. Trump may have had form in Russia, with Miss Universe contests and Trump Tower licensing. It almost didn't matter to the Russians who Trump actually knew, he could simply be targeted as a stooge to Russian destabilisation plans.

Notwithstanding the well-documented cases around misogyny, mendacity, racism, narcissm and sociopathy, we still have the questions around hard factual crimes to examine. Some might infer that a Trump owned building that housed money launderers, mafia style enforcers and casino interests might have some links back to the various activities? Or are they just trumped up suspicions?

We shall probably never know, because of the labyrinthine way that most of the topics are handled and the huge misdirections that permit one form of lamentable act to take place whilst everyone is looking at something else.

* disinformation? surely not.