In mid-September, around the height of the presidential campaign, NBC News reported on aggressive Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the American political system. Five days earlier, the Justice Department’s national security division issued related warnings. Six days before that, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did the same thing.
That was before the election. After the election, the Trump administration halted work on countering Russian disinformation campaigns. And this week, as The New York Times reported, President Donald Trump’s State Department shuttered the office that combats foreign disinformation altogether.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his aides shut down a State Department office on Wednesday that tracks and counters global disinformation from foreign actors, including the governments of China, Russia and Iran, U.S. officials said. The closing of the office, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, had been in the works for weeks.
The Times’ report added that this office had been tracking disinformation campaigns by a variety of foreign foes, including terrorist groups, though a variety of congressional Republicans accused this agency and other agencies “of trying to stifle the views of right-wing political groups around the world.”
The article went on to note that Russian disinformation “often circulates in far-right online channels.”
James Rubin, a former State Department official who ran the precursor to the office in the Biden administration, said of the move, “This amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament in the information warfare Russia and China are conducting all over the world.”
Indeed, it’s quite likely that officials in the Kremlin were delighted to hear about the Trump administration’s latest move, which came on the heels of a series of related developments that were also celebrated in Moscow. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which Putin spoke privately with Trump and provided the American president with a to-do list. Would it look much different than the White House’s agenda from the last few months? This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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