DISINFO: US Democrats accuse Russia of interference as a preventive measure for their defeat
SUMMARY
US Democrats are preparing themselves for defeat in the future elections: they started again with the old song that “Russia is interfering”, despite that it is hard to imagine why Russia would like to have Donald Trump as president since US-Russia relations hardly improved after his election. In fact, this can be said of all candidates, and therefore Russian interference in the US election makes no sense. The rhetorical figure ‘but we said’ could help Democrats to save face for some time after the defeat, but some of them can’t wait, spending all their arsenal of attacks before the election.
RESPONSE
It is not representatives of the Democratic Party, but members of the US intelligence community and independent observers who are warning of Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 elections. In February 2020, US intelligence officers warned lawmakers that about Russia was to help both Donald Trump and Democratic aspiring candidate Bernie Sanders. Some of these attempts were widely documented by social media investigations company Graphika in a report published in October 2019.
Contrary to the claim of the article, there are many reasons why Russia may want to do this, from increasing US polarisation to deepen divisions inside the Democratic Party to sowing mistrust on democracy.
This is part of a recurrent pro-Kremlin narrative denying Russia’s interference in foreign elections despite overwhelming evidence, both in the US and in other countries. You can see other examples of disinformation about this subject, such as allegations that neither the US Intelligence Committee report nor the Mueller report found any evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, that there is no proof that Russia tried to influence the Brexit referendum or about the role played by RT and Sputnik in these and other processes, that “absurd” accusations against Russia are an attempt to demonise it, or that the US and UK are indeed the ones who try to interfere in Europe.