September 5, 2024

Thursday, September 5, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Kamala is always busy.

Another school shooting yesterday.

The President said this.👇

Biden-Harris stood for banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines again, requiring safe storage of firearms, enacting universal background checks, and ending immunity for gun manufacturers. Kamala will get it done.

One more thing on school shootings.

Speaking with David Hogg, survivor of Parkland.

Touch to watch. 👇

Donald Trump.

Touch to watch. 👇

Kamala in New Hampshire yesterday.

Touch to watch.👇

Guns are affecting American life on all levels. The Vice President has begun to speak behind a bullet-proof shield.

Talking about small businesses and her proposed tax policy. 7 minutes. 👇

The vice President’s whole talk at the New Hampshire rally.
25 minutes. 👇

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Liz Cheney came on board yesterday.

"I have thought deeply about this — & because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris."

Touch to watch.

Kamala Harris campaign chair @jomalleydillon issued a statement on Liz Cheney’s endorsement.

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With 61 days until Nov. 5th, here are 2 states where you can affect the outcome.

North Carolina.

Ohio.

Bernie Moreno misleads on Sherrod Brown votes for federal aid for migrants with non-legal status

An ad from Republican Bernie Moreno in a high-profile Senate race labels incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, responsible for giving federal benefits to immigrants in the country illegally.

"For nearly 50 years, politician Sherrod Brown helped create the crisis at our southern border," a narrator says with Brown’s picture overlaid on images of migrant caravans and a controversial Times Square brawl between migrants and police, "voting with radicals like Kamala Harris to give illegals taxpayer-funded stimulus checks, health care, even Social Security, rewarding illegals. Sherrod Brown caused the crisis."

The ad also says Moreno, a businessman who has never held elected office, will secure the border and deport "illegals." It is part of a $25 million ad buy through Election Day that includes TV, streaming, radio, digital and mail, according to Politico.

We asked the Moreno campaign for proof to back claims that Brown, elected to Congress in 1992 and to the Senate in 2006, voted to give federal benefits to immigrants in the country illegally. Moreno campaign spokesperson Reagan McCarthy cited votes Brown made in 2007, 2013 and 2021.

Moreno’s claims are similar to past statements we’ve fact-checked and found misleading.

Immigrants in the country illegally generally do not qualify for most federal benefits.

Let’s take these claims one by one.

Stimulus checks required Social Security numbers
McCarthy cited Brown’s March 6, 2021, vote to reject an amendment to the American Rescue Plan from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as proof Brown voted to give stimulus checks to immigrants in the country illegally.

The American Rescue Plan already excluded people in the country illegally from receiving stimulus checks by requiring Social Security numbers and excluding "any nonresident alien individual" from the program. The Cruz amendment would have closed a potential loophole that may have allowed migrants who overstayed their temporary work visas from using their Social Security numbers to collect stimulus checks, according to the Washington Post Fact Checker.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee used an identical False claim against Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., in 2022. The American Rescue Plan, authored by Democrats and signed into law in 2021, required people to have Social Security numbers to receive the benefits, with exceptions for dependents who have an adoption taxpayer ID and people married to military members.

So, Brown’s vote against Cruz’s amendment did not enable people in the country illegally to receive stimulus checks.

Migrants do not qualify for federally subsidized health care
On March 23, 2013, Brown voted to reject a budget bill amendment from then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., that would bar immigrants in the country illegally from qualifying for federally subsidized health care. Moreno’s portrayal of that vote, too, is misleading. (Politifact).

What can you do? Donate. Volunteer. Get out the Vote or Vote if this is your state. Talk to friends and family. Repost this post to your social media.

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Tuesday, September 10th is the night of the Harris-Trump debate.

Do you think that the ABC moderators will ask Trump any of these questions? Ha.

Finally, the Department of Justice is acting against Russian interference in our Elections.

Right wing MAGA use voter suppression to try to interfere with our elections but they have some help in 2024 (as they did in 2016).

U.S. Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence Ahead of 2024 Election

American spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favors former President Donald J. Trump, seeing him as skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine.

The United States on Wednesday announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 election, as it tries to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters.

The actions include sanctions, indictments and seizing of web domains that U.S. officials say the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine, which Russia invaded more than two years ago.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland detailed the actions taken by the Justice Department. They include the indictment of two Russian employees of RT, the state-owned broadcaster, who used a company in Tennessee to spread content, and the takedown of a Russian malign influence campaign known as Doppelgänger.

“The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power engages in political activities or seeks to influence public discourse,” Mr. Garland said.

The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on ANO Dialog, a Russian nonprofit that helps run the Doppelgänger network, as well as the editor in chief of RT, Margarita S. Simonyan, and her deputies.

The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information pertaining to foreign interference in an American election. The department specifically said it was seeking information on a group known as Russian Angry Hackers Did It, or RaHDit.

The State Department also said it would designate five Russian state-funded news outlets, including RT, Ruptly and Sputnik, as foreign government missions and restrict the issuance of visas to people working for Kremlin-supported media institutions.

American officials have stepped up their warnings about Russian election influence efforts. American spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favors former President Donald J. Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris in the November contest, seeing him as more skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine.

The United States was caught flat-footed in 2016 as its spy agencies learned about Russian efforts to influence the vote on behalf of Mr. Trump and were late in warning the public. In subsequent elections, U.S. intelligence officials more aggressively called out Russian, Chinese and Iranian efforts to influence American elections.

Officials say that fighting election interference has been more difficult this year. Some Americans, particularly Mr. Trump’s supporters, see accusations that Russia is spreading disinformation as efforts to undermine their views.

Mr. Garland said the charges announced on Wednesday were not the end of the case: “The investigation is ongoing.”

The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have also been investigating a handful of Americans accused of knowingly spreading false Kremlin narratives. But officials have emphasized that they are not aiming to curb free speech. Americans who merely repeat or spread stories they see on Russian state media are not being investigated as part of the efforts, officials said.

The officials say that RT has spread disinformation through bots and other means, but that they are looking more closely at how the Kremlin and its spy agencies influence the election.

As news of the indictments broke, RT posted a sarcastic response on its website from Anna Belkina, its deputy editor in chief. “There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the American elections,” the response read in part.

The indictments on Wednesday charged two Russian employees of RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They are accused of spending $10 million to secretly pay the unnamed Tennessee company to spread nearly 2,000 English-language videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.

Disinformation experts have long struggled to measure the effectiveness of Russian influence campaigns, but Justice Department officials said the videos, most of which support the goals of the Russian government, have gained 16 million views on YouTube.

Mr. Garland said the videos were “often consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine.” The Tennessee company, he said, never disclosed its ties to the Russian government.

Justice Department officials declined to identify the firm, but the one in the indictment uses the same slogan as Tenet Media, a company registered in Tennessee that publishes videos and other content broadly supportive of Mr. Trump. The company — and its most prominent commentators — did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The indictment does not directly accuse the company of wrongdoing but said that it had ties to RT and that its founders referred to their sponsor as “the Russians.”

Critics of the U.S. moves said the indictments raised free speech issues and the possibility that the Biden administration was trying to censor pro-Russian commentary.

Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, said the government had to tread carefully to distinguish between foreign election interference and First Amendment protections of free speech.

“The dividing line is when you identify activity, particularly concealed activity, that is circumventing established regulations for how we try to prevent foreign interference in our elections,” he said. If that line is crossed, he added, “that’s a complication, but it’s not a reason to just run up the free speech flag and throw up your hands and we’re helpless in the face of Vladimir Putin’s very clever operatives.”

The United States has already taken action against Russian organizations it believes are trying to influence American politics. In March, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a Russian group that has aided efforts to create fake news sites that spread misinformation, and in July it seized two internet domains that it also linked to RT and the Federal Security Service, a successor of the Soviet K.G.B.

The Justice Department action builds on that, saying it was seizing 32 more domains that were used to covertly spread Russian propaganda. According to the government affidavit, the Doppelgänger campaign is run by Sergei Kiriyenko, a former prime minister who is now President Vladimir V. Putin’s first deputy chief of staff.

Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said the fake news sites had been seized by the government as of noon.

“When we learn that adversaries overseas are trying to hide who they are and where their propaganda is coming from, as part of campaigns to deliberately sow discord, we’re going to continue to do everything we can to expose their hidden hand and disrupt their efforts,” Mr. Wray said.

Mr. Garland said a Russian internal planning document stated that “the aim of the campaign is securing Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”

The document, produced for the Social Design Agency, outlined plans to influence U.S. voters without identifying that the content was coming from the Russian government.

It lays out a plan to target voters in swing states (as determined by The New York Times’s polling efforts), as well as voters in conservative states like Alabama, Texas and Kansas. The document says U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent, Jews and video gamers would also be targeted.

The goal, according to the document and the indictment, was to push Americans to support the idea that the United States should focus on “addressing its domestic issues instead of wasting money in Ukraine.”

The Justice Department blocks out the names of the candidates the Russians support, but the document says that “it makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort” into ensuring that the Republican Party’s view, and in particular the opinions of Mr. Trump’s supporters, “wins over U.S. public opinion.”

The Doppelgänger network used sites that impersonated legitimate news entities and fake social media profiles impersonating Americans.

The fake news sites targeted specific audiences in the United States by mimicking sites like Fox News and The Washington Post. The posts on the fake Post site had a pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine viewpoint, according to the court papers. (New York Times).

MSBC Legal Analyst Andrew Weissman had opinions on this issue.

David Hogg has opinions on this issue too.

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WhenJoe Biden was seeking re-election, all the press wanted to talk about was his age. Do you think any media will talk about this?

Touch to watch.👇

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Your daily reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September

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