Putin-Controlled Think Tank Wrote Plan To Help Trump Win Election: Report
A new report provides more evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.
A think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin wrote the plan to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election, according to a Reuters report published Wednesday.
According to Reuters, three current and four former U.S. officials said that two confidential documents written by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies helped the U.S. intelligence community confirm the conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump win. “The documents were central to the Obama administration’s conclusion that Russia mounted a “fake news” campaign and launched cyber attacks against Democratic Party groups and Clinton’s campaign, the current and former officials said,” Reuters reported.
According to the report, the institute is run by former senior Russian intelligence officials appointed by the Vladimir Putin’s office.
The seven U.S. officials said that one of the documents was a strategy paper drafted in June of 2016 that advocated a propaganda campaign on various media platforms urging U.S. voters to back a presidential candidate with a friendlier stance toward Russia.
“It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said,” Reuters reported.
And the second document, written in October, advocated for Russia to switch focus to amplifying voter fraud claims, given the widely held view at the time that Hillary Clinton was likely to beat Trump.
According to Reuters, the June strategy paper expanded Putin’s earlier strategy from March 2016, in which Moscow instructed state-backed media outlets such as Sputnik News and RT to produce more pro-Trump content.
