Some of the Trump campaignâs most prominent names and supporters, including Trumpâs campaign manager, digital director, and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign.
The Twitter account @Ten_GOP, which called itself the âUnofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,â was operated from the Kremlin-backed âRussian troll farm,â or Internet Research Agency, a source familiar with the account confirmed with The Daily Beast.
The accountâs origins in the Internet Research Agency were originally reported by the independent Russian news outlet RBC. @Ten_GOP was created on Nov. 19, 2015, and accumulated over 100 thousand followers before Twitter shut it down. The Daily Beast independently confirmed the reasons for @Ten_GOPâs account termination.
The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment, âfor privacy and security reasons.â
Two days before election day, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted a post by @Ten_GOP regarding Hillary Clintonâs email.
âMother of jailed sailor: âHold Hillary to same standards as my son on Classified infoâ #hillarysemail #WeinerGateâ the tweet reads.
Three weeks before the election, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaignâs digital director, retweeted a separate post from @Ten_GOP.
âThousands of deplorables chanting to the media: âTell The Truth!â RT if you are also done w/ biased Media!â the tweet read.
President Trumpâs son Donald Trump Jr. followed the account until its closure on Aug. 23 of this year. Trump Jr. retweeted the account three times, including an allegation of voter fraud in Florida one week before the election.
âBREAKING: #VoterFraud by counting tens of thousands of ineligible mail in Hillary votes being reported in Broward County, Florida Please, RT,â the tweet read.
Trump Jr. also retweeted the account on Election Day.
âThis vet passed away last month before he could vote for Trump.. Here he is in his #MAGA hat.. #voted #ElectionDay,â the account wrote.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn retweeted the Russian-backed troll account at least once. His son, Michael Flynn Jr., retweeted the account 34 times before it was removed from Twitter in August for its ties to Russian propaganda.
The account notably pushed for Flynnâs reappointment as Trumpâs national security adviser, a job Flynn lost after press revelations that heâd lied about his telephone discussions with the Russian ambassador after the election hacks. It also repeatedly pushed Breitbart-backed talking points, including a fake news story about a gang rape in Twin Falls, Idaho, that merited dozens of articles from Breitbart News.
Flynn Jr. will likely receive a Senate subpoena after he refused to be interviewed for the Senate Intelligence Committeeâs Russia investigation, ABC News reported on Tuesday.
Former Trump campaign advisor and longtime confidante of the president Roger Stone retweeted the account three times in 2017, twice to rail against commentators on CNN.
On the same day as the accountâs permanent ban, @Ten_GOP was caught passing a photo of the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Championship parade in Cleveland as a picture of the crowd gathered outside a Trump rally in Phoenix.
Last March the account was one of the most active in promoting WikiLeaksâ first big release of CIA documents, using the occasion to float the false claim that the so-called Vault 7 documents acquitted Russia in the hack of the Democratic National Committee. âBREAKING: Obamaâs CIA posed as RUSSIAN HACKERS to disguise their dirty work,â read one of the tweets. âThe âRussian hackingâ was a false flag by the CIA. It was done to give Obama a reason to spy on Trump!â read another.
Overt Russian propaganda outlets Sputnik and RT frequently used @Ten_GOPâs tweets in their news stories, including a story titled âRussia has no compromising info on Trump or Clinton, report is âtotal bluffââKremlin.â
Far right news sites The Gateway Pundit and InfoWars quoted the account in articles several times.
Fox News cited @Ten_GOP as its sole example of a âTrump fanâ in an article titled âTrump fans call for Kelloggâs boycott after brand pulls Breitbart adsâ last December.
Former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, who testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian cyberattacks, told The Daily Beast that this is âexactly what I was talking aboutâ in his testimony in March.
âIf what you said is true, Iâd say, âMy job is done,ââ said Watts. âIf this account is definitely an (Internet Research Agency) account, it proved Russian Active Measures (like the 2016 propaganda campaign) works, because Americans will use it against other Americans.â
Watts said the content of these pages is âmade to look organicâ so that âAmericans will use it against their political enemies.â
âIf you take rumors, false information, plants, and just repeat them, youâre doing the job of a foreign country. They are seeding out information or narratives they know candidates or partisans will use. They were so effective, they had the very top people in the campaign using it,â said Watts.
âBasically, Russia loaded the gun. The Trump team fired.â
Mike Hasson, chief strategist of the Republican data analytics firm Red Metrics, said he remembered seeing the account as far back as the primaries, but became skeptical of the account due to a âcouple odd things that stood out.â
âI remember seeing it in late primary season, showing up in my timeline, retweeted by ordinary grassroots people. Some of the stuff was conspiracy theorist and inflammatory, but other times the content was intended to be inspiring and heartwarming,â said Hasson.
Hasson said he became more confident of Ten_GOPâs origins after the account stopped tweeting about Tennessee and started tweeting about nationalist French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, then tweeted several links from Russian propaganda network RT.
âFor it to jump from Tennessee-related stuff and national stuff to Le Pen, that was probably the trigger pointâlike, âOK, maybe there is something here thatâs a lot worse,ââ said Hasson.
âAt that point, it was much more than just suspicion. That was more of a confirmation,â he said, of Russia Todayâs frequent citation of the account. âBy that point, it had accumulated enough red flags that I felt pretty sure that this was one of the bad guys.â
The account was retweeted 15 times by far-right agitator Ann Coulter, who also posted one of its tweets to her Twitter account.
Last month, after the accountâs closure, someone launched a petition on the White Houseâs âWe The Peopleâ site complaining about âa war on conservatives on Twitter.â The petition demanded the reinstatement of several alt-right Twitter accounts that had been suspended from the service, adding âMy own account, @Tennessee_GOP, was banned on August the 23th.â
The petition misstates the name of the @Ten_GOP account, but came at around the same time as two more White House petitions protesting Facebookâs deletion of fake African American and progressive political accounts linked to the Russian active measures campaign. None of the petitions received enough signatures to qualify for a White House response.
Others in Trumpâs inner circle, including former deputy national security advisor Sebastian Gorka, also retweeted Russian-tied Twitter accounts.
Despite posing as Tennessee Republicans, the account never hesitated to push the Kremlinâs talking points on issues like Syria and the French election. In May, the anonymous operator of a Twitter account called AltCyberCommand used Twitterâs password reset process to try and prove Russiaâs involvement. A video of the hack appeared to show that TEN_GOPâs Twitter account was set up with a phone number in country code 7, indicating the Russian Federation, not Tennessee.