Ken Dilanian: ‘Right-Wing Media’ Were ‘Repeating Russian Propaganda Directed by Putin’

EXCERPT:

DILANIAN: “Steph, there are really two major takeaways from this remarkably detailed unclassified intelligence summary. And the first is something that we did not know, which is that China did not interfere in the 2020 election. And the reason that’s important is because many senior officials in the Trump government told us last fall that China was interfering, that China was, in fact, the biggest threat. You remember the Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said that, and Robert O'Brien, Trump's National Security Adviser, and of course President Trump himself. They all said China was interfering. Well this detailed report says that while China has a massive influence campaign to try to sway U.S. Policy in Beijing’s direction, it decided not to try to influence the outcome of the 2020 election because it figured that no matter who won, policy in the U.S. was taking a turn against China, a harder line towards China, and we’ve certainly seen that with the Biden administration. The second big conclusion is something we knew a little about, but this provides much more detail, which is, yes, we knew that Russia was interfering, massive influence campaign led by Vladimir Putin, that they disclose. But this report goes into remarkable detail about how this Russian influence campaign essentially made pawns of people in the right-wing media and people close to Donald Trump by feeding them propaganda about alleged corruption by Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine and getting them to repeat it on documentaries and programs and -- and through President Trump himself. And one of key figures was Andrii Derkach, a parliamentarian who was feeding information to Rudy Giuliani and Republican members of Congress. And this report, which was prepared mostly by the Trump administration by career intelligence official staff makes no bones about the fact that these Trump aides were repeating Russian propaganda directed by Vladimir Putin.”