Roger Stone, Russia, and the 2016 roots of the “Stop the Steal” disinformation campaign

Over the past several years, when trying to understand the objectives and tactics of Vladimir Putin, I’ve found Russian dissident, chess grand master, and human rights activist Gary Kasparov to be an incredibly useful resource. Well, a few days ago, when discussing Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election, choosing instead to spread dangerous conspiracy theories about the integrity of our U.S. electoral system, Kasparov suggested that this had been Putin’s game plan back in 2016, when the Russian dictator was certain that Trump, whom he was working on behalf of, would lose the election to Hillary Clinton. At that time, according to Kasparov, Putin’s hope was to spread conspiracy theories about Trump having actually won, thereby weakening trust in our democratic system and detaching Americans from their “shared reality.” And, it would seem, Kasparov thinks that Putin and those serving his interests in America are doing the exact same thing now, in the wake of Trump’s decisive loss to Biden. Here’s the thread from Kasparov’s Twitter feed.

OK, so I was still thinking about this today, and wondering how much stock to put in Kasparov’s theory, when I happen across a CNN article titled, “Stop the Steal’s massive disinformation campaign connected to Roger Stone.” Here’s an excerpt.

It is an internet battle cry: Stop the Steal has swept across inboxes, Facebook pages and Twitter like an out-of-control virus, spreading misinformation and violent rhetoric — and spilling into real life, like the protest planned for DC this weekend.

But while Stop the Steal may sound like a new 2020 political slogan to many, it did not emerge organically over widespread concerns about voting fraud in President Donald Trump’s race against Joe Biden. It has been in the works for years.

Its origin traces to Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described “dirty trickster” whose 40-month prison sentence for seven felonies was cut short by Trump’s commutation in July.

Stone’s political action committee launched a “Stop the Steal” website in 2016 to fundraise ahead of that election, asking for $10,000 donations by saying, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.”…

A Stop the Steal Facebook group was managed by a loose coalition of right wing operatives, some of whom have worked with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. The group amassed hundreds of thousands of followers in little more than a day before Facebook shut it down on November 5 — the day after it was launched.

Also on November 5, Bannon started his own “Stop the Steal” Facebook group; he changed the name to “Own Your Vote” the following day. It was not removed by Facebook, but the social media company did later remove several other pages affiliated with Bannon…

Spinoff pages sprung up soon after like brush fires, with Facebook struggling to quickly snuff out the spreaders of bogus information.

All the while, Roger Stone and Bannon have been in full disinformation mode. Stone has appeared on the show of far-right radio commentator Alex Jones to trumpet groundless claims that Biden is trying to steal the election; Bannon is echoing similar conspiracy theories on his podcast, calling the election “a mass fraud.”

“We’re calling it a fraud or we’re calling it a steal — stop the steal,” he said on a November 4 episode.

Despite efforts by Facebook to shut down the misleading content, it was too late. The cluster of groups and pages — which altogether had amassed 2.5 million followers, according to an analysis by activist group Avaaz — had seeded a jungle of misinformation that is being shared — and believed — by millions of Americans…

So, is it possible that Kararov is onto something when he suggests that Russia and their confederates here in the United States, like Roger Stone, are merely executing the plan that had been in place since back in 2016, when they had every reason to believe that Trump would fail to win the presidency? Is it possible that Trump’s refusal to concede has less to do with his fragile ego, and his pathological refusal to publicly accept defeat, and more to do with a Russian disinformation strategy that’s been in place since 2016? There might be something to it. As our fellow Michigander Marcy Wheeler reminds us all this morning, there’s more than sufficient evidence, after all, to conclude that, back in 2016, Stone’s “Stop the Steal” efforts may have been coordinated with Russia. It’s certainly worth considering, right?