The Biden administration’s announcement this week that the Justice Department is taking action against alleged Kremlin-run websites and Russian state media employees as part of an effort to crack down on Russian “misinformation” ahead of the election should raise red flags — huge, obvious red flags.
The biggest red flag is the timing of the indictment and accompanying announcement, just as Americans in some states begin voting. The only possible reason for the DOJ to announce this now, and to frame it as a Russian election meddling scheme designed to boost former President Donald Trump, is to paint Trump and his supporters as agents of a hostile foreign power, or at the very least to imply that Trump’s support is fake, paid for by Moscow.
In other words, the timing of the indictment itself represents an egregious form of election meddling by our own Justice Department, whose own longstanding policy is not to file indictments that could potentially influence an election. Yet that’s the entire purpose of the indictment announced this week.
We’ve seen this playbook before from Democrats. Hand-waving about “Russian disinformation” and “election interference” by the DOJ and the U.S. intelligence community is of course a well-worn election interference tactic — and arguably a far more potent than anything that’s ever come from Moscow.
First it was the outlandish claim in 2016 that Donald Trump was actually a secret Russian agent and that he colluded with Moscow to win the White House. An entire FBI investigation was based on the discredited and
