Greg Sargent has an excellent piece on disinformation in WaPo, reminding us how the GOP continues to traffic in disinformation as the Senate impeachment trial approaches.
Two new developments attest to this point: a remarkable pair ofrevelatory tweetsfrom Giuliani, and atour de force of reporting in The Post, which reveals that Trump routinely communicated throughout the whole saga with Giuliani on unsecured devices, which may have been vulnerable to monitoring by Russia.
Giuliani’s tweets are revealing, and not in a good way
“The conversation about corruption in Ukraine was based on compelling evidence of criminal conduct by then VP Biden,” Giulianitweeted, referring to Joe Biden, the intended target of “investigations” Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to announce.
To empirically grounded observers, this will blow up a key Trump defense: that in conditioning official acts on getting Ukraine to announce the investigations he wanted, he was correctly concerned with cleaning up corruption there.
[…]
This scandal is all about disinformation
Making this narrative “true,” via the triumph of disinformation, is at the core of this entire scandal. It is why theWhite House meetingandhundreds of millions of dollars in military aidwere conditioned on getting Ukraine to release statements validating that narrative with disinformation, along withanother fictional narrativethat Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in 2016, in collusion with Democrats.
You cannot watch House Republicans, or Sean Hannity, rant about this bundle of theories without concluding we’re witnessing something very different from routine political lying here.
