According to a damning statement by a former Israeli intelligence officer, Russia actively decided that Donald Trump was the right man to be president of the United States and then participated in the election process to ensure that he was chosen as president.
As Newsweek reports, while there has certainly been plenty of debate about Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo has stated categorically that Russia had a huge hand in making sure that Donald Trump was elected as president after Moscow officials decided that he would be the right man to promote their interests after looking at potential U.S. presidential candidates.
“Officials in Moscow looked at the 2016 U.S. presidential race and asked, ‘Which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House? Who will help us achieve our goals?’ And they chose him. From that moment, they deployed a system of bots for the length of the elections, and ran him for president.”
Pardo further noted that in his informed role as a former Israeli intelligence officer with Mossad, it is his belief that Russia’s interference in American politics, and particularly their help in allowing Donald Trump to clinch the presidency, is one of the biggest threats the world has recently faced.
“What we’ve seen so far with respect to bots and the distortion of information is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the greatest threat of recent years, and it threatens the basic values that we share — democracy and the world order created since World War Two.”
In December, the Senate looked at two different reports that they had commissioned and discovered that Russia had used a heavy hand when it came to social media tools to try and sway American voters to choose Donald Trump as their president in the 2016 election. In fact, the company known as New Knowledge, who worked on one of the Senate reports, went into great detail about the Russian firm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA), who employed more than a thousand people to work on the Russian campaign to get Trump elected.
“Run like a sophisticated marketing agency in a centralized office environment, the IRA employed and trained over a thousand people to engage in round-the-clock influence operations, first targeting Ukrainian and Russian citizens, and then, well before the 2016 US election, Americans. The scale of their operation was unprecedented — they reached 126 million people on Facebook, at least 20 million users on Instagram, 1.4 million users on Twitter, and uploaded over 1,000 videos to YouTube.”
With two Senate reports corroborating what former Israeli intelligence officer Tamir Pardo has stated about Russia choosing Donald Trump to be president, it is doubtful that such discussions about the reach of Russia’s involvement in American politics will be ending anytime soon.