Joy Reid hosted an informative panel discussion about yesterday's Mueller indictments of a Russia misinformation campaign -- and why they don't actually clear Trump.
.
"What is fascinating here, it is not news to people who watch the show. It is interesting they had two targets, pro Trump targets, people who cared about NRA, who dislike immigrants, et cetera, and people who might normally be Democratic or liberal voters," Reid said.
She played this clip from RNC spokesperson Kaylie McAnany:
Today marks the day that the Democrats' Russian collusion conspiracy theory unraveled. We learned that the Russians were also organizing for Bernie Sanders.
"Is that fact, which is in the document, they were also saying, no. We like Bernie Sanders. Is that exonerating of Donald Trump?"
"No, not at all," Malcolm Nance said.
"There are three categories of people they target when they do these information warfare operations. They target unwitting assets, people who don't know that they are being played, witting assets, people who are either in their pay or understand where the puppet strings are coming from. There are many out there which are useful idiots. Jill Stein's campaign -- they received warnings from the Russian Green Party that these people are playing you. Hillary Clinton could have won if Jill Stein was not being pushed by Russia," he said.
"We did hear she was on the list that the congress was interested in talking to at the same meeting, the dinner, where Michael Flynn was paid to be at that same dinner with Vladimir Putin at the table?" Reid asked former prosecutor Jill Winebanks.
"Almost everything has raised my suspicions here," Winebanks retorted.
"Yes, this certainly is a suspicious act, the fact they were helping her and Sanders is because they were trying to hurt Hillary. Anything that would take votes away from Hillary would help Donald Trump. Their main goal changed when he became the candidate. Originally, it was just to disrupt democracy in our election. But then it changed to helping Donald Trump," she said.
"One of the other things that was done was to specifically target minority voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, not to say vote for Trump, but don't vote, or vote third party for people like Jill Stein. In and around the latter half of 2016, they began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate, Ms. Stein," Reid said said.
"From the indictment, Woke Blacks, defendants and co-conspirators used the Instagram account to post the following message, Woke Blacks. It is misleading the people and forcing blacks to vote Killary with a "K." We would surely be better off without voting at all. Then, Malcolm, you have the fact that Hillary Clinton did, indeed, get a smaller share of African-American votes and of Hispanic votes than President Obama did. That could be failures of her campaign or that she didn't do enough outreach. She did get fewer votes. You did have more third-party voting. In a sense, would Russia perceive that that part of their operation was a success?"
Nance said, "Of course they would consider that a success. I saw numerous activities like this. Not just saying Hillary Clinton is bad, we saw numerous other activities where they were made to look like these were black militants. Creating false memes. They were retweeting these to agitate whites against blacks with completely made-up organizations. I mean, the Russians understand you have to play both sides of the coin. If you own both sides of the coin, you can buy anything, right?" Nance said.
