Part IX -- Russian-Influenced Media; Case of OAN
Part IX -- Russian-Influenced Media; Case of OAN
Vladimir Putin has been placing assets in the US and Europe as a long-term project for at least seven years, and in some cases further back. As mentioned earlier in this series, many of his operations are designed in such a way that if ever confronted on it, he can credibly claim that he is simply returning the favor and retaliating “tit for tat” in response to similar operations directed against his country. For example, were anyone to mention to him his arming of the Taliban in Afghanistan over recent years, he might mention that the US openly supported the Chechnyan Separatists in his own backyard.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of having had direct dialogue with Chechen separatists, whom he likened to Osama Bin Laden, shortly after a hostage-taking at a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan that took place on Sept. 1-3, 2004, for which notorious Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev had claimed responsibility. Speaking in the wake of the attack, Putin addressed Western policy experts at the inaugural, closed-door meeting of the Valdai discussion club; there, CNN reported, he criticized the U.S. tendency to view anti-Russian fighters in Chechnya as “freedom fighters” rather than terrorists. In particular, he claimed that the Americans had met with Chechen separatist representatives and that Russia’s complaints about these contacts had been met with the response that the U.S. “reserve[s] the right to talk with anyone.”1In 2015, Putin again spoke of communication between militants from the North Caucasus and U.S. officials. In an interview with the Rossiya television channel he said that, “once, our special services noted direct contacts between rebels from the North Caucasus and representatives of the special services of the United States in Azerbaijan”; Putin suggested that the latter even “helped with transport” for the militants.2 His complaints about the matter to the U.S. administration, he said, ended with a letter from U.S. intelligence stating that the U.S. government had the right to maintain contacts “with all opposition forces in Russia.” (1)
Though there is no proof that the US openly gave direct material support to the Chechens, as Putin might claim, he is correct that the US did establish relations with them. That gives him enough cover to say that this was all he was doing with the Taliban. He employs similar arguments in other cases where he is conducting Intelligence warfare against the US and European countries.
Among the assets he has cultivated over many years are those in the US Media, several of which are longer term, and some more recent. One of the Russian steered assets in the US news media is particularly dangerous, because it has recently become the most favored source of news and information for Donald Trump, the “One America News Network”, (OAN) replacing his previous favorite, Fox News. The other is the official Russian State English Language News Cable, “Russia Today” (RT). Which we will cover more a bit later. OANN has been very open about its affiliation and preference for Russia, and in particular has been more than willing to spread Russian disinformation and explicitly falsified claims, for purposes of leading Trump in one direction or another. Many will remember that during the first wave of mass protests against the murder of George Floyd, Buffalo NY Police in riot gear brutally assaulted and seriously injured a peaceful 70 years old peace activist. It was OANN which first issued the lying report that the activist was an agent of Antifa and had fabricated his own injury in order to give his terrorist backers credibility and sympathy. That OANN story was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., and then embraced by his father shortly after.
So, who and what is OAN? According to the Denver Post, July 6, 2017
“…since its inception in 2013, and especially since Trump began his march to the White House, One America’s owner, Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who made his money printing circuit boards, has directed his channel to push Trump’s candidacy, scuttle stories about police shootings, encourage antiabortion stories, minimize coverage of Russian aggression, and steer away from the new president’s troubles, according to more than a dozen current and former producers, writers and anchors, as well as internal emails from Herring and his top news executives.”
…”Nonetheless, Robert Herring has repeatedly shaped the news on OAN. During the campaign, for example, he banned stories about polls that showed anyone other than Trump in the lead, according to emails and interviews with OAN journalists.
“Early one morning in March 2016, Herring emailed producers with a directive, two hours before former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was to denounce Trump as “very, very not smart”: “Do not carry the Romney speech live,” Herring wrote. “Romney has no standing. … He is a loser. We will let the people decide.”
…”In 2000, Robert Herring Sr., who is 76, sold the family’s business, Herco Technology, for $122 million. He retired and met a woman in Russia who became his third wife. ...In 2013, the family created its second channel, One America News. Robert Herring’s idea was to provide something that had gone missing from the cable news landscape – a basic headline service covering national and international news.
…” Almost all of the reports are read by the anchors over video footage provided by the Reuters, Associated Press and Euronews services, as well as by RT, the Kremlin-funded news outlet that a U.S. intelligence report calls “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”
“OAN breaks its cycle of half-hour newscasts only for two hours of evening opinion shows – The Daily Ledger with Graham Ledger and Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler – both of which are guns-blazing nightly tributes to Trump. Ledger is a tough guy who takes no prisoners. Talking about people coming into the country from majority-Muslim countries, he says, “If they won’t take a bite out of a pulled pork sandwich, we probably won’t let them in the country.” Wheeler leans more on clever snark and verbal eyerolls: “How many innocent people have Islamophobes killed this week?”
Continuing, from DP, “…Producers said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia. (Herring’s online streaming company, KlowdTV, features a package offering just Herring’s own channels and RT. “Wouldn’t it be better if we started working with Russia, than to keep blaming them for everything,” Herring tweeted in October. “Lift sanctions, no NATO on their borders.”
In a lead story, June 11, 2020, “The Atlantic” ran the following headline and sub heading-
“Is OAN the Leading Edge of Russian Misinformation?
The Biden campaign says Trump’s favorite TV network is peddling the Kremlin’s lies.”
Some excerpts—
“In what appears to be a signal of intensifying political warfare ahead of the November election, One America News Network, the Trump-supporting cable channel that has been promoting anti-Biden conspiracies for several months, says it has obtained several hours of secret recordings of then–Vice President Biden’s conversations with Ukrainian officials. If such recordings exist, they’re likely linked to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine and a Russian intelligence operation, two former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine and a former ambassador to Russia told me. The OAN employee who claims to have the tapes would not say what was on them, other than suggesting that they will be revelatory.”
“Andriy Derkach, who released the Biden tapes that have already come out, is a former member of a pro-Russian political party who graduated from a KGB-run academy in Moscow. OAN lends his efforts a veneer, however thin, of journalistic legitimacy.
“The person now claiming to have more tapes is OAN’s Chanel Rion, the on-air personality who went with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, on his December trip to Ukraine in part to find information on Biden to help Trump. Rion, who has become famous for her conspiracy-inflected questions at White House briefings, emailed the Biden campaign May 29 claiming that she was working on an “in-depth report” about recordings that appear to be of Biden speaking with Petro Poroshenko, then the president of Ukraine. “We have over five hours of these recordings (beyond what has been posted online by Nabu Leaks),” she wrote, referencing a Ukrainian website suspected of Russian links.
“Derkach, a politician known as the “Ukrainian Putin,” has been a proponent of the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was really behind the interference in the 2016 election instead of Russia. And he has previously been eager to provide damaging material about Biden for Trump’s sake. Derkach released a batch of recordings three weeks ago, claiming that they had been made by Poroshenko and given to him by “investigative journalists.”
…The Atlantic, continued…“as countries around the world increase their cyberwar capabilities and their willingness to interfere in one another’s domestic politics, and as the democratization of publishing allows for the rapid spread of misinformation, media leaks of hard-to-verify and potentially doctored documents and recordings of government officials are becoming commonplace. “It is common practice for Russian intelligence to help put out information in skewed forms in Ukraine, and forensic experts have seen that this information is doctored,” said John Herbst, a former career Foreign Service officer who served as the American ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006. “The Kremlin is a master at this sort of practice, and the sources in Ukraine providing this sort of information are known to be well connected in Moscow.”
“An OAN spokesperson, Krista McClelland, did not respond to a request for comment about the suggestion that the recordings have links to Russian intelligence. Nor did she respond to the Biden campaign’s charges.
“Other countries are stepping up their own efforts to get involved in this year’s elections; Iran and China, for example, have been linked to attempts to hack Biden and Trump campaign computers. But Russia continues to lead the misinformation game. The day after Rion reached out to Biden’s team, Sputnik—the Kremlin-owned propaganda service, which American intelligence has accused of being involved in the 2016 misinformation efforts—ran an interview with a former Poroshenko aide who claimed that he was the one who’d made the recordings, and that he’d given them to his lawyers to give the Trump administration. “Because of the coronavirus,” he said,” they are waiting. But in September, closer to elections, they will begin to use them more.”
In the Online Edition of the June 15th “The Guardian”, author David Smith wrote—
“Donald Trump and Fox News are said to have one of the strongest marriages in political showbusiness. But there is a young rival hoping to outfox Fox and catch the US president’s wandering media eye.The obscure One America News Network (OAN) makes up for its lack of clout or viewers by covering every Trump utterance, recycling conspiracy theories, downplaying Russian threats, bashing the mainstream media and championing the “Make America Great Again” agenda.”
“An article on the Daily Beast website last month was headlined “The Hell of Working at Trump’s New Favorite Network”, based on interviews with four former OAN employees. One ex-video producer, Ernest Champell, said he was told on his first day at work, “Yeah, we like Russia here,” and recalled how the network spread conspiracy theories and ran “hit jobs” on politicians. He quit after four months”
And lastly, from that issue of The Guardian…” But media watchdogs detect something more sinister about the network. OAN’s Washington team includes Jack Posobiec, once described by the New York Times as “a pro-Trump activist notorious for his amateur sleuthing into red herrings like the ‘Pizzagate’ hoax and a conspiracy theory involving the murder of a Democratic aide”.
Next I want to highlight the role of OANN’s Jack Posobiec, as he represents a perfect case study of the interface between the Alt-Right Extremists, Right-Wing Trump supporting media, Russian Intelligence, and the previously mentioned QAnon, as you see by the “Pizzagate” Conspiracy reference, his personal role in spreading that, and as well another infamous bogus Conspiracy pushed by them.
According to the May 11, 2017 issue of “Al Dia”, by author Yamilla Habib, reporting on an expose by Huffington Post French edition—
“Jack Posobiec: the link connecting France, Trump and Russia
--some excerpts
The head of department of The Rebel TV in Washington and Philadelphian supporter of Donald Trump, Jack Posobiec, has been the French headline for several days, having been the first to spread the “MacronLeaks”.
“The internal documents of the electoral campaign of Emmanuel Macron, president-elect of France, were the subject of a cyber attack during the last electoral week, and its dissemination was carried out on May 5, through an anglophone forum, before being immediately spread on Twitter by an "American militant, near the far right," according to the Huffington Post France. Belgian social media analyst Nicolas Vanderbiest said that after the publication of the documents in the 4Chan forum, frequented by surfers close to the American alt-right, Jack Posobiec was the first to share the data to his 100,000 followers on Twitter, inaugurating the hashtag "#MacronLeaks".
Flashpoint of New York and Trend Micro based in Tokyo have shared intelligence suggesting that the group of hackers known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28, Fancy Bear and Pawn Storm was responsible for filtering Emmanuel Macron’s documents. The group has been linked to the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Directorate, according to The Guardian.”
AD, continued…”According to the French media, Posobiec represents a digital site (The Rebel) openly supportive of Trump and Le Pen, which often disseminates inaccurate data.
"The militant appears as part of the 'Slavright', a far-right movement mainly located in Eastern Europe, considered racist and white supremacist”, according to the French media.Hours before disseminating the hacked information of Emmanuel Macron's campaign, Posobiec had been tagged in a photo along with former editor Breitbart and one of the main right-wing figures who supported Donald Trump, Milo Yinanopoulos, on a Caption that read "Happy #CincoDeMilo"…. Posobiec has been part of the spread of false information, such as the "pizzagate" issue - conspiracy theory involving the Clinton team with pedophilia - as well as the call for a boycott of the latest Star Wars film, "Rogue One," for allegedly broadcasting an anti-Trump message, according to L'Obs newspaper in France.
“For its part, Reuters published yesterday that Posobiec has received access to the White House, from the Trump Administration. Posobiec, " attended the daily press briefing on Tuesday and later broadcast video from the White House grounds with positive commentary on President Donald Trump's abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey”, explains the media.
“The cyber attack of the French president-elect has worried the international security community since it could imply a connection between Russian digital intelligence organizations and public figures of the American extreme right.
Through social networks, Posobiec and William Craddick, for example, founder and editor-in-chief of Disobedient Media have been perceived as close to each other. Craddick would have warned that French documents had been leaked minutes before it was made public.
According to Reuters, "two US intelligence officials said that they are increasingly confident that hackers with connections to the Russian government played a role in the French election.”
Here is more on Posobiec, from the Online edition of “Media Matters”, 11/14/2018, article by Cristina Lopez,
Headline:
White supremacists linked to pro-Trump media figure Jack Posobiec. Here is what you need to know about him.
Some excerpts—
“Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist and consummate pro-Trump media figure who often boasts of his access to the White House and other MAGA celebrities, worked as recently as 2017 with white supremacists who advocate for violence. Posobiec has a long record of extremism and ratfucking: He was an outspoken advocate of the “alt-right,” published a book with the help of an “alt-right” figure, and pushed all kinds of smears and misinformation for political gain.
“Posobiec reportedly had links to Jeffrey and Edward Clark, two white supremacist brothers. Jeffrey Clark was arrested by federal authorities in Washington, D.C., for gun charges after relatives contacted authorities about his support for last month’s mass shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue. As reported by HuffPost, Posobiec teamed up with the brothers in 2017 to film documentary footage; a source provided an image of Posobiec alongside the brothers. HuffPost also reported that anti-fascist researcher Laura Sennett said Jeffrey Clark had told her Posobiec both knew of his Nazi beliefs and was sympathetic to them.
“Posobiec is currently a host for One America News Network, a right-wing news outlet that specializes in sycophantic coverage of President Donald Trump and conspiracy theories. He previously worked for far-right Canadian outlet Rebel Media. Posobiec achieved his standing in the MAGA media universe by embracing the “alt-right” and its public figures during the 2016 presidential election and, like many other grifters, eventually rebranding as a member of the “New Right” after the extremism of the “alt-right” made associating with it too toxic.
“Despite his continued efforts to sanitize his role in spreading the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, Posobiec repeatedly broadcast to his social media followers and to Infowars audiences the baseless claim that a D.C. pizza restaurant served as a front for a child trafficking ring, showed up at the pizza parlor himself to “investigate,” and then claimed that the arrest of a gunman who also showed up at the pizzeria was a “false flag.”
And more from Media Matters…“Posobiec’s ratfucking record includes spreading forged documents tied to Russia purporting to be then-French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s emails; planting a “Rape Melania” sign at an anti-Trump protest to smear activists; and doxxing one of the women who reported that she was sexually assaulted as a minor by defeated Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, Posobiec was an administrator in a racist Facebook group that promoted Republican candidates and pushed far-right conspiracy theories.
So, you have a picture now of Jack Posobiec. Russian disinformation conduit, virulently Anti-Semitic Nazi, QAnon connected conspiracy spreader, leading journalist with Russia linked OANN cable station, and accredited White House correspondent with press pool access. People have been shocked and surprised by Trump’s embrace of QAnon connected candidates recently, but in reality, he and his son Don Jr, have been using these Russian steered White Supremacist networks for several years, in a staggering disregard for basic security and background checks which have always been standard procedure. (LFR)
More on Posobiec— Do you remember the infamous “Seth Rich Case,” which Trump’s Fox and other propagandists latched onto, regarding the tragic death of a DNC volunteer? Yep, that was Posobiec, all the way.
…”He used temporary White House press credentials in May 2017 to push the debunked conspiracy theory that former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered for leaking DNC emails.In his role as OANN correspondent, Posobiec regularly showcases his access to pro-Trump celebrities (including Donald Trump Jr.) and his presence at White House and Trump Hotel social functions. Meanwhile, he’s used his OANN platform to hype smears from the defendant in the Seth Rich lawsuit, as well amplify the wild conspiracy theory known as QAnon, giving virulent far-right troll Microchip a platform and taking his word at face value that he is the anonymous poster known as Q. Microchip is an anonymous and prolific user of Gab -- the social media site known for being “haven for white supremacists” -- where he constantly posts white supremacist grievances and anti-Semitic and racial slurs and invites followers to “fuck shit up” legally by pushing and spreading the misinformation campaign QAnon.
“Posobiec used Twitter to target Jewish journalists with antisemitic hate. His targets included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, whose Polish family survived the Holocaust during World War II. Posobiec also targeted a group of journalists reporting on a press conference hosted by Peter Thiel. Three Jewish rights groups – the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action – described Posobiec’s behavior as antisemitic or condemned OANN’s relationship to him after Hatewatch reached out for comment on this investigation. The full statements of those groups as well as additional evidence of Posobiec’s antisemitic remarks can be found.”
On May 2, President Donald Trump praised Posobiec in a tweet: “That’s right Jack. Keep up the good work!”
