A comparison between Iran’s failed assassination plot and successful hacking of the Trump campaign to Wednesday’s announcement that Russia is also seeking to influence the election couldn’t make their political priorities more clear, either for the Biden Administration or the mainstream media.
On July 16, the media reported that Iran was undertaking an active effort to assassinate former President Donald Trump. As CNN described it at the time, just days after Thomas Matthew Crooks came less than inch from killing him in Butler, PA in a said-to-be-unrelated attempt, “US authorities obtained intelligence from a human source in recent weeks on a plot by Iran to try to assassinate Donald Trump, a development that led to the Secret Service increasing security around the former president, multiple people briefed on the matter told CNN.” The plot was seen as part of a larger response to President Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3, 2020. Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said the White House has been monitoring Iranian threats to former Trump administration officials “for years” including briefings to Congress. “These threats arise from Iran’s desire to seek revenge for the killing of Qassem Soleimani. We consider this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority,” she said in a statement. It is believed that other Trump Administration officials have been targeted as well, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Iran envoy Brian Hook, but for reasons that remained unexplained, the Trump campaign wasn’t informed about the source of the threat. “The Trump campaign was informed in passing by USSS leadership of a general uptick in threats against President Trump,” a source told NBC News, “but were not made aware of any specific threats related to Iranian individuals or groups.” Nor was the existence of the plot seen as a way for the terrorist regime to influence the election by eliminating a candidate they feared, even after we learned that Iran was pursuing other avenues as well and this time, they were successful in their efforts to hack the Trump campaign. As the BBC reported on August 19, “Iran was behind the recent hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, US intelligence officials have confirmed. The FBI and other federal agencies said in a joint statement that Iran had chosen to interfere in the US election ‘to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.’” While they presented no proof that Vice President Harris’ campaign was also a target, “The [intelligence community] is confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the Presidential campaigns of both political parties,” US intelligence officials said in the statement. “Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the US election process.” US officials also said it was obvious that Iran wanted to influence the outcome of the election because it believes the next President is “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests” and thus, they have “observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle.”
Strangely, the reader was left to reach the equally obvious conclusion that Iran was hoping to influence the election in favor of the Democrat candidate, first President Joe Biden, then Vice President Kamala Harris entirely on their own. The election is “consequential” for them only in the sense that President Trump had ceaselessly harried Iran with sanctions and assassinated a key leader, while recent Democrat Administrations including Presidents Obama and Biden, have sought the opposite, even refusing to name as primarily responsible for Hamas brutal attack on Israel. The comparison to Wednesday’s announcement by the Biden Administration that Russia is also seeking to influence the election couldn’t make their political priorities more clear. In CNN’s initial coverage, it only took two sentences to reach the specious claim that these efforts were exclusively or almost exclusively on behalf of former President Donald Trump, despite a litany of “in parts” that suggests a much broader purpose even if you take the claims at face value. “The Biden administration announced a sweeping set of actions to tackle a major Russian government-backed effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election on Wednesday, including unveiling criminal charges against two Russian nationals, sanctions on 10 individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains,” CNN reported. “At Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direction, three Russian companies used fake profiles to promote false narratives on social media, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. Internal documents produced by one of those Russian companies show one of the goals of the propaganda effort was to boost the candidacy of Donald Trump or whoever emerged as the Republican nominee for president, according to an FBI affidavit.” This was repeated again a few paragraphs later in case there was any confusion, even if the only actual evidence was from the same internal government sources that refused to state clearly the goal of Iranian influence. “A nearly 300-page FBI affidavit released on Wednesday describes the domain seizures and lays out a broad, Kremlin-backed effort to seed fake news stories to attack US politicians supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia and stoke tensions in US society. Internal SDA documents cited in the affidavit, which appear to date to before Trump officially clinched the Republican nomination, say one of the ‘goals’ of the company’s disinformation efforts was to ‘secure victory of a U.S. Political Party A candidate (Candidate A or one of his internal party opponents’ in the 2024 election. The documents included in the affidavit do not mention Trump by name, but the US intelligence community has said that Russia’s preferences for the presidential race also haven’t shifted since 2020, when Moscow conducted a range of influence operations in support of Trump and aimed at denigrating Joe Biden.”
Incredibly, they managed to cover the supposed Russian plot on behalf of the former President while both mentioning the Iranian efforts and somehow excluding reference to the assassination plot, not once, but twice in the same article. First, it was “After the US accused Iran of trying to hack both the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns last month, Wednesday’s actions are a reminder that US officials continue to see Russia as a prominent foreign influence threat to November’s election, sources familiar with the matter said,” followed by “A growing number of foreign operatives have attempted to influence US elections since Russia’s 2016 activity, which included hacking the Democratic National Committee and leaking documents aimed at undercutting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In the 2024 election, Iran’s alleged embrace of a similar hack-and-leak playbook that Russia used in 2016 has US officials on heightened alert. In June, a group of Iranian government-linked hackers successfully targeted the Trump campaign, stole internal campaign documents and shared them with news organizations. The hackers breached the email account of longtime Trump ally Roger Stone to target campaign staff, CNN has reported.” Objectively speaking, there is of course no more dramatic way to influence an election than assassinating one of the candidates, but instead of covering the harsh reality that malign actors are doing truly terrible things as they normally do, the Department of Justice has chosen to focus precious resources on some rather flimsy efforts from the Russian menace. Despite the splashy headlines and supporting indictments, Russia is accused of creating and promoting online content, not even hacking, much less killing. More skeptical observers dug into some of these details and found the scope of the effort to be less than impressive by the FBI’s own admission. For example, they sought to “create and develop a network of 200 accounts on Twitter, four in each of the 50 states, with two active accounts and two dormant ones.” (There are currently about 600 million active users on X.) According to therecord.media, “The two active accounts in each state will represent fake people supporting the Republican Party and focus on local and international news. The actors are ordered to make three to four posts each day and six to nine comments on other posts. The dormant accounts are only to be used if the active ones are blocked.” (There are at least 500 million tweets per day; one of the accounts named in the indictment, “CNN California” had only seven followers.) Similarly, the FBI seized a total of 32 domain names, many of which are for sites that only get a handful of traffic, while there are some 362.4 million total domain names on the planet. In addition, one of the companies involved in the alleged conspiracy is Tenet Media, which CNN characterizes as “platform for independent content creators” and they themselves described as “a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.” “The alleged Russian operation tapped two people to set up the company in their names to add to its legitimacy and the two founders were aware Russian money backed the operation, according to the indictment,” CNN continued. “The goal of the operation, according to prosecutors, was to fuel pro-Russian narratives, in part, by pushing content and news articles favoring Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others who the Kremlin deemed to be friendlier to its interests.”
In their view, this was part of a further conspiracy to link the effort with “right-wing commentators,” except no one has ever heard of Tenet Media and the three commenters supposedly targeted, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin, have not been accused of any wrong-doing or said to be even aware of the plot. Indeed, their only connection to Tenet Media is being “among the commentators listed” on their website who apparently received some payment from the company for something, exactly what is unclear, and “All have released statements saying they were victims of the alleged Russian scheme and they maintained editorial control of the content they created” whatever influence Russia had on Tenet Media. In other words the connection is tenuous at best, especially when you consider that the presence of an actual spy-ring operating on behalf of Iran in Washington, DC in general and the Biden Administration in particular was exposed just last year, which one would think is a much, much larger story of potential election interference and national security implications. As Tablet Magazine reported at the time, “The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails.” The emails in question “showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.”
Personally, I do not doubt that Russia is trying to influence the election, as they have for decades, but the idea that a handful of accounts on X and a few websites is the size and scope necessary to have an impact is laughable (the total Tenet Media operation was said to cost $10 million compared to the expected billions that will be spent by both parties). The reality is that Iran’s efforts are much more brazen, but this didn’t prevent the Attorney General himself, Merrick Garland, from making a splashy announcement about these supposedly earth-shattering developments – as he completely failed to do even after Iran attempted to assassinate a former President, a topic on which he, most Democrats, and most of the media have grown conspicuously silent about to the point where one wonders if it happened in the first place. For what it’s worth, Russian President Vladimir Putin himself said he prefers Vice President Harris to former President Trump in response to these reports, “I have already said that the incumbent President, Mr. Biden was our favorite, if I may say so. He was dropped from the race, but he recommended that all of his supporters support Ms. Harris, and that’s what we’re going to do. That’s first of all…And secondly, she laughs so expressively and contagiously that it shows she is doing well. And if she’s doing well, then…Trump has imposed so many, many restrictions and sanctions on Russia that no President before him as ever imposed before…And if Ms. Harris is doing well, then maybe she will refrain from such actions.” While we have plenty of reason to doubt President Putin’s veracity, the FBI and the mainstream media haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory on this topic either, not in 2016 when they allowed President Trump’s opponent to manipulate the Department of Justice into a full on spying operation against a presidential candidate with no evidence, or right now, when they only appear to have an interest in what they believe will hurt the former President. Given the media coverage of the Russian plot, complete with spinning a steady stream of vague references about it being “in part” to help President Trump, meaning they are intentionally cherry picking what they consider politically salacious, it seems clear who is more likely to influence and therefore interfere with the election. The irony couldn’t be more obvious.
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