By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 1/27/23

CN Editor Joe Lauria was one of 644 Twitter accounts that secretly formed part of Hamilton 68’s fake “dashboard” that wrongly influenced major media about alleged “Russian influence.”

The editor of this website [Consortium News] is part of a secret list created by the organization Hamilton 68 that was fed to major media and Congress to identify so-called “Russian accounts” that were “sowing discord” in the United States. 

The list of 644 Twitter accounts was shared with Twitter executives who were unable to prove any links to Russia, reported Matt Taibbi in his latest installment of the Twitter Files on Friday. 

“This was digital McCarthyism, taking people with dissident or unconventional opinions and mass-accusing them of ‘Un-American activities,’” writes Taibbi.

Hamilton 68 was created in 2017 by Clint Watts, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence officer and MSNBC analyst as a project of the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a bipartisan think-tank.

On Hamilton’s advisory council sits former acting C.I.A. chief Michael Morell, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and former editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard Bill Kristol.

Twitter Pushes Back

Twitter executives were not taken in by Hamilton 68’s secret list of Twitter accounts, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, saying in an email obtained by Taibbi: “I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” Twitter uncovered the secret list by analyzing Hamilton’s Application Program Interface (API) requests to reverse-engineer the list in late 2017, Taibbi reported.

Taibbi wrote:

“The two founders of Hamilton 68, the blue-and-red team of former counselor to Marco Rubio Jamie Fly and Hillary for America Foreign Policy Advisor Laura Rosenberger, told Politico they couldn’t reveal the names of the accounts because “the Russians will simply shut them down.” Tchya, right. One look at the list reveals the real reason they couldn’t make it public.

This was not faulty science. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how ‘Russia’ influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming. As Roth put it, ‘Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.’”

But as Taibbi points out, it was not only conservatives who were targeted. “The names ranged from well-known media figures like David Horowitz to conservatives like Dennis Michael Lynch and progressives like Consortium editor Joe Lauria. It’s crucial to understand that the list captured not just Trump supporters but a range of political dissidents, including leftists, anarchists and humorists,” he wrote.

Major U.S. universities as well as members of the U.S. Congress were also duped by the Hamilton 68 scam, writes Taibbi.

39.Perhaps most embarrassingly, elected officials promoted the site, and invited Hamilton “experts” to testify. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders. pic.twitter.com/X97OmZ3dv1

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023

“Watts, who clearly knew how to play up the melodrama of his role, gave dire warnings to the Senate Intelligence Committee, telling them they should ‘follow the dead bodies’ if they wanted to get to the bottom of the Russian interference problem,” Taibbi reported.  Twitter tried to privately warn Feinstein and Blumenthal about Hamilton 68 but were ignored. By not going public, Twitter helped perpetuate the fraud, Taibbi said.

Taibbi wrote:

“The scam needed just three elements: credentials of someone like ‘former FBI agent’ Watts, the absence of any semblance of fact-checking, and the silence of companies like Twitter.

On the third point, Twitter is not guiltless. Though people like Roth wanted to go hard at the fabulists — ‘My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,’ he wrote — ultimately people like future White House and National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne advised caution. ‘We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,’ she wrote. Carlos Monje, future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, concurred.

‘I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,’ Monje decided.

Even if Twitter had pushed back, it wouldn’t have mattered. As it was, when company spokespeople urged reporters off the record to stay away, they didn’t — just as Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal didn’t, when Twitter tried to warn them that ‘Russian bot’ stories were fake. Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. ‘Reporters are chafing,” she wrote, adding, ‘it’s like shouting into a void.’” …

Indeed, corporate media gobbled up what Hamilton 68 was serving. Wrote Taibbi:

“If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s ‘research.’ Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as sources.”

Illusion of Ongoing Russian Interference

28.What makes this an important story is the sheer scale of the news footprint left by Hamilton 68’s digital McCarthyism. The quantity of headlines and TV segments dwarfs the impact of individual fabulists like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. pic.twitter.com/zfyjLb5Tkq

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023

Taibbi wrote: “The Hamilton 68 tale has no clear analog in media history, which may give mainstream media writers an excuse not to cover it. They will be under heavy pressure to avoid addressing this scandal, since nearly all of them work for organizations guilty of spreading Hamilton’s ‘bullshit’ stories in volume.”

He added:

“The Hamilton 68 story shows how the illusion of ongoing ‘Russian interference’ worked. The magic trick was generated via a confluence of interests, between think-tanks, media, and government. Before, we could only speculate. Now we know: the ‘Russian threat’ was, in this case at least, just a bunch of ordinary Americans, dressed up to look like a Red Menace. …

‘Outfits like Hamilton 68 don’t have to agree with us,’ says Lauria. ‘But they should just leave us the hell alone.’”

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe