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Jan. 30, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:45
Who Was Really Behind The 'Russian Disinformation' Hoax?

The latest "Twitter Files" release was a bombshell, detailing how a group of neocons got together to falsify information about "Russian disinformation" in 2016 to demonize Donald Trump and help Hillary Clinton. It turns out there was election interference...but it wasn't the Russians it was the neocons. Also today: warhawks exaggerating the China threat. Finally...a good news story from Gallup.

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Hamilton 68 Fraudulent List 00:12:02
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
I'm doing well, thank you.
How's our equipment going to be doing today?
Well, we're still struggling with some couple of technical problems we've got to work around right now, but we're going to have to, unfortunately.
Eventually, we're going to have new stuff and really get down to this.
Anyway, we're going to be here as long as our equipment we can put it together, but we recognize we have some difficulties, but we continue to work on them.
We appreciate your patience.
But today, we can talk about something we're not very patient about.
And that is all this professional spying and misinformation and disinformation and what they have done to Trump and the Trump campaign.
Oh, how many years now?
Started in 16, probably, or even before that.
Lying and cheating.
And, you know, a lot more has come out right now thanks to Twitter and Taibbi.
They're getting information out that really revealing what's happening.
But, you know, the one thing that's bothering me now is, you know, it's back to this thing of what can social media say as a private company.
Of course, I think that's been handled pretty well because they're not a private company.
But this thing that we're going to be talking about today, as we talk about it, I want to think about how in the world can this be not considered fraud?
I mean, it's deliberate lying for financial benefits, and it's a scam.
But it to me doesn't strike me as exactly, you know, the typical thing you're protecting with the First Amendment rights.
Yeah, it does.
And if we can put up that first clip, because this is from a Twitter file release on Friday, and this is just Zero Hedge's write-up of it, which is helpful to have a summary.
But again, as you mentioned, Matt Taibbi did another great job.
And what this did was absolutely blow the lid off of the Hamilton 68 dashboard.
That was something that was claimed by this neocon organization called the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
This was a tool that monitored over 600 Twitter accounts that were Russian bots.
They were Russian agents.
They were doing the bidding of Russia to help elect Donald Trump.
And that's what this whole thing was about.
And it became the definitive source for all of the Russian influence.
It was basically, as you point out in your column today, a massive McCarthyite witch hunt is what it was.
And Taibbi exposed it by digging into the communications of Twitter.
Let's look at this next one.
These are a couple of his tweets in this series.
Obviously, we can't cover all of them, but here's some important things.
Twitter executives, now this is pre-Musk cleaning of Twitter.
So Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton's list.
Because again, the Hamilton 68 would not release the 600 Twitter users that they followed, nor would they reveal their methodology, which should be two huge red flags, okay?
But no, no.
So Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton's list, reverse engineering it from the site's request for Twitter data.
Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so.
And what they found shocked them.
Go to the next one if you can.
They recreated the list.
And what they found, what Twitter found, these accounts, they concluded, are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.
No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops, hardly illuminating a massive influence operation.
And one more, Dr. Paul, before I throw it back, because here's also from Taibbi.
In layman's terms, the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians.
In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it's mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.
It was a scam, he continues.
Instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.
And finally, the last one that we'll talk about here, Twitter immediately recognized these Hamilton-driven news stories posed a major ethical problem, potentially implicating them.
And they said, and this is here on Roth, real people need to know they've been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.
You know, you'd think, well, Trump won, and he's the president, and the security agencies are involved.
The Secret Service is involved.
And, of course, the CIA is usually involved.
And the FBI is involved.
Well, he'll clean up that mess, and this is going to stop.
As soon as I'm elected, it's going to stop.
But it doesn't stop.
This is what scares me in the sense that where are we on this responsibility of government?
We talk about the deep state.
A lot of people talk about the deep state.
A lot of people think there's a group of people that have a lot more control than the elected officials, which is my position.
But why is it that we can't stop that?
I mean, the president is not even in control.
I would say I worry about us being involved in coups around the world, like the coup that we participated in in 2014 and how it lingers and how many coups have we been involved with that led to war.
So it's something I think is actually happening.
It's a transition.
It's not like the Russians came in and all of a sudden, boom, they took over our government and everybody knew it.
That's not it.
But there seems to me that there has been a coup in control that even the president doesn't have, he doesn't have any control over the FBI, really.
And they have control over him.
And Trump's been warned about this.
And sometimes I don't think he put up strong enough defenses for it.
But it's a system that is domestic, and that's why we're having trouble with our elections.
And I think we're going to talk about a poll that sort of verifies this.
The people are catching on.
They know there's something, some real shenanigans going on.
And in this great democracy, well, we live in democracy, you know, and the people will speak out.
Well, it doesn't seem to be working out all that well.
No, it doesn't.
And there are a few things that we know, and I think they're important if we put them together.
First of all, we now know, and we suspected it all along, of course, but now we know definitively that this whole thing was an absolute total fraud.
The whole Hamilton 68 looking for Russian bots and Russian stooges was a total fraud.
But this fraud was used to shape the perception of Americans under false pretenses.
And let's look at this next clip because this is just something that was on the hedge article.
There were hundreds and hundreds of articles written based on the Hamilton 68 assertions, which were fraudulent.
Again, fraudulent.
hundreds and hundreds of articles that shape the perception of Americans based on these lies.
Even Dr. Paul, the fact checkers, PolitiFact and Snopes and the others, they used Hamilton 68 as if it were gospel, as in their fact-checking process to demonize people who disagreed with the people who put this out.
You know, it seems to me that they should be vulnerable.
You know, we really, I think, have a pretty clear understanding of the First Amendment and government shouldn't be involved.
But you've used the word.
It's fraudulent.
It's damaging.
It's a plan.
And I would think there would be reason for a civil suit against this now that they're identifying these people.
And who knows, maybe there will be.
But that's sort of sad too, that you're at this point.
You think, just wake up the people.
They'll take care of it.
They'll help us out.
They'll give support to the people who want to clean up this mess.
And maybe that's why we see these statistics showing they're sick and tired of the government and why we see a shift in the political system in Washington.
But how do you know that's an authentic representation of the vote?
You still see information and statistics showing how many votes were lost.
Hundreds of thousands.
And then if you say anything, you're painted, oh, you big crybaby.
You know, you can't take a loss, that sort of thing.
But I think it's good that people are looking into this more carefully than they used to.
Yeah, and I don't know if the answer maybe is a lawsuit, but you mentioned it this week in your column that, you know, Ron Paul Institute wasn't mentioned on the Hamilton 68, but well, it may well have been because we don't know.
We haven't seen the list yet.
But we do know there was a similarly fraudulent organization called Prop or Not that made it into the Washington Post in November of 16.
I think some, yeah, there was an election then, right?
And that article linked the proper knots list of Russian dupes, and the Ron Paul Institute was on it, along with other organizations that we know like Zero Hedge, anti-war.com.
We know that Joe Lauria of Consortium News was probably on the Hamilton list.
So all of these organizations have been damaged by being labeled Russian disinformation when they were not.
They weren't Russian bots.
They weren't Russian dupes.
They weren't Russian agents.
They were simply American organizations with a different view on things.
We don't know how much we've been harmed by this.
See, I think this is a lot different than somebody had been in a conversation and somebody spurts out on our program.
You know, we really think our president's a jerk.
I mean, that type of characterization, which is not a conspiracy to use language and sneaky things and do fraudulent things to damage people, you know, on what their efforts are, all based on lies.
This is what's coming out.
The truth is coming out.
And I hope it's making a few people a little bit nervous.
But just remember, you know, sometimes they come out and they get these information and it's there for about a week and then it sort of disappears.
So let's try to help them make sure that this doesn't disappear too fast.
Yeah, you know, all of us are small organizations.
We're swimming against the tide of neocon public opinion.
You can't really tell how much.
And we strive to raise a little bit of money and we do a lot on a very small budget.
Who knows how much that hurt our possible donors?
Who knows how many people may have said, you know, I really like what these guys are doing, but I don't need the headache of dealing with this, you know, accusation of Russian agents.
You know, so we were hurt.
I'm sure we were hurt.
But, you know, you use the word coup a lot, and I think it's a very important and appropriate word here, because the financing for the Hamilton 68 dashboard came from an organization called the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is funded by the German Marshall Fund.
And you look at, well, who are these people?
What's the story with them?
Well, let's go ahead and look at a couple of clips here, Dr. Paul.
Here's their advisory council, the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
False Allegations Against Trump 00:03:43
Oh, Mike Chertoff, the rabid neocon.
He's the top list there.
Who's the next one?
Oh, it's David Kramer.
Hi, David.
Let's put the next one on.
Here's David.
Oh, he was senior director at the McCain Institute and part of Freedom House, which is a regime change organization overseas.
Well, who else?
Let's dig a little further.
Hey, oh, hey, there's Bill Crystal.
He's on it too.
He's a neocon.
These are all neocons who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.
And who else?
Hmm, let's do one more.
John Podesto.
That sounds familiar.
What did he?
John Podesta served as the chair of Hillary for America.
He was the head of Hillary's campaign.
He was the one behind all of this demonizing the opponents of Hillary as Russian agents.
And now we know that this is what the coup looks like.
So Podesta wasn't one of those people that would help us out and get us truthful information.
No.
Oh, I'll tell you.
He's behind the coup.
This is a coup.
They launched the coup.
They hated Trump.
There are a lot of reasons to not like Trump, but they hated him so much that they actually did what they accused others of.
They undermined our elections in favor of Hillary.
They weren't successful, but what they did, I don't know if it's a crime, it should be a crime.
You know, how many times have we heard the attacks against Trump?
That is exactly what you say.
It's more an expression of hatred rather than picking away at his tax policies or some other policy.
But the hatred is really very bad.
And he and others have suffered from it.
And maybe it will end when we have honest elections.
That's taboo, isn't it?
Better be careful.
Engineered elections.
So you want to go on, Dean.
I just want to do one more quick thing because I just want to drive home the Hillary point.
And Matt Taibbi, who's no fan of Trump, as we know, he made the point in what he wrote, which is that, and Zero Hedge did as well, which is that all of this stuff was created and paid for by Hillary, by the Hillary campaign.
And even the Wall Street Journal noticed it at the time.
If you can put this next one up, this is from back last year, last May.
Hillary Clinton did it.
Well, what did she do?
Well, Robbie Mook, who ran her campaign, testified before Congress about her involvement in these scams.
Let's do the next one.
Here's a quote from the article.
Mr. Mook said Mrs. Clinton was asked about the plan to call attention to the Trump-Alpha Bank ties and approve it.
A story on the Trump-Alpha Bank allegation has thus appeared in Slate, a left-leaning online publication.
One more.
And this is the allegation that Trump had a backdoor entrance to the Alpha Bank in Russia.
In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alpha allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations, but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it were legitimate news.
And I won't read the rest of it.
But here we have Hillary directly involved in false allegations against Trump to promote her campaign.
I had a conversation with somebody that was sort of anti-spiritual.
He wasn't approaching things in a spiritual manner, but he was talking about Hillary.
His expression was, she has no shame.
She's an evil person.
And she has no dignity whatsoever.
But I guess you don't have to have any special insight to that other than have a goal of being honest on what you see and hear.
But she is like many others, and I think it's a good term that can be used.
And how do they do this?
How do they get us into these wars and participate?
Exaggerating Military Expenditure 00:08:24
And just think of how many people participated in this stuff.
And how much the propaganda, the ongoing propaganda, Republican and Democrat, to justify the Ukrainian war.
You know, they have no shame.
Matter of fact, they have it.
So that if you withdraw 1% of the military funding, which is outrageously high, they think you should be shameful.
And that, of course, has values all messed up.
But we're running out of money, so it's all going to change.
Well, there's one organization that gives us plenty of money.
Let's look at this next one.
This is our second story of the day.
Exaggerating China's military spending.
The St. Louis Fed breaks all statistical rules with a misleading graph.
Now, they wouldn't do that, would they, Dr. Paul?
No, this one really fascinates me because there's been out there, and I've always thought, well, it's just my suspicious nature because in talking about auditing the Fed, one thing the Fed would cling to is anything overseas, anything involved in foreign policy.
And my theory or suspicion is that they're very much overseas because they can finance and do all kinds of things with governments and agencies, which is never on the budget.
And I thought, well, here it is, the Federal Reserve is admitting this.
And they say that their exaggeration, they fudged the figures.
They said it was wrong to say that we were spending more money than the Chinese.
And they fudged the figures.
And they weren't that complicated to understand.
And they just lied about it, too, on claiming.
But they wanted to work into the scenario of being anti-China.
And that's part of that.
So even, and they're going to get away with this because of the momentum and the patriotism as a line associated with being anti-China.
That to me is a little bit scary.
And that means that the coup is in charge.
Well, you said to me when we were talking about the show offline is that this just shows how involved in foreign policy the Fed is.
That's right.
I really do think so.
Because it's endless funding.
This is why, in a way, this whole idea of we're in about the budget, you know, and how can we get the deficit increase?
Well, just send out a trillion dollars.
They can send out a trillion dollars to bail people out in the middle of a financial crisis.
We have a couple of those about every year or so.
And we're in the middle of one now, and it's been going on really since 2008.
So there is a lot of propping up around the world.
It's done secretly.
And it's a powerful institution and the source of so much trouble.
But they're dignified.
They don't shout and scream about dropping bombs on people.
They just control things by, if you want a buck from us, you got to visit with us.
Yeah.
Well, let's look at those terribly misleading graphs.
And I'm the worst at all this math stuff, to be honest, but this is pretty obvious to anyone.
Let's look at this next one.
So this is military spending in constant $20, $20.
That red line is China.
And that is alarming because the blue line is the U.S. China has shot way up over everyone else.
It's almost a straight line up.
And the U.S. is falling, falling, a little bit of an uptick, but falling.
Well, the left axis is very different than the right axis.
That's what they've done.
All of the other countries are on the left lower axis, zero to three hundred billion, and the U.S. is on the right axis of up to 800 billion.
If you look at the next one, this is an explanation of what happened.
The St. Louis Fed listed the world's top six countries by military expenditures, but used two separate axes.
The spending of China, Russia, Britain, India, and Saudi Arabia were depicted on the left axis, which went from zero to $300 billion.
But a separate right axis was created just for the U.S., which went from $400 billion to a trillion.
This extremely misleading graph made it look as though China spends more on its military than the U.S.
And then the author of this went to re-show the graph if it were done in an honest manner.
And it looks very different if we do this next one.
Very, very different indeed.
You can see it here.
If you can put up, there we go.
There's the U.S. way above all anyone else.
You see the Chinese, yes, they have increased their military spending, but they're nowhere even in the same ballpark as the U.S. Very, very shoddy practices.
Yeah, the article we've been quoted was written by Ben Norton published a couple days ago.
But he had an interesting statement.
If a student presented this in a statistic 101 class, the teacher would likely give them all an F.
He they flonk.
Yeah.
It doesn't bother him.
They have no shame.
Ben Norton said.
We're just doing our duties.
Norton's a good writer.
He's on the left, but he's very, very good.
I read a lot of the stuff.
Well, here's in the same sort of general category about exaggeration.
Let's put this one up on China.
Because they're exaggerating the threat, and we know that.
This is the deep state exaggerating the threat.
This is from our friend Dave DeCamp over at antiwar.com, and it coincides with what we just said about the Fed and spending.
Air Force General predicts the U.S. will be at war with China in 2025.
So he released a memo.
This is General Mike Minahan, the head of the Air Mobility Command, issued a memo saying, I hope I'm wrong, but my guts tell me we will fight China in 2025.
First of all, you have to wonder, where do these guys get off?
These generals get off writing something like this outside the chain of command, outside their commander-in-chief, talking about war with China.
That's a political point.
But of course, Michael McFall, who's the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, yeah, he thinks the general is right.
We're going to have a war with China here in a year or so.
Yeah, you know, all this stuff is that's the leader of the coup and the principles in the coup are just sending the message because it doesn't have anything to do with giving us some truth about the matter and the danger of it.
The whole thing is, is how are we going to get that budget?
You know, you saw the Federal Reserve's Act.
China's getting so rich and you just gave these great charts to show the opposite of that is happening.
So the gimmick is that even though they speak, you know, this Admiral wasn't Admiral.
He was speaking the truth, but it was all militancy and spending more money.
So behind it is spending more money.
But then if they have to preach this militancy, they sometimes believe their own propaganda.
And of course what we argue is they don't have control anyway because something else is going to be controlled.
But I'll tell you what, it is the way the foreign policy works.
And I thought what we lived through in the first decade of this year, you know, dealing with the Middle East, all the lying and killing and things going on.
But right now, we're doing that now with Russia and China, you know, just looking for a fight in this continuation of putting more weapons into Ukraine.
And I just was looking at what they are doing in Europe, how they're militarizing.
all of Europe.
They're fussing among themselves, which might help, but they'll be forced to line up.
And, you know, the U.S. is in charge and we have the money and we have the weapons.
So all this weaponry dealing and all, do you think these countries are doing it all on their own?
Inflation's Impact 00:08:33
Not a bit.
You know, it's all done with instructions from us because we have the money and the Federal Reserve.
If we don't get it appropriate, we'll get them in the money anyway.
You know, our good friend Colonel McGregor talks a lot about how bloated the top ranks of the military are, the four stars.
He sent something around last week where he made a really good point.
We have got such a bloated rank of four-star generals, it's unbelievable.
And he says their incentive is to be as hawkish as possible because they realize that soon they will be in industry and they will be joining the military contractors.
And so if they're as hawkish as possible when they're in the military, they'll be rewarded by these companies that are set to make billions of dollars off of these increased manufactured threats.
So that's a problem.
He says we need to get rid of these four stars, kick them out of there.
I'm sure he's got a very good point on that.
They'll be on TV for sure.
They will, yeah.
Well, let's end on a high note, Dr. Paul, since we've had some depressing news.
This is good news.
Every skeptical person from progressive to libertarian to conservative should be happy about this.
A new Gallup poll.
More cite government as top U.S. problem.
Inflation rakes second.
So with all of the inflation we're seeing, Dr. Paul, with all of the problems of buying eggs at the store, with all of these fears, Americans still think government is the biggest problem, even worse than inflation.
And maybe the connection they see also that government has something to do with the inflation.
So someday they'll realize and we'll have to deal with it.
You know, they talk about spending, and spending is a problem, but literally spending by itself is not the inflation because, you know, if you paid for it, it wouldn't be inflationary.
It is the monetizing of debt and doing anything that the leaders, the deep state wants, as long as you provide the funding, the only way you can do it is to have a Federal Reserve system.
And they knew about it, and they have systematically undermined the Republic since 1913.
And it's on its last legs right now.
Some people think it's gone already.
And it had to do with this introducing this freebie stuff.
Because don't worry about it.
Deficits don't matter.
I saw a liberal on television the other day that used those terms.
I didn't know they would use them.
Don't you know, don't you know that deficits really aren't that important?
Well, it depends on what you're looking for.
Well, let's look at the data from this because they had their last one was in November, I believe, and they did another one in January.
This is interesting because in November, inflation and the economy in general were the number one concern with the government being in second.
But the 15% who named government in November, December, that has grown to 21% of Americans who view the most important problem in the U.S. is the government worse than anything else, crime, violence, Russia, whatever.
No, it's bad government.
And here's something interesting.
Both parties agree.
Let's do this next one.
Because they asked Republicans and Democrats if we can switch on that next clip.
Here we go.
Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the biggest problem we face is our own government.
I think it's good news.
They're coming in our direction, right?
Yeah, it's a great victory for bipartisanship, which I'm always condemning.
Why do you have to have bipartisanship?
Because they're going to get together and always spend more.
They've never gotten together to cut something.
So, yes, they work together and they have done this on all the big issues.
They have something they're going to fight over.
They'll spend the time.
It's worth a fight and an argument on how we handle the issue of life.
But that's designed for the distraction.
But the real effort is to bring people together to continue the process of not challenging the Federal Reserve, don't challenge the interventionist foreign policy, not to ever touch anything in the welfare, especially corporate welfare, and on and on.
But it certainly isn't Biden's fault.
He was in the office for a week, and the prices started moving up.
See, Biden created the inflation.
He's done a lot.
The only way you could support that argument is over all that time he was a senator, he was voting for inflation by spending money no matter what.
So it's a shame that we can't wake him up.
And that is why we strongly support institutions like the Mises Institute, believing that people need to understand the economic.
People have to know that it's in their best interest.
So people vote a certain way, believing it's in their best interest.
Even if they think, well, they're going to send me a check, and I know that's not the best thing for the next decade, but right now, in my best interest, is send me a check.
So there's a short term and long term.
But people will, when things get worse, they have to be convinced that the government is at fault.
And then they have to be willing to say, well, what would you guys do with it?
Well, we would very rapidly reduce the size and scope.
Exactly.
Well, I'm just going to close by thanking the audience for watching.
Please hit like, hit subscribe if you can.
Pass this on to your friends.
We'd like to grow the show as much as we can.
Can't do it without you.
We appreciate you.
We talked about some problems we've had with our technical side and some problems with the neocons attacking us and trying to put the foot on our necks.
But as Dr. Paul says, we persevere as well as we can, and we do our best because of you and your encouragement.
So thank you very much.
And Dr. Paul?
Very good.
And I, too, want to make sure our viewers know we deeply appreciate their support.
And we are pleased in many ways the way things are going, but displeased that we need to do more faster.
But when we see a report like we saw today on Gallup, people are saying government's at fault.
But the big question is, and that's why I emphasize the education and getting out information, information you can trust, is we have to know what to replace it with.
Because it's not going to be a gentle transition.
And it's not going to be a smooth bipartisan agreement.
They're going to go down fighting and they do and they fight tooth and nails, except on the important things where the people behind the scenes tell them you better vote for the military budget and on and on.
So that's the problem.
But I tell you what, there's a lot of people, and where I had the most encouragement over the last decade or two is the openness of young people if you just get the chance to visit with them and explain to them what's going on.
And then I found out that a lot of young people, high school on up, have more open minds than the people who depend on a government check.
And that's a lot of people right now, whether it's the business welfare or the ordinary welfare, that there's a lot of support for the people who say, look, what you need is more freedom.
And under those circumstances, we can overcome this.
But right now, it's a real challenge because I think our biggest threat is the interference in getting this information out, which is what we were talking about here.
But we repeated some of the exposure that Twitter was involved in, and we are getting more information thanks to what's happening right now.
And that is important because so many people haven't heard that the FBI was really behind a lot of the shenanigans, and they have interrupted and interfered with our elections.
There's no doubt in my mind.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
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