Trump scolds 'Fake News Media' over reporting of Russian meddling in 2016 election
WASHINGTON — To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan, there he goes again!
President Trump went on a Twitter tirade Saturday against one of his favorite targets: the media. Or the “Fake News Media,” as he not-so-lovingly calls the nation’s scribes.
“Funny how the Fake News Media doesn’t want to say that the Russian group was formed in 2014, long before my run for President,” Trump wrote. “Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I didn’t know!”
Trump was referring to charges spelled out in a 37-page indictment issued Friday as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The indictment charges 13 Russian nationals and three businesses — including an Internet firm tied to the Kremlin — with conspiracy, identity theft, failing to register as foreign agents and violating laws that limit the use of foreign money in U.S. elections.
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Prosecutors said officials at that firm, the Internet Research Agency, described their work as "information warfare against the United States" and their goal as "spreading distrust toward the candidates and the political system."
The indictment said the organization registered with the Russian government as a Russian corporate entity in July 2013 and nine months later formed a department called the “translator project” whose strategy included interfering with the 2016 election.
Trump entered the election on June 16, 2015, after the Russian organization was formed — a fact that, contrary to Trump's Twitter musings, was reported by many news organizations.
In another Twitter post on Saturday, Trump retweeted an anti-media diatribe from Rob Goldman, whose Twitter bio identifies him as the vice president of ads at Facebook.
Goldman claimed in his tweet that most Russian ad spending happened after the election, but that few outlets wrote about that because it didn’t align with the narrative about Trump and the election.
“The Fake News Media never fails,” Trump wrote. “Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!”
Under pressure from lawmakers, Facebook last year revealed its own analysis of the Russian influence campaigns on its platforms, several times increasing its estimates on the depth of their activity. Facebook has given Congress 3,000 ads but Congress has only released a small portion to the public.
In October, Facebook said 10 million people saw Russian-backed ads, with 44% placed before the election and 56% after.
It later estimated that as many as 146 million people on Facebook and Instagram were reached, with the number rising as it discovered fake accounts set up to share original content, rather than ads, on partisan issues that other Facebook and Instagram users then shared.
A spokesperson for Sen. Mark Warner, (D-VA), one of the most vocal critics of the social media companies for failing to make clear the extent of the Russian operators' presence on their platforms, on Saturday criticized the Facebook exec's comments, saying focusing on "ad spend" missed the big picture.
"Ads were only a small percentage of the content pushed by IRA", the Internet Research Agency, said Warner press secretary Rachel Cohen on Twitter. "FB itself said the 3000 ads reached 10 million people but that the 80,000 organic unpaid posts reached 126 million."
Contributing: Laura Mandaro in San Francisco