DISINFO: Five Eyes afraid of Trump as they have much to hide from the "Russia hoax"
SUMMARY
Top US spy alliance is afraid of US President Donald Trump. America’s Five Eyes partners - Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand - fear that Trump's deep state crackdown and spy apparatus overhaul could destabilise their intelligence network, reports The Wall Street Journal. Five Eyes were entangled in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, largely pushed by US intelligence. Trump hasn’t directly targeted Five Eyes lately, but their unease suggests they have plenty to hide.
RESPONSE
This is a deliberate exploitation and distortion of an original article of The Wall Street Journal to promote several recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about a “Deep State” behind elected officials, and labelling claims of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election “a hoax” despite irrefutable evidence. Talking about unsubstantiated allegations as if they were established facts while introducing minor variations, as in this case, is a frequent pro-Kremlin disinformation technique. See also our article Lost in translation, vol. 2.
Russian interference in the 2016 election has been proven beyond any doubt. There is a solid corpus of evidence compiled in the two-volume Mueller report and the five-volume US Senate investigation. Mueller’s investigations led to the criminal indictment of 34 people, 26 of them Russian citizens or entities including the infamous Internet Research Agency. Many other findings by The New York Times and The Washington Post, for which they received the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, were later backed by the evidence presented in court, further investigations or confessions of those involved.
The original WSJ story does not refer to any “Russia collusion hoax”. The article states: “During his first term, President Trump clashed with U.S. intelligence agencies on a number of issues, including their conclusion that Russia tried to help him win the election. He also accused U.S. spy agencies of hostile leaks against him and his aides”. Quoting Western legitimate sources while distorting their content to introduce a pro-Kremlin message as if it were part of the original story is also a frequent pro-Kremlin manipulative technique.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the official version of New Orleans attack may be FBI fabrication like Russiagate, that the firm behind global IT outage was part of the Russiagate hoax, that Russiagate was a fraud orchestrated by the West, that the US maintains sanctions on Russia even though accusations of interference proved to be unfounded, or that the Mueller report is another proof of how Russia is always falsely accused.